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edit — Posted in wrong OT. Now posted in OT 120
Atlas,
Good post!
Anyone here play city skylines or other sim city variants?
I just launched it last night after a few years and their “radio” addition is hilarious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mMexMWWBBk
Made me think that real companies could probably get in on in game ads
I finally had a chance to see the film “First Man” yesterday when it became available for rent on iTunes. The film is about Neil Armstrong, starting with his early work as a test pilot and culminating in his historic flight to the moon. The flight sequences were well done, but I think it was a mistake to spend any time at all on this man’s private life. He seems to have been known for a certain get-it-done stoicism that just looks like dead time on the screen. The film also suffers by comparison to more engaging earlier coverage of the US space program, such as “The Right Stuff”, “Apollo 13”, and “From the Earth to the Moon”.
Actually…..
I had an issue with those. Basically, everything was significantly punched up relative to what actually happened. If you’re high enough to use the X-15s RCS, you’re not going to get lots of aerodynamic shaking. This is fundamental physics. Likewise, the Gemini capsule was spinning significantly faster than it actually did. And way too much shaky-cam on the launch sequences.
I don’t know, all the examples you cite sound like perfectly reasonable artistic license for a mainstream biopic.
I think there is real difficulty in conveying how dramatic and dangerous the situations really were to a non-expert audience raised on Michael Bay films. Presented 100% faithfully to physics, the scenes would look boring and trivial. In some sense the exaggerated physics paint a better picture of the “truth” than a more accurate simulation.
Granted, and I didn’t hate the movie. But I was sitting there counting errors in those scenes, and there were a lot. I can’t speak to the rest, as I haven’t actually read the book it was based on. (It’s on my Amazon list, but actual buying is obviously dominated by the naval list instead of the space list.)
What will you do when there is a space navy?
Try to get a job working for them, obviously.
Had the Air Force given up on being the armed force in space then?
They haven’t, and I expect that they will continue to have that mission. But we’re a long way away from having something even vaguely like a naval model in space, regardless of who is running it.
I think it makes sense for the AF to continue with orbital stuff for the foreseeable future, but long range, many-manned missions seem like the things the navy would be better suited for.
At which point we can probably add the Air Force’s navy to the Navy’s air force (and the Navy’s army’s air force).
The basic problem is that you’re not going to have a hard line between the two. Military roles and missions evolve, and by the time we get to the case that you’d point to and say “clearly naval”, the Air/Space Force will have been doing something that’s 90% of the way there for some time. We start manned military presence in space with a new spaceplane for fixing or capturing satellites. It’s basically a long-endurance plane. Then we set up a space station. It’s in LEO, and an obvious extension of Air/Space Force missions. We call it a base. Then we need to do the same around Mars, so we set up a station there. Obvious extension of what we were doing before. And we decide to get our own vessel to ship stuff back and forth. Nothing big, it’s not even armed, but it’s nice to not have to deal with civilian cargo firms.
Now, suddenly, we need to produce an interplanetary warship. Do we give it to the Navy, whose mission looks fairly similar but has minimal presence in space, or to the Space Force, who doesn’t have “naval heritage”, but does have all of the experience of operating in space, including deep space and long duration.
I can see a couple of cases where you get naval-style organization in space. The most likely is that someone is standing up a force from scratch and uses fictional models. Or possibly there’s a messy divorce from the Air Force and they want to separate themselves. But it’s not like there’s a sharp divide when someone is going to say “better hand it over to the Navy now”.
Quick look at wikipedia says the Air Force became much larger, and also de facto independent from the Army, in 1941 and 1942. With that in mind, I feel like the most likely scenario for a Space Force as a separate branch of service is for us to start doing a *lot* more in space. Maybe someday we’ll have settlements in space and reason to worry that they’ll be attacked.
This is interesting to me, because I’ve started watching the anime “Space Brothers” chronicling a hypothetical near future where astronauts take moon missions in preparation for a Mars mission. It’s a very optimistic show, and so far, nothing has gone wrong on the missions.
This is because the show is about the wonder that comes with space exploration, and is more of a character study of why people fall in love with space and want to become astronauts. In addition, some tension comes from there having been a disaster mission in the past that killed astronauts. So it’s not about making the audience worry about the people on the mission, it’s about making the audience interested in how the characters feel in that moment.
It’s like how there’s not really tension in seeing if something goes wrong for the Superbowl Halftime show, or at least it’s not the primary source of tension.
“it’s about making the audience interested in how the characters feel in that moment”
That’s kind of what I’m getting at. Armstrong was an expert, so he would have known he was in (or was in serious danger of getting into) a FUBAR situation. But part of recognizing that is his expert knowledge. To a layperson, it might be necessary to exaggerate to get that feeling of imminent disaster across.
The solution to that is, as Space Brothers did, not to focus on dread or nervousness as the primary emotion. It’s about anticipation, excitement, determination. Parlay his expert knowledge into a heroic confidence.
It’s the tension of waiting at the bottom of the ninth inning to see if the cleanup is gonna get the hit to score the winning run, or if the star quarterback can complete the play to score the winning touchdown, if the tie-breaking point will come from this one penalty shot, etc.
I haven’t seen the movie, but watched the moon landing scene and thought it seemed well done, despite being a little choppy and slightly disorienting. I really liked the moment when the landing module’s door opens, you hear the whoosh of what I assume is decompression (or maybe just artistic sound meant to convey the feeling, since I assume the air was actually pumped out beforehand), and then he exits through the door and everything goes silent. That was really nice.
When will the results of RavenclawPrefect’s alternate survey be available?
More D&D discourse:
So, I like 5th Edition better than 3.X – it fixes most of the issues with caster supremacy and the way system mastery made or broke any character. Yet I have a couple of significant points of dissatisfaction:
1) NPCs are built like 4E monsters, rather than having class levels like AD&D/BECMI. This creates a world with a lack of transparency – how many soldiers or lords of the realm can the PCs fight and not be doomed? Well let’s see… a Noble has 9 HP and attacks for 1d8+1 damage with +3 to hit… and every combat Veteran (besides PCs) has 58 HP and attacks thrice a turn for 1d8+3 with +5 to hit. Well, uh, that sure has big implications for the implied setting!
2) All PC can functionally cast Cure Light Wounds on themselves at a rate of 1 slot/level. That is way too much healing for my taste: I like PCs to viscerally feel their dependence on a priest for healing.
1.) I don’t really understand the problem you are laying out here, but assuming I understand the general direction it is going in, I don’t think it is a problem. The numbers in combat are abstractions anyways, I think the system in 5e works well enough in that capacity. My problem with monster design is mostly, lots of worthless spells and too many sacks of hit-points(which are boring). Which I guess means I think the monsters are too complicated and too simple…yup.
2.) I generally like surges for a few reasons. I like the idea that a party can in theory get by without an explicitly magical healer, even if this rarely happens. I also think that healing is probably the single least interesting use of a spell slot. Ultimately though I think surges are only really needed at low levels, being a level 2 cleric you just do not have enough healing, even if you blow all your slots on healing(bad class design IMO). I also don’t really have a problem with the idea of mundane characters ‘healing’ themselves, because again, all the numbers in combat are abstractions.
Depth versus complexity in game design is an important concept. You want to increase the amount of meaningful choices available while have as few as possible mentally taxing aspects.
Is not easy to increase depth while decreasing complexity. Presentation can help; clear, simple, consistent language or iconography will make referencing and learning quicker. Thematic elements are important. Here’s a monster that can fly, has a blast range damaging power, and can make a reactive attack when flanked. How do you keep all that in mind? Well, it’s a dragon with a breath attack and a tail attack. Bundling things together into thematically relevant states can help. You want a transition point where the monster is stronger but more vulnerable, create a “bloodied” state at 1/2 HP where has increased attack but reduced defense. Stay away from numerous small modifiers and have fewer ones that are relevant. The Combat Advantage mechanic is pretty good about this.
In terms of monsters, I’m not familiar with 5E, but they should each have a good thematic hook that you can describe in a few words, and an ability to two to reinforce that. Goblins are mobile–okay, every goblin has a bonus move action, or a reactive shift, or whatever .
I don’t like this much abstraction because I’ve always extrapolated a population pyramid from the existence of classes. Assume a king or priest-king is 9th Level, the village priest a 1st level Cleric, determine the population of the kingdom, and figure out a multiplier from there. Say it’s a city-state with a city of 10,000 supported by 90,000 farmers:
1 9th level King, 2 8th level Superheroes, 4 7th level Champions, 8 6th level Fighter guys, 16 5th level Fighter guys, 32 4th level Heroes, 140 3rd level Fighter guys, 600 2nd level Warriors… there, now I have the demography and power of an entire social class. Repeat for Clerics and Mages.
In 5E, it’s not clear how PC classes fit into social classes, and they only give you about 3 stat blocks for humans of each social class (Noble for an aristocrat who’s never seen combat, Knight for an aristocrat who has, Veteran for a commoner who’s seen combat…)
I have never played in a D&D setting that I felt accurately reflected what a real world would look like run on D&D rules(maybe Dark Sun is close), I guess I would say this concern is just something that I have sensory fatigue to at this point.
If you do, here’s where to go to find out how many chandlers to have per population in a medieval village.
(Spoiler: 1/500 people. Hope it’s an above average size village!)
That is a really cool link.
1) Challenge Rating and a really accurate gut check is all you can really rely on. A noble has a CR just like a goblin chieftain.
1.1) Part of the reason for this is that the game design is that players are supposed to be relative glass cannon – high damage output but relatively low HP. Opponents, including opponents with apparent class levels, are supposed to have relatively high HP and do relatively low damage. Someone with game design can explain why this is, but apparently PC vs PC conflict is a recipe for devastating first strike and it’s over combats.
1.2) As a result, you will get told many times that if you want your players to fight a monk or a warlock or a bard or what have you, you should almost never just generate a character using PC generation methods. Instead, you should find a monster stat block for a relatively similar monster and adjust it to have the class features you want. As so you have monster stat blocks like Archmage, which is essentially a level 19 wizard, but generated with a monster stat block instead of a PC stat block.
2) I find the “you heal completely at the end of each long rest” to strain my credulity a little bit, but it hasn’t really hurt things. Recovering hit dice certainly encourages players to take short rests and continue adventuring, which the game is designed for. (Along with giving opponents PC stats, another destabilizing GM choice is “the 5 minute adventuring day,” which is where instead of the recommended 6 combat encounters per day(!), GMs tend to gravitate to a lot of social and non-combat activity interspersed with about 1 big battle per day, which again, isn’t what the game is designed for).
If one were interested in an RPG suited to a much higher ratio of story to battles, where should one be looking?
I’m not sure this the right type of question.
There’s actually very little in terms of game mechanics that can successfully “facilitate telling stories” – either the players at the table are interested in storytelling (in which case no mechanics will stop them either) or they’re not and you can’t force them to.
I’m currently involved in two concurrent D&D campaigns:
1. The one I’m running using BECMI rules (that account for very little other than combat encounters),
2. A 5E game one of my players is running.
Other than me and the second DM, there are two further players plaing in both campaigns. My game has two additional players who aren’t involved with the other game, whilst the other game has three who aren’t playing in mine.
In practice, my game – which has little if any rules for non-combat things – is hugely more story and role-play heavy than the other one; despite 5E having so many additional rules for out-of-combat play, social interaction and whatnot.
The majority of the people involved play in both games (4 of 6 in mine; 4 of 7 in the other), so it’s not like the groups are that different. In fact, the guys who shoulder a lot of the story-building/role-play in my game are also playing in the other. So why isn’t the ratio of story to combat roughly the same?
Paradoxically, I suspect that the “rules for everything” approach of 5E (and anything coming out of WOTC, for that matter) is the main culprit. For example: I play an Eldritch Knight, so my main ability focus is DEX and INT for mechanical reasons and for those same reasons CHA is my dump stat. So it goes. What that does mean, however, is I’m not even going to bother interacting with NPCs very much, because I’ll get called on to do Charisma-based checks at a penalty. We have a bard in the party for that stuff – pity his player is usually the one to speak the least during the session.
Conversely, in my game I tend to focus more on what the players do than the stats on their character sheets. One of them has a WIS 18 cleric that he’s playing as a pretty naive young man. Am I going to tell him that his character wouldn’t do certain things with a Wisdom that high? Or should I reduce his Wisdom score to that actually displayed by the character in most interactions?
The answer, of course, is to do neither. My approach is to use mental stats where mechanically necessary (very few situations in BECMI), but otherwise let players play the way they want to. The result is a much more interesting group of characters (in the 5E game, I’m well versed in what mechanical powers each fellow character has, but have nigh zero idea of who they’re supposed to be as people, barring a couple).
@Tarpitz
Fate comes to mind as an effort to design an RPG to better facilitate story, but in my experience it doesn’t actually work all that well.
The two big things I see with games that try to encourage more story focused play is RP tokens(which even D&D has at this point). In theory this adds an incentive structure for players to RP more, in practice basically everyone forgets the system is there, and or the already active players are the ones getting/reminding the DM to give them, inspirations.
The other thing is just, being very rules light, so the rules don’t ‘get in the way’ which again sounds better in theory than in practice. At lease one issue I have with these kinds of systems is that the lighter your rules get the less space there is for skill expression, not just in combat, but in general out of combat problem solving. Without skill expression, it stops feeling like a ‘game’ to me. If you want to just sit down with four friends and write a story, then, good luck with that. An emergent story from game play though, kinda requires some actual game play to help narrow the field of possibilities and get the creative juices flowing and such.
@Faza
The player vs character skill problem is a classic. I like to take a differentiated approach as much as possible. If you try and overly hamstring your proactive engaged players based on character limitations, you tend to get a dead table. On the other side, if my shy silent player picks a bard I am fine with them simply rolling an interaction, rather than coming up with the interaction. I don’t expect the guy playing the fighter to actually be able to cleave an orc in two, he just says that’s what he does, so if the bard can’t string together a cogent argument that is fine, he just needs to say that is what he does, and use the dice.
@Spookykou
That’s pretty much my approach, as well, except I try to keep the out-of-combat dice-rolling to a minimum.
In practice, I find it simply doesn’t matter very much – most out-of-combat interactions are not indeterministic in the way combat is supposed to be. Provided the characters are on the right track (that is: are trying to do something that makes sense), I typically just let them succeed, unless they do something really, really stupid. In other words, the player doesn’t need to sweet-talk me, in order to convince the King – he just needs to have a sensible argument on hand (doesn’t even need to be presented in character) and not call His Majesty an a-hole.
@Tarpitz
I think table matters more than rules but I’m partial to GP for XP D&D like I used to play, and I’ve heard good things about Legend of the Five Rings and 7th Sea, but the game I’ve played that I think encourages role-playing the most (if that’s your thing) is King Arthur Pendragon.
Doesn’t Pendragon have rules to enforce roleplaying? Your knight’s nature or something like that constrains their actions, and there’s rewards for following it and penalties for not?
(Which seems pretty ahead of its time; that sort of thing starts being more of a thing in the late 2000s for game design, doesn’t it?)
@dndnrsn:
Depending on how strictly you choose to interpret “constrain actions”, we can see the idea go back at least as far as Supplement I: Greyhawk to OD&D (1976 v. 1985 for Pendragon).
For example:
(Didn’t know that one…)
Plus, of course, the Paladin:
Around the same time Pendragon first came out, TSR released Unearthed Arcana for AD&D, that introduced the Cavalier class with a fairly detailed code of knightly conduct and stressed that it should be enforced:
@dndnrsn,
Yes the 1985 version of Pendragon had those rules, as well as the subsequent “editions”.
@Faza (TCM)
The paladin is an example of what I mean – it’s not just “a CG character can’t do XYZ” – there’s a stick but not much of a carrot. A combination of rules to reward acting according to some predetermined nature and to punish not seems like something more modern, but of course there’s earlier examples.
@dndnrsn:
I would say that the carrot is in the considerable advantages the paladin gets, qua paladin – compared to “normal” fighters (and most other classes, in fact). The behavioural constraints (and the CHA 17 requirement) were the price the player paid for the benefits.
My quibble with classing the idea as “modern” comes from the fact that, as far as I’m aware, most role-playing constraints that were considered fairly standard back in the day were lifted around 2000 (IOW 3E D&D and what came after). If most currently active players grew up with the idea that your class (role/profession/whatever) is simply a collection of bonuses/skills/powers, the idea that a knight should actually act like one may seem novel.
Most of the stuff I played – and still play – dates to the early Nineties or earlier and the idea that class/profession/role also means constraints on expected playing style is my default assumption.
Looking at the 1st and 2nd ed paladin prereqs, I wonder how often they got rolled up honestly on 3d6 in order, or the rules followed. Although when I started playing late in 2nd’s life cycle, 4d6 drop lowest arranged was the norm.
I don’t mean the idea of class-based constraints, I mean mechanically quantifying it – which the paladin does, and which Pendragon did. . Personally, I prefer mechanically quantifying rewarding roleplaying to some extent – the people who like to roleplay for its own sake are rewarded for what they were doing already and the people who would ordinarily play in a less constained manner and create friction with the first group have a mechanical rabbit to chase.
@Tarpitz – I think D&D is probably ok for 1 combat every day or so if you employ the “Hardcore” resting rules from the DMG, discussed elsewhere in this thread. They’re probably more realistic as well. (I think it’s short rests take overnight, long rests take 7 days of downtime?)
It would also have the advantage of limiting the ability of spellcasters to dominate non-combat situations and offer more opportunities for “skill monkeys” like rogues and bards.
Thanks all for your thoughts – much appreciated.
1) A noble with a lot of combat experience and the right gear becomes an NPC with the knight statline, so this really isn’t too big a deal.
2) 5e PCs are definitely a little far into the disbelief territory of being able to shrug off mortal wounds and truck on, yeah. I do still prefer it over the approach older editions took, because playing band-aid is a thoroughly unsatisfying experience in a tabletop RPG; every time you cast a healing spell that’s one less shatter or well-timed dispel magic, and clerics using their slots for everything but the healing spells is a feature, not a bug.
My experience DMing 3.X was that Clerics got so much narrative agency/power over the world around 5th level that every slot spent on being a healbot was a small mercy to the non-caster players.
Why does a Cleric get to nope out of the architectural constraints of a dungeon at 5th level in a dungeon-crawling game, and why don’t the poor martials get the Strength to break through a wall like Kool-Aid Man around the same time the vicar gets Stone Shape?
5e answers this question by not in fact letting some random lvl 5 cleric cast stone shape or fuck the world around him up as much, so that’s one more thing it does well.
Well, yes. My belief is that Stone Shape never should have gone below a 5th level spell, where 1E put it, because Level 9 is exactly where a character was expected to stop crawling around hostile castles and own their own.
What’s your take on the Book of Weeaboo Fightan Magic?
A pretty positive one in theory, though I don’t own a copy to go through all the maneuvers for a detailed take.
In 3.X all full progression casters are just playing a different game than everyone else, and I would agree that forcing them to occasionally heal might have balanced them slightly, but that was far from enough to bring them in line.
I don’t think that situation continues in 5e, I think you can make a reasonable argument for a well made fighter being one of the most dangerous things in the game in combat, and they never run out of steam. In contrast casters get more utility and situational power, but IMO in 5e this balance is already on point, if anything I think fighters might be too good, given the normal focus and scope of most D&D games.
As such, clerics(or bards, or druids), who are already probably weaker than wizard, and in general very balanced, probably should not also be expected to single handedly deal with the most important resource in what is effectively a resource management game. For a player like me, who considers casting a heal spell in a table top RPG as basically wasting my turn, a Cleric turned heal bot instantly becomes the most boring class in the game(maybe rangers are still worse??), if the game expects them to spend most of their spell slots on healing.
That depends heavily on whether “the normal focus and scope” is a dungeon crawl where 7-8 encounters a day is logical. I have yet to play in a campaign run the way the 5E devs want. In the campaign I’m a Moon Druid in, we have two casters who “go nova”, then the DM gives them a long rest because that just makes sense as an option when we’re traipsing around Bronze Age Greece and most villages aren’t going to attempt to murder us while we rest.
Agreed that 5e fighters are very, very, very good at what they do. This doesn’t help them one whit when they’re trying to salvage a sunken ship for loot, negotiate a difficult treaty, spy on the immortal queen’s battle plans, or put out a fire started by sorcery, but 5e martials are extremely good at what they’re supposed to do and if your DM isn’t giving you enough to fight you really ought to ask him why you’re not playing another game instead.
It does break down if your campaign is of the one encounter a day school, but 3.X breaks down a lot worse in those scenarios, and 5e has improved on that front, so it’s better if not perfect.
I am probably biased by a lot of my 5e experience being in public play, but the game being balanced roughly around the expectations of published modules and books(which admittedly don’t get to 8 encounters a day either) is acceptable to me.
In my experience, consistently the players who have the worst time with class balance are people playing casters who don’t really know how to play casters and activly hurt themselves of the group with stupid spells.
I have played in groups that don’t do enough encounters though, one a day even sometimes. It does skews the class balance a bit, but concentration at least does some work to bring it in line. More importantly though, the heavy OOC/RP games I play in, player enjoyment seems linked to player engagement and general sociability much more than class capability. If we are actually spending four hours with only one combat, sure maybe the wizard casts fly at some point, but most of that game at that point is just friends hanging out and telling a story together.
Because you can’t play “another game”, you have to play a specific other game, and unless your nerdosity is dialed up to eleven (glances nervously at four shelf-feet of RPGs), the response to any specific suggestion is usually that half your players haven’t heard of that game and don’t want to learn a new system so the campaign never happens.
Dungeons and Dragons(*) is both the Schelling point and the gateway drug for tabletop fantasy role-playing. If it can’t be fairly easily adapted to do classic Sword and Sorcery or Tolkienesque High Fantasy or Bronze Age Mycenean Adventuring, if it is too narrowly optimized for Munchkinized Murderhobos to be useful for anything else, then that hurts the entire genre. So both asking “How can I play this as other than eight combat encounters per day?” and complaining “Is WoTC trying to kill off tabletop roleplaying by turning it into the monoculture least likely to compete with online roleplaying?”, are reasonable things to do that are not appropriately countered by “play a different game”.
* Which in this context means editions of the main product line that have been in print sometime in the past twenty years or so. For the time being, “why aren’t you playing 3.5e?” is perhaps a reasonable question.
I would assume that the stock noble is just Viscount Random and if the players rumble with Duke Facestomper he’s built with his own statline and maybe they get their faces stomped. The stats of the noble guy suggest a guy who has money to buy gear, and minimal training, but isn’t really a proper warrior.
Some of them seem a bit high-levelled for what they’re described as, definitely. Random knights seem tougher than one might expect.
No, they can’t. Cure Light Wounds can be used in combat. Healing yourself using hit dice the way you described cannot.
You’ve said before that you like how the cleric role helps players get into a premodern headspace, and you’re not wrong that it does that, but I have serious reservations about how. Cleric as holy warrrior, prophet or miracle-worker has plenty of theme behind it, but cleric as healbot does not; there’s nothing in folklore or mythology that points to a field medic tagging along with the heroes, and all the (still relatively few) examples of it that I can think of in fantasy fiction postdate D&D. And divine favor as Vancian magic has some pretty weird implications.
The roguelike Nethack has an interesting alternative model. It’s a single-player game, and you can play a D&D-like cleric or a JRPG-like healer, but healing magic is explicitly a branch of magic rather than a religious thing: anybody can learn it by reading the right spellbooks, and you don’t need to be pious to use it. There are religious mechanics, though, and it’s beneficial for all classes to foster good relations with their gods by sacrificing to them and observing the appropriate taboos: the gods give powerful gifts if pleased by sacrifice, and praying to them can get you out of serious trouble (starvation, poison, disease, etc.). On the other hand, though, offending the gods by asking for their favor too often is a good way to pick up a curse or eat a lightning bolt, and apostacy makes a game unwinnable.
(snip) Cool!
I’m not sure what to say about “there’s nothing in folklore or mythology that points to a field medic tagging along with the heroes.” There’s definitely more than one Arthurian romance where wounded heroes get healed by a holy person after surviving a battle, but that’s not the same. The sons of Asclepius in the Argonautica and with the army in the Iliad should fit?
Sure, you see heroes being nursed back to health by wise or holy people fairly often — or by a love interest, sometimes — but you don’t often see a wise or holy person following a small group of heroes around and patching them up, and you never see them doing it mid-fight. The Iliad and even the Argonautica (which follows what we’d now call a platoon-sized force) are a little too large-scale for what I’m talking about, I think.
Sure, you’re correct: the minimum force of adventurers to get a holy field medic is 50, and you never see healing mid-fight before 1974.
The thought occurs to me that holy and arcane spell casting should not be separated, but any spell casting should be more religious in character, with spells costing “mana” you generate by making sacrifices. This could take the form of Cast From Hit Points, animal sacrifice, or for demons and other inimical deities, ritual sacrifice of a maiden that takes long enough for heroes to have a chance of rescuing her.
So how dangerous is a small, optimized adventuring party to the authorities, using 5E stats?
Since my DM is running it in Mycenaean Greece, let’s give our party a city-state to try to conquer: Pylos. It’s a city of (probably) fewer than 6,500 people supported by more than 300 damoi, villages with ~150 people. The damos “was obliged to supply a certain number of men who had to serve in the army.” So the rural population produces some multiple of 300 5E Veterans, unlikely less than 900. Every village would also have an Acolyte (“junior members of the clergy” — Monster Manual 342) who can cast 3 1st level spells a day. Knossos, which covered more than thrice as many hectares as Pylos, seemed to be able to field 310 chariots with “knights”, so let’s give Pylos 100 of those.
The weakest stat block for a Mage is a 9th level caster, so I’m going to assume arcane NPC support is rare as hen’s teeth.
Our adventuring party will include a 7th level Necomancer (Wizard) who uses his 3rd and 4th level spell slots to cast Animate Dead every morning, walking around surrounded by 10 skeletons (AC 13, 20 HP, +7 to hit with shortbow for 1d6+2 damage), a 7th level Moon Druid, and an Ancestral Guardian Barbarian with at least 2 levels of Moon Druid. The AG’s gimmick is:
“spectral warriors appear when you enter your rage. While you’re raging, the first creature you hit with an attack on your turn becomes the target of the warriors, which hinder its attacks. Until the start of your next turn, that target has disadvantage on any attack roll that isn’t against you, and when the target hits a creature other than you with an attack, that creature [takes half damage].
OK rationalists, how would you have Skeletor, Beast Man and friends conquer Pylos?
…….Assuming you throw ethics out the window.
And long term sustainability.
First make friends with the local bandits.
Pick the most isolated damoi. Have your Barbarian enter the center of the village without becoming Have your animated dead, bandits and druid summons surround the village. Barbarian aggros in the center of the town, picks a fight with any competent fighters, supported at discretion by the other party members. The Skeletons, bandits and Druid summons pick off anyone who tries to escape. Sending is a third level spell, so as long as you kill everyone, you should be able to hit a significant number of villages this way before anyone catches on. Even when people do catch on, there’ll still be a while before they figure out your M.O. and actually do something about it. Either way, loot the village, giving most monetary spoils to your bandit friends (wouldn’t do well to piss them off). Melt back into the woods. Optionally, when the city-state starts catching on, leave groups of bandits/paid mercenaries behind to ambush the investigative/aid teams. The success of your raids should attract other bandits, and you should eventually build enough people to raid the city and take it. Even if you never build that strength, the city will be weakened economically by the loss of its surrounding villages. It becomes classic guerrilla warfare, and hopefully enough villages were razed in the initial attacks for standard attrition to wear down the city-states forces eventually. You’ll be left with a nonfunctional smoldering apocalyptic husk of a city-state, but it’ll be your nonfunctional smoldering apocalyptic husk of a city-state.
Does re-heating coffee really damage its quality?
What makes the difference between iced coffee being delicious and cooled coffee being stale?
Is freshness of brewing really that important, and that quality permanently lost upon the first time it cools? What’s happening at the molecular level, or is it just a placebo effect?
(Much thanks last OT to baconbits9 explaining why pizza can’t be done as fast as burgers! I hadn’t thought of it that way, though I suppose there’s room for experimenting if you can underbake a crust, flash-freeze it, and then add pre-heated sauce to reduce on-order bake time without sacrificing final quality.)
Iced coffee is fresh coffee that’s been quickly cooled. I’d expect the cooling process to slow the loss of volatiles (both through evaporation and by oxidation), so iced coffee should last longer than hot. Cooled coffee has had plenty of time to lose volatiles; heating it up doesn’t bring them back and increases the reaction and evaporation rate.
There seems to be dispute about re-heating. I tend to the school which says that re-heating isn’t the problem, it’s that the cold coffee already sucks. Based mostly on re-heating coffee which got cold due to being put into big and too-cold cups rather than sitting around too long.
Not always, the best iced coffee is typically cold brewed, simply grounds in water left for a longer period than a hot brew (12+ hours), and it has the longest shelf life. My wife makes a pitcher that lasts 3-4 days when refrigerated in the summer.
I don’t know why hot coffee goes stale quickly, but I do not like reheated or tepid coffee at all (I take mine black, passable but not super high quality).
@Nybbler
Can you elaborate on what volatiles are evaporating/oxidizing? Is it similar to why decaf loses a measure of flavor?
And I guess these same compounds would become volatile upon heating cold brewed coffee, such that heated cold brew still goes “stale” at the same rate as a fresh hot brew?
I don’t know nearly enough about coffee chemistry to know exactly what the compounds are. But here’s a random study I found on the internet.
Coffee is decaffeinated by extracting the caffeine using solvents; this process probably isn’t totally selective. However, there’s also the fact that caffeine itself has a flavor (mostly bitter).
I’d expect cold brew to start with different flavor/aroma compounds than hot brew from the same beans (since in general temperature affects extraction rate of different compounds differently). So staling of heated cold brew compared to regular hot brew probably just isn’t directly comparable. Anyway, my chemistry knowledge is close to exhaustion with “heat usually makes everyday reactions happen faster”.
Re freezing bread/dough
It is done in some situations, the last bakery I worked for bought par baked (half baked) frozen baguettes and we would basically toast them to the right color each morning. This works better with bread though because dough rises in the oven as the air trapped by the gluten heats up and expands. A pizza dough without any sauce, cheese or toppings would rise and become thick (and probably unevenly so with bubbles). It is my understanding that your New York City customers would then tar and feather you for such insolence.
Hrm. then perhaps pre-sauce a little bit, as well? Just enough to prevent rising, but not enough to significantly increase re-heat time. (and then additional pre-heated sauce is added at time of order, until desired moisture is achieved)
I mean, they do sell premade pizza crusts in the non-refrigerated section, though I don’t know if those are any good. Or maybe something like pita, which has some rise (unlike no-yeast breads like tortillas) but can be toasted at will.
None pizza with left beef
Whatever happened to the public option in healthcare? It seemed like the natural solution to the problem. The government has a default plan that covers the basics, while if you want something better you can pay a private company. This seems to work fine with the post office vs ups and fedex, and worked fine with public schools before educational policy became divorced from reality. It also gives an outlet for people with congenital diseases that no insurance company could realistically profit from.
Is there something wrong with it that I’m missing? Do people still talk about it? It seems like Medicare for all is the hot idea these days.
Basically, the public option is still a compromise position from the political universe that thought Europe-style socialized medicine is “politically unattainable” and a compromise is needed.
The lesson Democrats took from Obamacare is that no compromise is possible, and any position they take will be attacked endlessly as socialism no matter what. That being the case, you might as well go for the actual socialized medicine as the half-measure.
Also, the most popular part of Obamacare in the states that got it was the Medicaid expansion, not the marketplaces or the subsidies, and Democrats noticed that too.
In addition to MrApophenia’s points about why the liberals didn’t trust it, the conservatives didn’t trust that the public option was not going to become a government-supported system that won because it made other systems illegal or just special tax exemptions not given to other companies.
That wasn’t how the public option was going to work. The public option was meant to be an insurance company run by the government offering good (as in not bare bones) plans that would compete head to head with private companies on equal terms.
It only made sense as a way to reduce costs if you think that (A) the government is just that danged efficient or (B) that insurers would make too much money from a captive consumer base that was mandated to buy insurance and needed to be kept honest.
ACA insurance hasn’t been particularly profitable so B isn’t an issue, and if you believe A I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.
@MrApophenia
No compromise was attempted with the ACA. It was a healthcare bill that got bernie sanders’ vote that the right wing of the democratic caucus had to be cajoled into swallowing. That’s as much an effort to compromise as the republicans telling the democrats “We’ll vote for whatever budget you want, as long as you get Ron Paul’s vote.”
It’s a pity, too. A true bare-bones public option is probably the least-bad alternative that’s anywhere close to politically feasible.
A bare-bones public option would last as long as it takes to make a campaign showing someone photogenic who couldn’t pay for care that their bare-bones public option didn’t cover.
At this point, I’d settle for a bare-bones public option: anyone who wants can sign up for Medicaid and pay the average Medicaid cost.
Which means mostly people with chronic conditions whose treatment costs more than the average Medicaid cost will sign up, which will cause the average Medicaid cost to rise, which will make it even less likely that anyone without expensive chronic conditions will join, lather, rinse, repeat.
That’s not what the public option was. It was supposed to be just like an insurance company, self-sufficient and the only thing the government gave it was a loan to get started.
And from the start, proponents of the public option started talking about how it was Medicare and taxpayer-funded. You need to hold off on the bait-and-switch. You can’t talk in public about how you are planning to swindle the other side. It doesn’t work like that.
John Schilling
My plan will definitely push average Medicaid cost up, but I think it will avoid the vicious cycle problem because Medicaid has so many participants already, who will not switch away. About 20% of the US population has Medicaid now–even adding 5% of the population with 10x the current average cost would “only” triple average cost.
As discussed below, Obamacare was the Heritage Foundation’s conservative alternative healthcare reform plan, and Obama went with it, over the objection of large parts of his own party and even his own administration, in an open and explicit (and laughably futile) effort to get Republican votes.
And even if no Republicans believe it was a compromise, that isn’t really the question. Democrats absolutely believe Obamacare was not just a compromise, but a staggering, bending over backward compromise at that – and the Republican reaction to it has shown that it isn’t even worth trying to compromise with Republicans.
This will fall on deaf ears, but the Heritage Foundation plan was for mandatory HDHP, not mandatory full-coverage with anything labelled as “preventive” done for free.
Sorry, but you can hear straight from the Heritage Foundation Director in 2012 that they had nothing to do with the Obamacare plan, nor mandate. It’s a myth some people seem to like to tell, but the reality is that the ACA didn’t pass with a single Republican vote. To call that a “compromise”, is a bit much. Who exactly were the Democrats compromising with, themselves? They certainly weren’t listening to the concerns of Republicans at the time it was being discussed. At best, they tried to bribe a couple of GOP Senators with special treatment for their States, which they didn’t go for in the end.
That article comes off as saying “We didn’t support an individual mandate, we supported something that’s just like the individual mandate.”
“Yes, we want to make everyone buy health insurance, but when we do it it’s for sound economic reasons and when the Democrats do it it’s because they love the nanny state.”
I’ll grant that this could be a substantive difference in how it works out, but if your position is “I don’t want to make everyone buy insurance, I just want to offer them a lot of money to get it,” I don’t think there’s as much daylight as you think between you and the Democratic position.
I’m pretty sure this is exactly the same defense Obamacare used – that it was constitutional because it was not a requirement, simply a tax increase on people who didn’t get insurance.
The only defense I really buy is “That was 20 years ago and my views have changed,” but if the Obamacare mandate was a Republican plan from 20 years ago, then that rather puts a dent in the “Cthulhu swims left” narrative, doesn’t it?
Beleester the ACA has a mandate but the ACA is not merely a mandate. I think the argument being made is that a lot of the bells and whistles of the ACA that ended up overwhelming any potential premium reductions gained from expanding the insurance pool were not part of the heritage foundation’s proposal. If the ACA was a mandate and nothing else it would not have resulted in the kinds of premium increases that was observed.
This part was actually my main point. You guys, and other Republicans, don’t think the ACA was a compromise. Cool.
The Democrats did, and do. They think they compromised a huge part of what they care about in health care reform to try to create a compromise plan that would be palatable to at least moderate Republicans.
And it didn’t get one Republican vote, and they spent the next decade devoting all their efforts to killing it.
Which is why the party has moved on to Medicare for All now. If the Republican response to a subsidized private healthcare market and a nationalized healthcare system are going to be identical, why not just go for it?
The Democrats were compromising with their own party. Senator Joe Lieberman killed public option, not Senator Susan Collins.
Given that a bill with public option would not have had cloture, I’m not really sure how anyone thinks Medicare For All would have passed. But absolutely, go back in time and try to run that instead. It would collapse just like Clinton’s health reform did, despite the fact that Clinton had substantial majorities to work with in both Congressional houses.
They think they compromised a huge part of what they care about in health care reform to try to create a compromise plan that would be palatable to at least moderate Republicans.
And failed, evidently. It happens. That’s the point where I’d expect a bunch of professional politicians who were actually bent on compromise to look around for some unrelated thing the Republicans actually wanted, and offer them that in exchange. “You give us part of what we want, in return for nothing” isn’t most people’s idea of a compromise.
What would such a compromise look like? The Democrats get Medicare for All, and the Republicans get what? Would any one of the following on its own be enough political compensation?
– nation-wide ban on second-trimester abortions, with narrow exceptions
– prompt deportation of 90% of current illegals
– nation-wide concealed carry for everyone except ex-cons
I think that there are at least two distinct types of Republicans on those answers. Inasmuch as I respect Republican thought processes on the question, I respect that they can look at Medicare-for-all and (correctly) point out that it’s way too expensive for the current budget, and taxes on the middle class would necessarily go way up to pay for it. Because that would be completely unpalatable to the average voter, both parties seem to know the whole proposal is DOA.
The other side of the Republicans seems to be more interested in getting what they can and using the government to support their own shibboleths. That side doesn’t seem to care about deficits either, and would probably take one or all of your proposed offers – at least if they thought they were genuine offers and not a short term ploy that gets immediately retracted.
Well put. Merely compromising with the status quo is how you get the ratchet effect.
@johan_larson
It would look like what Bush did w/ no child left behind.
NCLB originally had two main planks: enhancing school choice by giving people the right to move between different public schools and making schools more accountable by mandating testing and establishing accountability criteria for schools. When it didn’t get the votes, Bush cut a deal with Ted kennedy that dropped the school choice provisions and dramatically increased federal education funding. This cost republican votes, but won over more democratic ones. The final vote in the senate actually had more democratic support than republican, and the thing passed overwhelmingly.
Regardless of what you think of the policy, that’s what legislative comprise looks like, offering the other side something that they actually want to get what you want. In the context of healthcare, that would have meant adding something like tort reform or block granting medicaid in the hopes of winning over some GOP support. Nothing like that was ever on offer for the ACA, at no point were the democrats willing to give up a single democratic vote to win over republican votes.
As for a compromise to get medicare for all, I don’t think it would pass the democratic caucus in the senate. They might like to posture with the idea, there’s no appetite for the trillion a year in taxes required to pay for it. Yes, there’s a house bill every year that gets a fair bit of nominal support, but that proves as much as the republican votes to repeal the ACA or the ryan budget. Less, actually, because republicans actually took votes on those things and passed them through the house, something the democrats don’t do on medicare for all.
@johan_larson: The things in your list might even have been overkill: they’d have only needed to shake loose a handful of Republicans to get something most people would recognize as a bipartisan compromise. A modest tax cut would probably have done the trick; tax cuts are the dealing-with-Republicans equivalent of an Amazon gift card.
The ACA had nothing to do with the heritage plan. Heritage involved completely blowing up the group insurance market. the ACA mandated group coverage by a large number of employers. Heritage was, at least in theory, zero cost. all the cost of the individual subsidies was to be paid for by abolishing group subsidies. the ACA spent 100 billion a year out the door. the heritage mandate was minimal, to keep the subsidies down, to make it cost neutral. the ACA had an expansive mandate.
the two plans had nothing to do with one another, despite some very superficial similarity. the ACA had far more in common with hillarycare than anything heritage as ever proposed.
That was honestly the part that baffled me the most about ACA. Rather than blowing up the employer provided group coverage system, it entrenched it. Losing insurance when you quit or switched jobs was one of the biggest issues with the existing system, and ACA did nothing but enhance the tie between employment and health insurance.
While blowing up group insurance is possibly necessary, 1) actually blowing it up would bring out INCREDIBLE amounts of pressure, and the lesson Obama learned from Hillarycare was to not pick huge fights, and 2) it is the most secure way someone with pre-existing conditions can get good coverage that they know is good.
You can say #2 was going to be solved by PPACA changes, but a) it didn’t, and b) people aren’t going to trust what comes out the other end of the sausage factory will still take care of them.
I agree that blowing up the group market was both a good idea and essential to making the individual market functional, but they wanted to be able to say “If you like your plan you can keep it.”
“If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan”. Yes, that was a four-Pinocchio, pants-on-fire whopper, but Obama wasn’t wrong when he understood he needed to sell that particular lie if he wanted to get the ACA passed.
At least in 2008, most working-age Americans actually liked the coverage they were getting through their employers. They may have feared what would happen if they lost their jobs, and sympathized with the less fortunate who didn’t have (good) jobs, but regarding their own present health insurance, they had a reasonably plump bird in the hand and Obama wasn’t promising more than a single vaguely equivalent bird hidden in the brush.
If you openly propose to do away with employer-provided group coverage, you can’t credibly promise to let people who like their plans, keep their plans. If you can’t make that promise, the ACA is DOA in 2008.
Then the ACA SHOULD have been DOA. If your plan can only be sold by lying about the downsides and you don’t have the cajones to push the hard changes needed to make it actually work, you have no business screwing with something as huge and important as the US healthcare system.
But of course, Obama had to have something that could be called healthcare reform, and, well, the ACA was certainly something. Political symbolism has become something of a theme the last couple OTs. At least Trump’s dumb wall is 2 or 3 orders of magnitude cheaper. If only Obama could have been appeased with a $10B statue of himself.
The US post office has annual operating revenues in the neighborhood of 70 billion and losses under 5 billion. It ‘works” largely because the US system is wealthy and robust enough to withstand that level of inefficiency easily. A public option would likely be much higher, though also likely absorbable on its own the the broader economy, what will eventually happen though is that enough of these programs that work fine will be built up and the economy won’t be handling them well. At that point none of the individual programs will appear to be the culprit.
The US Post Office’s isn’t running a deficit because it’s inefficient, it’s running a deficit because a Republican Congress foisted ludicrous requirements on it, possibly in a cynical attempt to kill it. From Bloomberg:
“Then there is the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 (PAEA), which some have taken to calling “the most insane law” ever passed by Congress. The law requires the Postal Service, which receives no taxpayer subsidies, to prefund its retirees’ health benefits up to the year 2056. This is a $5 billion per year cost; it is a requirement that no other entity, private or public, has to make. If that doesn’t meet the definition of insanity, I don’t know what does. Without this obligation, the Post Office actually turns a profit. Some have called this a “manufactured crisis.” It’s also significant that lots of companies benefit from a burden that makes the USPS less competitive; these same companies might also would benefit from full USPS privatization, a goal that has been pushed by several conservative think tanks for years.”
I don’t understand this objection, is a national health care plan going to be magically exempt from asinine rules written by congress? It doesn’t particularly matter if the problems are caused by congress or the postmaster general, they exist because of the structure that it operates under.
Is there no substantive distinction between, this will have to operate under normal government oversight, and this will have to operate under an active attempt to shut it down by ‘bad actors’ in the government.
If not, yeesh.
Anything that is politically controversial, will if implemented as a government program have approximately half the elected officials in the government trying to make it a humiliating failure for the next generation (at least). This is an inherent consequence of democratic government; if you don’t want to deal with it, don’t have a democratic government, or don’t ask it to do controversial stuff.
The objection is to the manner in which you characterized the problem. If you had said that any national healthcare plan would have to content with asinine rules set by Congress, possibly in a cynical attempt to destroy it, and used the Post Office as an example, then there would have been no objection. Indeed that is exactly my primary concern with adopting a national healthcare plan. It is very likely to be sabotaged by Congress through either malice or incompetence.
Hell i remember a long time ago a forum discussion in which US posters were explaining to a Canadian this exact thing. He couldn’t believe it, to him it was tantamount to claiming that the US government was filled with petty evil people. It’s unfortunate that nobody thought to say, “Congratulations! Now you know why the Libertarians exist.” Instead everyone immediately walked back the implications. Of course that was then, these days the response would probably have been, “Yes, haven’t you been paying attention? They’re called the Republican Party.”
that’s not an insane requirement, given the enormous pension issues in that exist in virtually every major American government institution, it’s straight up good policy to require government entities to fund their retirement programs. Private entities have already funded their pensions. That said, regardless of whether or not the policy made sense, the post office did it, and it’s still losing money hand over fist.
I don’t know enough of the financial situation to say for certain, but my initial response was similar. Maybe the USPS is the only entity that has to meet this requirement, but maybe the others should.
If you read much on Reason.com, you’ll note that there are many, many entities who are not going to be able to fund their pensions. This is highly predictable, clearly known, and not being accounted for in current planning. If the intention is to continue having the USPS not be subsidized by taxes, then they will not have the option that many other public pensions have – increase taxes. Whether it’s good or even acceptable for other public entities to knowingly fail to fund their pensions seems like a highly relevant conversation.
I saw municipal and state pension funds being underfunded mentioned as a crisis during the 08-09 recession. Was that overhyped, or has market improvements delayed it, or is it still impending but just not talked about much in the last decade? Or am I not looking in the right places?
The article actually mentions that. And it does seem like the issue is that private companies have not completely prefunded their pensions.
The fact that everybody should do something doesn’t mean that singling out one and forcing them to do it is not discriminatory.
The way pension budgeting works, they are allowed to assume a certain level of growth in the funds to cover future expenses. So a 3% shortfall can be “covered” by a 3% annual growth (highly simplified). One of the major problems is that the budgeted growth is often higher than can reasonably be expected. Not usually pure fantasy, but higher than what we see in practice. In good years, where the markets are all up, this seems like a non-issue. In bad years, like 08-09, people suddenly realize that there are a ton of underfunded pensions.
The pensions really are often unfunded, but the markets have been doing great for the last two years, so it seems controllable. That is actually true for better funded pensions, and completely false for the bad ones (even in really good markets…).
ETA
Sure, but the USPS doesn’t have a lot of competition, since it’s a mandated monopoly. I would prefer stricter rules about how entities are allowed to structure their pensions. I don’t support the narrative that the Postal Service is failing because it loses money, because it’s made opportunistically. If the people saying that would also say “all these other [entities] are failing too, because they don’t account for future expenses” then that’s fundamentally true. Hiding the Illinois state pension fund shortfalls doesn’t make them go away.
Actually, I think you have this one wrong. That law required the Post Office to fund outstanding retiree benefits within 10 years, which should have meant 2007-2016. It’s taking longer because the Post Office keeps defaulting on the debt, but it’s not a permanent thing. And given that the other alternative is for the USPS to get bailed out by the government when they run out of money down the road, I don’t really have a problem with this.
I am a bit confused here as to the outrage that the USPS funds its pension plan. I had to dig a little beyond that Bloomberg article, but I found the text of the law.
You have to scroll down a ways to find the applicable section, but I think section 802 is what they are referring to. In that section, it says that the USPS must fund the net present value of its future costs over the net present value of its pension receipts. Thus they must pay for their pensions when they are incurred. It is my understanding that every company in the US has these exact same requirements. It is certainly true that companies have gone bankrupt and their ex-employees have lost much of their pensions. But that’s because many times these pension costs and receipts are calculated very badly, not because the requirement isn’t there. So I am unclear what is so insane about this law. It looks like the rare sane pension law that has come out of government to me. OF course all this is just a segue to the discussion about ACA, but I don’t see how the pension section of the postal code is a good “bad example.”
If your model is the public schools the public option is free to the customer, paid for by everyone’s taxes, which means the private option has to be a lot better to be worth taking, since those who take it, like those who send their kids to a private school, are paying twice.
If the public option isn’t subsidized, then it becomes a straightforward question of whether the government can do a better job of providing insurance than private firms.
@DavidFriedman
Note that it definitely isn’t necessary for the healthcare to be free, just like sending mail through USPS isn’t free.
The USPS manages to survive by having a government-issued monopoly on mail. IIRC correctly, competing services are only allowed to exist if postage costs at least 6x 1st class mail.
The lesson to learn here is that the government would soon ensure a monopoly on its health insurance plan to guarantee universal service.
There are other reasons to prefer the private school options, though, beyond quality. Segregation -by race, social class, actually having the money to pay, religion-, immediately comes to mind.
I doubt segregation is a premium for private vs public healthcare.
Neighborhoods in America are already so segregated this seems like it would not be a powerful motivator. Private schools to me have always looked more like signaling that no cost is too great for my child’s future, or a sort of nebulous belief in the core principle that things that cost more are better.
Spookykou:
Do you actually know any parents who send their kids to private schools?
@albatross11 I have known a few, the most salient example in my mind is two Jewish families who sent their children to a Christian private school(so, not segregating on religious grounds*) in my area, the school had slightly nicer facilities, in that they had a ‘campus’ set up that looked very nice, but the demographics of that school and the closest public school were basically identical, I am sure the private schools produced slightly better results on average, thanks to selection effects, but from everything I have seen the top public schools in my city are very competitive with the private schools in terms of student outcomes.
*While my example and previous comment does not speak to it, I do think segregation on religious grounds is probably a common/reasonable motivator for private school.
My parents sent us to a private school run by the University of Chicago. I don’t have statistics, but I’m pretty sure the intellectual quality of both the classes and the student body was well above that of the local public school.
We sent our kids for a while to a small and very unconventional local private school run along unschooling lines, a model we much preferred to the conventional model, public and private. Eventually problems arose with the school and we shifted to home unschooling.
Not signalling in either case.
The only people I’ve known who sent their kids to private high schools lived in Philadelphia. I doubt segregation was a factor in their decision; they were a mixed race couple — black and white.
@eyeballfrog
Isn’t the issue that the private insurers will then cherry pick the healthiest people? So then the people on the government plan will be very expensive, which means either very high premiums or huge subsidies (which in turn makes people upset who are on the private plans and which gives government a bad name for being inefficient, because most people probably wouldn’t understand the problem).
In The Netherlands we used to have both a public option and private options, which worked as long as Dutch society was still fairly collectivist. However, when it became much more individualist, young people began picking cheaper private options. This caused the premiums to rise, which made more relatively healthy people leave the public option, which raised the premium further, etc.
So we got a reform where we now only have (semi-)private insurers, who are forced by the government to provide a standardized package whose contents is set by the government, for which they cannot refuse any anyone. So they now compete on providing this package the cheapest (although fairly few people switch insurers, so whether this market is competitive enough is up for debate). Then above and beyond this, they can offer extended packages, the contents of which they are free to pick (and where they may refuse customers).
Dutch people are required to have this standard package, (more or less) preventing low-risk people from opting out entirely and poor people from using ’emergency-room only care’ (as is common in the US).
This sort of sounds like the ACA-insurers required to offer essential health benefits, people required to buy a compliant plan.
I’d bet an awful lot that the standard Dutch plan is a lot less generous.
This is a foreign perspective on an expat website:
https://www.iamexpat.nl/expat-info/insurances-netherlands/dutch-health-insurance
I forgot to note that the premium doesn’t cover the full cost. Part is funded by taxes and part through the premiums.
Only if you have price control. On a free market, insurers are happy to insure healthy people at a healthy person price, unhealthy people at an unhealthy person price.
One of the problems with discussions of health insurance is that they confuse insurance with income redistribution, try to compel people who expect to have low medical costs to subsidize people who expect to have high medical costs. In particular, the ACA is designed to force the young to subsidize the old. Once you do that, you then need something like the mandate because otherwise the people who are being forced to pay $4,000 for insurance only worth $2,000 choose not to buy, and their money can’t be used to provide $6,000 worth of insurance to other people for a price of $4,000.
Sure, but how else are you going to force solidarity from the healthy to the less healthy? You could have an inverse tax on healthcare use, but that would distort the market, incentivizing people to avoid healthcare more than warranted.
An income redistribution plan is not nuts, but if you are hiding an income redistribution plan in your insurance plan, it’s going to look bonkers and weird.
incentivizing people to avoid healthcare more than warranted.
In all seriousness: if the country as a whole is spending Too Much on health care (and Obama made the case for this very strongly in 2009-2010), and we want to Spend Less on health care, we should be taxing it more. Practically, this is received about as well as plans to eliminate tulip subsidies.
Adding to what Edward said: Even given that redistributing resources to the unhealthy is a reasonable thing to want to do, why would you pick on the healthy– mostly young people without a whole lot of money– as the people to redistribute from?
The way the ACA pays out subsidies is based on income levels, such that the wealthy are paying extremely high premiums while the poorest groups are only a small fraction of the nominal price.
Because of this, the bulk of the ACA acts as transfer from the rich to the poor.
@Guy in TN
– The hardest hit by the ACA are young working people and familes just over the subsidy cut-off, who pay the full (and inflated as a result of the ACA) cost while receiving the fewest benefits on average.
– Ultimately, the ACA transfers money from people who are (a) above the subsidy cutoff and/or (b) unusually healthy to others, but only if the people buy ACA insurance in the first place, so people with access to other sources of insurance, or who go bare, pay much less of the subsidy.
The transfers aren’t funded exclusively though premiums. The law also levies taxes on the rich in various ways to fund the program. You can read all about it here.
Describing it as being funded by people “above the subsidy cutoff” is a little deceptive since this group technically includes billionaires, but that’s not what the phrase colloquially implies.
That might be true, but how do you calculate the amount of the transfer in the other direction due to rules restricting the ability of insurance companies to charge lower rates to healthier people in order to know if it is true? On average, people are poorer young than old, and the system pretty clearly subsidizes the old at the expense of the young.
As far as I can tell, for the past three months, the Sort by Controversial algorithm has been running on a Kremlin supercomputer.
The border wall–government shutdown was their first shot.
The Buzzfeed story about Cohen was their second.
The Covington School tempest in a teapot was their third.
What’s next?
It’s not Putin running the supercomputer, it’s Molloch.
In the case of the MAGA teens, it appears to have literally been the Russians – the video was originally posted by a fake and now banned account and then signal boosted by a bunch of bots.
Correcting myself – the original video was posted by some rando on Instagram, but the one that went viral was posted by a fake account and then signal boosted by a bunch of bots.
How does fake account + bots = Russians?
They hardly have a monopoly in that area.
I mean, they are the ones we know are actively running a government program to seek out or generate culturally divisive topics and spread them on social media to create chaos in America. Fair enough, could be somebody else doing the same thing.
I’m putting my marker down on Russia, though.
Good God, someone was sharing around this “Covington School is a scissor statement” interpretation on Twitter earlier today and now Ross Douthat’s gone and written his column on it.
@Nick
Despite being annoyed that I now know of the incident (which I don’t think should have ever been considered “newsworthy”), I thought the column was pretty good, it reminded me of something our host would write (and I’m sure that was Douthat’s intention).
I actually wrote that before reading the article itself. Mostly I was supremely amused that, like two hours before, Ross was retweeting this interpretation and then quoting Scott on Twitter, and then I poke back on and sure enough, he’s written about it. Like, that didn’t take long I guess.
So I’ve actually read the column now and it probably deserved more than a snarky comment from me. I liked that Ross broke script to acknowledge the stupid dance many conservatives* feel they have to do, performing moderation and both-sidesism but not always feeling it. Because there’s the exterior tension as Ross is caught between his wider liberal audience and his conservative allies, but an interior tension too between playing a lie and just cutting loose.
*This goes for many folks in many positions, I’m sure; I just know the feeling from the position of a conservative surrounded by liberals.
i thought it was cool to see an SSC thing featured in the NYT, but uh
well, it wasn’t a bad column; I feel strongly that I’m right about the case, but of course that’s how I’m supposed to feel, which doesn’t stop me from feeling it
if I have one objection it’s that I feel like the early over-reactions to this case forced people to maintain their position to avoid admitting that they may have tried to ruin the lives of someone for no good reason; maybe that’s part of scissorism too, that one side gets stuck in a wrong position to avoid cognitive dissonance. Of course that’s just me subtly advancing my position on the whole case, but maybe it can be taken as a commentary on scissors; in a scissor case, one side really can be right, but due to forced cognitive dissonance it still tears people apart.
That’s explicitly suggested in the part of Scott’s story Ross quoted on Twitter:
But the lesson here isn’t that one side has cognitive dissonance; it’s that it’s easy to suspect that the other side has cognitive dissonance. It’s one element of the paranoia that a Scissor statement induces, and it’s one more escalation of the fight, should you act on the belief that the other side doesn’t really believe it anymore, that now they just want to destroy you.
After all, cognitive dissonance is not a one-way phenomenon. It’s obvious that one can be on the wrong side of a statement, encounter evidence that favors the other side, and feel dissonance. But it’s perfect possible to be on the right side of the statement, encounter different evidence that favors the one side, and feel dissonance too.
So I’m sure a fraction of people on both sides ended up in this position. It’s easy to imagine myself watching the video for the first time, getting a sinking feeling as I see the tomahawk chops and MAGA boy’s awkward smile that the media narrative is right, and then quashing all doubt so I can get back to owning the libs. It’s likewise easy to imagine myself watching a video from a different angle, getting a sinking feeling as I hear the homophobic slurs being aimed at the boys and watching Phillips approach them, and quashing all doubt etc. etc.
I think ignoring the dissonance like that is wrong and shameful. I also think I can’t read minds, and acting even on the relatively firm assumption that some percentage of my interlocutors don’t believe what they’re saying is a terrible idea. So the dissonance is, ultimately, not an element we want to focus our energies on.
It’s embarrassing and socially awkward to admit you were wrong. And media sources tend to follow one another and cluster around the same narrative. That creates a lot of path dependency. For example, the Trayvon Martin shooting’s original set of facts turned out to be quite different from what eventually came out (the great big white guy became a little hispanic guy, for example), but once the narrative was established, most media sources just followed it. I suspect this interacts badly with the desire to get the story first/get a scoop.
One thing this should make us do: pay attention to the people who initially jumped on the bandwagon, and then got back off when more facts came out. Those are people who might be good to pay attention to in future stories, as they’re doing something hard and uncomfortable to be more right.
Absolutely, on both counts.
One more thing: Jonah Goldberg had a comment on The Remnant (which I’ve been listening now thanks to you) that when news breaks on Twitter everyone rushes to be “the first to be wrong.” Robby Soave and others have placed a lot of the blame here on journalists for piling on and not checking the facts, but of course, it’s not journalists who broke the story. A million people had gotten there first and a narrative already crystallized.
It has me wondering about the tradeoff. Irresponsible journalists can screw up and malicious ones can twist the story. So a platform like Twitter that lets us signal boost the very people, on the ground at the time, with documentary evidence no less, seems like a powerful tool to combat that. But the very people on the ground at the time used documentary evidence to twist the story themselves! How well can even responsible journalists fight that?
The way the Washington Post handled the Rolling Stone “Jackie” story.
They approached it as neither true nor false, and did the research that RS should have done in the first place. Then noted the problems with the story, ran their own article pointing out the issues, and effectively changed the narrative.
There was already a very public crystallization (more accurately, several different ones in different segments of the population) of the narrative before the Post wrote their story, but they did the right thing anyway.
The most important thing a Journalist can do when presented with a trending Twitter story is to research it and then present a more detailed report. The worst thing a Journalist can do is signal boost an existing narrative without checking into it, especially if the signal boost specifically adds inflammatory language – in essence becoming part of the mob they are reporting about.
“Solicit comment from the person you’re criticizing before you run the story” is, or used to be, responsible journalism 101.
The mainstream outlets seem to have abandoned this when it comes to Twitter outrages, rushing to report before doing even a simple investigation into the subjects involved.
It certainly would have lessened this controversy.
I think that’s why Covington, at least the event itself, isn’t quite a classic scissor. Part of the problem is that a narrative started to crystallize based on incomplete information. Once the complete information came out, a good chunk of the initial critics of the Covington boys either outright apologized or quietly memory holed their criticism. Another chunk doubled down. So the actual current controversy is between the double downs and the people who are pissed off at the double downers (as well as upset about the early coverage).
To me a true scissor would be a scissor that remains once all the facts are on the table, where in this case the unusual two-phase way the story came out is a big reason it was controversial in the first place.
Part of what I observe in this case (on FaceBook) is people who are uncomfortable admitting that their initial response was wrong shifting from blaming the boys to blaming their adult chaperones—because that still lets them put the blame on the outgroup instead of admitting that both they and the people they were supporting were in the wrong.
That was basically my reaction, too. When I read the Ross article, I thought, “how is this a scissor statement, it was a simple misleadingly edited video that now that we’ve seen the whole context we can now agree was an honest mistake.” Then I read the NYT comment section and felt a desire to burn the entire organization to the ground. Scissor statements are
scary.
Edit: After typing this I thought it might be unfair to form an opinion on what other side was thinking by only reading internet comments, a notoriously unreliable source. So I did a google search and read the first three clearly left leaning articles published today, Vox, Huff Post, and Roots. I regret that decision immensely. All three of the news sources are dead to me, which is sad because I like some Vox articles. Again scissor statements are scary.
@aristides,
I had a similar reaction to a left leaning radio station that I was listening to on Friday because they were reporting on a “wildcat” teachers strike in my hometown.
Come my Tuesday morning commute I turn on the radio and they were interviewing Nathan Phillips and…
….it was just so very bad!
Honestly, I remain unconvinced about this being a scissor statement, as defined by Scott.
I’d also had a look at the NYT comments section (on the David Brooks column linked by Plumber) and I wasn’t particularly surprised at what I saw. Essentially, when people’s “is” position (what the parties did) became untenable in light of additional evidence, they pivoted to “ought” statements (what the people involved should or should not have done).
“Ought” statements are pretty much unassailable on objective grounds (you can appeal to someone’s previously stated position, but they can always retort that the circumstances are different in this case), giving everyone free reign to talk past one another till they’re blue in the face.
If there are (perceived) political benefits to doing so, they can go on for a really long time.
Can we at least agree it’s not toxoplasma? This blew up before the facts were available that favored the students.
There are two possibilities here:
a. Most of the participants are acting irrationally–overreacting and making fools of themselves. They’ll eventually moderate their behavior and stop doing so.
b. Most of the participants are behaving rationally–signal boosting these outrage fests is beneficial for driving clicks/keeping media types in the spotlight.
If we’re in case (a), things will probably get better over time; if we’re in case (b), though….
I agree with Faza here, the NYT comments are bad but they are basically some combination of “ought” and “they were asking for it by wearing MAGA hats and
protesting abortioncalling for pregnancy to be used as a weapon to subjugate women”.While that stance is unfortunate, it seems like the current extent of the “punish these kids” crowd is limited to the hardliners who were always going to hate on any white kid in a MAGA hat regardless of what he was doing, and, eh, it doesn’t take a scissor to make people be dicks on the internet.
@Jaskologist
I think that toxoplasma involves the apparent story fitting biases about outrages that are going on. So then people don’t wait for or look for further facts, because they feel the need to fight this outrage right now.
Stories that match the biases the best tend to be toxoplasma because the biases are very exaggerated and thus the stories tend to be very exaggerated.
So the story blowing up before better facts are in and it being shown to be largely false later fits fully with it being toxoplasma.
I don’t see how the government shutdown could be a scissor statement, unless the Kremlin was able to cause either the Democrats or Trump to refuse to pass a budget. Like, the shutdown is an actual piece of government policy, not just a meaningless statement that gets argued about endlessly.
(“Trump is a pawn of the Kremlin being used to generate the conditions for scissor statements” would make for a pretty fun take, but not a plausible one.)
RPG thread: people who’ve played 5th, and especially people who’ve run it, what’s it run like? I’m about to run a 5th ed game. I’ve played 2nd, 3rd, and a tiny and regrettable amount of 4th (I’m least familiar with 4th). I haven’t actually run any D&D other than the sort of feeble quickly-abandoned one sometimes runs as a kid, and a retroclone, which is pretty far from modern D&D.
Mainly I have the following questions:
1. How closely do I have to adhere to the CR system and all that? Does it assume they are doing x numbers of encounter per long rest and thus gaining x amount of treasure and Y xp, thus able to face encounters of a higher CR later, and so on? Do I have to be spending my “CR budget” every adventuring period to not break the system?
2. If I just level them every x sessions (increasing with level; more time spent at each level as they level up) instead of giving out XP from combat and whatnot will it break the game?
3. Is the bard as good as the class looks? Are rogues as high damage-dealers as the sneak attack ability suggests?
4. Are there any idiosyncrasies or general tendencies of play I should be aware of?
It runs a lot like 3.x/Pathfinder, in my experience. Less source bloat, less endless rabbit holing, but the core of the game feels more like that than it does 2nd or 4th.
As for your particular questions:
1. It is a helpful suggestion, but you know your players better than the algorithm. They will be stronger or weaker than their numbers suggest, balance accordingly.
2. No, it is fine.
3. Eh, not really to both. Neither is going to make you pull your hair out a la the pathfinder summoners. 5th is still young and comparatively balanced.
4. Not that I noticed. It is just D&D. You’ll have to look stuff up, but by and large the game goes like it always has.
3. It just kinda looks like the bard can do several things about 2/3 as well as that thing’s specialist can: they get arcane and divine magic, they quickly get half proficiency on anything they don’t know how to do, and they get some cool abilities of their own. They can’t tank, seems to be about it.
In general, the proficiency bonus doing everything and the easy availability of melee weapons that use DEX to attack and damage, would seem to devalue the damage-dealing abilities of the melee classes. Is the increased survivability of someone with a d10-12 HD and better armour enough to make up for the thief now hitting as hard or almost as hard?
From experience: yes. The sheer destructive power of a fighter or a paladin with Great Weapon Mastery can’t be denied.
I’m playing 5e right now, one game as a player and one as a DM, and really like it. As Walter said, it runs like 3.X with a lot more polish and a few of the better aspects of 4e tacked on.
As for your questions:
1. You don’t have to do anything, but you need to keep in mind that resource depletion is the primary way of generating tension in D&D. If characters aren’t weighing their odds of pressing on with half of their hit points and most of their spells gone versus resting and possibly facing tougher opposition later on, they’re not going to be challenged in the way the game expects. The game’s default assumptions about how rests and encounters are paced creates a good sense of tension in my experience.
If you want time to pass more realistically while maintaining that pace, I suggest using the “Gritty Realism” variant rule in the DMG: short rests take 8 hours, long rests take 7 days. That way you can get 2-3 days of adventure with 1-3 encounters per day in a ten day period.
2. What you’re talking about is a recongized variant rule, called “Milestone XP” in the DMG, so you won’t break the game. You will definitely have a harder time keeping a consistent tone though: your players are going to very rapidly go from seeing a goblin tribe as a serious challenge to being able to take on Demon lords and elder dragons, which is difficult to work around from a narrative or world-building standpoint. The mayor of a small town literally cannot compensate a high-level adventurer for their services, because the money they pull down individually is worth more than the entire settlement.
3. In 5e Bards are one of the better full-casting classes. Rogues also do pretty solid damage, because they get Sneak Attack virtually every single round.
4. Warlocks are the big one. If you play by-the-book when it comes to how often the party can rest, Warlocks are competitive with other classes. If you rarely allow short rests, they’re much weaker; if you allow short rests after every encounter, they’re much stronger. The other casting classes don’t have this problem to the same extent because their abilities are tied to long rests.
What’s brought in from 4th? The powers of the commander fighter archetype look pretty 4th-y. So do “legendary actions” or whatever it is some creatures get.
1. So, HP is high enough that attrition of the party is the name of the game? What I’ve noticed in the retroclone I’ve run is that there’s very little space between “it’s just a scratch, we got this” and “the hirelings are dead and there is a serious chance of one or two PCs going down, maybe start thinking if running is a good idea.”
With regard to resting, I intend to use that variant for healing, more or less, but the ordinary lengths of time for power refresh. Otherwise wizards get however many spells per week rather than per day, etc. Is this going to mess things up?
3. Do I make rogues suck if I don’t let them pull the sneak attack from the front? As it is, if you and your buddy are standing in front of a guy, and both of you are rogues, you’re getting an extra xd6 damage per hit, which seems the opposite of a sneak attack. As written it’s a “team up” power.
4. I haven’t sat down and figured out exactly what it is warlocks do.
The biggest single thing that they brought over is healing surges. Other than that, the daily / per encounter / at will powers are still around although in a less insultingly dumb way. There’s even some vestigial traces of marking.
1. Yes, PCs have high HP and monsters have much lower damage output than PCs with that many HD would have. Combat is less swingy on the PC side, which can be a good or a bad thing depending on what kind of game you want to run. If it seems too easy you can run fewer “Deadly” encounters instead of more “Hard” or “Medium” encounters. Speaking of, treat that terminology like a Midwesterner trying to describe how spicy something is: vastly exaggerated.
2. Yes, that will mess everything up. The point of the pacing of rests is how quickly resources come back. Spells are resources just as much as hit points if not moreso. If you change how frequently spells recover relative to hit points, that’s a substantial change to the game’s balance.
3. If the rogue isn’t getting consistent sneak attack damage, they’re basically just “the guy with the lockpicks.” A nerf isn’t necessarily bad but it makes the class a lot less appealing.
4. You should. They’re my favorite class, very fun flavor and interesting mechanics. Unfortunately they’re also a source of a lot of 5e’s cheese builds: beware the Sorlock!
1. Healing surges like the spend HD to gain HP on a short rest? Because 4th-style healing surges were more “you just gain some HP all of a sudden in the middle of combat” – this is available as an option in the 5th ed DMG.
2. It’ll change the balance – probably gives casters a boost, especially those who only get whacked upside the head when things go badly wrong – but how? I’ve liked the way it’s been with the retroclone, where naturally healing significant damage will take a week or two. A week for a spell refresh is silly, but so is being able to get a good chunk of healing out of a lunch break and healing totally every night.
I’m cool with party balance that’s a bit out of whack as long as it’s not the “one guy finds the build that lets him do the jobs of 2-3 other party members better” kind of out of whack. The wizard being a more important party member than one of the martial guys is not going to ruin the game. I’m more worried about balancing against the enemy – I want to be able to make minor use of the CR numbers.
3. I’m thinking they’d at least have to be to the side or rear; it’s not that hard to get around someone’s side in a fight. Maybe up the sneak attack dice? I suppose I have real problems with conceiving of a rogue’s special attack as just being “they’re distracted and I pick my shot well” – why is the rogue better at doing that than the martial classes? I have at least two players who will complain about that, one of them particularly bitter, and it kinda bugs me. A sneak attack should be a super damaging attack that’s tricky to set up.
4. I might build a big-name NPC sorcerer to get the sense of it.
I think It is hard to balance a sneak attack in the way that you want, because I generally think Nova-ing is bad for D&D encounter balance. Dropping the enemy wizard before he gets off a single spell warps the difficulty of the combat in a way not easily teased out through more generally applicable DPR based balancing.
If the problem with your player disappears if sneak attack was instead called ‘Combat finesse’ then…i’m sorry.
Rogues do slightly less damage than fighters, the fact that it is tied to sneak attack instead of multi attacking with a great sword, creates interesting and different tactical considerations for the rogue, especially coupled with their ability to use bonus actions better than anyone else. Rogues in 5e actually play in a considerably more ‘rogue like’ fashion than rogues in 3.X from what I have seen. They are dashing around, throwing caltrops or interacting with puzzles between attacks. Or at least, they can be if your player is fully exploring what the class can do.
The problem with the players is going to manifest if anything that suggests better ability in a stand-up, face-to-face fight is available to a non-martial class, but not the martial class – a couple of them are just the sort of people for whom this sort of thing profoundly bothers them (it bothers me, but much less so.) Meanwhile, I don’t really mind if the rogue pulls something like that off – I think on balance my players are people who lean towards the “it was awesome to absolutely bushwhack that boss fight” side of things rather than “boo what an anticlimax”. I think it’s OK if the rogue is less powerful in a straight up fight, but is better able to pull off truly decisive sneak attacks.
Rogues are literally worse than perfectly normal fighters at dealing sheer damage, so if your players throw a fit over sneak attack damage they are mistaken at best and wrongfully spiteful at worst.
I don’t know exactly how you want to change sneak attack, but I guess just keep in mind that with one combat days, it is pretty easy to misty step/invisible, every fight, which will probably make your harder sneak attack requirements, trivial to achieve at the start of every fight.
Given that, at least elsewhere in this discussion you have talked about wanting to use the CR system/design good challenges, I would reiterate that Nova-ing is much more powerful than it would seem if you just average their expected damage across four rounds, and keep upping the CR until you start pressing your players.
Elsewhere I said the biggest flaw with CR is effects that make players save, and advised you against using them too much, so ignore that, and go crazy with the save effects(probably not 5 banshees hiding in a wall crazy, but yeah).
@DeWitt: I’m not super familiar with it; can fighters be made high damage one-shot using battle master abilities? I’ve statted out a few fighters at different levels and it looked more like their benefit was more attacks.
@Spookykou: What level does that sort of thing start happening? I figure this isn’t going to go further than level 10 maybe before the campaign wraps. So if gameplay past that gets wacky and will be getting wackier because of changes I’m making that’s not a big deal but if I do a higher level campaign sometime I’ll have to do things differently.
I’m still not sure why this even matters. A battlemaster in plate armor with a greatsword doesn’t outdamage the rogue per attack, but absolutely per action. He does this while having more AC and less ‘leftover’ damage when he kills people. What do you care whether the damage is from one attack or from three?
Fighters and Paladins have far and away the best Nova, going by the PHB. Action surge +3 attacks is 12 d6 + 30, smites are how pallys do it big.
The CR being bad about save effects happens basically instantly, the only difference is at level 1 regular attacks are also dangerous, where as by say level 4 save effects are way more dangerous. A paladin can help a bit with this, but outside of the pally aura it is really hard to get better at saves and a lot of the save effects are very serious. 5 Banshees would be a ‘Deadly’ encounter for 5 level 5 characters, and there is almost a 100% chance they TPK a party of 5 level 5 characters. Technically 5 Chuul are the same CR, but a party of 5 level 5s would have a much better chance of winning that fight/are probably favored to win that fight.
*This all assumes more or less optimal play by the DM though, if you are willing to pull your punches, that kinda throws the CR system out the window*
@DeWitt
From a functional standpoint, there’s usually not much of a difference, but I find that enough of my players draw a line between “I just got one super cool attack on the lich and did 100 damage” and “I hit the lich 2x doing 50 damage each” that it’s worth it for me to keep it in mind.
@Spookykou
So, all else being equal, if I want an easier encounter, fewer “your tons of HP can’t save you” things like the banshee? Looking at it, yeah, the drop to 0 thing is bad news. I’m also still kind of thinking in 3rd terms, where everyone after a certain level could reliably make DC 13 saves; the way proficiency works means that a DC 13 check is probably gonna have a ~50% chance of taking out anyone without a CON save proficiency. Am I getting this right?
“Commander fighter archetype”? What book is that from? I have what I thought was a complete list of all the classes, races, etc.
Look at, for example, the commander’s strike in the Battle Master Archtype in the PHB. Some of the Cavalier in Xanathar’s might be inspired by the Warlord as well.
So “Commander” is 4e terminology? I’m not familiar with 4e.
Commander’s Strike 4E
The Warlord in fourth edition had some healing powers, and could select from a power list that often included granting attacks to allies.
I meant “battle master” but thought the name was “commander”. “Shout real good and your buddy hits the orc again” feels very 4th to me.
I don’t see why you think a real good chosen word would be unable to turn the tide of battle, be it strategic advice or morale boost. It’s a very common fictional trope, and hardly unrealistic.
You know RPG combat is abstracted. The combatants aren’t actually making one attempt at a hit every six seconds like clockwork, but trying to get a blow in when they see an opening.
Eh, you do you. If you want to understand the intent, I can help it make sense. If you want to take scissors to any lessons learned during the time 4th edition was published, well you’re the target audience of 5th, so it should work out.
@Randy M
I don’t actually have any problems with it; the Warlord or whatever was one of the things I liked about 4th. “Your cornerman yells that he’s dropping his left, he’s DROPPING his LEFT and boom you find an opening for the overhand right” is absolutely a thing; it’s not dissociated, which is the problem I had with a lot of 4th stuff. I bag on 4th a lot because the general philosophy* but it had some good bits. I’m assuming that “character-native” healing is a 4th thing? In any case I’ve got two fourth ed fans in my group so they like that sort of thing at least.
*by which I mean: Let’s say a player wants to slide down a bannister and kick a dude in the face. Original D&D says something completely inscrutable and you gotta figure it out yourself. Basic D&D says nothing but you oughta be able to improvise something that works; the system’s simple enough already. Advanced says “hey yea bro I got a rule for that; it’s completely arbitrary and doesn’t connect to anything else and it’s maybe in some optional book.” 3rd requires that you consult several different tables and crunch DC numbers and a player just showed up with a third party sourcebook that contains the Dashing Swordsman prestige class. 4th has one class get the Cool Slide daily power, which works in any situation where you’re moving downwards.
Very well! All implications that you did dropped and apologized for!
Are you familiar with the famous page 42 chart from the 4E DMG? It was very much raw that stunts were allowed. The effects of which were generally limited to damage and less powerful than on level class abilities, so they weren’t used much, but there was absolutely support for “stunting”.
Yes, but please be aware that healing surges were healing limitations as well as reserves. Each character could, once per encounter, heal their HP by their surge value. That’s it. And doing so cost 1 healing surge. Magical healing and potions also cost 1 healing surge, and surges didn’t come back until resting. So no character could heal much by themselves during a fight, and they couldn’t heal fully after a fight without resting. In a way it was grittier than 3E, aiui, with unlimited potions.
3) Don’t nerf rogues. The rogue’s sneak attack is how the rogue keeps up with the multiple attacks of the fighter, the multi-attack and damage boost of the paladin, etc. It should be the exception when a competently played rogue isn’t getting sneak attack damage, not the rule.
Some of that is the term. “Sneak attack” is actually less effective (and a subset of) “Surprise attack” for a rogue. In the “from the front” version, the rogue is picking her (one) shot and fighting dirty while the monster is busy responding to the barbarian’s (three) greatsword attacks.
The rogue’s penalty is AC – she can’t use a shield or the better armor – but her combat function is built on that sneak attack.
So, it’s probably relevant that I don’t intend to run a campaign where the standard obstacle is combat. I want chases, stealth, environmental obstacles, etc. Rogues seem so good at that stuff – there’s so many situations where the rogue is the only person who can deal with it – that it seems a bit much to have the rogue keeping up with the martial classes in combat. There’s so many situations where the fighter won’t get a chance to shine and the rogue will – why can’t the fighter be better at combat?
https://img.fireden.net/tg/image/1463/70/1463707829647.jpg
E: because this is a bit flippant…
Since 3.x or so a large part of D&D has been a tactical miniatures combat game. If most of your obstacles don’t require tactical miniature combat I highly, highly suggest that you either accept the imbalance of the game or play a different one, because D&D will remain largely fundamentally broken for you.
You should, very sincerely, play another RPG. My poison of choice is Reign RPG, but D&D really does fall apart a lot if you try to play a campaign like that.
Edit: Jesus Christ, that’s one way to get sniped. Wow.
I think you can play D&D 5e as a relatively combat lite game, it doesn’t give you a lot of mechanics to interact with if that is what you are doing, but in my experience most games don’t, or if they do it always feels cludgy to me, I have never experienced really smooth out of combat table top RPG mechanics, player skill is just way too important I think.
As for rogues, expertise is probably not as important as you are thinking it is, especially not for the first few levels. The Urchin background turns anyone with dex into a rogue more or less, as far as out of combat is concerned. The 10%-15% bonus up until 9th level shouldn’t be huge, especially because calling for tons of stealth checks always fails anyways. By 9th level your players out of combat challenges are going to be solved by your casters far more often than your rogue.
@Spookykou
You mean like skill checks and such, or more complicated stuff, like how some games try to introduce a social-situation analogue to combat? (Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying tried but in practice it didn’t work very well)
Exactly, I played a bit of the song of ice and fire RPG and the ‘social combat’ system, and generally all social combat systems, just feel super artificial and wrong to me. Outside of those, you have a ton of stat-skill skill systems in, D&D and WoD and Shadowrun and what not, these systems are super light and don’t give you a lot to interact with, if all you are doing is lots of skill checks, the roll of the dice normally ends up being more important than player or character competency, and as such, don’t make for good games in and of themselves.
Lots of people will recommend playing something else if you want to play an out of combat heavy game, but my personal experience is that no table top RPG handles that problem well, so just play the one you are most familiar with or most interested in. I think 5e is the most elegant and interesting system I have seen, so far, so even if I was running the game you are describing, I would probably still use it.
I think that systems that are pretty light in the sense that most of the work gets done with skills that are described in a paragraph (BRP, for example) can be done well, but they’re more sensitive to other elements being off (bad GM or just having an off day, bad adventure, whatever). D&D’s core gameplay is harder for a bad GM to screw up or a bad adventure to undermine. It’s also less overhead for the GM as far as adventure writing and prep goes: it can be a hassle to keep track of complicated combats but I spend less time before the game hammering out the web of clues or whatever.
@dndsrsn
I think that in some ways D&D is worse when it comes to the not-tactical-miniatures parts of the game. Although the bounded design of 5e does alleviate the problem somewhat, it’s still the case that something that’s designed to be “challenging” for the party can become “downright impossible” or “downright trivial” for individual members fairly easily, and because so much of D&D is deterministic there’s not much you can do alleviate that IMO. If a PC’s stealth falls under an enemy’s perception, they’re seen, RAW. Whereas a system like BRP has less deterministic outcomes because gracefully handling skill checks is a core part of the game.
Is BRP better at handling out-of-combat stuff? I don’t see how rolling a +6 d20 check against a DC of 10 (85% chance of success) is different from rolling an 85% chance in DG is (no idea how to calculate chances for opposed checks).
My impression of 5E was that it was very consciously trying to model the feel of old-school D&D through the lens of modern design.
Part of this is that they introduced the idea of bounded accuracy, in which players AC/hit bonuses do not increase every level, and so the monsters don’t need to either; the result is that a bunch of goblins can still actually hit a high level PC and PCs can actually hurt a much higher level monster than in earlier editions. There are obviously limits on this – a fully grown dragon will obviously pulp a level 1 party – but you can be much looser with CR and encounters per day than in the last few editions.
In my 5E campaign, I pretty much just sprinkled a bunch of classic D&D modules (Keep on the Borderlands, Village of Homlet, that sort of thing) on a hex map and ran them with minimal conversion – just updating monster stats to the new versions, basically, except where there was something completely obviously broken – and it worked great. As long as the players have the mindset that just because a monster shows up doesn’t mean it’s a carefully balanced encounter they can definitely win – they might need to get the hell out of there instead.
Oh and to go full on “Let me tell you bout my campaign” mode, the best thing about a pure sandbox hexcrawl with a bunch of classic modules dropped into it, is that it becomes possible for your party to roll up on Castle Ravenloft with a cart concealing the power armor and energy rifles from their expedition to the Barrier Peaks.
That was a fun fight.
1. CR works a lot better at lower levels in terms of giving your players a reasonably challenging fight, breaks totally past 13ish (PCs are way too strong). The other problem is that in general the CR system does not accurately account for making players throw saving throws, saving throws are super dangerous for the players relative to everything else, but again this isn’t a huge problem normally, maybe just be mindful if all of your CR budget for a low level encounter is stuff that makes players throw saves. There is no requirement to have a certain number of encounters per day, but keep in mind that different people have different types of resources. If you have one fight per day, your wizard is going to seem a lot stronger than if you have four or five. A unique aspect of 5e related to this, 5e works very well with low stakes low risks fights, that only really serve to reduce party resources/let the martial players shine.
2. Milestone XP is in the book, and a looser version where you just level them when you feel like it is appropriate works fine. A related side note, 5e handles off level parties better than basically any other table top RPG I have played, having a couple level 2 and level 4 characters in the same party is really seamless.
3. IMHO Fighters and Wizard are generally the strongest classes, Bards are actually pretty weak outside of a few niche builds where they can for example, cheese to generate a lot of out of combat healing. Rogues are totally fine, and in general the game is very well balanced, the real risk is that a bad player can REALLY fuck up while playing a caster, and be useless or actively detrimental to the group.
4. The biggest advice I would give for a player is avoid ranged DPS, it is super non-interactive and generally very boring. A lot of the meat from combat in 5e really comes from emergent game play based around the chapter nine core combat mechanics*, which ranged DPS mostly don’t engage with. Moon druids are broken at level 2-4, its a really weird outlier in an otherwise very balanced game, moon druids from level 2-4 are basically as strong as two player characters, but fall back in line with the level 5 power spike and are generally middle of the road at every other level. Owl familiars, especially for the arcane trickster/eldritch knight are kinda broken, but if your player starts abusing it just kill their familiar, so, not a huge problem.
*If you really read only one chapter in the book, make it chapter nine!
1. I’m cool with one fight per day and the wizard is the most vital part of the party. It’s like that in the retroclone campaign – the major strategic factors are the wizard’s spell loadout, hirelings (need numbers to keep the enemy from outmaneuvering you), and surprise; magical healing a secondary priority. Of the complaints people have had about the campaign, the wizard being too central to the party wasn’t one – although the wizard has complained that it’s a bit boring to be a sleep/fireball/invisibility/haste machine sometimes. The guy who plays arcane casters is generally reliable and does his job as a caster.
I’m not a huge fan of low-pressure fights; I find they slow down play and the chance that a mook who’s supposed to go down easy might land a good hit is a potential problem. Any other ways I can give the martial guys their time to shine?
2.
There isn’t much they can do out of combat, but my general opinion is that fun out of combat is mostly down to the player not the class(or game). 5e fighters have more options and more game play in combat than 3.x fighters, and similar or more out of combat options, thanks to sub classes like eldritch night.
If you are going to run the game as you have described it in other parts of this discussion, I would recommend getting all your players to at least play half casters.
Of course if you have played similar games in the past with the same group, and they were honestly okay playing a 3.x type martial, they should have no problem playing a 5e martial, it is as far as I can tell a straight improvement.
If they really hate dissociative mechanics the champion fighter, or thief rogue are good options.
Sort of. It’s VERY important to either have 7-8 CR-equal encounters before PCs are allowed a long rest, or at least two deadly encounters with a short rest in between, due to the vast stores of resources classed characters have. Having players murdering 7-8 groups of easy enemies (CR-equal) enemies every adventuring day is the default assumption, but that really tests the tensile strength of your suspension of disbelief unless you’re in a dungeon owned by hostile creatures. If you’re travelling in a dangerous wilderness, or even soldiers in a war, 2 combat encounters a day is the most that’s plausible (e.g one on the road then an ambush at night, or encountering a band of enemies on a scouting mission and then more show up after you catch your breath).
Here’s an infamous example of the kind of attrition some PCs are capable of: the Barbarian 1/Moon Druid 2. If her second-highest attribute is 14, she can have 28 HP (a 12-sided Hit Die & two 8-sided with +2 CON), and all Moon Druids get an extra 74 HP by Wild Shaping into a dire wolf twice (short rest recharge). Rage (twice/long rest) doubles your HP against “non-magical piercing, slashing and bludgeoning damage”. If a combat encounter chews through all those hit points, a short rest allows her to reroll her hit dice (average results 6.5+4.5+4.5+6=21.5) and go into combat again with 75% human (or whatever) health and full double-dire-wolf health, one Rage, and any spell slots not used.
This is an outlier, but any way you slice it, if you end up nearly dead after one encounter, you can survive another encounter >75% as hard, and if the DM ends the adventuring day without throwing that encounter at you, the game simply will not work at intended.
Treasure is not a big deal because there are no core domain rules (OSR gold sink) or magic item malls (3.X gold sink). Nor do you have to award XP by the book: the devs accounted for “milestone” level-ups as a variant rule.
Yes, especially a Lore Bard with finesse weapons or STR-based Valor Bard who puts their Expertise into Athletics for grappling. Rogues are high damage-dealers when they get Sneak Attack, but they’re not even the highest, so if you weaken them in any way, expect no Rogue PCs.
Encounters designed for attrition with a negligible chance of death is probably the biggest one. I’m playing in a campaign where the DM made the mistake of starting us at Level 6 explicitly because “most of the Greek monsters are CR 6” and then gave us adventuring days with only one encounter. The rules do a poor job of explaining why CR-equal encounters are jokes and why you should use them anyway (because your PCs are metal-skinned murderhobos in a war of attrition), yet it’s an absolute bedrock assumption.
Wait, you don’t let a Moon Barbarian rage while in beast shape, do you? That’d just be silly.
I think RAW there is nothing wrong with it.
Pff, this is D&D, not a Warhammer tourney. GM can declare “rocks fall, everyone dies” if they really want to. You are allowed to reign in stupid bullshit that the WotC playtest team didn’t munchkin hard enough to unearth.
And let me tell ya, the people at the table who aren’t rules-lawyering asshats will be grateful you did.
What Spookykou said. A Barb-dipped caster cannot concentrate while raging, but that just means they can switch from a 148-HP (+ humanoid HP) dire wolf tank to a spell-casting tank between encounters.
I don’t have my PHB on me, but the usually reliable wiki says (emphasis added):
So when exactly does Rage synergize with the Druid powers?
Wild shape is not a spell and not concentration.
* I do a lot of public play 5e and lean really hard on RAW so that everyone at the table knows what they are getting
You do you, then. I for one have been bored out of my skull on several occasions with public play due to munchkins not being reined in. To the point where I basically never do RPGs at conventions anymore.
1So, if I want few but dangerous combats, I should be building them to Deadly spec, or one to Deadly and one Hard or whatever it is? That should work?
That’s a good guideline, yes. Try Deadly & Hard, and if Hard doesn’t drain their post-short rest resources, try making both Deadly. It’s the sort of thing that requires tuning to your party composition. A Wizard who doesn’t know what he’s doing, a Ranger and a Monk are going to play differently from a group with a Moon Druid, a Necromancer, and Assassin.
CR is a little nebulous, but the differences between levels are a little less stark than they are in 3.X. Encounters a day is similarly nebulous, but there’s definitely some general pointers to keep in mind: terrain and circumstance matter a lot, mobs of weaker enemies are more dangerous than they are in 3.X, and short rests exist, something much more important if the party has a monk or warlock.
2. Nothing breaks, at all. You’re fine.
3. Bards are pretty good, if terrible at dealing actual damage. I know that dealing damage is a dirty word in 3.X, but it’s quite necessary here and not to be neglected. Rogues’ damage is on par with fighters of the same level, so don’t begrudge them the sneak attack; Word of God is that they were balanced with them having access to sneak attack every round.
4. Don’t screw over your short rest folk by never actually letting them get short rests. If someone asks you to play a hexblade warlock multiclass character, cut all contact with them. Don’t sweat bringing your players to 0 hp too much, it’s much less deadly than it was in older editions. Don’t give out magic items etc like candy and don’t let your players con you into thinking they’re entitled to any, 5e (mostly) works with zero magic items whatsoever as long as monsters’ resistances aren’t too bad.
3. If I assume they’ll be getting it half as much and double the sneak attack damage, does that work or is that silly?
Silly. How do you balance a subclass like swashbuckler, where they can get sneak attack even without allies?
What book’s that in? I’m going to be sticking with the core books for at least a while; there’s more than enough material in them for plenty of play.
Xanathar’s Guide to Everything. I don’t know of anyone that considers any of the subclasses in it to be off kilter, other than the hexblade multiclass thing anyway, but you do you.
(And I still say you shouldn’t mess with sneak attack; a lot of thought went into it and nerfing or altering it is a bad move)
Gloomstalker is potentially busted as all hell, depending heavily on your campaign(which is one, of the many reasons, that I hate gloomstalker).
Doesn’t the reason it’s busted get nerfed a whole bunch by any odd enemy casting the light cantrip?
I might try sneak attack as written and see if in practice it causes what I’m afraid of, or if it doesn’t feel weird. There don’t seem to be defined penalties to firing into combat – can rogues just get sneak attack damage shooting through their own line at the enemy?
@dndsrsn
There are, in fact, rules for shooting into melee. They’re not very popular, but they’re around and either in the PHB or DMG(I forget), so you can use that as a way to discourage firing into melee.
Which is also one thing I can’t really blame anyone for because 5e ranged combat is lots stronger than 3.X’s.
So one of the reasons it is upsetting is because it creates all sorts of weird questions around in game monster knowledge. It might be reasonable to assume that monsters, especially sentient monsters are familiar with magical invisibility, but outside of direct contact with other gloomstalkers, there is nothing else in the whole D&D universe that is invisible to things looking at them with dark vision such that a light cantrip would reveal them but dispel magic would not. It is a completely unique, highly tactical trait.
Also, light is a touch spell, which seriously limits it’s effectiveness at revealing ranged gloomstalkers so the drow are fine, their dark vision is probably the same as yours so you can’t distance cheese them and they have dancing lights which has 120 foot range(again assuming they know to cast dancing lights at an invisible archer).
But basically my problem with the gloomstalker boils down to how much of its power is wrapped up in how the DM plays it, in my opinion the gloomstalker features are uniquely bad for creating DM determined character effectiveness.
Those are good points. I have gloom stalker rangers in both my campaigns, and they’re both quite strong, but in practice most fights do let me handwave the presence of light, and one particularly mean bastard of a drow enemy decided to cast darkness and render everyone blind.
@Hoopyfreud
Huh. I wish it gave a bit more guidance; is firing right from behind your buddy at the enemy full cover for the enemy?
@dndsrsn
If fully eclipsed by another person, I would say yes – that is, if it’s unreasonable to catch a glimpse of them by moving within your 5-foot square.
I think that depends on how much of his AC your buddy gets from Dexterity 😉
[clarification: It probably doesn’t actually depend on that]
Casander, with 2 Ss, is still banned.
So, Oscar noms are out. The Academy continues to mystify. I probably won’t watch this year, as most of the films I care about (Annihilation, Burning, Beale Street, Won’t You Be My Neighbor) don’t seem to be in the running. That’s pretty expected, honestly; the fact that my favorite film of 2017 won best picture last year is still so shocking that I can’t actually be mad.
Last year seemed like a pretty abysmal year for movies in general.
I think it was a fine year. 2 or 3 movies I’d rewatch is a typical crop; it just seems like the Academy briefly poked it’s head out of its rectum but decided it didn’t like the experience.
I think it was an actively excellent year: any one of Cold War, Leave No Trace and A Star is Born would be my favourite picture of any normal year, and I also very much liked Shoplifters, Lean on Pete, Miseducation of Cameron Post, The Favourite, Blindspotting, Colette, probably a bunch of other stuff that isn’t springing to mind right now, even apart from the various probably good films I haven’t yet seen. I’m delighted that Pawlikowski and Zal got nominated, but sad that none of the voters apparently saw Leave No Trace.
We obviously have somewhat different tastes, though – I didn’t much go for either Moonlight (although the acting was superb) or Annihilation, and haven’t seen any of your others.
Wrong year, actually – Moonlight wasn’t much my jam either. I’m taking about The Shape of Water. Cold War did look good but I never got around to seeing it – the timing was bad. Same with Leave No Trace.
Ah yes, senility strikes again – last year was not in fact 2017.
I also didn’t particularly like Shape of Water: I could appreciate the craft, but I dislike both magical realism and 50s Americana. I was sad that it beat Lady Bird, which I absolutely loved.
Incidentally, was it you or someone else of the same name I saw talking about Dune in LSV’s Twitch chat a few weeks back?
Is this a scissor??
Hey, that was me!
I still maintain that God Emperor is the best Dune novel.
@Spookykou
What are you trying to say? Some of my best friends like magical realism.
@Hoopyfreud
Huh, small world. Though I guess it’s not entirely surprising that Scott and LSV’s audiences overlap. I actually only read the Dune books once twenty years ago, and don’t remember them well at all. I loved the first one and thought they got progressively crazier and more unreadable (which, to be clear, I thought was a bad thing) but 35 year old me has, uh, limited regard for the literary opinions of 15 year old me, so I’ve no idea what I’d make of them now.
Beale Street and First Reformed got robbed.
Not too angry though. Since at least the time of the “Crash” Oscar in 2006 it seems like the whole institution has existed only to infuriate people and create a canon no one likes or agrees with. No one under 30 seems to “believe” in the judgment of the Academy like young cinéastes did in the 90s and before
I suspect it’s partly a product of the Weinsteins commercialising and politicising the process, but mostly a result of the bifurcation of production budgets. There are far, far fewer intelligent mid-budget mainstream pictures than there used to be.
Having actually looked up the numbers, you appear to be absolutely right to highlight Crash. Prior to Crash, American Beauty was a notable outlier among Best Picture winners of recent times in terms of budget. Crash had something like a third of American Beauty’s inflation-adjusted budget, and since then the vast majority of winners have cost American Beauty money or less.
Woah, the Atlantic, of all places, just admitted progressive pro lifers exist.
https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2019/01/march-life-secular-liberal-pro-lifers-feel-welcome/580837/
That’s several deviations away from their brand. I wonder what prompted that?
My opinion of the Atlantic is that they have generally intended to be open-minded and neutral. The fact that they are often not either of those things comes from being in an insulated bubble more than editorial diktat.
They consider the inclusion of Conor Friedersdorf and David Frum as offering “right wing” perspectives, and allow left wing perspectives that they consider similarly far from the center of their Overton Window. They genuinely seem to not see that their Window is fairly to the left of a national center.
Acknowledging political breadth in left-of-center individuals seems like an easy place for them to be.
The recent prominence of Angela Nagle or Liz Bruenig maybe? Until recently it was possible to put all progressive pro-lifers into the category of Christina Hoff-Sommers where you always suspected them of being maybe secret right-wingers, but now even people in the Atlantic intellectual bubble can name far left pro-life thinkers they’ve read
I’m glad to be living in a world were Liz Bruenig can now be considered “prominent”. She is my favorite political commentator, bar none, and its crazy to see her career take off over the past ~3 years.
Instead of discussing that Gillette ad, where would you point someone who wanted positive masculine role models, rather than negative ones? American popular culture is, of course, corrosive as hell, and so we’ve got plenty of bad examples. Where would you point someone for a better example?
If you’re raising boys, I very much recommend getting involved with Boy Scouts, as a source of a lot of positive male role models and traditionally masculine pursuits that aren’t destructive or toxic. Where else would you point someone trying to raise boys to end up as healthy, functional men?
Engineers, Scientists, the military, churches, tradesmen. Regardless of individual failures in each of these groups, they each represent major elements of what is positive masculinity.
Boy Scouts has pretty much fallen down in that respect as it has abandoned masculine exclusivity.
For Christians in America Trail Life USA has replaced it, but I don’t know of a non-sectarian replacement.
I don’t think having only boys involved in the troop is a requirement for teaching them how to become men. At any rate, there’s a plan to eventually allow girls to be involved in a somewhat separated structure, but I don’t know how that’s going to work. (Though my nine-year-old daughter is very interested, since she thinks campouts and outdoor stuff is way more interesting than most of what she does in Girl Scouts–she basically went through all the activities for Cub Scouts with her brothers.)
My boys’ troop is still, AFAICT, a good place for a boy to grow up.
UK scouting is mixed gender and that works fine.
There’s some bloody hardy girls out there.
Their fathers or, failing that, possibly the military.
My father was my role model for being a man. Be hardworking and develop the skills to be self-sufficient; be honest without being a sucker; stand up for yourself and fight back if someone is disrespecting you; put your family first. I don’t always measure up to that standard but it’s the standard I measure l myself against.
He didn’t know his father and didn’t have a church, so if it came from anywhere besides personal experience it would have to have been from the US military. Not sure if they’re transmitting the same values now as they were in the late 60’s and early 70’s, but if it’s close then it should serve as an acceptable fall-back for fatherless boys.
In these degraded times, most of those are useless. If you work hard, it will be demanded you give up your work product for the benefit of those who don’t. If you develop the skills to be self-sufficient, most will jeer at you for wasting your time and many will tell you “you didn’t build that” because you failed to mine the ore yourself. If you stand up for yourself you’ll be told you should “be the bigger man” by letting it go (though if you do let it go, you’ll be considered weak). If you fight back, you’ll be jailed and punished by the process at the very least.
Jesus. You feeling ok, Nybbler? Don’t go shopping for a straight-razor, now.
Less useful, but not useless.
With a few notable exceptions, marginal tax rates are under 100%. Hard work isn’t rewarded as well as it should be but it isn’t actually punished yet.
Self-sufficiency is mocked, but again still worthwhile. Cooking is the big one I point to: I can cook myself a week’s worth of healthy good-tasting food for what I would pay in one day for takeout or fast food. Nobody respects thrift but they respect money, and being thrifty in some areas means that you can display that money more prominently in other areas.
Standing up for yourself and fighting back is a similar story. If you’re institutionalized, like a student in school or a convict in prison, then any overt defiance will be cracked down on. There are people trying to expand that institutional mindset to the rest of public life and so far they’re succeeding, but they haven’t succeeded yet. If you exercise discretion you can still stand up for yourself and your rights most of the time as a free adult.
The nice thing about stoic self-sufficiency is it doesn’t really matter much to you if you are mocked for your stoic self-sufficiency.
@Randy M
If the only feedback you get is negative, you have to consider whether you’re engaging in a good thing which is treated as a bad thing, or whether you’re just an arrogant ass who is wrong all the time.
Depends on whether you are optimizing for the kind of feedback you get from reality, or the kind of feedback you get from fools and mockers.
Hey Nybbler,
Your outlook seems really dark right now. Is that normal for you or is this more than usual?
The world is full of critics and people with judgments about everything. There is no way to live a life that will gain approval from all quarters, and besides, it’s no way to live a life.
Nabil ad Dajjal is saying what their values are. That’s their measuring stick. What’s yours?
We’ve all got to find the things we value, and live as best we can according to those priorities and find our satisfaction there. Other people will have to deal with their own disappointments and we with our own.
I work mainly with women in my psychotherapy practice, but not exclusively, but I do get to hear quite a bit about the things that different women love and don’t love in men. These are smart, good-looking, healthy, high-functioning women.
Most of them want partners who can listen and carry on an interesting conversation. They want partners who take responsibility for tending to their own issues (depression, anxiety, addiction, ADHD, whatever it is), but they aren’t looking for men who don’t have issues. We all have issues. They want partners who know how to be emotionally present for them and for their kids if they have them. None of these women have complaints about how much their partners earn or what kind of cars they drive or what list of accomplishments they can point to or whether they can single-handedly remodel a kitchen. Some other women may want other things, but you don’t have to please all women. Or all bosses. Or all men. Or all whoever. We need to learn to please ourselves (by finding and living according to our own values) and let that guide us forward.
My sense is we all need to feel like we’re good enough, in order to function in the world. If we let the big rioting sweep of “they say” voices in so deep that we feel like we chronically don’t measure up, then it’s “society’s” standards and not our own that need to go. “Society” as one voice is just a shit show and is no guide for a life, regardless of your gender.
Shitty people say and do shitty things everywhere, including constantly advancing narratives of shame and inadequacy. We don’t have to be perfect to live good, worthy, enjoyable lives. I think it’s really important though to get one’s own bearings as quickly as possible, so that your own standards are what you measure yourself by and not some version of masculinity promoted by a razor company, a political organization, a church, the military, the boy scouts, or any other institutional entity. If those groups’ expressed values make a person feel good, confident, capable, then that’s great. Some other people don’t find that to be the case. No one else can say for us what we need to become the people we want to live with. We can’t outsource that job to an institution; it’s our responsibility. So when the external voices of inadequacy and judgment seem really loud, it’s time to look to yourself for guidance about what makes a good enough person and a good enough life.
This is a good comment.
+1
I think it’s useful to ask, though, where people should look for models. We are a social species, and indeed, social learning and mimicry of high-status people is a huge part of how we operate.
Ideally, your parents and relatives and friends’ parents and teachers all provide some useful models. But our popular culture is extremely corrosive, and IMO often puts the worst people up in positions as models to be emulated. (Consider the current president, or the one a few years back who had major sex scandals. Or the common behavior of top sports stars, musicians, and actors.)
Neither a razor company nor pop culture is going to provide useful guidance about how to be a functional adult–a man or a woman, for almost all kids. So I think it’s useful to try to work out what useful models look like.
I agree albatross11. My main thought is that there aren’t generic good models or generalizable places to find them, but rather that all sorts of relationships end up providing helpful modeling for all kinds of people. Still, individuals need to get clear who makes a good role model for them.
One of the hazards I see of people (including me) who grew up with some significant gaps is that we can find ourselves drawn to people who are reproducing the dysfunctional stuff we experienced, rather than helping us to move on from it by showing us a different way of relating and being in the world. So it seems important to me that people listen to what feels helpful to them and articulate for themselves what values they hold dear and where they see those values showing up in their lives and in the people they hang out with.
As you say, we are hugely social as a species, and so who we spend time with can have a really big impact on our sense of self. I work with a lot of people who wind up in relationships with the alcoholic who is like their parent or the narcissist who is like their parent, etc. And then wondering why it feels so bad but they can’t quite leave.
People who say they value loyalty, empathy, honesty, and taking care of oneself are sometimes also getting into friendships over and over with people who aren’t behaving in accordance with those values because their parents didn’t display those values (even if they might have talked them up). I find when people get clearer about their values and say them out loud more that they are quicker to notice the discrepancy between the kind of people they are drawn to or spend time with and the kind of people they want in their lives.
It’s like our radars get bent as a result of not great role models early on and we need to be a bit more intentional about getting them oriented right.
So I don’t think there’s a “should” when it comes to where people can find good role models. I think there’s getting clear about what you value and then noticing when you are in the presence of people who seem to enact those same values. Those people can show up anywhere — martial arts teacher, college professor, high school coach, person in your church, co-worker, and so on. The thing is that bad role models for a person show up in all those same places too. So the trick is helping a person recognize their own internal signals — “oh, this is how it feels to be in the presence of someone whose values I share/admire” versus “oh yeah, this feels familiar because this is how mom/dad made me feel and it wasn’t so great.” People who had pretty good parents tend to do a better job of finding what they’re looking for in terms of mentors while people who had more shitty parents have to train themselves to look for what they need because it’s so different from what they got. We know this of course, but it does seem unfair.
I’d also say I think it matters that most of our role models be real people in our lives with whom we have real relationships. It’s fine to admire someone from afar, or to have someone’s actions you witness from afar inspire you. But like you say, we’re social, and most of the learning we do is in the context of real live relationships of one kind or another.
@cuke
Some desires are attractors, others are repulsors. People are more likely to talk about attractors as what they want in a person, while repulsors are often only very salient to people if they have been burned (a lot) by mistakenly judging people. For example, women who repeatedly misjudge men as being nice when they actually are abusers. However, when their assessments are fairly accurate, people just tend to dismiss those who have repulsors, without making a big deal out of it.
From the perspective of someone who has one or more strong repulsors, the other sex is then being disingenuous when they say that they are looking for A and B in a partner, but never say that they won’t consider someone who has trait C, even though they do.
This is what typically goes wrong with ‘Nice Guys.’
—
A further complication is that some desires are socially acceptable and some aren’t. People tend to lie (even to themselves) about those that aren’t, while still acting on their desires. Nowadays, judging men for how well they can provide is not accepted in the blue tribe, but the evidence pretty strongly suggests that blue tribe women still judge men that way. For example, you only have to ask “do you judge men who don’t offer to pay for the full meal at the end of a (restaurant) date negatively?” to see a very high proportion of women say yes.
Few individuals can change society that drastically and most people are not so stoic that disapproval glides off them as water from a duck.
The issue with mimicking role models to get approval is that you still have to be sufficiently true to yourself or you will just live a lie and the approval you get, will be for the false facade.
It doesn’t necessarily help with cynicism when you figure out that the only way to get respect is to consciously act the part, where showing the actual you will result in disapproval.
Revealed preferences claim otherwise.
@Aapje
And as I said before, suppose they are that stoic. They constantly do what they think is right, and consistently receive disapproval for it. Are they really stoic, or merely so arrogant as to believe the rest of the world is wrong? Isn’t it more likely that it is they who are wrong all the time?
@The Nybbler
History is full of commonly accepted behaviors in the culture of the day & place that we now consider quite bad and I expect that future people will judge us similarly for some things.
Collective behavior is often herd-following, not so much actual careful objective ethical consideration. People rationalize more from behavior to arguments than that they reason from arguments to behaviors.
I read a story in my newspaper very recently about a guy who studied perpetrators of genocide and those who resisted. He was a bit dismayed that those who resisted once genocide was the new normal were themselves very abnormal (and it was implied that they were rather asocial). The normal people just followed the herd.
My father was navy and reserves from the mid 60s to high year tenure in the mid 90s. He too didn’t know his (biological) father, though knew his step-father.
I attribute some of the negative parts of his personality, that ultimately drove me to cut him out of my life, to his time in the service.
Country music. I don’t know too much about the actual musicians themselves (maybe they’re good role models, maybe they aren’t) but in the music itself it’s easy to find upstanding father figures.
This feels like a paradox some ancient Greeks must’ve written about somewhere: to be distinctively masculine means being on an extreme end of a gender spectrum, but virtue requires moderation, so how can there be such a thing as a gendered virtue? I’ve seen Mr. Rogers given as an example of “non-toxic masculinity”, but somehow I doubt someone asking this question would see him as masculine enough to count as a masculine role model.
Maybe it only has to mean “I’m a boy, and this is a man I could grow up to be like.” Although there are women a boy could grow up to be like, the scope of that would necessarily be more limited (to things like “how you conduct yourself as a professional or as a friend”, etc.) because a boy can’t grow up to be a mother/wife/etc.
It’s only a paradox if you consider virtue to be a single universal thing.
The Greek and Latin conceptions of vritue, like most of the ancient world, were very tied to telos. What’s virtuous for a man might be vicious for a woman and vice versa. The same way that we can say that a horse which hunts mice and birds for meat is deeply unhealthy and abnormal when a cat which behaves the same way is healthy and normal.
The Abrahamic religions tend to muck this up but for most of human history people have understood that different virtues apply to different people.
This is half right. The virtues are grounded in natures, because what is good or bad for a thing is grounded in its nature, and virtues are stable habits to doing good. But most of human nature is common to man and woman, and I don’t think anyone believes that, say, it’s not in some people’s natures to be prudent or temperate. Certainly, prudence is easier for some people than others, but that just means those who have a hard time being prudent would get more out of cultivating it.
Proposed modification for clarity: nobody believes that it’s not in peoples’ natures to have the potential to be prudent or temperate or whatever. It is very much in a lot of peoples’ natures not to be those things without a lot of work; they get extra virtue points for the effort. Somebody who has never been tempted towards some excess isn’t really virtuously temperate, just very lucky; c.f. Nichomachean Ethics.
Virtue was gendered male anyway – clue is the vir- bit of the word. Virtue was to act like an ideal man.
A few months ago I read that early Christians deliberately changed the meaning of “virtus” in order to promote their morality; essentially, “Real men love Jesus”.
Slight pushback on the Scouts. During my short time with them I met six or seven leaders, only one of whom was at all what I would consider a decent person let alone a positive male role model. The others were all arrogant bullies, sad losers or both.
I know lots of people who’ve had entirely positive interactions with the Scouts, and I know some people who had a similar experience to me. My point is that it’s not consistently positive.
Since the plural of anecdote is data, I’ll add that I had the same experience with boy scouts, but a friend from college loved them. All depends on the group.
Any organization that big is going to have major differences from one local subgroup to the next. I’ve heard of Boy Scout troops that don’t even go camping.
I grew up in a town with a lot of military officers, and they were most of my troop’s leadership. Good, honorable men, though I don’t agree with their politics.
This got me thinking: What traditionally feminine role-models are out there?
Maybe I’m not involved with traditionally feminine spheres, so it’s less salient, but most of the female role models I’ve seen lately have been in Stem/high-powered business/the military.
Where are you looking for your female role models? At your family, church, PTA, community groups, etc? Or Hollywood, advertising, etc?
Traditional femininity has a complicated relationship with orthodox opinion makers. The message seems to be, Sure, it’s a choice, you’re free to make it if you must… but are you sure you aren’t making it because some man wants you to? Have you considered that deep down you might rather be the next Senator, CEO, or PhD? Look at these strong independent women over here!
There are a hundred flavors of “good role model” for women, depending on the woman who’s looking. People aren’t just these gendered beings. We’re so much more complicated than that, right, and we all need to find our own ways.
In our family, we have “manly” lesbian women, we have STEM women, we have women raising children and farming in almost 19th century gendered division of labor arrangements, we have artist women and lawyer women and so on. And just as many flavors of men as well.
One person’s fantastic role model is another person’s nightmare. The goal isn’t to see how well we can focus our lives around fitting into other people’s boxes, is it? Isn’t the goal to live satisfying lives making good use of the ingredients we came in with? We’ve all got to start with our own ingredients. If we do that, then we’re likely to stumble across people who feel like kindred spirits to us and who act as role models in various ways and for parts of our lives. Men can be role models for women and vice versa.
All these conflicting voices “out there” about how we “should” be — how do they help us really when we’ve still got to live our own lives every day? Trying to fulfill someone else’s image of “right” isn’t going to get a person very far in a life before they break down from emptiness or unhappiness or exhaustion from trying to be something they’re not.
Jesus is always a good role model choice for Christians.
You’d advise a child to model themselves on the self-proclaimed son of God, a man who knowingly raised the dead, excised demons from the insane and who challenged the secular and religious authorities of his time to the point of it being a capital crime? I’d say that was a bold choice.
I think that anyone advising people to model themselves on Jesus (or Mohammed or the Buddha or whichever embodiment of a religion you want to name) is generally confusing following the teachings, which are in all cases pretty good in the main, religion tending to last best if it’s teachings are viable for its followers, with imitating the founder figure, and sometimes aspect of the divinity.
Focussing back on Christianity, I’m not sure I’d say the Bible is exactly full of good role models. Probably because it’s characters were written about 1,800 years ago or so, at the most recent, and reflect societies closer to Islamic State’s ideal of society than what any reader here seems to want. The remarkable thing is that this book’s teachings manage to transfer so well, but as a source of moral behaviour not as a source of literal exemplars of how to live in a modern society.
All of which to say is that Jesus as recorded is a poor choice of role model for a modern boy, and if you wish to promote his teachings as part of a model of masculine behaviour you need a role model who embodies them without the extremes of the lives of Jesus or many of his recorded early followers, although St Paul might be a good role model if you want your son to write home lots (with observations about how to improve things).
Are role models actually a thing? I never really felt like my personal experience contained anything matching up with the concept.
Agree.
But they are a thing to a broad variety of people.
I think a mentor is a more useful concept. Failing that (and for most people, they probably do lack anything close), numerous examples of honorable productive behavior they can see in person is surely preferable to specific but unknown and likely idealized people, although I can see it being useful to know how a particular surgeon got to be where they are if your goal is to be a surgeon or whatever.
I think a lot of the virtues that make for a functional, healthy adult are a pretty bad fit for popular entertainment, and especially for onscreen entertainment. Think of adult virtues like hard work, commitment, loyalty, kindness, putting your values ahead of short-term gain, prudence. It’s not so easy to tell a story onscreen where those are a big part of the main characters nature. It’s easier to focus on someone with some amazing inborn talent than someone who spends decades honing his skills and abilities; it’s more fun to watch someone resolve a conflict by kicking ass than by calmly talking everyone down and working out an equitable solution; the guy driving a 200,000-mile Honda is less fun to watch than the guy driving a shiny new sportscar. And so on.
I’m not sure that there’s a great solution to this. It’s like the way movie scientists spend all their time having brilliant insights and building death rays, rather than trying to figure out what the hell keeps going wrong with their plaque assay or poring over badly-written documentation to try to work out how to get their statistics package to do the specific thing they need done.
Furthermore, a lot of storytelling is about expressing your emotions about a particular situation, or resonating with the emotions in a story, which means that some people want to tell and/or consume stories about broken, messy people and broken, messy situations. Representation and all that. Storytelling is rarely meant to be aspirational, and aspirational storytelling often needs to incise the parts that don’t fit the narrative, rendering them unrealistic, anyways.
Read this.
@albatross11
Going through a four or five year trade apprenticeship seems to mature most boy-ish men beyond the years alone, and those that are ex-military, volunteer for extra work for their church, and/or volunteer for extra duties for their union seem exemplary, but it’s hard to judge which is cause and which is effect.
Helping build a fence (or other such work) seems to have a positive effect, and so does teaching him how to cook something for his mom to eat (using the heavy cast-iron pans that his mom doesn’t use to make it “masculine”) as does “women’s work” like babysitting, really just any kind of work, but the trick is to do the work together and calmly offer advice on doing it, just “go do chores” doesn’t quite do it, you have to be there.
Having your son learn something you don’t know is also good, a computer programming or some other skill class beyond what’s in school, some days at Home Depot with their monthly kids classes are good as well (yes you’ll wind up with birdhouses and wood toy cars that will barely roll, suck it up and find a place for them).
The main lesson is not to quit and to be the one to rely on to finish whatever the task, and be counted on, however many mistakes are made.
“Shop Class as Soulcraft” by Matthew Crawford, and “How to Tell When You’re Tired” by Reg Theriault are good books for an older teen to read.
For films to watch together and discuss: Casablanca, The Grapes of Wrath, Lord Jim, On the Waterfront, and Saving Private Ryan are great, and if you could only include the scenes with Sir Percival and somehow keep Mordred being Arthur’s son a secret I’d be tempted to recommend Excalibur, but maybe that movie is one for your son to find on their own. And after he reads or watches The Lord of the Rings ask him to tell you about Samwise Gamgee.
For you to read: “The Compleat Gentleman: The Modern Man’s Guide to Chivalry” by Brad Miner, which is sort of “Red-Tribe-ish”, and “Rules for a Knight” by Ethan Hawke, which is sort of “Blue-Tribe-ish” are two good takes with which to make a synthesis of values to pass on.
If you can take your son to your paid work or (better yet) volunteer work with you that’s good as well, as is taking him to a union meeting.
Boy scouts:
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/nyregion/islamberg-attack-muslim-community.html
So, those particular guys are maybe not the ones to seek out as mentors/role models for your boys….
1. A razor company is not a moral authority. For them to take on that mantle and lecture men as a group on their behavior requires much chutzpah.
2. The ad implies that these behaviors are common and tolerated among men. That seems insulting to their audience. If Popeye’s Chicken ran an ad campaign about how their customers need to stop stealing bicycles I don’t think we would be applauding Popeye’s for their anti-bike theft* stance. I think we would be wondering what kind of delusional racists are running Popeye’s ad campaigns.
* Is it “anti-bike theft” or “anti-bike-theft” or something else? It looks weird. I feel like there should be a hyphen there, but “anti-bike theft” makes it seem like they’re stealing anti-bikes, which annihilate when they collide with regular bikes.
To be fair, a bike’s mass of antimatter would be worth an incredible amount of money.
To be even more fair, money would next to worthless in the post-apocalyptic landscape that would result in a bike’s worth of antimatter existing in the vicinity of any existing monetary economy.
What’s the black-market exchange rate between antiprotons and .22LR cartridges?
That really depends on how much of a weight weenie our antimatter cyclist was. Assuming anti-cyclists are also anti-UCI-weight-limit, we’re talking considerably less than 7kg. The lightest road bike today is less than 3kg, in fact. At about 43 megatons per kilogram, that’s not SO bad, at least if you kept it all together. One devastating kaboom, but release it from containment out in the desert somewhere and it’s nowhere near a civilization-ending event.
Parcel it out in gram-sized packets and you have a quite respectable arsenal, of course. Provided you can maintain containment until you reach the target..
I figure the sort of bike that gets stolen from a Popeye’s parking lot isn’t one of the fancy racing ones, which means it would be heavier. I assumed 9kg and it worked out to about 7.7 Tsar Bombas. That’s pretty bad and could seriously disrupt the world’s supply of fried chicken.
I don’t see what you guys all have against enormous, steaming radioactive craters in the middle of North America.
A common rule for situations like this is to use an en dash rather than a hyphen between the prefix and the compound word, viz. anti–bike theft.
Huh, TIL. Thanks Nick.
BTW, my son plays in his first chess tournament on Sunday. Thanks again for your advice. I’ll let you know how it goes.
That’s awesome! Do let us know, yeah.
SSC–where a grammatical footnote will generate more discussion than the paragraphs preceding it.
This is the house that puns built.
To be perfectly honest, grammatical footnotes are often more intellectually stimulating than politics.
SSC, where any discussion is bound to generate meta-discussions, and meta-discussions bound to generate meta–meta-discussions….
I think at a sufficient level of recursion it’s just continuing the same meta discussion.
If TLP were here, he’d say that “You should pay attention to what advertisers have to say about anything at all” is the real message of the ad, right? I’ve not seen the ad, had not heard of it outside of SSC comments, and am mystified that it’s garnered so much discussion here.
David Reich (a famous geneticist) requests five major corrections to a NYT magazine piece. It looks like the original article got a bunch of stuff wrong, whether from the reporting not understanding stuff or a trying to hammer the story into a desired narrative.
Interesting read–reading Reich’s piece and skimming the article, his complaints seem sound.
For example, as I mentioned to you in my letter of January 7, 20 of 49 statements presented to me for review on January 2 were incorrect, and 27 of the 36 statements presented to me for review on January 5 were incorrect.
Is this normal? This can’t be normal.
Having so many mistakes, or submitting it for review in the first place?
Atlas: “… to convince the just but weak to be strong” — you mean not afraid to be punched in the face by the strong bad guy when they talk back to him or tell him to stop being bad?
Suppose you’re just and physically strong — you might still not confront the bad guy because if it becomes a fight you’re very likely going to face months of legal anxieties and lots of debt paying your defense attorney. And you won’t get any support from a community esteeming you for your heroism, because there are no communities anymore.
It wasn’t, but it very clearly laid out an ideological stance in a very obvious CW topic. Even removing “toxic masculinity” alone might have changed that, because that term is a cultural signifier for a left wing academic position.
For those who either didn’t notice the culture war aspect or could look past it, the underlying message was not a bad message. For many on the right, it was much like the left with Reagan complaining about “Welfare Queens” – nobody wants welfare abuse, but the term provides much more heat than light and places the conversation in a CW battlefield.
ETA: There’s also the fact that a major corporation is presumptively accepting a narrative that there is a cultural problem in need of fixing. On its face, that’s true (there are always bad actors and potential improvements), but it’s like saying “there is welfare fraud.” Yes, there is fraud in the welfare system, but a major ad campaign about it has implications beyond “I am stating true facts for completely neutral reasons.”
Matt Reed is a blogger who writes about his experience as a former faculty member and current dean in community colleges. In one of his latest posts, he writes about the experience from the other side of the transaction. His son has been applying to college and Matt is frustrated that some of the offers from colleges come with completely inadequate amounts of student aid.
Why can’t his son borrow money to feed the maw of BigEd and their ever growing armies of administrative staff like the rest of us?
I don’t know. Maybe Matt sees paying for his children’s education as his job, not the kids’. That would be understandable. If I had children I would want something better for them than starting adult life six figures in the hole.
Perhaps he didn’t go about it the best way if he’s waiting until now to start figuring out how to pay for college. My state has a prepaid college program and we signed my kids up for it when they were born. This locked in their tuition rates to the rates when they were born. So long as they go to one of our (very good) state schools they will have four years’ tuition already paid for by the time they arrive.
Mat is an official at a community college. I’m sure he knows all the tricks for getting an education on the cheap. But that’s not what he wants for with his son. I don’t think he has dropped any names, but I get the impression he supports his son’t efforts to apply to upper-tier private schools, like the one he himself went to, Williams.
So the chain of logic is: “I want to voluntarily take on this obligation” -> “I can’t afford to take on this obligation” -> “how dare the schools not make it possible for me to voluntarily take on this obligation”?
To put it mildly, I have my problems with BigEd, but that just sounds like special pleading.
Yeah, I kind of agree. There’s lots of reasons why college shouldn’t be as expensive as it is, but “because I can’t just pay for it outright for my kids” doesn’t seem like a good one.
Also, six figures seems like a lot. I went out of state for a year (bloody expensive) and then in state for the rest of the time (much less expensive) — always to good, reputable state universities — and I wound up with about 25 or 30 grand in debt*, of which I’ve now ten years after graduating paid off about half. (This includes a few years of forbearance for economic hardship.) Not ideal, but when I hear about people with six-figure college loan debt and they’re not doctors or Ivy League graduates I find it a bit puzzling.
*I had a few modest grants and scholarships as well as working two to three jobs simultaneously throughout college. I believe that is typical though.
I think his view is more, “Why even bother making an offer this bad? You can’t believe my son is going to say yes to this. You might as well have said no in the first place. Doing otherwise is clueless or insulting.”
How would the admissions office possibly know that this particular applicant refuses to take loans and so they should reject rather than sending an acceptance and aid package that requires loans?
I’ve had to delete a couple unproductive responses because I feel similar. The college loan situation sucks in a lot of ways, and moreso now than when I went there twenty years ago.
Haggling over student aid offers may be a useful way for an individual to soften the blow, but seems unlikely to be a worthwhile systemic change.
The answer to “Why is the price this high?” is almost always “because someone is willing to pay it.”
I think part of the problem is the language, when I was applying (and this was 15 years ago, it has only gotten worse), FAFSA suggested an “Expected Family Contribution” of what amounted to nearly a quarter of my parents’ income per kid (my sister and I were in college simultaneously). To add $26k a year to that is kind of insane.
It’s one thing to say “We recognize that this is a huge sum of money you will need to go deeply into debt to support, but that’s the price”. It’s another to couch it in language that makes it sound like it’s a totally reasonable and modest request and you’re bad parents if you don’t just have that laying around.
The schools charge based on the parents ability to pay. The schools will bill like the parents are paying.
I’m not sure I would let my 18 year old take on six figures of non-dischargeable debt, the same way I wouldn’t let him start making meth in his bedroom.
I wonder when the last generation of kids will be who take out huge educational loans for the required-for-a-good-life credential–the ones who get screwed to the wall because the *next* generation has switched over to some much cheaper credential.
The entire paradigm of allowing a business to have full access to your (and your family’s) financial information before deciding what to charge you is one of the most bizarre and immoral things I know of.
Especially when the product is as necessary to a middle class lifestyle as a college diploma is.
Well, if you make enough money that you’re not eligible for any government tuition assistance, I suppose you could try to treat it like a negotiation.
But I suspect they would just drop you for your presumption.
I also suspect that, unfortunately. Still tempting to think about.
Heck yes, don’t presume it’s gentlemen making the decision. 😛
If you were determined to try this, what would be the right way? I’m guessing to would help to be a strong student and applying to second-tier schools that can’t afford to ignore the financial side of admissions, and sometimes have to make some hard choices to fill out a class. Also apply broadly, and be prepared to spend a gap year in case no one says yes.
Ultimately, you are insisting on not doing things the normal way, so the colleges will probably pass on you in the first sweep. But I expect colleges sometimes have to go to second or third rounds when unexpectedly few prospects say yes the first time around, and that’s when they might consider you seriously.
Actually my guess would be that they would treat the letter as a negative, as not wanting trouble-makers, but otherwise ignore the letter. So if the student was otherwise a good fit for the school, they’d accept the student and give no financial aid, pending receipt of your FAFSA.
They don’t have time to deal with weird outliers, and I doubt they have any interest in doing so. I think it’s pretty much accepted that part of the value of a college degree is to prove you are conformist enough to follow all the rules to get there. A letter like this isn’t something they’d want to encourage.
This is just anecdotal, but I’ve noticed that a lot of universities’ online calculators tend to offer student aid of around 1/3 of what the student would actually need (cost – EFC). This is before you even factor in that EFC calculations are ridiculous in the first place. As someone lower in the thread says, any transaction that when you ask for a price, you are first asked, ‘How much do you have?’ is going to end up going badly.
What’s happening here is risk allocation. Students have the ability to place bets on themselves. The university can allocate some risk to the student, in the form of a higher tuition that requires securing a loan.
“Financial aid” is just part of a highly information-asymmetric ploy to squeeze as much money out of students as possible. It’s basically the school replying to “How much does it cost to go here?” with “How much you got?”.
Frankly, the fact that anyone considers it remotely acceptable for schools to post high sticker prices and then proceed to negotiate only after conducting an audit of the finances of the prospective student and his family is insane. I am in favor of banning it, personally.
This is a question for the amateur astronomers in the audience. How does one turn astronomy into a lasting hobby? I can easily see how you can get a couple of years worth of fun out of looking at various astronomical features. But once you’ve saved up for the big telescope, the one that’s a sizable fraction of your yearly income, and used it to find a whole bunch of deep sky objects, that kinda sounds like the end. Is there anywhere to go from there?
I’m not an astronomer of any kind, but I imagine the rarity with which various cool celestial objects/phenomena are visible, given atmospheric conditions and various things having to line up and so forth, puts a natural speed limit on how quickly a person with a really good telescope can exhaust their checklist of things to see.
I am a very amateur astronomer (read total investment <$300), so take what I say with a grain of salt, but try taking pictures through the big telescope. It not only takes up many nights taking pictures you can merge of the same object, it also allows you to buy a whole new class of expensive electronics for your hobby.
Seriously though, it does allow you to share your hobby with a wider range of people, and there are some great amateur astronomy photos.
If you’re not prepared to go quite that far, then it lasts fairly easily. My Dad found a 6″ reflecting telescope at a garage sale when I was young, and we usually got it out a couple times a year to take a look at something or other. It was usually stuff we’d previously seen, but Saturn is really cool to look at. And there are lots of people around who haven’t seen that stuff, so showing them is half the fun.
But that was a $25 telescope (it was an estate sale, and my Dad got a good deal because he had kids) that has since had a couple hundred dollars poured into it. Not something that’s a substantial fraction of a year’s income.
Take it to a public, outdoor place and use it to teach your kid or pick up chicks, depending on your life situation.
I think you’re basically right.
I have maybe $4-5k into the hobby and have dabbled a bit in astrophotography. If you reach the point where you have the 36″ reflector, 8″ refractor, cooled CCDs for photography, $50k mount on a pier, etc – yeah, you’re kinda done unless you get into the really esoteric stuff like radio astronomy, or plan a trip to the southern hemisphere to see things you haven’t seen before. I will probably never get to that point, but spending several hundred on a new, slightly better eyepiece every now and then, or trading up for a bigger/better scope, helps keep the interest going.
There can also be a social aspect. You can bring your gear to outreach events or “star parties” at dark sites and meet other interested parties.
A lot of the attraction is the gadgets, though. The gear is really impressive. You can geek out on optics, make your own mirrors and obsess over their wavefront errors and Strehl ratios. Astrophotography also provides a lot of opportunity to do things a little different or a little better. Occasionally there is something new to see – comets, something changed on Jupiter, etc. – but not super often.
A few uncollected thoughts.
1. How big are we talking, because you can always go bigger.
2. The best
self defense weapontelescope is the one you have with you. A big scope either requires a dedicated observatory, which will cost the rest of that year’s income, or a team of people to set it up for you any time you want to use it. Also, I’m pretty sure being perched on top of a ladder to peep through the eyepieces is a huge PITA. The wind can be a cruel mistress, as well. There are decided drawbacks to having a big scope.3. If you want a big scope anyway, and you’re in California (which I think you are?), I think the 100 inch Hooker telescope is available to the public for visual use. I seem to recall is costs about the same as a super bowl ticket, though. ETA: Apparently $2,700 for a half night, and $5,000 for a whole night. (The 60 inch Hale telescope is considerably cheaper.) Conveniently located in LA County.
3. But more importantly, your viewing will almost always be limited by the atmospheric conditions rather than the telescope. In any given year, you are only likely to experience a handful of nights of good seeing unless you live in a mountaintop observatory. Your ability to actually get a good view of a particular object depends on having a night with good seeing during the right time of year for that object to be close to the zenith. (The closer to the zenith you are looking, the less atmosphere you are looking through, the less distortion affecting your view.) Developing the skills to take advantage of the rare moments of excellent seeing takes time, and an enormous amount of patience to sit through hours of wavering views to find the few moments of perfect clarity right as you were about to give up and go to bed.
4. Astrophotography is one method to get around the seeing limitation. This can be very technical, and developing the skills to do it well takes even longer.
5. If you really, really want to nerd out you can probably try doing photometry light curves and try to find exoplanets.
Why aren’t there proposals on universal healthcare for kids who are American citizens? This seems to be the reasonable middle ground (or step forward) between the current situation and Medicare for all.
It would create economies of scale, where you could have national (or state-wide) vaccination schedules, where nurses go to school to give everybody the reminder shot (except those who opt out). You could also streamline annual checkups by doing them at schools.
It wouldn’t be too expensive, either. Sure, kids have a tendency to break bones and stuff, but extremely expensive childhood diseases tend to be rare, unlike those for the elderly. This would also cover rich kids, not just poor kids. One of the things that makes the Scandinavian system more palatable is that it covers rich people too.
Two confounders:
1) anchorbabies/dreamers/children born to unlawful residents etc.
One side getting fearful and upset if this group is included and the other getting upset if it isn’t included. My guess is in a realistic scenario that it would be.
2) If it does/doesn’t work on a small scale why would it work/not work on a large one?
What you’re describing sounds like certain things that could be tacked on to a school budget but doesn’t really amount to universal health care as i understand it. FYI blood tests and flu shots are administered at where I work [office has at least 1000 employees] annually but that’s far from HC.
No, in Spain, where this is practiced, this isn’t part of the school budget. The nurse works for Social Security. This is organized in this manner because then parents don’t have to schedule these shots separately, and it can be done all at once. This is especially useful for slightly disorganized homes. It also makes following vaccination schedules the more convenient default mode.
Well, but wouldn’t American citizens (even those that are anchor babies) be covered by Medicaid or something? If Medicare does not include illegal immigrant seniors, why would this cover illegal immigrant children?
Because in the United States any child born on American soil is an American citizen.
“Anchor baby” is the term used because it’s much more difficult (both legally and politically) to deport the illegal parent of an American citizen than it is to deport other illegals.
So if a pregnant woman enters the United States illegally and then gives birth, she has given birth to an American citizen.
No, I know that. By illegal immigrant children, I mean those that are not American citizens, like those covered by DACA.
Politically maybe, but it isn’t much more difficult legally to deport the parent of a USC than a person that doesn’t have that relationship.
8 U.S. Code § 1225(a)(1)
8 U.S. Code § 1225(b)(1)
8 U.S. Code § 1225(b)(2)
There is no special rule for parents of minor US citizens.
@brad
It absolutely is. The judge will ALWAYS take into account that a child (who cannot be deported) will be left without a parent if they are deported.
Quoting the black letter law doesn’t change much about the practice on the ground. Pretty much everybody on the right would be happy if black letter law was followed in all cases for immigration, but it’s pretty motte and bailey to pretend that when I say legally I mean black letter law and not how judges and the system actually interpret it.
Which is incidentally why the high profile “my parent was deported” are always kids who have a second parent in the United States.
Have you ever been inside an immigration court? Because I have. I cited law and you cited not black letter law, not statistics, maybe personal experience, maybe just supposed “common knowledge” or “common sense”?
https://cis.org/North/Just-How-Does-Anchor-Baby-Anchor-Illegal-Alien-Parent
Linking to unevidenced assertions by anti-immigration thinktanks is not much of an improvement on just making those assertions yourself.
Speaking hypothetically, If it does cover them [officially], people will get upset. If it doesn’t cover them, [other] people will get upset.
A fair portion of the electorate already believes non lawful citizens are given citizen’s treatment as far as medical care is concerned [in addition to things like public schooling]. They’ll assume it is the case unofficially.
Another portion believes non lawful citizens should be given these things as official policy and would resist ant attempts to enforce a distinction.
For Confounder 1, the law could be written to only cover children of citizens.
Could this be legal?
I can’t imagine a law that discriminates between American citizens based on who their parents are would stand in court.
@ana53294
Sounds like a great idea!
Please make it happen!
As to why doesn’t it happen already?
The U.S.A. is wedded to what I call “Tonite Socialism”, if you live long enough it turns into Sweden, but only if you live long enough.
Probably because of lingering Spencerism.
The demographic in question votes more than anyone else, is reasonably well off financially, and believes that social security and medicare are ‘earned’ by virtue of having paid some amount of taxes for some period of time.
So what are the specifics? Right now, the US has both Medicaid and SCHIP to provide health care to minors. However, these funds are doled out to the states with certain conditions, and the states decide how they wish to spend the money. We really don’t want the states to use this money to give to families that are making several times the poverty income, because the intention is to help out families that are not making a ton of money. Based on what Wiki says, there were about 10 states that were essentially giving discounts to middle class families when they hadn’t fully enrolled poor families, which is a waste of federal dollars.
It would create economies of scale, where you could have national (or state-wide) vaccination schedules, where nurses go to school to give everybody the reminder shot (except those who opt out).
They don’t have this already in the USA?
Yes and no. Vaccines are required for public school attendance (with some medical and religious exemptions to various and variously-silly extents depending on locality), but are generally handled through the child’s family physician, as I recall.
That said, we do already have free routine medical care for otherwise-uninsured children already under the CHIP (again with local variation), and the vaccination schedules are centrally set by… CDC and the Academy of Pediatrics jointly, I want to say, so this would be more rationalization of existing policy than something really novel.
Some states do have free vaccine clinics; in a way, OP’s plan would just be one more focused on school-aged children.
It reminds me of how a few years ago, Unilever was running a feminist-ish body image positivity campaign for Dove skin care products, while at the same time the ads for their Axe men’s deodorants were the most sexist trash on TV.
P&G owns Gillette and a gazillion other brands. I’m almost positive that if you go through all of them, you’ll find they’re being just as cynical and hypocritical as their competitors at Unilever were.
Yeah, the point of the ad is to sell razors, or at one more level of analysis, it’s to sell the ad agency’s future work product to future clients by showing an example of an ad they made that went viral. Gillette has no more inherent position on toxic masculinity than it does on AI risk.
Stories of men failing to meet the demands of masculinity are probably among the oldest ever told; The Bible is full of them and probably so too with every other foundation text. It’s possible to overshoot and become a tyrant, or undershoot and become a bitter resentful, coward. Modern society has gotten very good at guarding against the former, but particularly bad at preventing the latter.
Regarding the ad, my issues with it boil down to the slow encroachment of advertising into politics. Marketing agencies, who never let a bandwagon pass by, seem to have seized on a hot-button cultural topic in order to maximise brand exposure, without regard for (surprise surprise) nuance or tact. The whole thing felt cheap and insincere coming from a faceless megacorp who several years ago were busy plastering their logo all over the bikini-clad asses of cheerleaders and Formula 1 trackside girls. One of the things that’s guaranteed to piss men off is being given a morality lecture in the form of corporate advertising, and I can certainly relate.
In relation to seizing on a bandwagon am extremely doubtful this ad will actually benefit Gillette, at least on net. When a company firmly takes one side over another on this issue the anger from the losers will almost certainly outweigh the appreciation from the other.
Gillette is not a media company, it doesn’t profit solely from drawing attention to itself by signal boosting controversies. Journalists can write incendiary articles and as long as outraged people are sharing it amongst each other, effectively the critics are consuming the product. But if one outraged person shares the Gillette video to another outraged person who happens to be a Gillette customer, they can materially harm Gillette.
I am not so sure – the famous (and probably apocryphal) Michael Jordan quote about “Republicans buy sneakers too” apparently turned out not to be true. The Nike/Colin Kaepernick thing was specifically because they looked at who was actually buying Nikes and who wasn’t, and determined growing their market in Democrat-leaning areas was worth far, far more than losses in Republican areas.
Is this a euphemism for black neighborhoods?
Not exactly – I don’t have the list handy, but Nike determined that basically their entire business was coming from a specific set of cities, and that expanding in those cities gained them so much that they didn’t really care whether they lost some red states that don’t buy many Nikes anyway.
Urban vs. Rural certainly has a black/white element to it, but it’s not fully the same thing.
Sneakers seem considerably more cultural as a distinct type of shoe, Gillette does not to my knowledge really make a distinct type of razor. Of course I have always been confused by cigarette brand loyalty, so I could be missing some sort of weird razor loyalty blue tribe thing, although at first blush I would think this would divide in exactly the opposite direction, with things like Harry’s and other ‘disruptive’ razor companies being far more represented in the blue tribe. Maybe this is an attempt to fight back against that?
The type of razors Gillette sells are cartridge razors, which are the same as Harry’s and Dollar sells. The “culturally different” hip (dare I say hipster?) competition is the safety razor (invented by King Gillette and a guy named Nickerson, how’s that for nominative determinism?), which Gillette AFAIK no longer sells but sister company “The Art of Shaving” does.
Safety razors probably don’t have a significant amount of market share anymore, and I’m saying that as a guy that uses a safety razor. Cartridge razors’ main competition is probably disposable razors on the one hand, and electric razors on the other.
Looking at the sidebar, I notice that our South Bay meetup, which is this Sunday (not, like previous ones, Saturday) isn’t on it. I thought I put it up on the schedule, but perhaps I did something wrong.
@Atlas
I’ve never seen the ad as an ad and I’ve seen it exactly once when the news was on during lunch instead of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?”, and the news was reported on the Ad, I could barely follow what the message was but the new hire started yelling about how awful it was that the Ad suggested touching a women’s shoulder was bad.
So one person didn’t like that message enough to shout about it at the table, but he’s a weirdo.
https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/se-asia/muslims-cast-votes-for-self-rule-in-mindanao
Interesting. Has this been reported anywhere in the Western media? I’ve not picked it up and southeast Asia is an area I’m currently professionally involved with. The dominant media narrative is that Duterte is a dictatorial strongman with no respect for the rule of law, but nothing about his attempted resolution of the regional instability. If something as key as this is not being reported, what else positive is happening in the Phillipinnes that isn’t being reported?
Did anyone stay up late to watch the lunar eclipse?
I saw part of the eclipse, but did not want to stay outside under the clear, cold skies. (Locally, I had single-digit temperatures, on the Fahrenheit scale.)
I did, but it really wasn’t very impressive, unfortunately.
I went outside several times during the eclipse to watch. It seemed really weird to have the moon getting dark from the bottom, instead of the right or left. And then, the rust-red color looked really strange.
It wasn’t anywhere near as impressive as the solar eclipse a few years ago, but still well worth seeing.
Lunar eclipses are slow events. And it pretty much requires the observer to stay up very late to see.
My memory is that lunar eclipse watching is more enjoyable with company. (Which I also didn’t have on Sunday night…)
Of course, the lunar eclipse I remember best is the one that happened when I was a child. My parents took me to an eclipse-viewing party. I saw the beginning of the eclipse, and remember the progression to total eclipse… Then I got too tired, and the whole family went home.
When I was a kid, my parents took me out to our front steps one night to watch a lunar eclipse. It was too cold, and it was taking too long, and I got bored after ten minutes or so. Maybe a viewing party would’ve been better?
Yes. Thought the blood moon looked very neat. Also was creepy when all the monsters came back into the world.
But nobody got reincarnated, dood.
For me, it’s solar or nothin’.
I did. It was cold, so I started 5 minutes before total. I took the kids. It was worth it. One of them really learned something from it, despite complaining that the moon totally did not look as red as blood, too much grey. 1/100 as amazing as the solar eclipse, but 1/100 the effort too.
It was cloudy and raining, so there was nothing to see. 🙁
(Clearly this was a clever ploy by our plucky protagonists to prevent the nefarious from completing their world domination spell by the light of a superbloodmoon.)
Re the conversation about health insurance:
ISTM that the major issue with people not having health insurance is getting a ruinous bill. We see horror stories in the media about people getting billed thousands or tens of thousands for things that insured people who did not meet their detectable would pay much less for. Defenders of the current system say “no one actually pays that”, however, not everyone is confident negotiating, people may be intimidated from even trying from the size of the bill, and, if the provider or hospital does sue, it will be for the amount that supposedly “no one actually pays”, and that will be what the judgment against you will be for. How does this sound as a way to alleviate this:
-Health care providers must disclose the average insurance price for each billing code
-Courts may not enter judgment for more than this price
-Any bill or collection notice or summons & complaint must disclose the average insurance price for what they’re billing you for, and must disclose that a court will not enter judgment for more than this amount
-Any contractual provision a provider has with an insurance company preventing them from routinely charging the insurance rates to people without insurance is void as contrary to public policy
-Straight catastrophic insurance that pays for literally nothing (no check up, no birth control, no nothing) until you reach the deductible is legal
The idea is that people who get bills that, as someone her put it “only a Saudi prince could pay, and only a Saudi prince actually pays”, would be able to just call the hospital and say “Look, according to what you sent me, you could only actually get $X from me in court, so let’s just cut to the chase and I’ll pay you $X”, and that if the matter did end up in court, the judgment against the person would be more in line with what is actually paid for these services. The provision for catastrophic insurance is in there because I expect this system would push more people to catastrophic insurance.
I strongly agree that cost disease is real, there are absurd “nobody pays this” numbers in healthcare and some people get their finances ruined over not preparing for healthcare disasters.
I mentioned my friend who had a major potentially lethal health problem while he had no insurance. He was billed upwards of a million dollars, which he obviously could not pay. Some of it ended up covered by Medicaid (his health problems left him unemployed), some was written off and in the end he had to pay a fraction of the seven figures he was charged.
But he would say, and I would agree, that his poor planning does not mean that I have a moral obligation to rescue him. His going through the system made him more anti-ObamaCare, actually.
And the other thing is that ObamaCare wasn’t pitched as a new welfare program to make good young people who want to play the odds by not having insurance and lost that bet. It was pitched as fixing a broken medical system that left people to die.
I don’t know about the details, but the core of this proposal seems reasonable. An uninsured person goes into an emergency room and is treated. No list of prices was offered to him before he agreed to be treated, so there is no explicit contract.
The question then is what price can he reasonably be charged–what can a court force him to pay? It makes no sense to answer “whatever the hospital says.” A reasonable answer would seem to be “the price that the hospital accepts from other people for the same services.”
I observed a case of this sort. The hospital originally billed about $40,000. They then reduced it, because of the discount they give to uninsured patients, to about $4,000. Comparing it with my records for what was paid for similar services when I was an insured patient of the same hospital chain, I concluded that it should have been something under $1,000.
This sort of thing always confuses me, because [health] Insurance companies are always insisting that they can negotiate down the prices of these things. Does the $1000 represent the total paid by all parties or just the amount paid by the insured below the deductible?
Is the assumption that the uninsured should pay what the insured pays out of pocket or the total born by the insurer and insurance company?
Interestingly a few days ago I was researching NAIC data on the health insurance industry. I don’t have 2017/2018 data but I noticed:
1. loss ratios consistently at 85%
2. Admin expenses originally at 11-12% until 2014 when it spiked up to 13.5% then went down to 13% by 2016
3. Underwriting profits 3.5% in 2007 down to 1.1% in 2016 [lowest was .06% in 2015]
4. claims adjustment expenses aren’t aggregated but they appear to be 1/2 to 1/4rd the size of the admin expenses by health care type with some exceptions.
That doesn’t seem terribly gluttonous as far as insurance goes. perhaps I’m missing something.
The total paid by all parties–insurance plus insured.
The pattern, as I have observed it in my own case, is that you get some medical treatment. The hospital states a cost, say $10,000. The insurance pays a small fraction of that, say $1,000. The insured owes a smaller fraction, say $200. The transaction is then over–the remaining $8,800 is, in effect, a discount the hospital provides to the insurance company.
What I am suggesting is that if the patient is uninsured and refuses to pay the $10,000 bill, the court should find that he owes the hospital $1200.
I should add that I don’t know how such cases are handled now, when and if they go to court. But it makes no sense to say that the patient owes however much the hospital says he owes, given that no price was stated in advance for him to agree to.
For me the problem isn’t paying absurd prices, but paying average prices, even with insurance. I’m on a (mostly worthless) high deductible plan and if I get a major illness or have a major accident in the next ~3 years my plan is to kill myself.
That’s a bad plan of action: don’t.
The highest legal OOP is somewhere under $10k per year. If you get a serious illness, not having $10k will be a fairly minor problem; that’s an amount that even very poor people routinely come up with, given enough time and a few fundraisers.
To put it in context–our middle child had a birth defect that ended up with him spending 5 weeks in the hospital when he was 2-3 months old; he had major surgery, spent part of the time in the ICU, etc–and ended up completely healthy and not expected to have any long-term health issues. The bill for that was over $500k. It took over a year, but we did manage to pay off the $10k deductible eventually; we’d never have been able to pay the $500k.
There’s something …. depressing about the “oh just charity it!” approach.
Almost by definition you hear about the go-fundme campaigns that go viral.
But for every one that goes viral there’s hundreds or thousands of similar that don’t.
https://thenib.com/a-gofundme-campaign-is-not-health-insurance?t=default
There’s nothing sexy about a “1 month worth of insulin” gofundme and most gofundme’s fail.
There’s also a facet of human nature where if most of the little girls with cancer we hear about, the story ends with a generous angel descending from the clouds and saving them… we assume that that’s the normal outcome when a little girl has cancer and needs donations to live.
We, almost by definition, don’t hear about all the fundraisers which don’t go viral.
Where the person doesn’t get the money for that transplant or similar.
So on the one hand you have a load of gung-ho people convinced that “the system works” because every case they heard about it’s worked out. Who may even have been part of the lucky minority themselves… on the other hand you have a giant pit of suffering that simply doesn’t get addressed because it hasn’t gone viral filled with people with a more realistic view of the world.
I’m not thinking of gofundme, or other fund-raising, as a way to pay for needed future care. I’m noting it as a way of paying for the deductible on already-provided care: the advantage of even a high deductible is that the needed amount is fairly small relative to typical incomes.
@SamChevre
That still doesn’t help much, if anything small go-fundme’s seem to do worse, like the “1 month of insulin” one in the link.
[Warning: Emotionally loaded, terrible and ethically-fraught question]
Why should insurance have covered that? $500k is a lot of money and has to come from somewhere. From a purely mechanical perspective, the cost of a newborn (as measured by low-end surrogacy costs) is about $90k. Why should we structure public policy and insurance requirements to cover the far more expensive option?
Because insurance works differently than someone deciding whether the social value of caring for someone is greater than the cost?
That’s what insurance *is*. People who sign up for it pool small, regular sums so that the few of them with the tail end events are covered. The details of what will be covered and what won’t are available up front, and the company knows exactly the price and likelihood of all medical events and decides what they will cover based on that.
Further, if an insurance company has too many pricey, valid claims, they turn to their insurance company to cover them. This is what the system is for–massive questions about how the $500,000 figure is arrived at aside.
The company likely didn’t pay 500K, it could have been closer to 50K or even much much lower the way US hospitals structure their prices.
I’m occasionally inclined to agree. My sister (former PICU nurse) would agree even more strongly, especially once you are out of the “fine long-term” range.
On the other hand–it seems like spending $500K on a newborn who will be healthy and fine afterward is more sensible than spending it on an 80-year-old, and we do that routinely.
Murphy, you’re surely right, but that kind of lack of transparency seems to be a problem to me.
Maybe it’s good if it allows them to negotiate with people unable to pay without causing a lot of complaint, but it seems more that it is the opposite–those least able to pay also have the least leverage to negotiate, being unaffiliated with insurance.
@Randy M
I completely agree.
My understanding is that it’s the result of some kind of nutty arms race (pricing race?) between hospitals and insurance companies.
Insurance companies, having lots of clout, turn around and declare that they’re only going to pay a fraction of the invoiced amount, so the hospitals, to cover costs, start invoicing for a multiple of the real price and then the insurance companies lower the fraction they’ll pay…. until you’re seeing bills for $2000 for giving someone an aspirin.
And it absolutely does screw over poorer people and people who don’t know the game they’re playing.
The point of a high deductible plan is to cover exactly those sorts of major events while not covering the small stuff. If such an event would drive you to suicide, your deductible is too high.
But you’re required to have health insurance, even if it’s mostly worthless. Thanks Obama!
Low deductible plans are too expensive, so people gamble with the high deductible ones that aren’t as financially painful but have a tail risk of total financial ruin.
This costliness isn’t a feature of the mandate though it’s quite possibly exacerbated by other aspects of the affordable care act. If the bill had been nothing but a mandate, it’s likely you’d have roughly the same number of people facing the risk of financial ruin opting to take HD plans but their premiums would be somewhat lower because of lower cross-subsidies and “feature-creep”.
How high is the deductible on a high-deductible plan? I’ve never seen one with more than a $10K deductible, and $10K of medical debt would be unpleasant to get saddled with, but isn’t the end of the world. A hell of a lot of people carry more than that much credit card debt, basically used to fund unnecessary consumption.
OK, somebody is unclear on (or deliberately misrepresenting) the concept here. The whole point of high-deductible insurance plans is that they A: completely eliminate the high-end tail risk and B: don’t do anything else that would inflate the cost of eliminating the high-end tail risk. If there’s a thing that still has a tail risk of total financial ruin then calling that thing “high-deductible insurance” is wrong.
Unless you’re saying that simply being asked to pay the deductible (IIRC $6K for an ACA Bronze Plan) would itself be financially ruinous, in which case that’s not a “tail risk”, that’s basically all the risk. Insurance where the payout doesn’t begin until you’ve already crossed the threshold for declaring bankruptcy or committing suicide or disappearing into the night or whatever, is worth less than nothing and no one should ever buy such a thing.
It’s more that it’s weird to declare victory on “access to affordable care” when in practice the majority of your health care costs are 100% out of pocket.
Yes, high deductible insurance is still “insurance”, but we were promised affordable health care.
Most of us were already insured. The net change in my health insurance post ACA is that the PPO plan I was on became unaffordable and everybody is on HDHPs with HSAs now. I guess I get free “preventative health care” now, but whoop-tee-do, that used to be a $15 copay.
As a young, relatively healthy male, most of my health care needs are of the urgent care sort, plus a couple of surgeries for joint injuries. Fortunately I got those surgeries back when we had the PPO, and those were $200 out of pocket. On the HDHP, they’d be $3000. Not ruinous, but not a trivial write off either. Basically the likelihood of my health insurance actually paying for any health care for me in the next decade is minimal.
@gbdub
Yes, because the ACA was intentionally redistributive. It was supposed to take away the good plans (“Cadillac plans”) from the people getting them to pay for the poor to get health insurance.
The goal was to get the money from you to the less healthy, less young, less male. There was a lot of discussion at the time about how it was rational for you to forgo insurance other than perhaps the most catastrophic, but that meant less money paid into the insurance pools, higher rates for the sick and poor.
I don’t think it was honestly sold, but the rebuttal of “You didn’t really think your insurance wasn’t going to change, did you?” is probably fair.
I’m with John, this is an unrealistic expectation. HDHPs are supposed to be catastrophic insurance, like home insurance or car insurance. Complaining that all your costs were out of pocket is equivalent to saying that you didn’t have any catastrophic health emergencies.
Separate from that, premiums were going up each year and insurance was covering less each year before the AHA came along. You can argue that things would be better now if the AHA hadn’t passed, but you can’t just assume it; they might well have been even worse.
Separate from those two things, HSAs are supposed to be the main way people pay for healthcare in the future, and the best you can say about our current system is that it’s sort of optimized for a time when HSAs have always existed. If your HSA had $60K in it, invested in a vanguard fund that returns ~$3K a year, having a HDHP that caps your healthcare expenses $3K/yr sounds pretty good.
Not just this, but that you’ve always had money in them. Part of my problem is that my HSA balance is so low that I can’t afford to spend any of it, and if I did spend it it’d be a drop in the bucket.
RandyM:
I dunno, it sure seems like if we care about politicians lying, we ought to care about even politicians we like lying in a cause we support.
Wow, I passed that ideological turing test.
I just meant that, with sweeping changes to the laws and regulations, of course it was going to trickle down into each persons’ individual policy, everyone knew it at the time and voted accordingly, or else probably should abstain from doing so in the future.
@suntzuanime – On December 22, 2017, President Donald Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which reduced the individual mandate penalty to $0. On December 14, 2018, District Judge Reed O’Connor of Texas ruled that the Obamacare individual mandate was unconstitutional because [the] “Individual Mandate can no longer be fairly read as an exercise of Congress’s Tax Power and is still impermissible under the Interstate Commerce Clause—meaning the Individual Mandate is unconstitutional.”
Until the Democrats sweep back into power and change that to ≥1¢ “required” is doing too much work in that sentence
@johnschilling
“OK, somebody is unclear on (or deliberately misrepresenting) the concept here. The whole point of high-deductible insurance plans is that they A: completely eliminate the high-end tail risk and B: don’t do anything else that would inflate the cost of eliminating the high-end tail risk. If there’s a thing that still has a tail risk of total financial ruin then calling that thing “high-deductible insurance” is wrong.”
Sorry, I use the term ‘Tail Risk’ to mean something more expensive than the regular medical requirements of a healthy individual that would hit the deductible or come close to hitting it, and is priced above what the individual is capable of paying without going into debt. In some cases [like me] I have enough liquid assets that I could pay the deductible on my health insurance at least once without having to resort to borrowing.
Calling an unexpected and involuntary 10K payment total financial ruin was hyperbolic on my part [sorry] — as payment plans are obviously a thing. But a significant portion of Americans have next to no savings. So the typical American getting hit up with a 10K bill is going to feel pretty ruinous even if it is manageable.
I probably said total financial ruin because while I’m no apologist for socialized medicine but the idea of people borrowing money for a medical procedure strikes me as a bit ghoulish.
With deductibles as high as 10K there’s still a fairly ‘event space’ of medical incidents that have costs that a typical american could afford to pay out of pocket as well as those that can’t.
So ACA proponents just get a free pass for “if you like your plan you can keep your plan”? And “bend the cost curve”?
It was the “Affordable Care Act” not the “health care is as expensive as ever but we subsidized HDHPs so poor but not poor enough for Medicaid people can still pay 90% of their health care costs out of pocket but we get to label them insured now Act”.
Incidentally I’m not opposed to the idea of a government provided HDHP for everyone; that, supplemented by additional private coverage, might be the best compromise. But I don’t think it’s politically feasible – in addition to the ACA opponents on the right you’re going to have interest groups wanting to tack their preferred stuff into “basic” coverage.
As I understand it, even pre-ACA you had to maintain “continuous coverage” or you ran the risk of a future insurer denying your claims on grounds of a pre-existing condition. At least I think that was the point to those HIPAA certificates I got whenever my employer changed plans. It seems to me that even worthless ultra-high-deductible policies would have met this requirement, but maybe someone familiar with how things worked then can chime in.
So i’m in the “poor but not poor enough for Medicaid” category. Or well, that’s what i tell the government, because i’d rather pay the extra taxes than actually be on Medicaid. The plan i’m on costs 60 dollars a month, has a deductible of 600 dollars, and an out of pocket maximum of 600 dollars. Maximum yearly health expenses are therefore less than $2000, or about 1/8th of my reported income.
That’s with some steep government subsidies, amounting to more than i pay in payroll taxes. Not sure exactly how much, but i believe that without subsidies the same plan’s deductible and out of pocket maximum are each ten times higher. So at least where i live it seems that the people getting saddled with the high deductible plans are the ones who are too poor to get them subsidized. I’m hopefully working towards becoming one of them suckers, since being a net tax drain has thus far been a pretty shit deal.
Obviously i meant those who are not poor enough to get them subsidized.
I don’t know, you’re like the fifth right-leaning poster to admit that in this thread, myself included.
To clarify, the problem wouldn’t necessarily be paying as such, but rather losing my job, having no support structure, and being stuck with massive bills on top of massive medical bills. Just too much to deal with.
That is pretty much what bankruptcy is built for. If you don’t have much assets and have debts on top of debts that’s kinda when it makes sense to press the reset button.
Non-dischargeable debt is a bitch like that.
@Hoopyfreud
I’m not tracking medical debt as being non-dischargeable. Once you discharge the medical debt, that’s going to put you, in terms of credit, roughly where you are now. Could you sketch out what you’re referring to here?
@CatCube
I’m paying about $3000 per month on non-dischargeable student loan debt. That’ll all be gone in a year and a bit, but until then I’m fucked if anything happens to me.
If you qualify for disability, you can suspend payment (or pay only a nominal fee) on your student loans to keep them out of default. Even if you just lose your job, there are income based repayment plans.
None of these forgive/discharge the debt, but they can at least keep you from getting hassled for cash while you get back on your feet.
@gbdub
It’s likely that by the time I managed to obtain a forbearance I’d be wiped out.
I’d go for that plan. We are “insured” through a religious healthshare (basically, catastrophic high-deductible insurance). The way our plan deals with the problem is:
A) $5k deductible.
B) If you get a bill that exceeds that $5k, they pay for everything over that, BUT…
C) IF you call up the hospital (clinic, office, whatever) and are able to negotiate a lower price, the difference between the originally billed price and the final price is essentially subtracted from your deductible. So for example, if you’re billed $20k, and you talk them down to $15k, that $5k difference is subtracted from the $5k deductible, and you pay nothing.
D) They have a helpful consultant you can call up on the telephone, who will coach you through the process of getting the institution to lower your bill.
I really like this sort of incentive. A previous employer of mine gave money off your deductible for meeting various healthy living tasks&benchmarks during the year
Another solution: you should only have to pay whatever is specified in a written contract you have signed ahead of time. You don’t just go to a hospital without signing anything, and in the end they give you a bill with whatever number they decide to make up on it. No contract, no promise, no obligation, no enforcement.
Emergency situations where the time needed to read contracts or shop around would put life or limb in danger are probably a small minority of health spending. Those situations, as well as ones where you are unconscious, are tricky, but ideally “no enforcement without contract” should still apply. You could have a contract with a hospital chain that, in case of unconsciousness or emergency, you agree to be treated for prices outlined in the contract; and another contract with a health industry association that, if there is no time to take you to a hospital in your preferred chain, you agree to be treated for specified industry standard prices at any hospital. Ambulance crews should be able to retrieve these contracts from a database, including your directives regarding your preferred hospital(s) or chain(s).
That seems to be trying to apply the rural american fire service model used in some places: you have to pay for fire cover and if you don’t the fire service will come out and watch our house burn down while making sure it doesn’t spread to any neighbors who have paid in advance.
Which works kind of OK for houses but less well for people since people move around.
it’s much easier to ID a house and check if it’s covered in a few seconds.
OK, so the cops find someone bleeding out in a gutter with no ID and no wallet.
Do they say “welp, we have no proof they have a prior health cover contract” and leave them to finish bleeding out?
Does the hospital have to take the hit under your system if they stop the bleeding and then it turns out you never paid in advance? (massively antisocial and benefiting people who defect the most “HAHA! Chumps! Why would I pay at all when they’ll treat me anyway and can’t collect!”)
Now there is a model used in many countries where you pay in advance with it being taken out of your paycheck in advance and then whatever happens, no matter what, you’re covered with no deductible so that medical staff can treat anyone who comes in to the best of their ability without any fear of landing them with a gigantic ,life ruining, bill. it works remarkably well and is much much cheaper than the American model. But it only works if people cooperate to a reasonable degree and agree to all pay in advance.
A little bit like everyone just paying for a fire service in advance with the agreement that they just concentrate on putting out any fires that need to be put out without worrying about trying to decide if a particular burning house’s owner has paid in advance.
Or everyone just agreeing in advance to pay for police so that the cops can concentrate on dealing with crimes rather than trying to decide if the victim has paid their police-protection bill this month.
All it would take is a smartphone with a fingerprint reader to retrieve your contract data in seconds.
We don’t “agree to all pay”, we are all forced to pay whether we agree or not.
….Just like with fire services and police in most places. How terrible.
While a gigantic biometrics database of most of the countries population accessible to vast swaths of the population where the current condition of your fingertips decides whether you’ll be left to die on the street sounds so very appealing it also sounds worse than every other option in basically every way.
@Murphy I would make special provisions for the rare case of a freak accident where your fingers are blown off, or similar. Again, these are a tiny fraction of all cases of an unconscious patient, which are themselves a fraction of all healthcare spending. I feel like these technical details and edge cases are not the real reason you dismiss my suggestion.
Please argue with a bit less sarcasm. I get that you think that state healthcare works the best, but many people disagree (and many others agree; it has been debated at length several times on this forum e.g. here), thus it’s natural that we discuss ideas to create a better system under free market principles; it’s not very productive to just ridicule any such proposals. I definitely think that advance contracts in as much of the situations as technically feasible would be an improvement over the current American system, as it would create more transparent pricing, and thus more competition.
Alternate question: how should we create incentives for people to do the “healthy” thing? There are lots of costs associated with a lack of prenatal care, lack of vaccination, failure to comply with medication regimens, smoking, being overweight, etc.
Premiums based on risk drive out those who are poor and high-risk. But due to EMTLA/medicaid they end up being covered anyways, just via a more circuitous system.
Mostly people have pretty strong incentives to be healthy anyway. unless your incentives are massive they’re not gonna do much to tip the balance if years of life and life quality aren’t enough and/or people value the things that make them unhealthy a great deal or don’t have the energy after working their second job.
Making it easier for people to do healthy things seems to get much more millage than punishing people but it’s much harder to get money for a kids skate park from people than to convince them to try to punish people they already consider kinda sinful.
Straight financial rewards from insurance companies (often through lower premiums, c.f. safe-driver discounts) or employers (of the form ‘check of these 10 Healthy Living Challenges, win a ~$50 gift card!’) work disproportionately well – at least the latter are already broadly standard among large employers.
A problem is that very few of these things actually matter all that much in the grand scheme of things, compared with the raw fact that Americans are basically sedentary. To significantly reduce our chronic disease rates we’d need to tear down our entire commuter-orientated infrastructure and replace it with European-density cities, or something on that order of drastic-ness.
at least the latter are already broadly standard among large employers.
They are standard but do they actually work?
Getting people to take care of themselves is bloody hard. It is long hard sloughs of paying doctors millions of years to tell millions of smokers to stop smoking and having some tiny percentage stop, and then moving onto the next hard slough, while hoping you don’t have backslides in all the previous efforts.
I have anecdotal evidence (confirmed by a medium-sized insurance company, for whatever that’s worth to you) that financial incentives do work. Not shame, or cajoling, or pleading, but straight financial considerations.
That could be deductibles, or higher fees for smokers, or co-pays, they all seem to work. I couldn’t tell you how strongly they work, though my anecdotal experience is “quite well” when there’s an up-front cost to making a decision.
A lot of insurance plans charge a large ER fee, which is waved if someone gets admitted. That definitely redirects people to Urgicare centers for non-serious problems.
@Edward Scizorhands
Sorry, just saw this – they work at the object but not the outcome level. Sure, you can get a lot of your employees to e.g. do a WebMD lifestyle training and get an annual checkup, but those have basically no effect on overall healthiness or health care spending because, well, duh. The level of change-required-to-impact-real-health is outside the realm of things companies are willing to try and make their employees do, outside of very specific things like vaccination or dis-incentivizing smoking.
The ideal solution is the simplest one. Ban the price discrimination. Make it so the out-of-pocket price is the same as the insured price, and that these prices are posted publicly and knowable before treatment. Now all healthcare providers are competing on price and the market can sort itself out.
I’m sympathetic, but the ability to purchase in bulk has advantages for both buyers and sellers. (Think an insurance company saying “we are buying 1000 MRI scans for the next year” which the facility uses to finance purchasing of the MRI machine.) You would ban that. A facility may also have an MRI machine that is used by both internal groups and external groups: those internal groups may be subsidizing the price and have good reason to expect a discount.
Like I said, I’m sympathetic to the idea of getting price signals out there. Maybe everything I just complained about doesn’t matter, doesn’t happen, is petty, or is worth losing in exchange for clear price signals in the market.
One problem with this is that the uninsured patient may be less likely to actually pay his bill than the insured patient.
I have a puzzle that people here may be able to suggest solutions to.
Why do people prefer to do their socializing in very noisy environments, where it is hard to have a conversation? It’s a pattern I have observed repeatedly, in a variety of contexts and several different countries.
It’s easy to drop conservations you don’t like. People prefer to have the option to escalate rather than deescalate intimacy. Environments where you do things together tend toward the noisy because they tend towards centralization.
My gut instinct says it’s to create a lack of intimacy.
Talking in a private quiet space is an inherently intimate activity and there is a lot of natural resistance to engaging in too much intimacy too quickly is very uncomfortable for a lot of people.
There is also an energized feeling to doing the same thing as a large group, which is probably a natural result of this.
By noisy, do you mean at a concert, a construction site, a club, a gun range, a bar, or bazaar?
Because some of those I couldn’t possibly answer, but some I have some theories about.
Most recently, at the social event at the end of Libertycon, a convention of International Students for Liberty that I had spoken at earlier that day. A big hotel ballroom, with pizza and drinks and music playing quite loudly. The crowd was mostly about college age–I would guess several hundred people.
A year or two back, at a London pub full of people. I don’t remember if there was music playing or not—the noise could have been just a result of lots of people talking, but that wasn’t my impression, and I don’t think that such locations design their interior to be as sound absorbing as possible. A similar experience more recently in a Belgrade pub (or whatever they call the equivalent) in the evening of a libertarian event–again, I would guess mostly about college age. I’m pretty sure there was music.
I believe that most pubs are loud for primarily two reason: It makes it difficult for someone to overhear your conversation and, as others have pointed out, it also makes it easier to disengage.
At the convention, I think that others are also right about it being more about a shared experience and not about talking to the person next to you. You all have a mutual experience of enjoying the event and socially charge that way.
Because that is where the booze is.
Setting aside the sarcasm, I don’t particularly understand it either; my impression is that “socializing” has less to do with actually talking to the other person and more to do with the shared experience of some kind of energy. Whatever is making the venue loud is usually the source of said energy. Or maybe it is the noise itself. I don’t really know.
Some hypotheses.
1. Mixing up cause-and-effect. Lots of people socializing at the same time generate lots of noise.
2. Masking. Music is made loud enough so that you can only hear people at your table but not eavesdrop on conversations at the table next to you. (This, if I recall, is the justification for loud background music in a recent bartender’s manual I read. No, I’m not a professional bartender)
3. Killing conversation is a feature, not a bug. If you spend less time talking, you’ll spend more time drinking, which improves the bottom line of the bar.
EDIT: Typo
No one goes there to socialize. It’s too crowded with people socializing.
Could be more plausible deniability. If I say something off, maybe you misheard, or maybe I was distracted, or hey, look at that!
A. Signalling
1. Interacting with someone in an environment with lots of distractions shows that you are interested in them. Interacting with someone in private might just mean that you prefer them to sitting quietly alone, but in a bar it sort of shows that you prefer them to anyone else in the bar, plus the TVs/music.
2. Being able to interact in that situation shows stronger social skills, after all if you can figure out how to act/reply when you are missing a lot of the words that are being said then you clearly are picking up on everything else.
B. Superficiality
1. Perhaps you don’t want to delve into personal discussion with someone, but also don’t want to tell them to stop talking about their grandmother’s cancer. Meeting at a public place is a nod to “I want to hang out but not in an intimate way”.
2. It makes it easy to signal your intentions. “Why don’t we go back to my place” is a shift when you are out in public, but a lot less of one when you are already in a private setting.
3. Lack of originality- most people don’t think of creative things, they see what other people are doing and copy that, which means that people are going to congregate.
You are in a lively area with lively music and lively food with a bunch of other lively people that are having lively conversations. You feel energized and exciting.
I find many common environments so painfully noisy that I assume most peoples’ brains work much better in such environments than mine does. Perhaps we are both a few standard deviations below the mean in our ability to think and hear well in “noisy” environments. Once when I was teaching I found the noise of the yard work being done outside almost unbearable. I asked my students if any of them were bothered by the noise, and none said that they were.
When I was in college, the most common thing to go out and do was to go to smoky, loud, crowded bars and try to pick up girls/get drunk. I found icoffeeshops a much better fit–less bad music and more bad poetry, fewer PIB (proto-Goths) and more retread hippies, but it all worked out okay.
I think this sensitivity to multiple auditory channels is linked to the autism spectrum.
Likely true. I’m diagnosed, and I absolutely can’t stand noise, particularly when coupled with other tasks or strains.
Same. I don’t even play music while studying text, which is apparently the most neurotypical thing in the world.
@Le Maistre Chat
I may be undiagnosed then.
So may my wife.
Neither of us like screaming.
I think James has it–this is just less objectionable if you’re fully neurotypical. I shut down in these spaces.
As far as I know I’m neurotypical in the relevant sense–I’m not particularly bothered by noisy environments if the noise isn’t getting in the way of talking with people.
I think there are people who like noise and crowds. My dad is such a person.
He always puts the TV on as background noise during lunchtime and in the evenings. Pretty loud, at that. And it’s not like he is listening to what they say – I sometimes comment on something they said on the telly, and he’ll be like “What? Did they say that?”.
He also has this strategy of looking for pubs. We’ll pass by several cosy and quiet places, and he will find the noisier and busiest one.
I have a lot of sensory issues, and I don’t get it at all, but it does seem to me like there are people who enjoy noise.
Is there some particular reason why this can’t be explained by the fact that many people socializing at the same place produce a lot of noise? Which causes everyone to speak louder to be heard which creates even more noise thus closing a positive feedback loop. And if there’s any music present it follows the same pattern.
I always assumed it’s an inevitable price to pay for socializing in large groups. People in a small group or pair often prefer to socialize in more or less quiet environments.
Often the noise of conversations is being added to the noise of loud music, which isn’t an inevitable price of large groups. If it were seen as a negative rather than a positive, bars and the like would be designed to minimize noise, which I don’t think they are.
It you’re talking specifically about various eating/drinking establishments, I have little idea about why American bars and restaurants are so noisy, but Scott posted a link to this article which tries to explain that fact, and it seems to have less to do with people’s preferences about the noise level and more with other restaurants’ incentives. And I can testify that at least in some other countries restaurants and bars are commonly much quieter and expected to be so, and (to a degree allowed by budget and other constraints) are designed to minimize noise. That is, except for a certain category of bars which are somewhat club-like and have accordingly loud music, but I assume people go there not so much for talking as for… idk, hooking up? getting drunk?… guess here I share your puzzlement.
But all the other common places for socializing seem to get pretty loud naturally, unless there’s something pushing against it, such as written or unwritten rule or sound absorbing panels. At least that’s my experience and understanding.
My sample includes the U.S., the U.K., and Serbia. But outside of the U.S. it was all in bar-like environments, very likely ones in which people were drinking and hoping to hook up.
Which also seems rather odd to me. If I were still single, I think I would find something like an SSC meetup a much more appropriate place to try to find a girlfriend.
I expect part of the problem is that I really don’t understand the dynamics of conventional courtship behavior, short term or long. If I imagine myself in that situation, I would be trying to demonstrate characteristics that would make me attractive to the sort of woman I would want to be involved with, and would expect her to be doing the same, mutatis mutandis. That would be done mostly through conversation.
I suppose the problem doesn’t arise if the main relevant characteristic is physical appearance or dancing ability. That might make some sense for short term hookups, much less if the objective is a long term relationship.
@DavidFriedman
For hookups, an obvious upside of loud music is that it gives you a natural excuse to get physically closer to your (prospective) partner. And I don’t really think a lot of people look for anything more serious in clubs and the like. Not that I’m a big expert on the topic – in case of America I don’t even know where adults do look for something serious, except for dating apps.
And for the countries, I’m quite sure about Russia and Bulgaria. Also Ukraine was the same IIRC, and the friends from other post-soviet countries seem to mostly share my experience.
Surveys seem to suggest that most people meet through friends and that dating apps are not actually that successful.
Rowling points out in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix that noisy environments actually make conversation more private, because it makes it harder to eavesdrop.
Maybe most of the relevant people hear better than you do in those environments? (And than I do.)
I have no such preference. But I have noticed I’m usually outspoken on that. (Pun intended.)
Ugh, I hate those. I have trouble understanding people and having any conversation at all in these situations (but most people seem to manage that just fine). Probably missing some wiring growing up partially deaf till I was 5ish. That’s on me though, because I should bite the bullet already and learn lip reading.
I figure that people who do this don’t do it to fill a need for communication, but want to see the people around them just act without having to give much cognitive input or expecting any. Less words, less bullshit. Having that feeling of a crowd, can be kinda hypnotizing and calming. I get that with smaller groups, but larger groups and more volume, I just find alienating and I leave soon.
For an environment where a lot of people are going to be drunk, a loud place is going to indicate a lot quicker who is too drunk. A sarcastic put-down has to be expressed as outright vitriol, a creepy sexual comment has to be made loudly enough that it’s gonna trigger people around you who could help, and so on.
Outside noise fills gaps in conversation which can otherwise become awkward.
I think this is a big part of it. It kind of makes it feel like you’re “socializing” even if your local conversation is dead. On the flip side, you don’t have to feel awkward if you laugh loudly and everyone in the room turns to look at you. It’s an environment that’s simultaneously full of social energy and also pseudo-private, since outside noise makes your conversation inaudible beyond a few feet.
That said a lot of places are too loud. Some of this is aesthetic (harder, industrial chic decor absorbs less sound), some is the weird idea that every bar needs to be a sports bar. But I also don’t like restaurants that are library-quiet. That’s awkward too.
I suspect it’s for similar reasons to why some people like getting utterly hammered.
Loud music, dancing etc helps a lot of people to let go and stop thinking.
At first glance it seems counter intuitive “I want to meet new people. To do that most effectively I shall drink myself close to incoherence”
But a lot of people struggle to put themselves out there a great deal and the algorithm they settle on is, to paraphrase a classmate from back when I was at uni: “Get hammered, go to [club name] sloppily stumble together with someone at 2am and hope you like each other in the morning”
And many people seem to have crippling issues with intimacy such that unless they numb their brain pretty thoroughly they can’t get together with anyone.
And it seems to work OK when the other people are following the same algorithm.
Looks like trouble starting back up again in Northern Ireland. Whether this is Brexit related or not, who knows, but it’s strange that it’s happening right now. Car bomb went off on Saturday, more vehicles hijacked and a controlled explosion carried out on one today.
Awaiting further developments.
Very troubling news. I’ll say a prayer that these kind of things don’t continue.
Stay safe over there.
@Deiseach,
Glad you live in the Republic and not the province, and hope you stay well.
It’s martin luther king day and this is one of them hidden open threads. What could go wrong?
Confession time: I, like a lot of people my age, had to listen to a bunch of Martin Luther King speeches in grade school and high school. and I, like a lot of people my age, spaced out and wrote it off as a bunch of utopian noise. This was of course in my angsty teenage phase when I figured I was an ice-cold realist fully apprised of the horrors in the world and how to set about righting them.
Post-college, when I landed a gig that included, in part, teaching kids how to speak persuasively, I went back over his speeches…and goddamn it, that guy was GOOD and RIGHT.
I’m now a convert: I’m crazy about his rhetorical style, and I’m thoroughly convinced he was correct regarding pacifism and activism. I converted to full-on personal pacifism in college, through a different source, but I should have listened when I was younger.
I don’t exactly blame the establishment for “teaching Martin Luther King wrong.” I’m of course equally to blame by being an angsty teenager…but I still think there’s some basic facts about MLK that could be taught differently.
He was a problem solver. His pacifism did not come out of some benighted utopianism but a clear understanding that any other technique would lead to instant and brutal annihilation. I do not recall anyone actually teaching MLK this way growing up, but it is absolutely AT THE CORE of what he taught, and he talked about the practical utility of pacifism ALL THE TIME. This is true whether he’s talking about nonviolence generally (“the command to love one’s enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival. Love even for enemies is the key to the solution of the problems of our world…Jesus is not an impractical idealist; he is the practical realist.”) and his political struggles specifically (“In violent warfare, one must be prepared to face ruthlessly the fact that there will be casualties by the thousands. … Anyone leading a violent conflict must be willing to make a similar assessment regarding the possible casualties to a minority population confronting a well-armed, wealthy majority with a fanatical right wing that is capable of exterminating the entire black population and which would not hesitate such an attempt if the survival of white Western materialism were at stake”).
In short, nonviolence is both a moral necessity and a really effective tool, maybe these are both the same thing.
Thoughts?
I took a history course in college that spent a couple weeks on MLK. It was revelatory.
Re:nonviolence, one thing that made it so effective was how it leveraged the ubiquity of television to show the stark brutality of segregationists to the whole country.
Nonviolent tactics perhaps work better in the modern world because the whole world is watching? It’s an interesting possibility.
Scott always characterizes various forms of nonviolence/tolerance as technologies. Perhaps mass media is a pre-requisite of this form of nonviolent protest.
The whole world is watching, but its people do seem to differ in how much they care (and in some cases, what direction they care). It suspect that there is an increasing disadvantage to A: caring too much and B: watching too closely, with advances in information technology making “so we won’t watch too closely” a less tenable strategy.
Also a degree of mass media support and or some basic sympathy of the broader population is also a prerequisite. If the considerable majority of the population and all mass media thinks a group got what was coming to it for advocating an evil position then nonviolent protests can be attacked at a low enough level to avoid really drawing attention but at a high enough level to make them unworkable.
I’d add that non-violent tactics work much better when the courts will make up law in your favor, and the US Army will back them up with combat troops.
You’ll often hear that MLK offered a more acceptable alternative to Malcolm X. In my opinion, what he more importantly did was offered a deal: you can give me what I want, or the courts will make up or strike down any law or precedent to benefit me and harm you (from real estate easements, to libel, to freedom of association, to town boundaries, to electoral system) and the Army will enforce those decisions.
Wow, now that’s something you don’t see every day!
The courts and military being kindly predisposed to his movement is a literal damn consequence of it not being a bunch of domestic terrorists or armed insurrectionists and you really ought to account for that rather than pretend one trend precedes the other.
No, DeWitt, it’s “a literal damn consequence” of all of the Nice People already dreaming the Dream; he was the playing the role assigned to him (by the Sandman) within the pageant.
My not-very-informed impression is that lots of whites in 1950s America were pretty comfortable with the status quo of blacks being subject to private discrimination almost everywhere and legally-mandated discrimination in some places, but didn’t like to think about how that had to be enforced. “Yes, the Georgians treat their blacks badly, but it’s not really my problem” is harder to swallow if you’re watching footage of people getting their heads bashed in during a peaceful protest.
If white public opinion had been hardened to the point of being willing to see blacks’ heads get busted to maintain the status quo, as I think it was in much of the South, then nonviolent tactics wouldn’t have worked.
I largely agree. I think King understood violence – why it happens, what it means, and how it affects people, including those who suffer it, those who commit it, and those who witness it. He understood that people are not naturally inclined to violence, that the “veneer of civilization” is actually the core of humanity, and the power of articulated pain.
That’s a beautiful way to put it!
I’m not sure I’d describe myself as a rationalist anymore, but I definitely went through a period where I did. Rationalists should like King more (even though he emphatically wasn’t). King always emphasized the damage that hate does to the human ability to think rationally. I think the moment I “got” King was this passage from a speech on nonviolence he gave circa 1957:
“But there is another side which we must never overlook. Hate is just as injurious to the person who hates. Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Hate destroys a man’s sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.”
You can see a resonance with Tolkien and Lewis.
As a pastor of mine once said “Holding a grudge is like drinking poison hoping the other person will die.”
@Hoopyfreud
People are inclined to punish ‘bad’ people, including with violence if deemed necessary to correct their behavior.
The trick to non-violent resistance is to create cognitive dissonance between behaviors/people deemed ‘bad’ by the rules and the actually perceived badness.
I’m not in favor of pacifism. It was absolutely the right choice at the time, and I’m not criticizing his methods. I toured the Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta a couple years ago, and the stuff on the Civil Rights Movement was deeply impressive and moving. But the last room, where they tried to generalize the principles, fell really flat. To use the most stark example, they held up Vaclav Havel as an example of non-violent resistance. But while Vaclav Havel is pretty impressive, 1989 wasn’t the first time the Czech people tried to throw off communism via non-violent protest. And the Czech Spring of 1968 was brutally crushed by the Soviets. The conditions that allowed Havel and the other leaders of Eastern Europe to bring down the communists were created by people like Reagan and Thatcher, who were unacknowledged in the exhibits.
Edit:
To be a bit more clear, they completely failed to look at any example of cases where nonviolent protests just didn’t work. I’m not necessarily saying that armed resistance is always the answer either, but there are times when it’s necessary.
I don’t see this as a compelling argument, it is unlikely that any type of rebellion in 1968 would have lead to independence for the Czechs.
It’s quite likely that there is a selection bias regarding nonviolent protest. It’s hard to point to examples of “nonviolent protests that don’t work” because possible contenders fall into two categories:
1) the sort that have been brought to your attention. These will surely work someday. The arc of the moral universe is long and all that
2) the sort that you don’t know about because they’re arcane.
That said: I don’t think it’s a coincidence though that King remains hugely relevant while other leaders remain relatively more obscure, but as you point out this might be a situationally dependent decision. I know scads of people, for example, that know of King but not Malcolm X. In fact I just had a discussion about this today. Someone objected to me making exactly this characterization by saying “well yea, but that’s not really fair, it’s only because King took great pains to make himself palatable to the power structure so now the same power structure memorialized him” and I was kinda like “yeah! that’s the point!”
Could you unpack this?
I agree with your first characterization, but my second would be:
“There have been thousands (millions?) of ‘nonviolent protests’ that have resulted in the nonviolent group getting conquered, captured, or killed. We will not hear about them because they are destroyed.”
This is a very good point. What was vital for MLK was media coverage of non-violent protester getting hit and the mass audience finding it icky.
I mean, I think everyone knows the King-ist Civil Rights movement was a Christian spin on Gandhi’s non-violent resistance, and if you watch his official* Hollywood bio-pic they show the importance of journalists (in the form of Martin Sheen) to his success.
*It was funded by the Congress Party-ruled Republic of India, and Congress is controlled by descendants of his associate Nehru also named Gandhi (no relation).
Just a side note, I think its a pretty common opinion of historians and the like that Reagan and Thatcher had a very minor to no role in the fall of communism. Probably not the thread to have “why did the USSR fall debate”, but I think a museum would be justified in not mentioning them if that was their stance.
First, I sort of regret including them in the OP. My bigger issue is that they didn’t mention the Prague Spring or any other case of nonviolence failing to work. Or the cases where violence advanced human rights. Slavery was ended by warfare, after all.
Second, fight me. One of the main factors leading to the fall of the Soviet Union was deliberate economic warfare on Reagan’s part. (I’m perfectly fine with delaying that discussion or moving it elsewhere, but I disagree incredibly strongly.)
When you say “economic warfare”, do you just mean the military buildup or are you referring to something else?
That was most of it. He basically managed to set up a new arms race in smart weapons, a sector the Soviets were ill-equipped to compete in. They spent a bunch of money trying to stay in the race, and Gorbachev set up stuff like Glanost to get more. It didn’t work, and the whole house of cards collapsed.
Slavery was ended by warfare in the US. From what I understand,
the British Empire managed to abolish slavery without fighting a war first. It was very expensive, the UK only paid off the loan they took to compensate slave-owners in 2015, but much less expensive than the American Civil War by any measure.
I’m not really disagreeing with you on the meta level, sometimes violence actually is the answer, this is just not the best example of that.
Fair point that the British ended slavery without fighting a war, but it’s completely implausible to suggest that the US could have done the same, at least in the same timeframe. Slavery was deeply rooted into the culture of a big part of the US, and they wouldn’t have let legal abolition happen. On the other hand, it was only a thing on a few small islands far from Britain, so the political power the slaveholders could muster was very limited. And the same is true in terms of relative financial burden.
Objection. The UK has only fairly recently finally retired a lot of debt that was really, really old. I’m not quite sure why this was, but for the entire 20th century, it apparently made financial sense to simply keep paying interest on the debt. Some of the debt retired in 2015 dated back to the South Sea Company. But the US would have had to pay proportionately much more, and that was also impractical.
Let’s put numbers on this. The compensation for slaves appears to have been about 15 pounds at the time. That’s $2,300 today or $76 in 1860. (Note that this was about 10% of the market rate at the time.) That year’s census showed 3,953,761 slaves. A similar level of compensation would have cost $300 million. The 1860 federal budget? $63.1 million. So you’re looking at 5 years of federal spending at a ridiculously low rate of compensation. In comparison, the compensation for Britain’s abolition of slavery was about 40% of the treasury’s annual revenue. So the Civil War may have been more expensive than buying out the slaves, but it’s actually within the same order of magnitude.
Not everywhere! In the US and Haiti, yes, but the the UK ended slavery in the homeland and then in its overseas (mostly Carribean) colonies without any sort of real war over it – in 1833, three decades before the Americans did. The British slave trade, which was outlawed even earlier, was pretty significant, and around a million (IIRC) British slaves were freed by the 1833 act – not as many slaves as were ensalved in the USA at the time, but a significant number.
@bean
I will note that slavery was substantially MORE a part of Brazilian culture (and partially with the same people under the Confederado program) and it was abolished peacefully there, although not as early as 1865, but within a generation.
The idea that it could have possibly been done peacefully in America doesn’t seem wildly implausible to my admittedly biased Southern self.
Two points:
1. That wasn’t entirely without problems. There had been some steps already, and slavery was rapidly becoming uneconomical, but it still brought down the monarchy.
2. I’d quibble with “more a part of Brazilian culture”. The US at the time was something like 70% people who were not into slavery and 30% people who were really really into slavery. Yes, on average it might have been more a part of Brazilian culture, but the South had enough political power (see all of the debates over free vs slave states) to basically make it impossible to end slavery peacefully.
While it’s obvious in retrospect that the economics of slavery were going to go away within a few decades, I think that the South’s leaders had invested too much of their self-image into slavery to make a peaceful transition work. During the time of the Revolution, slavery was seen largely as a necessary evil, but that changed over the next few decades. You had lots of people defending it as a fundamentally good thing, and that’s a hard position to retreat from.
The economics would definitely have eventually broken slavery in the south, the newer moral arguments for slavery coincidentally started appearing with the technological advancements such as the cotton gin which increased the value of cotton in textile manufacturing. The US was producing more cotton in 1870 than it did in 1860, despite the devastation from the war.
The only way to perpetuate slavery in a world where Eygpt et al are pushing into the cotton market would be to heavily subsidize cotton producers. Such subsidies would have to come from the North as the economy of the South outside of cotton wasn’t large or strong enough to bear a significant cotton subsidy. The North was very unlikely to support such action and tariffs wouldn’t work as the US was a massive cotton exporter.
In the long run slavery may have continued to exist indefinitely as a legal institution but on ever decreasing scales, and how much worse this would have been than the war + reconstruction + Jim Crow is up for
debatespeculation, but I doubt that as well. Lincoln was willing to negotiate with the South and not demand an immediate end to slavery, but the South basically knew that the writing was on the wall if they remained. Eventually they would be forced to give up the institution and move on.I don’t think that’s clear. Slavery was workable in activities suited to the gang labor model–lots of people doing the same thing at once, so pretty easy to monitor and enforce. The two big examples were agricultural–cotton and sugar.
Consider assembly line manufacturing as a possible third.
There’s also the caveat that everything isn’t economics, and that people had some highly political and cultural reasons not to want to abolish slavery.
To add to @DavidFriedman I was taught that the Confederacy’s claims to land in AZ/NM were based on the fact that certain crops that could be grown there would be profitable if slavery could be established, even though cotton in the Deep South was coming to an end. The South wasn’t merely standing athwart history yelling stop, they were actively thinking about how their system would be perpetuated
To add to @DeWitt, I also don’t buy the Ron Paul argument that we could have bought our way out of slavery. There was an alternate history mockumentary a few years ago about the Confederacy surviving to modern times, and although slavery had ceased to be an economic engine, it hadn’t died off in the 1%, and everyone who in our timeline could afford to have a Hispanic maid or racehorse still had a slave. I think that’s probably what would have happened without the harsh reprimand of Southern aristocracy that came from the ACW
This is pretty much my point, though. This is a group who decided that succession and war were a preferable alternative to staying in the Union, despite Lincoln saying as loudly as he could that he wasn’t going to abolish slavery, he just didn’t want it spreading any further. Slavery was way too deeply embedded in their culture to let them give it up gracefully, no matter what the economics said.
@David Friedman
That didn’t turn out so well for the Nazis. I’m sure that the slaves (or the abolitionists) would have quickly figured out how to make products that would pass QA and yet still fail pretty quickly. I don’t think that’s really possible to do with cotton.
Those two sentences don’t belong together, because while our culture celebrates the exceptions, the vast majority of the stuff (explicitly including weapons) that the Nazis produced by slave or slave-adjacent labor worked tolerably well. The productivity of industrial slave labor was substantially less than that of free, by ~50% IIRC where we can do an apples-to-apples comparison, but if the cost of slave labor is <<50% of free that's a net win in labor-intensive industries.
Slavery has been a thing for basically all of recorded history because it works, and it works because most people who aren’t characters in a work of inspirational fiction will actually respond to slavery by trying to get by day to day and stay out of trouble rather than by trying to sabotage their masters’ works.
@ Dewitt
Everything isn’t economics, but massively important and internationally traded commodities are mostly dominated by economics.
@ bean
The Sought chose succession and maybe war, the North chose war after succession. Succession does not mean the long term survival of slavery. Points to consider
1. Several slave states stayed with the North, they would definitely have lost the ‘right’ to own slaves eventually (and probably in the short term) with this move.
2. The states that remained had low cotton production vs those that left.
3. The leave faction heated up heavily with the increase in cotton prices prior to the civil war.
The places where slavery was ingrained culturally and politically were, surprise surprise, the places where the economic benefits were greatest. The places where it was least economically beneficial walked with fairly open eyes a path directly towards abolition. The end of the economic advantages of slavery would almost certainly have eroded and eventually ended the needed political power to continue it.
You can argue that would have been to long to wait for the end of such a heinous institution, and with good reason, and the argument that in 1860 ending slavery by 1870 required a war is a strong position, but the argument that ending slavery in the south required a war is far weaker.
@John
Apparently, slavery ended in Brazil because immigrant labor was cheaper even for plantation work in the late 1880s. Between the efficiency hit you take and the fact that you have to do your manufacturing in the South to take advantage of slavery, I doubt it would have worked very well.
I’ll grant that the glorification of slavery and the economic need for it went hand-in-hand. But I’m positing that it had potentially grown close to a critical mass. The Crittenden “compromise” would have completely prohibited abolition at any point in the future. That is not exactly the work of someone treating slavery rationally, and allowing that it might stop making sense.
I didn’t argue that the South was acting rationally in that way, only that the economics of the situation had lead the cultural and political alignments. A shift in the economics away from slavery should therefore generally be expected to shift the cultural and political over time.
The Crittenden compromise wasn’t much of a compromise, it was a promise to give the South everything it wanted and the North got…. not war. It was closer to appeasement, and was mostly rejected by the North (and was probably also unworkable with the fugitive slave issues as well). It was also proposed by Kentucky, who elected to remain without the compromise.
It’s plausible that a better negotiator than Lincoln can get Virginia to not leave the Union. Half of Virginia wanted to stay so much that they split to stay, after all. It wouldn’t take much compromise to get the rest to stay.
Once Virginia stays North Carolina certainly doesn’t leave.
There isn’t a need to invade a rump Confederacy led by South Carolina even if you really want to keep the Union together. They aren’t economically viable if the North embargos them, and will cave fairly quickly. Then you’re easily on the Brazil path with absolutely no large-scale violence. Maybe not by 1870, but certainly before 1900. Slave-based agriculture clearly doesn’t make economic sense past then.
This obviously isn’t what happened, but it’s far from “completely implausible”.
I am of the opinion that nonviolent civil disobedience works when it is backed by credible threat that if protesting faction chooses violence, Power will be in serious trouble. That was not the case in Czechoslovakia of 1968, Warsaw Pact armies were prepared and able to crush any resistence Czechoslovaks could muster.
In 1989 situation was very different – Gorbachev clearly signalled that he is not only unwilling to use force against the protesters, but even that USSR is prepared to withdraw its troops from Czechoslovakia, if its government would ask them to. So protesters were facing only weak and demoralized domestic communists, which was an easy fight.
My thought is I’m so glad you came on here and wrote this. My husband, son (“an ice-cold realist fully apprised of the horrors in the world and how to set about righting them”), and I stumbled into a conversation in this direction over lunch today and wound up at how do you distinguish between enlightened self-interest, “rationalism,” and morality. So I copied your comment to share with them and we’ll revisit this at dinner, I’m guessing.
Here’s my philosophy: I’m a rabid individualist and I detest anything that compromises my autonomy. That meant I was pretty selfish growing up. It’s still the core of my morality though, but I took a lot of the lessons taught by my religious upbringing to heart even though I’m not very religious: C.S. Lewis, JRR Tolkien and MLK all taught that evil, especially hatred, is essentially a form of slavery, one that slowly devours your autonomy and individual identity (this literally happens in two different C.S. Lewis books). Additionally, Scott has reviewed a book on this site: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/01/30/book-review-eichmann-in-jerusalem/
which demonstrates vividly that Hatred ultimately makes someone REALLY BORING.
All these were moral realizations that lead me from angsty teen to slightly more well-adjusted adult.
Thank you for this. I share your rabid individualism and detesting anything that compromises my autonomy, as does our son. And that hatred is a form of self-enslavement. Where did you wind up for a career (broadly-speaking) and are you happy at it?
I graduated in the depths of the 2008 financial collapse, and lived abroad as a teacher. Then I came back to the states and worked as a librarian for a few years. Now I’m in law school. I’ve generally been happy with my work but there is a lot about librarianship that I didn’t like, which has nothing (much) to do with librarians and more to do with the environment that surrounds them. That’s why I’m in law school.
…That personal history explains so much of Synchronicity.
Virtually everything that happened in synchronicity is autobiographical or something that actually happened to a friend, with exceptions that should be obvious. I went to a catholic college, was really into the history of science, did a lot of urban exploring, and hung out with a bunch of martial arts nuts. Almost every character is just a real person I knew with some salient traits swapped around.
I like to joke that the guy Nathan Wild is a based on is actually more of a cartoonish exaggeration in real life. I really did know a Jiu-Jitsu nut that was also a supergenius science teacher, but in real life the same guy was ALSO a top-of-the-line knife and axe thrower. (also in real life he’s Canadian not an archetypal “ugly american”…that part of nathan was based on the americans I worked with)
Hah! I joked when I shared the book with my friends that it sounded like you were writing about us. At least, as far as the college characters go; none of us are teaching abroad. (We attended John Carroll, no less, which was formerly Ignatius College.)
@ Nick
John Carroll in University Heights, Ohio?
@baconbits9 Yeah.
I lived 2 blocks over from JC from 2002-2009. Something about seeing a thing that is so familiar to me mentioned on SSC is both comforting and off putting.
Almost everyone I knew thought I had based James Shannon off of them…which is odd because James is probably the only person in the whole book that I did NOT have a single direct model for. I think he’s just sorta how a lot of vaguely intellectual people I know feel, a lot of the time.
@baconbits9 That’s neat! It’s a really nice area; I don’t own a car, so walking to Target or to friend’s or professor’s houses I got to see a bit of the neighborhood.
I’m a demoralized rabid individualist. I’ve come to believe there is only obtaining control over others, being controlled oneself, or slipping through the cracks in a system intended to control one. That is, you’re either a tyrant, a slave, or a criminal. Individualism is a fine goal, but unattainable; if you can’t control others you will be controlled yourself, or be despised by all others.
Nice to meet you, Foucault 😛
@The Nybbler
The fourth option is to be a nobody. People are slaves to control systems only because it’s important to enslave them; it has an actual purpose. You need to be manipulated because the government relies on your votes, and because the capitalists rely on your labor. As technology advances, the bulk of people are going to become irrelevent, not prized slaves. The liberation of humanity from control is the liberation of humanity from relevence.
I rather like this answer about being a nobody.
Wanting particular goodies (whether things or forms of validation) from society in order to be happy makes one more subject to systems and therefore less autonomous.
Some kind of perfect individualism may be unattainable, but a lot of autonomy can be had in the crevices without being a criminal.
The authoritarian/totalitarian impulse is too great for merely being a nobody to work (at least nowadays). People don’t control other people only for labor or votes or for their own convenience, they also do it just because they enjoy the power of doing so. So “being a nobody” is the same solution as slipping through the cracks and being a criminal.
Nybbler, I guess I’m missing your central point.
I’m not sure who you’re referring to when you say the totalitarian impulse is too great for being a nobody to work. From my perspective, not everyone enjoys controlling other people. I don’t enjoy it. When I’m anxious, I can get controlling, yes, but I don’t get pleasure out of that and work against it in my own life.
There are lots of people I know who seem to have found comfortable non-criminal places in the crevices. Farmers, programmers, psychotherapists, massage therapists, artists, some kinds of teachers, writers of various kinds, some solo practice lawyers, and so on. These people, including me, might call ourselves “nobodies,” but we also love the people and things we love and feel considerable freedom to go about our lives in our own ways. We could argue about levels of self-delusion or whatever, but if a person feels subjectively that they have autonomy, who are we to deny that? Yes, there are moments of having to connect to official systems, but it’s also possible to limit those moments so that daily life is not hugely impinged by those systems.
Are we talking about two different things?
Yeah, MLK was a good man (I mean, he was a Christian pastor, guys!) and a good rhetorician. As far as pacifism as practical opposition to violence by a minority, though? The jury is still out on that: Europe is running a huge experiment as we speak, even if some of the variables are different (such as the wealthy majority being disarmed rather than well-armed).
I didn’t really care for the previous time you spoke of Europe in this way, and I still really don’t. What are you even on about?
I’ll confess to being afraid to touch this one, but now you did so I’m all ears.
Muslim immigration, and the fact that nearly every terrorist attack by a Muslim in Europe is an attempt to use violence to achieve social change that their religion has programmed them to want. They do this in European countries where they constitute as little as 6% of the population, less than half the black American minority in MLK’s day.
So the empirical question is whether a pro-violence faction within a minority of ~6-12% of the population can achieve its goals at the expense of a wealthy majority without the minority getting violently crushed, which is the empirical question in theodidactus’s MLK quote.
seems very different from
and different enough indeed that you should’ve been clearer from the get go. Aside from the motives of terrorists, which seem much less clear-cut than you keep implying, governments in Europe do in fact spend a lot of money combating terrorism, they’re not very kind about the matter, they do in fact kick out and punish people who commit terrorism even abroad, and muslims in other countries do in fact get killed by various European nations.
The argument that the entire muslim population doesn’t generally get targeted proves too much. Would you say white Americans are nonviolently resisting their black fellow citizens because the latter group is, on net, more violent?
I’ve reported this comment. I don’t believe it to be true, kind, or necessary.
I hope your constant anti-Muslim bigotry isn’t welcome here.
Hmm. I hope the “true, kind, necessary” rule doesn’t mean that outlier opinions are banned. One of the things I like about SSC is that people can make arguments well outside of society’s Overton window, and get serious responses.
When we use the TKN rule, are we basing on what Scott thinks is TKN? Maybe that is Scott’s intent, but I hope not. Because otherwise anything outside Scott’s Overton window he might well find neither true nor necessary. I think we should use TKN under the sense of the person making the comment. This would eliminate trolling but not outlier opinions. I think MLC sincerely believes that violence is an inherent part of Islam (and I think there are some others on SSC that would agree). I don’t agree, but I would like to hear an argument.
Speaking of teaching and King, I’ve always been amazed that his day is a day off. I think if you told King “on the day honoring you, little kids don’t go to school” he would be really pissed off. I think he would want his day to feature mandatory schooling.
So in the last “open thread” I posted:
Which prompts me to ask in this thread:
Just where is the SSC learning of all these “outrages” of the week?
I check The New York Times opinion pages, and (a bit less) The Washington Post, I used to check The Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal but those have become harder for me to view, otherwise I’ll look at the front page of The San Francisco Chronicle and pick it up if something looks interesting, and there’s the news I hear on the radio that’s in-between the traffic and weather reports, and many things the first time I learn of something is from a SSC comment (note: Facebook and Twitter don’t sound appealing to me).
So how are y’all finding these things out?
We’re finding these things out on Facebook and Twitter. You are choosing to learn about these events second-hand here instead, after they have been filtered through the SSC talking-point bubble.
That’s not the worst thing, but just recognize its an ideological filter, shaping not just how the content is presented/discussed, but what content is presented/discussed.
(The social circles we follow on Facebook and Twitter are ideological filters as well, so there’s no way out)
I’m going to second this. To be perfectly honest, I actually enjoy having this filter around. It keeps me from expending emotionally energy on every single controversy that goes through my social sphere. If Trump or Gillette or whomever decides to offend the powers that be, it has to be a big enough deal that not only does it bother someone, but it bothers someone I share a social circle with enough to talk about it.
Yep. You’re inevitably going to have a filter bubble- it might as well be via people you trust.
As for the supposed “ideological exposure crisis”: as someone old enough to remember the pre-social media discourse, I am absolutely sure people are being exposed to more diversity of viewpoints now than they were 15 years ago. The exposure crisis narrative mostly plays on the faulty viewpoint that the mainstream media is non-ideological, and doesn’t qualify as a bubble itself.
You should at least peruse the headlines at Slate and Vox which are reasonably mainstream and often pick up these sorts of “outrages of the week”. (Notably, both, Vox especially, are places where Scott has gone for examples of “media behaving badly” that are mainstream and level-headed enough to be worth, in his mind, engaging).
Also cable news. It’s worth noting that a lot of these things on Twitter aren’t just randos tweeting (even if they start that way), they are getting picked up and spread by members of the traditional media on their own social media accounts. So even if it doesn’t make its way into the hoary confines of the NYT opinions page, your latest Twitter outrage-of-the-week is almost certainly reaching and influencing the people who write that page (e.g. Ross Douthat, columnist for NYT, has commented about this week’s outrage, the “Covington Boys”, although it hasn’t made its way into one of his columns yet).
EDIT: I should clarify that I don’t necessarily recommend doing these things, but if you’re actually honest about understanding where folks here are coming from, those are important influencers.
1. Click here: https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex
2. Click the thread at the top each week that says “Culture War Roundup”
(note: never actually do this, but there are thousands of comments each week discussing the dozens of things to be angry about that are going to pop up a few days later in open threads here. Every time I’ve been confused about the context of flavor of the week outrage in this blog’s comments I hadn’t heard about, it has an immediate predecessor conversation in Culture War Roundup threads. Its a pipeline constantly pumping toxicity over to here)
Well the incident that I was ignorant about, which “went viral on social media” did finally filter to what I usually read besides SSC tonight, and it turned out that it was such stupid nothing of a story I’m pretty irritated that pixels and ink our wasted on it.
It was on Dutch TV yesterday. Anything that goes international like that is not minor in its reach.
It was also on CNN over the weekend. Stupid story or not, it was pretty mainstream stuff. In fact the reaction of mainstream news outlets to this latest social media outrage is a significant part of the controversy.
As weird as SSCers are for generally being in tune with the latest Twitter/Reddit/Whatever outrage, at some point I think you’ve got to admit your lack of exposure to these things is also a little weird.
Yeah. Rod Dreher wrote that people were talking about it in Dublin when he gave a talk there Monday.
@gbdub
After I read of it here at SSC I saw mentions of the story three times in The New York Times here, here, and here, and yesterday I heard one long interview on the radio with the drummer (if SSC hadn’t primed me to listen I likely would have quickly turned to another station and forgotten about it), and I heard brief mentions of the story twice on the radio this morning, but I definitely saw the story at SSC first, and I still find it baffling that it became a news story in the first place.
Why did three protest groups meeting each other without any violence become a news story, what explains this?
First, it fit into the narrative of ‘Trump empowers racists to abuse minorities’ and used as an example of that trend. Then, when that was shown to be completely bollocks, it was fit into the narratives of ‘media lies about conservatives’ and ‘twitter mobs dangerous’ and used as an example of those trends.
While individual stories may not matter to you or I, trends might, if they really are. Of course, it’s hard verging on impossible to correctly identify trends given the ease of misrepresenting them by not reporting on other stories, or even just the inability to see enough news to get an accurate picture.
The Two Minutes Hate feels really, really good and is politically useful to cultivate. Social media strips out almost all of the context that would make people feel a bit guilty about hating an actual person. And that kid, in that instant before the camera, had a really punchable face.
The question isn’t why this became a story, the question is why at least some of the haters are backpedalling on that story. This is a positive sign, though there’s still a long way to go.
Not attacking you personally, but it feels incredibly and frighteningly tribally hateful to say that kid had a “punchable face”.
That’s such a dehumanizing and nasty statement. Can you imagine if a right-wing commentator said that about the Native American on the other side of that picture? Or about a black protester?
That anyone would make this statement about any teenager bothers me a lot.
“Dehumanizing” is really overused nowadays, and this seems like an example of that. Nasty? Sure. But the term gets the visceral feeling across; it’s useful. A “punchable face” is literally a face with an expression that just makes you want to punch the person. There really isn’t any polite way to put it. Urban Dictionary’s page on “shit-eating grin” (which is one way you display a “punchable face”) probably gets the point across best.
I parsed “punchable face” as not being merely the expression, but that his face by nature was acceptable for punching.
But even your parsing, that seems so incredibly mean and tribal in nature. His face never registered as punchable to me, so it seems that it isn’t anything inherent in the expression.
The question stands: Would it have been acceptable for me to say that the Native American protester also in the picture had a punchable face?
“Punchable face” is a way to try to find something objectionable in otherwise quite restrained behavior. It is attempted to discern a thought-crime from extremely ambiguous evidence, complete with sentencing.
To clarify:
I assert with almost complete political and emotional detachment, based on my observation of human behavior over close to half a century, that the kid’s combination of general physical appearance, demeanor, and facial expression will tend to cause human observers who are not already sympathetic to him, to experience a visceral pleasure at the thought of punching the kid’s face on the grounds that they believe nature would never allow that face to exist on someone not guilty of underlying WrongThink of a kind and degree that is or ought to be righteously punishable by facepunching.
If I were a proponent of the theory of Intelligent Design, I would also consider it a grievous design error of H. Sapiens v1.0 that its brain usually come prewired with such broadly dysfunctional heuristics and reward loops, but it is so and there isn’t much I can do about it. Humans gonna human, and that means vastly overestimating their ability to evaluate character from appearance.
Meh. Kid’s gonna get his face punched if he keeps doing what he’s doing, along with all the verbal and textual abuse from people who can’t be bothered to find him in meatspace. That’s wrong, but it’s likely to happen and it’s not going to be better if nobody ever explains to him why. He’s got a punchable face. He has to learn to wear a different face, or lay off the f2f political agitating, or get comfortable with having his face punched. Hopefully only virtually, but that can’t be assured.
It would not have been accurate. Among other things, you can barely see his face in the camera angles of the most commonly published photos. And from what I’ve seen elsewhere, his face is not generically punchable and he doesn’t seem prone to the demeanor and expressions that tend to amplify perceived punchability. His inner self may for all I know be mean and hateful, but he wears a face that will rarely be punched for it even as the kid wears a face that is likely to be punched even when he is sincerely innocent.
If you were to find some other Native American with a punchable face, and say so, I’m certain there would be people who would still call you out as having acted inappropriately, but they would be wrong to do so.
@EchoChaos:
I read “punchable face” as meaning: the face of someone who deserves to be punched, as a method of attitude adjustment (in other words: deserving of a short, sharp shock that’ll make him rethink his choices and/or world outlook).
Mind you, that should actually read “someone who looks like they deserve to be punched”, but before we knew more details, the story was that he had participated in something we might find more or less objectionable (what, if anything, is behaviour deserving of a punch is another story altogether).
The thing is: as much as I disapprove, I can see why the boy’s face in one of the photo’s looks like that of someone who could use a good punch. I find this a valuable thing, in that it allows me to get some idea of other people’s emotional reactions to the story as presented.
Are such reactions justified, given what we know? I certainly don’t think so. Would they be justified under different circumstances? Maybe. Suffice to say that peaceful coexistence of large numbers of people requires setting boundaries. Sometimes, such boundaries are best enforced by a fist to the face (“best” meaning most effective with fewest long-term downsides, in this case).
I mention this as a caution against going too far in the other direction: to dismiss this merely as “tribally hateful” or “dehumanizing” is to lose valuable insight into what makes people tick. Without such insight, all that’s left is pushing for a confrontation (“don’t you talk like that”). Even if you win, you’ll only have made an enemy (this, incidentally, is the main problem of the progressive movement these days).
I feel like it is worth mentioning that “punchable face” is a reasonably common colloquial term that is roughly equivalent (but uses slightly more inflammatory language) to “that guy looks like a dick”, and while it may not be a particularly admirable way to make quick judgement on people it is fairly common and I suspect most here have done it.
I can see how people who have not seen it in common usage due to age, social circles, or whatever might be more bothered by its use than people who are familiar with it which might be part of the issue?
“Punchable face” is the male equivalent of Resting Bitch Face. There are people who wear a facial expression that is annoying.
I saw that video after everything was cleared up, but that boy still has a deeply annoying smirk. This may not have anything to do with his character. He may outgrow it. I know people whose facial expression has changed a lot. But if it hasn’t, he will be punched (or criticized by internet commenters) for no reason.
I believe that John McWhorter’s complaint about the psychological turn in anti-racism may have wider application. In many areas of human conflict nowadays, we seem to waste our time demanding that people purge themselves of incorrect feelings, despite the obvious fact that they have very little ability to do that– and are neglecting, by comparison, the older and more productive project of trying to get them to stick to correct actions in spite of their incorrect feelings. (Look at how “hate” has stopped being a universal human emotion which can’t be avoided but must not be allowed to become the master– and turned into a moral failing which They have and We do not.) I can’t help finding the Sandmann kid’s smirk irritating, though knowing that he’s hiding a bad set of teeth helps a little– but I like to think I can control what I do about it.
It could just be the media waiting until he gave just the right facial expression (again, just like in Gone Girl), but I totally understand why people have a "what a little shit" and "punchable face" vibe, even though I would 1) condemn and demand punishment for anyone actually doing it 2) wonder what was wrong with someone for sticking with this opinion after getting more facts.
I think there is room for interpretation on that smirk–it could be haughtily dismissive, or it could be an uncomfortable wan smile held in place for lack of any better social response to the provocation.
I hope here of all places will grant a bit of consideration to, at worst, some social awkwardness.
Even if it was haughtily dismissive, so what?
After all, the best way to teach teenage boys manners is apparently to punch them in the face if they make an unapproved expression in a single frame of a video selected to make them look bad.
I will suggest that his “punchable face” is far more what Randy M said. People felt angry at him because of what they were told he did and because he is a tribal enemy (a good looking white kid in a MAGA hat), but when it turned out that he didn’t actually do it, their anger didn’t leave, so their brains came up with a reason for it.
@EchoChaos
I’m pretty sure people of several tribes agree that he’s got a punchable face.
Some of the twitterati are (apparently seriously) claiming that his having a punchable face is an actual justification for all the hate he’s gotten. But then, other twitterati (I’ve seen them) are claiming “guilt by association” as an actual reason to fix blame, so all that proves is that Twitter sucks and should be destroyed.
“Punchable face” is essentially designed to describe relatively wealthy, young white guys who are damn cocky and act like jerks, but don’t look like they could “walk the walk.”
No one would describe John Cena as having a punchable face, since John Cena would Bane-Break you in about a second if you punched him.
Regardless, “punchable” should definitely fall into the category of “things you think, but don’t say, except in locker room talk.”
ana:
Consider Matt Taibbi–good reporter, but the guy genuinely has an annoying smirk.
The annoying smirk on the kid’s face may be something that doesn’t usually show up (there’s a whole art to catching a celebrity or politician looking unusually goofy), or might be just how he looks.
Either way, when a bunch of allegedly responsible adults decide his annoying smirk and MAGA hat is sufficient reason to say horrible things about him in public or call for bad things to happen to him, I’m going to think a lot less of them. As Brad might say, these folks have acted like jerks in public, and I’ve revised my opinion of them as a result.
And like I said before, spending a week reading the tweets from blue-checkmark journalists on Twitter is a really good way of correctly calibrating your sense of how moral and careful with the truth a lot of our media elites are.
Both tribalism and twitter make people dumber and less decent, and there’s a multiplicative effect.
My thoughts exactly. From some of the pictures I saw, it could be interpreted as a haughty smirk. That it could be does not mean it had to be, by anyone.
I am not saying that him having RBF is a justification for all the hate he has received. And no, it is not because he is a white rich teenager. There are plenty of rich white teenager who are adorable.
All this bondoogle was a huge overreaction that shouldn’t have happened.
But it is a fact that some people can get away with stuff other people can’t get away with. Some people have charisma, others have anti-charisma. This guy has a very annoying smirk. It may not reflect who he is. But some people have body language that is offputting, and you just have to deal with it. Knowing this makes it easier to deal with consequences.
And this partly explains why this whole thing happened. Other than the media being itching to expose MAGA hat bearers as racist assholes, and the very aggressive twitter environment, there where other factors that contributed to this, and his face was one of them. And just to make it clear: explaining something is not the same thing as justifying it.
I feel compelled to say that I find some of the “punchable face” explanations to be among the most offensive ideas I’ve seen expressed by regular posters to this blog. Maybe I’m misunderstanding it, but it seems directly parallel to making excuses for rape because a woman smiled at a stranger. As an awkward and occasionally bullied child I may be unduly sensitive to group behavior of this sort, but from here it looks like a really ugly opinion. I’m shocked that you would believe this, aghast that you think everyone else would agree with you, and terrified by some of the responses that this attitude might be a lot more common than I would have guessed.
@nkurz
I strongly agree with you.
@nkurz
Consider someone like Gilbert Gottfried or Fran Drescher, with a voice like nails-on-a-chalkboard to some people. Such people are likely to be judged negatively in situations where they objectively have done nothing wrong, just because their voice grates. A “punchable face” is a visual equivalent of this. That’s not justifying it, that’s just explaining it.
@nkurz
I think that people are reading victim blaming into comments that can be interpreted as being merely descriptive.
I don’t see anything wrong with noting that something happened to a person because of a trait they have and that there is no need to make a moral judgment in a comment. As a reader, you can provide your own moral judgment.
For example, if you ask someone why Dreyfus was targeted, then the answer ‘he was a Jew and people were antisemitic’ is a fine answer. It doesn’t mean that the person who gives this answer approves.
I feel like people are taking “punchable” way too literally. Would “he looks like a smug little shit” have stirred up nearly so much controvery? Because that’s basically what it means. Sometimes an idiom is just an idiom.
Though I suppose that when elements of society start celebrating the literal face-punching of quote-unquote nazis, that faces being referred to as punchable could set off alarms.
Amongst all the pushback, I would like to say that I thank John Schilling for letting me know how much of a fucking asshole he is. If someone gets off at the thought of punching beardless young schoolboys, especially those already clearly vulnerable and extremely uncomfortable, then yeah I want to know about it, all the better to know to avoid and ignore them. Bye~
Probably not.
But “punchable” has the further implication that punching people who look like that is an appropriate response.
Consider the difference between “she looks really sexy” and “she looks really fuckable.”
Eh, I don’t think I agree with this. Just because the id would enjoy something doesn’t make it appropriate. Or even imply that the ego supports the course of action. Any functioning adult knows this.
But nowadays we live in a world where childhood lasts decades, nuance is forbidden, and words are violence so I guess we should stop using idioms that rely on common knowledge of standards for adult behavior ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Obviously I should have used the long-form explanation rather than the colloquial “punchable face” expression. Lesson learned, and I won’t make that mistake in the future.
But we’ve had the long-form explanation, and extensive discussion thereof, and there’s definitely still some miscommunication here. How can we make it more clear that explaining why a crime or other misbehavior occurred, does not constitute excusing that misdeed?
If we want to see less face-punching, less twitter-mobbing, or for that matter less raping, we’re going to need to understand why these things happen. That’s going to be harder to arrange if anyone who tries to offer an explanation without an elaborate disclaimer, is at risk of being called an apologist.
It is an often sad truth in life: in large part we determine the way people treat us.
To clarify, my objection is to the phrase “punchable face”. It’s reasonable and desirable to explain why a someone is likely to encounter violence because of their appearance. But in my opinion, it’s unreasonable and undesirable to treat that violence as justified because someone was provoked by another’s appearance. I feel that describing someone as having a “punchable face” condones (and even encourages) unjustified violence.
As a parallel, I think it could be helpful to explain (if true) that a women in Western dress who smiles at the conservative tribespeople is likely to be raped. But it crosses the line (for me) to therefore describe her as having a “rape-able face”, as that buys into a system that accepts rape as a justified consequence for smiling at strangers. I may be wrong in taking a phrase too literally, but I do think that choice of language matters, and can have consequences.
It may also be that people who use the term “punchable” (for Nazi’s or for smirking high schoolers) feel that “punching” is not actually violence, but is instead equivalent to a stern rebuke. I don’t agree. After a few rounds of retaliation, or after others see that punching seems to be socially acceptable, escalation will likely occur. I don’t usually like slippery slope arguments, but I think once society comes to believe that violence against others based on their appearance is acceptable, things can turn very violent very quickly.
To go the other way a bit, I get why people are uncomfortable with the term. I’ll map the term onto a dynamic I remember from high school:
Bully 1: Hey, look, it’s victim X. What a punchable face has he.
Bully 2: *having nothing else to do that day, punches victim X in the face*
Then Bully 1 says “I didn’t do nuffin” and administrators don’t give enough of a shit to actually find out. There’s enough bored bullies around that just picking on someone often leads to a third-party committing violence, and Bully 1 knows this damn well.
My operating theory is that, to a first approximation, everyone who uses Facebook and Twitter as primary news sources is either dangerously media illiterate or deliberately shit stirring. The theory is looking better and better as time goes on.
That looks like a pretty good list. Are you committed to paper, or are you doing this online? I’ve mostly substituted Reuters for WSJ these days, but that’s mostly for accessibility reasons.
@Dan L
All of the Wall Street Journal articles I read are from the print version, but someone usually buys the copies at my usual news stand before I get to them so now so I seldom read it anymore, and I’m too set in my ways to go someplace else. The vast majority of The San Francisco Chronicle articles I read are from the print version as well, while I still pick up a printed copy of The New York Times about every other week I mostly read it on-line now.
Just bought a bunch of PredictIt shares in Joe Biden, since he is leading 12 out of 13 polls, the most heavily-vetted and well-connected politician of the bunch, but only at 15% to win the nomination. Did I make a good choice or not?
Surely 78 is too old to reasonably be sworn in as president? It would also mean a good chance of giving up the incumbency advantage (unless the plan is for him to die at 80, and then have his Veep serve ten years?).
Baby boomers will have to let go of their death grip of American civilization at some point I hope. It is remarkable though that any of Biden, Clinton, Warren, Sanders or Trump would be the oldest president ever inaugurated in 2021.
Surely 78 is too old to reasonably be sworn in as president?
His health seems to be reasonable for a man of his age, and living to be 82 to the end of his term doesn’t seem unlikely. Running him as a ‘caretaker president’ for one term until the Dems get their act together and pick a decent electable candidate would be a plausible strategy; I’m going by the elections of ‘caretaker popes’ in the past e.g. John XXIII who was elected at the age of 77 and lived to be 82:
For those who don’t want to read the wiki article, the joke is that this “stopgap” pope proceeded to convene the Second Vatican Council, which became essentially the defining event of twentieth-century Catholicism and ushered in decades of tumult.
Decades of tumult? For real? I wasn’t born until the 90s so it must have settled by then. When they got it into their damn fool heads to shake things up *mumble* years ago I got fed up enough to stop attending mass – was it similar back in the 60s? From my super-biased perspective, Vatican II was one of the best things to happen to the Church
Dude, the oldest baby boomers will turn 73 this year (the youngest will turn 55). You’re gonna have to live with us a few more years yet. Bwa ha ha!
I think not, dude is a white guy. I believe that the democrats will go for anything else this year.
if I was going to bet it would be on Kamala Harris. Minority woman who has no baggage and who has some enthusiasm.
She’s an interesting candidate, one flaw might be her embracing identity politics though.
Kamala Harris has a lot of baggage involved in her scummy DA work, which regularly ground down criminal defendants.
Is this a CW-free thread?
Does this apply more to Harris than to other prosecutors who run for office?
At least for some people her work as a prosecutor gives her baggage.
There are enough Hispanic Catholics that I think “attacked the Knights of Columbus” is going to her cause some trouble.
I don’t think he has much of a shot. This would be his third attempt at running a campaign and the first two ended with zero impact (’88 he withdrew before the caucuses and ’08 he got trounced in Iowa and dropped out). The odds that he has suddenly figured it out at 76 and can run for months without sinking himself verbally are low, let alone run and beat other candidates.
I dunno, considering how the dems are going full-on progressive, Biden might have a shot as the “don’t scare the normies” candidate (eg, tone down things like “abolish ICE” and “let people with penises use the women’s changing room”), and, if he did win the nomination, his opponent would be Donald Trump, and he is not nearly as toxic (rightly or wrongly) as Hillary Clinton.
He’s probably the only somewhat moderate Democrat who has a chance and certainly the only stale pale male who has a chance due to his close association with Obama.
He has had two shots and hasn’t built enough of a following to make it to the New Hampshire primary either time. His policies aren’t the issue, convincing people to vote for him has been the issue. He has a shot if the Trump blowback is of just the right sort where people are tired of the bickering and outrage, but it doesn’t look like that right now. Carter won the nomination in the Nixon aftermath, but Nixon was gone, and the D candidate didn’t have to beat the villain to displace him.
I think his time as the Obama VP (and the heaps of praise from Obama for him) might help him break out of the mold. He had the smell of Bob Dole on him in 2008 – old, been in politics forever, nothing special. Obama still holds a very high position in the minds of many, and he essentially endorsed Biden for President. He’s likely calming to the crowd that feels the Progressive wing is taking over, while also being supportive enough of that wing to not have them try to tear him apart.
If I had to pick one candidate from the crowd to win, it would be Biden. That said, it currently looks like the Democrats might be in the same position as the Republicans in 2016. Too many candidates splitting the “normal” votes. If that holds until the primaries, we might see a minority (votes, not race) candidate getting a plurality of very passionately supportive voters. In that case, Biden might turn into the Jeb Bush of this election and get demolished. If the race thins down, I would only expect Biden’s position to improve.
That all said, I don’t know how to account for his age. He’s incredibly old by electoral standards, but so are several other people likely running against him as well as the current Republican president. I’m leaning towards his age being a minor detriment overall, and a bigger or smaller issue depending on who runs against him.
I don’t see him being VP as solving his issue, his issue is that when people hear him talk they have no real impulse to vote for him. He didn’t get VP by coming in 2nd in the primaries, he got VP after dropping out with 1% of the vote in Iowa because the Obama team didn’t want Hillary as VP (or whatever reason you want). He didn’t earn it by convincing lots of voters which is his major flaw. Dole did far better in the primaries in ’88, and was a top Republican in the 90s. As important was the fact that he was associated with the Republican standoff against Clinton in the mid 90s, which put him on the stage as an adversary to Clinton, Biden hasn’t been in such a conflict to prove himself. His main attributes right now seem to be name recognition and a distance from the current conflicts, the latter has to go away with campaigning and a potential race against Trump.
One thing about age in politics is that it is far more than just “s/he’s to old for the job” it is also “why are you presidential material now if you weren’t for the last 40 years”. Biden is 75+ and the next primary he wins will be his first despite running twice previously. Dole, who is a good comp, kudos on bringing him up, had a short run in ’80, but in ’88 won 5 contests. That is a significant difference, but he still needed to build his name up just to get trounced in 96 by Clinton (well Clinton/Perot).
I certainly wouldn’t argue that he has a lock on the election, primary or general, but of the crowd I put him top three and maybe top single position.
What Bob Dole never found was a way to break out of the mold that Biden found in 08. Without eight years as VP I would think Biden was insane for trying again. Instead, he can ride the coattails of a very popular Obama presidency (at least in the primaries) and the outright love Obama shows for Biden. His name recognition is probably carrying him more than anything right now, but unlike Clinton (who also rode name recognition almost all the way to the WH), he’s considered a good person and I can’t think of a group that hates him. Even on the right he seems to be mostly respected (person, not his politics obviously).
I disagree with this assessment of Hillary, she certainly used her name recognition early, but she is a shrewd, aggressive, hardworking political operator. She is very good at getting people to actually vote for her, getting more votes than Obama in 2008, Sanders in 2016 and Trump in 2016. She has some obvious and well known flaws, but she still gets people to actually vote for her and still raised huge amounts of money, which are clear skills in politics. Name recognition fades in importance as campaigns go on as other candidates get their name out there.
Obama coming out and actively campaigning for Biden would be huge for his chances, but I don’t expect that in the primaries. Being Obama’s friend isn’t exactly a compelling reason to vote for him, its a nice reason to vote for him, and politically strong emotions dominate rationality and moderate emotions. Biden inspires moderate emotions and he gets ignored as soon as a candidate who inspires something strong appears on stage.
Democratic primaries assign delegates proportionally rather than winner take all, so it’s difficult for a minority but passionate block to run away away with the primary because the more mainstream candidates have split the vote. If nobody has a majority of the primary votes then nobody will have a majority of the pledged delegates, unless they’ve gotten delegates from candidates who’ve dropped out. Therefore it is entirely possible for the plurality candidate to still lose if all the delegates coalesce around one of the other candidates.
I consider that a positive. Thanks for clarification!
…Are we? Internet politics =/= IRL politics, I haven’t seen Warren or Harris be particularly woke yet.
Warren was “woke” back when that meant “Occupy Wall Street” and the term wasn’t particularly mainstream. But that was centuries ago in woke-years.
Less glibly, she was / is a leading progressive on economic issues but has largely come off as just following the leaders in terms of identity politics / social justice.
The odds that he has suddenly figured it out at 76 and can run for months without sinking himself verbally are low, let alone run and beat other candidates.
Yeah, but with the wide field of candidates popping up now all he reasonably has to do is hang back, let them beat each other into the ground, and then when the last couple are left start the serious campaign. Just look wise and elderstatesman like in the background while all the hair-pulling is going on, do some sympathetic photo-ops like visiting blind one-legged puppy sanctuary, and then in the final stretch go for it (or rather, let his campaign tell him what to do and say and how to do and say it).
This is generally not how presidential primaries work in the US, if you hang back while the others fight the winner of the others is now a big name who has withstood their attacks, has “momentum”, and is a hot story. That is the opposite of what Biden is good against.
If people are tired of the whole ruckus around Trump, I think they’ll be looking for a candidate who hasn’t gotten into any fights, who seems like a calming presence. Just show up and be friendly and statesman like. Biden seems like that. I think that would give him an advantage. But it all depends what candidates actually go forward, and if any of the ones currently throwing their hats in the ring are going to stick with it once they’ve done some initial exploration of how their candidacy might be received.
My disagreements here are on two levels. One is that if you are sick of Trump you will want your candidate to be able to beat Trump. You can get Jimmy Carter after Nixon if Nixon is out of the picture, but if you have an ongoing problem with the biker bar down the street you don’t generally go to your easy going friend for help.
The second one is that the people I note to be most complaining about Trump look more like they are thriving/obsessed with the conflict and not at all going to go Uncle Joe in this election if there is an option that will keep the conflict going. Enough of the moderates who would like to see an end to the Trump situation are moderate Republicans and Independents that their impact will be muted in the the Democratic primary.
If there isn’t a strong Republican challenge to Trump next year, where do you imaging the moderate Republicans and Independents will be casting their primary votes?
It will be interesting to see the difference between states with Open verses Closed primaries, especially if Trump is running [functionally] unopposed.
John Schilling:
Depending on state law anti-Trump Republicans might be stuck with the Republican primary (eg: I think NY requires party changes a year in advance).
I’m not sure how relevant polls are at this point. IIRC, Obama only announced he was running around this time in 2007, and Trump waited until June. Furthermore, there are various reasons that make an outsider nominee this time more likely.
Polls right now are just noise. They measure name recognition and not much else.
Pretty sure if they measure name recognition, they’re significantly better than noise.
If he makes it through to the nomination stage, sure. Right now the Democrats are reminding me of the Republicans in 2016 with everybody deciding “I’ll have a go!” I don’t think Elizabeth Warren will make it through, and I don’t know about Corey Booker (there does seem to be some whiff of past scandal still hanging on to him). There’s another three or four names I’ve heard tossed about. The Wikipedia page has a whole lot of “Who the heck is that?” people throwing their hat in the ring.
We’re going to see them winnowed down to “possibles” over this year, and Biden has the advantage of the nostalgia over Obama and probably being seen as moderate/centrist. Once all the no-hopers have been shot down (because there is going to be a lot of in-fighting to do down rivals and get internal support, and this will mean the candidates will do all the work of dragging each other down for the Republicans), the field will narrow to a reasonable number and it may well be “the old dog for the hard road”.
Now, unless some wild card comes along (like Trump did) to blow all the established candidates out of the water, I think you’re okay. Ocasio-Cortez is legally too young for the presidency so she can’t be the kind of wild card for the Democrats. As for First Female Ever, I think Tulsi Gabbard and Kamala Harris would be fighting each other too much for either to get a solid lead (as I said, I don’t think Elizabeth Warren has a chance – she really shot her bolt with that DNA test unprompted error) and I get the impression that there’s a certain amount of dislike about Harris due to decisions she made as Attorney General, plus again a whiff of scandal that she got her start in politics due to being the girlfriend of Mayor Willie Brown who used his influence on her behalf.
So Biden to be last man standing when the dust settles is not a bad bet.
15% seems about right to me. If it weren’t for his age, it would be much higher. He was the VP of the immensely popular (among Democratic primary voters) Barack Obama, and he didn’t conspicuously screw it up. He has an excuse for sitting out 2016, in the death of his son, so he doesn’t have the stink of loserdom on him, and the Democratic base has had time to develop a serious case of buyer’s remorse re Hillary Clinton. They’ll be looking for someone more generally likeable, and if Biden were even ten years younger he’d be the George H. W. Bush of 2020. But at 76 he may not have the energy or the mental flexibility, and he will not have the full trust of voters who are expecting a grueling ten-year commitment.
He’s a white guy; BFD, so was Bernie Sanders, so is Beto O’Rourke, and the bit where the Democratic electorate is all mindkilled SJWs who count Oppression Points uber alles is just plain wrong.
He’s up against Kamala Harris, and a couple of fellow geezers without his positives, and a bunch of nobodies and a few popular somebodies who haven’t yet declared and are looking flakier by the day. Looking at the Predictit numbers, I’d say Harris is a bit undervalued and O’Rourke a bit high, but otherwise everything is about where I’d expect it to be.
Looking at the Predictit numbers, I’d say Harris is a bit undervalued and O’Rourke a bit high, but otherwise everything is about where I’d expect it to be.
I agree about O’Rourke, I think a long campaign like the presidential one would expose him. His record is that he was a three-term member of the House of Representatives, which at least means a fair amount of political experience, but as for the rest of it? “I nearly beat Ted Cruz” is not good enough, and if he couldn’t win the Senate seat in Texas how are you gonna win the Presidency, Beto?
Nearly beating Cruz is good, but not enough. “Nearly” doesn’t count. And he has not much else to run on – him being the progressive option for Texas, how does that scale up for the rest of the country?
The reason I’m so interested in the US campaign? Because our own election was “yeah Michael D. is going to get the second term, why are the rest of them even bothering?”, the most interesting scandal we had was “did the President spend too much on dog grooming”, and whoever becomes the next President of the US is going to have an effect due to being a global power on us, like it or lump it. So it’s more entertainment than our own recent election plus we do have a stake in the outcome.
I don’t share this view of how politics works, it isn’t accomplishment based in that sense. What were the combined accomplishments of Obama and Hillary in 2008? Accomplishments count because they correlate well with what you have to do to win a campaign, not because people will vote for you because of your experience.
What were the combined accomplishments of Obama and Hillary in 2008?
To be snarky, Obama had the First African-American thing going on very strongly, also well plugged in to the Chicago political scene. I agree about Hillary! That’s why I thought along with all the baggage that she had no real chance in 2016, despite all her insistence on being the best qualified and most experienced, because when you dug down into it there wasn’t a lot of experience there.
O’Rourke at least has three terms in the House of Representatives, but he doesn’t have “First Ever” and he doesn’t have “Occupant (as spouse) of the White House twice”. Trump was a goddamn fluke, do you think lightning can strike twice like that? I don’t get a sense of anything from him, of any particularly strong policies one way or another, of him being anything other than a garden variety Democrat (that’s fine, that’s okay, nothing wrong there, but nothing to stand out).
Even this pro-O’Rourke article doesn’t convince me: Criminal justice reform! Legalise soft drugs! Get big money out of politics! Healthcare for all! Immigration is great!
Can you point me to anything there that is uniquely his own brand?
I don’t think Obama got “First” until people heard him campaigning and said “holy shit, he could win”. He was also going up against a “First”, so I attribute his success to be mostly his personal characteristics, with a little sprinkling of having a die hard base he didn’t have to pander to.
I’m not sure what you mean. Most presidential elections are fluky in some serious way. Bill Clinton had Ross Perot dramatically shift the race, JFK was the youngest ever elected by ~3 years and was Catholic Bush #2 lost the popular vote and won a very contentious and controversial Florida.
BTW I’m not arguing “O’Rourke is the guy!”, I’m arguing that personality, or force of will, or difficult to explain combination of traits X, Y and Z are the major determining factors and that unless no candidate has those things then experience and accomplishments don’t matter much*. The brand is the person and how they resonate with voters, not he has position X, Y and Z. As long as you aren’t on the fringe policy wise then you can get people to overlook where they disagree with you, because there will be enough overlap with your other positions anyway.
*outside of the fact that if you have that kind of personality and drive to become president that you will have accomplished something.
Keep in mind that Cruz is much more popular in Texas than is Trump. Trump fared very poorly for a Republican in the general election in Texas in 2016 and was demolished by Cruz in the primary. I suspect Beto has a much better chance of beating Trump in Texas than he did of beating Cruz.
And what other Democrat has a chance of winning Texas in 2020? Castro, maybe.
Trump fared very poorly for a Republican in the general election in Texas in 2016 and was demolished by Cruz in the primary
And yet. Trump is Mr President, Ted is “I beat Beto” and that is being treated less as “you won” and “he nearly won but narrowly lost”. So O’Rourke wins big in Texas – and Clinton won big in California. Having one state that loves the heck out of you is not enough.
I know it’s comparing apples and oranges, but don’t forget that Abraham Lincoln was also a former U.S. Representative best known for “nearly” beating an influential opponent in a Senate race.
A Democrat doesn’t have to win Texas to be elected President. Beto’s proposition is that he narrowed the 2016 R/D gap from 9% to 2%. It may well not translate nationally in 2020 but it’s an argument.
Also, it’s important to note which demographic group he appealed to in order to shrink that gap. If he did better among Hispanics than prior competitors in Texas did, that’s not terribly important nationally, but if he cut heavily into suburban and rural white voters, that’s a big selling point.
Note: I don’t recall the answer to this for O’Rourke specifically.
I would say not – this far out, leading the polls is more about name recognition than anything else, and Biden has obvious advantages there. Nearer the time, as campaigning actually starts, I think that advantage will evaporate. Biden may still be leading then, but the polls now are not strong evidence for that.
Do we know the rules that the Democratic party will use for allocating delegates and choosing its candidate? I’ve seen claims that the structure of the process was very important to the emergence of DJT as 2016 Republican party candidate.
Its still very early in the primary season. To give you some perspective, Donald Trump announced his candidacy in June of 2015 (meaning we could have ~5 months before we even learn that the Dem winner is running).
My take is that, like in 2016, the media is probably over-hyping centrist candidates while under-hyping more anti-establishment ones. I see no indications that the pundits and prognosticators have learned any lessons after getting nearly everything about the previous election wrong. (So yeah, Biden was a bad bet)
Just for fun, here are the top polling candidates for the 2016 Republican Primarily in January 2015 of the previous election cycle.
From Fox News:
1. Mitt Romney
2. Rand Paul
2. (tied) Mike Huckabee
4. Jeb Bush
5. Ben Carson
Note that none of these candidates would even place in the top three in the final voting results (those would be Trump, Cruz, Kasich).
@Scott Alexander,
My late grandmother said voted for Obama in 2008 mostly because she didn’t like “that women” (Palin) and she loved Biden, but she was from the generation that elected Roosevelt and Truman, and they have mostly passed on.
I’d vote for Biden (Sherrod Brown also looks good), I liked Water’s The Two Income Trap book, and her efforts to protect people from the credit industry, but while I think she’d govern okay I really doubt her ability to campaign (Trump’s “Pocahontas” quips visibly got to her), I like Kamala Harris’s tax proposal, and I’d like to see more of her, but I doubt she’d win (but I didn’t think Obama or Trump would win either so me predictions are off).
It might be worth noting that according to according to the Social Security actuarial life table, and assuming I did it correctly, Biden only has a 73% chance of surviving from now until the end of a first term. His chance of surviving from now until the end of a second terms is 51%.
As a point of reference, Donald Trump has a 94% chance of surviving the rest of this term, and 81% until the conclusion of a second term. ETA: And 64% until the 2029 inauguration, which would correspond to the end of Biden’s second term.
Erratum:
Since the 2nd anniversary of Trumps inauguration was yesterday, adjust by one day’s life expectancy.
Bear in mind that, IIRC, the tables are counting birthday to birthday, and we are using it to approximate today through the following inauguration days. The actual ages of the individuals concerned will be slightly older than the reference population, and so the mortality rate would be slightly higher.ETA: I did a simple linear interpolation (mortality isn’t linear, but it is simple!) to account for the slight age discrepancy, and the effect wasn’t large. As I’m sure you could imagine. Adjust every number down by 1%, except Trump making it to 2029, which is 2% lower, and Trump surviving the current term, which is the same.
I believe that at this point it is well established that heads of state have a higher life expectancy than the general population of their respective countries. I have never seen any attempts to quantify it, though, so it is hard to tell the magnitude of the impact.
The Social Security life table pulls from typical 78 year olds on Social Security, and a good chunk of those deaths would be from folks with existing long term problems. Whereas Biden is pretty healthy, would have a doctor and field center shadowing him 24/7 for short term complications, and would get the absolute best healthcare the U.S has to offer for long term.
A. I suspect you are overestimating the ability to diagnose health issues at a distance. He’s not wheelchair bound or bedridden and doesn’t have any obvious physical deformities, but that is about all we can really say. Brand management is huge for politicians.
B. Like I said, heads of state have a longer life expectancy than the general population but I’ve never actually seen any discussion about the magnitude of this effect. And how much of it is driven by selection effects. Sample size is obviously an issue, but if you have any cool insight into the question I would love to see it.
Using the life tables found here for 2015, I get about 81% for making it through the first term, and 59% for two terms. This is, of course, assuming I’m doing it correctly.
I’m using the data from Table 14: Life table for non-Hispanic white males: United States, 2015, found on p36 (pdf page 35). The table assumes a cohort of 100,000 people at birth, and gives the number surviving to a particular age. 59,288 are the number surviving to age 77; assuming that the first term is 77-80, 48,269 are still alive at 81, or 48269/59288 = 0.8141. For both terms, assume 77-84, so 35,194 are still alive: 35194/59288 = 0.5936. You are starting to get into a region where fencepost errors will have a big effect.
The life expectancy at age 77 is 9.9 years (the arithmetic mean survival), and eyeballing the median survival it looks to be about the middle of 87, or about 10 years.
Edit: Added the last paragraph, since it seemed interesting and on topic.
I used this table, which doesn’t break it out by race.
Also, I used the inauguration day because it seems more appropriate than election day to me (and because it was yesterday), which is two years from now (Jan 20, 2021). Biden will be 78 then.
But also… I think you have an off by one error: even when counting election days, he would be 81 on his incumbent election day (Nov 5, 2024). Again, counting by election days (Nov 4, 2028), he would be 85 on outgoing election day.
But again, I think we really care about inauguration day, Jan 20, 2025. When he’ll be 82. (His birthday is, IIRC, Nov 20th.) The end of his second term would then be Jan 20, 2029, when he will be 86.
I mean, I guess surviving the lame duck session isn’t as important as the other 45 or so months… but it is the principle of the matter!
ETA: Oh! Also, I used today as the start point. It doesn’t do much good if he drops dead during the race. [Glancing at my notes] The 8% chance of doing so before being sworn in is worth considering! So I used 76-82, and then 76-86 as the intervals.
ETA ETA: Re: Fence post error. I am open to arguments that I am off by one somewhere as well. The way I read it, though, if you want to know the chance of surviving from birth to age 19, you should do p = t(19)/t(0), where t(n) is the table lookup for that age. More generally, to find the probability for an n year old to survive until age m, you do p = t(m)/t(n).
I think Yglesis is way off on the reasons, and totally misunderstands the basis for votes. Partially this is a misremembering of history, Hillary stomped Sanders in the popular vote, 55% to 47%, she was neck and neck with Obama in 2008 actually picking up 300,000 more votes. None of the things mentioned sank her against Trump, it was her on going email scandal that did the most damage (and lets not forget she still picked up almost 3 million more votes than Trump).
Its not that Americans like young blood to drain the swamp, its that if you are a lifelong politician why would it take you until you are 70+ to become a serious candidate? Hilary was a serious presidential candidate at 61/62, and there is a good chance she would have beaten McCain in a GE. She ended up as the 2nd fastest horse in the ’08 and ’16 elections and people who broadly predicted her victories going in are now claiming to know how and why they went badly. If you are young (and remember that “young” is 46-50 for a president), charismatic and ambitious why are you waiting to be president until you are grizzled? Of course American voters prefer the newcomer, because a half a dozen to a dozen newcomers throw their hat in the ring every election cycle, and odds are that one of them is going to have the talent to at least push the older ones who were newcomers in some previous cycle.
@baconbits9
I think that the #MeToo thing is definitely real. Biden seems extremely into touching people, to an extent that makes many (women) uncomfortable.
With one of the main accusations of Trump being that he grabs kittens, it seems like a hard sell.
I have no interest in that part of the article, “and maybe hes a serial sexual harasser” is a nasty thing to toss into the article without evidence that I think its best to ignore it.
More to the point, so long as Donald Trump is in the campaign, accusations of sexual harassment against just about anyone else will be ignored, in roughly the way accusations of wimpish pacifism were going to be ignored for anyone campaigning against Jimmy Carter in 1980.
@John Schilling
I think that the opposite is true. Trump’s opponent will have to be sufficiently different on this front so that the way Democrats responded to Trump and Kavanaugh doesn’t seem totally hypocritical.
But they only have to be sufficiently different from Donald Trump, and Donald Trump has set the bar low enough that anyone this side of Harvey Weinstein could clear it. Donald Trump isn’t excoriated by #MeToo because he didn’t treat Christine Blasey Ford fairly, but because he brags about sexually harassing and assaulting women and can’t even be bothered to pay his mistresses properly. The accusations against Joe Biden are very, very different in kind and degree from that.
Except for Al Franken.
Take this video. Look at 0:39 on, but especially at him creeping on the little girl at 1:32 on.
That’s what he does in front of a crowd. How much did he do behind closed doors? Has to be a lot more.
I don’t believe that all of these women like that and don’t believe that accusations won’t start coming up if he becomes a true front-runner.
Because if there’s one thing we’ve learned lately, it’s that you can always trust video snippets provided by political opponents.
I would have thought we’d learned that lesson from the 100% reliable sting video produced by James O’Keefe w.r.t. Planned Parenthood. Or for that matter, from 60 Minutes decades ago.
Can you explain how you think these fragments could have been tampered with to turn something innocent into something that seems rather #metoo (to me)?
Interviews can be manipulated by editing out part of the answers, putting answers next to wrong questions, removing relevant precursor questions, etc. James O’Keefe did at least some of these things.
None of that is relevant for an uncut video fragment showing the entire event, unless you think that either of these women stated loudly beforehand that they wanted Biden to do this.
Funny you should mention that. Because when I googled “Joe Biden Sexual Harassment”, literally the first result was a Snopes fact check of the claim “Did Joe Biden Grope Stephanie Carter During a Government Ceremony?”, with the result, “False”.
Now if you read the fine print, they’re talking about a version of the photo where Biden is photoshopped as touching Carter’s breast. But the framed narrative is clear: It is capital-F False that Joe is a pervy groper. In Snopes’ estimation, what the real photo shoes is Not Groping, and it takes fakery by evil fakers to make it look like Evil Groping. More generally:
A: Biden is old enough to benefit from a literal grandfather clause where any touching will if at all possible be presumed to be paternalistic or at worst patronizing rather than sexual in nature.
B: To the left, and the #NeverTrump center, Biden is for the moment Too Big To Fail and so will be protected against this level of failure by the left and the #NeverTrump center, which is to say approximately all of the mainstream media and every thinkfluencer any Democratic primary voter would ever notice.
C: Biden isn’t grabbing anyone by the breast or the pussy, he isn’t sleeping with anyone other than his wife, he isn’t expressing any interest in doing any such thing, he isn’t saying derogatory things about women,
D: There are AFIK no victims, no women anywhere willing to say that they were sexually harassed by Joe Biden or found his conduct towards them to be inappropriate.
E: He’s at a few hundred milliFrankens at worst, and he’s up against Donald J. Trump. Or against other Democratic candidates who are being evaluated on almost the sole basis of “can this person defeat Donald J. Trump?”, so same difference.
F: Neither the DNC nor the Democratic Primary Electorate are lockstep Social Justice Warriors who would consider the slightest unwanted touch or white-male “creepiness” to be a disqualifiers.
This is going to be a negligible factor in the 2020 Democratic Primary. Some fringe protesters will protest it, some talking heads will talk about it, the near-unanimous decision of everyone with real power on the left will be that Joe oughtn’t have done that but it isn’t a big deal, and the Democratic primary voters will go along with that.
And then probably vote for Kamala Harris or Beto O’Rourke or whomever, but because they are younger and cooler and not because of any allegations of sexual harassment against Biden.
Mark my words, at p>0.80
@John Schilling
I believe that there were some complaints from his secret service detail in that vein, and even some noise on the left, but I agree that they’re probably politically irrelevant as long as Biden is running against trump.
@John Schilling
There were no women accusing Weinstein openly, until there were. There were no women accusing Bill Clinton, until there were. These things tend to explode when there is a breakthrough.
The issue is that due to the ‘believe women’ framing, the Dems will have a really hard time dismissing accusations now.
And yet it was common knowledge that Weinstein was demanding sex for jobs. Everybody knew this. They just didn’t care, because Weinstein was either a powerful high-status member of the ingroup or he was part of an outgroup that had already been written off as hopelessly licentious. Until people noticed that he wasn’t really powerful any more and they could claim some status of their own by tearing him down.
Joe Biden hasn’t been demanding sex for jobs, he hasn’t been diddling interns or exposing himself to his secretary, he hasn’t been committing sexual assault. He’s been touching people on the head and shoulders, hugging them at somewhat more than the socially approved rate, and that’s pretty much it. If you think he’s secretly been engaging in Weinsteinian or Clintonian behavior and keeping it 100% secret, then I don’t think you understand how this works.
Hollywood can swing from “meh, who cares” to “We’re not going to let this guy get away with extorting sex from vulnerable young women”, when all it costs them is a few has-been directors and actors. If you think from this that the political left generally is going to swing from “meh, who cares” to “We’re not going to let this guy get away with hugging people at more than the socially approved rate“, when it costs them a serious chance at defeating Donald Trump, then you definitely don’t understand how this works.
Sure, but the current ideology on the Democrats side is that all this stuff is very wrong. The common way to resolve the cognitive dissonance is to ignore transgressive behavior when they don’t really want to go after it, rather than argue that it is not that bad. See Keith Ellison and yes, Weinstein, who was ignored until things added up too much.
The issue is that presidential campaigns, especially in the last phase, put all the dirt front and center. Trump is especially good at dragging people into the mud pit (the central figures, but also the press and other bystanders).
Not a good idea to bet until Sanders makes a definite decision. When and if Sanders announces, he immediately becomes the “Trump” figure in the Democratic replay of the 2016 GOP primaries and it’s his to lose; without Sanders, it’s a totally different dynamic (essentially 19v1 with Sanders or 1v1v1v1v1v1v1v1v1v1v1v1v1v1v1v1v1v1 without)
I think it was a good choice if you do it right. I doubt that Biden will win the nomination, but at 15% those are not bad odds. Because of his poll results and his backing, I think he’ll be able to make a good showing when the race starts. Iowa and New Hampshire are good states for him, and I think he’ll be one of the last to drop out. At the very least, I would predict his shares to go up to 20%, at which point I would consider selling for a quick profit.
I don’t think he has much of a shot. The media has decided the Democratic nominee will be Kamala Harris.
The media had “decided” that the Republican nomination would be anybody but Trump. The media is biased, sure, but that’s not the same as “they pick the nominee.”
The media also decided the Republican nominee would be Jeb Bush.
Openly. Secretly they and the Hillary campaign and the DNC (but I repeat myself) decided it would be Donald Trump.
Do you have any evidence for that claim? It seems implausible.
https://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaign-intentionally-created-donald-trump-with-its-pied-piper-strategy/
Your cited source,
A: Has the DNC unable to decide between Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson, and doesn’t even put Trump at the top of the list
B: Is suggesting them for the role of “pied piper”, whose job is to lead the rest of the GOP candidates towards the far right and which is only relevant if the eventual nominee is presumed not to be one of the three pipers, and
C: Conspicuously fails to mention the part where “the media” secretly decided to commit to this plan.
Which is to say, you have evidence of sleazy electioneering by a bunch of known politicians, but stretch it past the breaking point when you try to make it support a conspiracy theory.
Trust in the media among Democrats is much higher than among Republicans.
I think 15% is about the chance I’d give him of getting the nominee. I think the mood of the left is moving ever leftwards both in economic and cultural terms, which works against him. In my mind the Dem nominee needs to either satisfy economic progressives or the cultural left, and Biden doesn’t really push either button. He’ll lead early, which might propel him to go the distance, but I think support will eventually coalesce around another candidate once the field starts thinning (this was also said in the Republican primary last go round though, so there’s that).
Not sure where the right place to post this is.
For the 2019 SSC survey, I didn’t like a few things about the survey results page that Google generated. So I tried to make another survey results page using the dataset:
https://datarendered.com/ssc-survey/
The page has interactive graphs showing the results of each question on the survey. You can also filter the dataset by any field you like, by pressing the filter icon next to the graph of that survey question.
Hopefully some of you find this useful.
@tmirkovic,
That was great!
Very readable, thanks!
This is awesome, thanks. Much more readable than the Google results.
It would be nice if the graphs weren’t in red (I’m red-screened currently prior to sleeping). It would also be nice if the pie charts had percentages (perhaps they do, in red font?).
Other than that it looks nice.Scales need to be normalized. Work vs College is particularly ridiculous.
Responses are truncated in some questions (though seen in full in the filter selection button). E.g. Communists: Ideal
Other than that it looks nice.
That’s beautiful. Do you have something that does that automatically, or did you have to put everything in by hand?
Also, can you send me an email full of a bunch of keywords like SURVEY and DATA VISUALIZATION so that when I do the survey next year I can find you again and talk to you about making the official results page?
Are the tails truncated for numerical questions? e.g. the highest charitable donation shown is $20K and the highest income shown is $1 million, and I’d have expected the tails on both questions to be much longer.
Uhm… it strikes me as odd that the IQ scores all cluster at multiples of 5. I get how that usually happens, but in this case, if you just submit the actual result from your latest test, why should 130 be over six times as likely as 131?
My default explanation is “people who have never taken a test just estimated what their IQ would be and entered a number that sounded plausible”. Please correct me if there is an obvious other explanation that I missed. I kind of doubt people don’t remember their scores.
It could also be mental rounding from time, e.g. “I remember it was 130-something. I’ll just put 135”
I really have a hard time believing that people don’t know their test results exactly
Seems plenty believable to me, at least for older people. At 48 I think I know what my GRE scores were for the general test, but I could easily be off by 100 points on the combined total. I can’t remember at all what my score was for the computer science subject test.
Why would they?
And where do you get tested anyway?
How common is it?
Excellent work, really makes things stand out – for instance, I note that the readership is generally happy but anxious 🙂
Weird – only 136 answered Marxist for political affiliation, but there are over 1000 responses on the Communist particular questions about the USSR and What is to be done? Is that right?
There’s lots of non-Marxist socialists out there. Major European parties, people influenced by Sanders, ect.
I’m one of them.
The quiz asked people to answer those questions if they identify “at least somewhat” with a political movement, not merely if it was their primary political identification. So all this tells us is that at least ten times as many people identify at least somewhat with socialism as are outright Marxists, which I don’t find remotely surprising. Glancing at the survey, it looks like about twice as many people identify at least somewhat with libertarianism as chose it for their primary political orientation, while for alt-rightists and social democrats/liberals there seem to be only a few more who identify somewhat than who identify primarily (judging roughly from the graphs; I didn’t bother to look up the raw data). Of course, those who gave either social democrat or liberal as their primary identification were a majority of those in the survey, so it would have been mathematically impossible for there to be even twice as many at least somewhat identifiers as primary identifiers in that case. And to some degree the difference does line up with which orientation is more popular, although the socialists seem to be huge winners over the alt-right types in the dubious category of getting people to kind of identify with their cause but not really.
@Protagoras
You called?
For me it’s basically “What do those opposed to the policies I support call those policies?”, and since the mid 20th century policies of the U.S.A. are called “socialistic”, and since the runner-up of the 2016 Democratic Party primary elections described himself as a “socialist” despite advocating what sound to me only as a mix of the mid 20th century U.S.A. and contemporary Denmark, sure why not just jump in and accept the label since what most mean now is more often Sanders than Avakian?
When I’ve taken various “political compass” test they’ve labeled me as everything from a “Libertarian Democrat” to a “Left of center authoritarian patriot”, but I’d describe myself (this week) as a “social democrat with populist sympathies and reactionary instincts”.
As for the Soviet Union I take some of my co-workers who grew up there’s word for it: The guy who left as an adult in 1979 says it was “horrible”, and the younger guys who didn’t leave until after it fell described it as “not that bad”, so it seems to me that it was probably worst from 1918 to ’44 if not ’53 (civil war, invasion and Stalin) and got a bit better after Stalin’s death until under Gorbachev it wasn’t that bad, and then it fell, got worse, then a bit better but still not anyplace I’d want to move to.
I’ve heard mixed reviews of contemporary Cuba which I’d classify as “Not someplace I’d want to move to but there’s worse places”, and then there’s North Korea which only one person I’ve spoken to who has seen and I’d classify it as “Hellscape”.
The detailed questions said “If a question is aimed at a certain group – eg libertarians – please answer either if you identified as a libertarian on the earlier political ID question, or if you feel like you are libertarian enough that the question applies to you. Err on the side of answering – I can always break down the data by political ID later if I want.”
Thanks for your replies. Although it made intuitive sense to me that at least ten times as many people identify with “Socialism” as are outright Marxists since ~2008, the idea that that now holds “at least somewhat” for “Communist” is genuinely shocking to me, even for 2019.
@GuyinTN – Please do not take my question as exclusionary or uncomradely. I wasn’t making a purity argument, I genuinely thought some part of the numerical results in the computer had gotten messed up because I couldn’t conceive of the results presented. My priors were that calling, say, a Kropotkinite a “Communist” instead of specifically an “anarchist” would make them angry, but I haven’t updated them since the Bush administration.
Eh, some people didn’t bother to read the questions carefully (in this case that it was for people leaning communist), and enjoy answering questions regardless of whether they apply to them. Approx. half of the people who answered the USSR question were social democratic (as opposed to about a third of the total), and almost all Marxists answered it, but right-wingers are well-represented as well. Thus those who answered the question because they consider themselves at least somewhat communist are perhaps as few as a fourth of those who answered the question.
I’m not clear how you are arriving at this conclusion. “Communist” wasn’t an option in the political ideology list, so people learning that way could have answered “Marxist” or “social-democratic”. (Which was confounded even more by Scott giving Scandinavian countries as an example, when many on the left view the Nordics not as social-democratic but democratic socialist due to their high levels of state ownership)
I am one of the people who chose “social democratic” and also answered the USSR question, for these reasons. I can’t explain the right-wing answering the question though, other than as mistakes/lizardmen.
@Guy in TN , Given that a certain percentage of conservatives, libertarians etc. ignored the “Communist(-leaning) restriction, it’s presumable that a similar proportion of social democrats also ignored the restriction, and would have answered regardless of whether they lean communist. My 25% figure was mistaken, though: I assumed that soc-dems who ignored the restriction would be 1/3 of all answers (the same as the proportion of soc-dems as in the entire survey); but actually far-from-communist answers to the USSR question are a smaller proportion than in the entire survey, as soc-dems and Marxists make up a bigger proportion, so if we assume that the same proportion of soc-dems as other ideologies ignored the restriction, that is only around 20% of the answers to the USSR question. Them soc-dems who answered because they lean communist, together with the Marxists, are around 40%.
As far as I understand, originally social democrats actually wanted something pretty similar to communists in terms of end-goal, they just wanted to reach it by gradual, democratic change, rather than revolution. Then the label somehow transformed into meaning a capitalist economy with a high level of welfare and redistribution. Still, I think it should be broad enough to include the Nordics (which, nota bene, also have a significant private economy).
You’re fine. I think the 10-to-1 ratio for communist vs. Marxist is due to a natural trend, where the philosophy-as-a-whole eventually eclipses the people from whom the philosophy originated. Look at how Rothbard and Ayn Rand have virtually disappeared from the libertarian discourse (when was the last time you ran into an Objectivist?). As history moves on, the specifics of what Marx believed grow increasingly irrelevant compared to the movements he (and others as you are aware) created.
And no one wants to be tied down to (and have to answer for) the ideological missteps and failed predictions of just a guy who lived over a century ago. Its a good strategy to name your ideology after the idea, not the person.
Day before yesterday. David Kelley.
But you weren’t asking me.
I’m noticing a pattern:
Random SSC commenter: I tell you nobody ever…
@DavidFriedman: *ahem*
☺
The other day, I was talking with my uncle, a civil attorney in private practice, about various bail reform proposals. It was a fun conversation, but one thing neither of us really understood was why defendants so often wait so long for trial. I can understand that some cases do demand a lot of on-the-ground investigation or review of documents (that’s one reason my uncle’s civil cases take so long), but I find it hard to believe people are putting multiple days of investigation into every single arrest.
Or, is it just backlog? But then wouldn’t the time to trial keep getting longer as more cases go into the system than it can process? I haven’t heard of that, but is it the case?
So – what’s the holdup?
Cynical answer: Lawyers get paid more when everything in the judicial system takes longer.
Less cynical answer: Defense tries for long delays in hopes that the witnesses (both police officers and bystanders) will forget details (or the entire event). DAs don’t object because they have a ton on their plate. Judges sometimes object, with mixed results.
Short answer: Defendants don’t always invoke their right to a speedy trial (sometimes intentionally), and if they do the judge gives a lot of leeway to the prosecutors if they “need more time” for whatever reason, possibly as a response to defense lawyers using delayed trials as a tactic in other cases.
Edit: Oops, my “short” answer was the longest one. In any case, those are my not-mutually-exclusive answers. I would be interested in input from someone who works in the legal system, my take is that of an outsider who has seen some of the inner workings.
But that can’t be a very major player in the story; otherwise, the alternatives-to-bail projects (like the Bronx Freedom Fund, which our host has previously mentioned favorably) wouldn’t be anywhere near as lauded. Far too often, defendants are forced to stay in jail waiting for trial while their lives are ruined by their absence.
I hope your “cynical answer” isn’t anywhere near the whole story, either.
You’re right, my responses mostly apply to people who aren’t behind bars while waiting for trial.
Although, since I’m already being cynical…
Incredibly cynical answer: Nobody cares (enough) about people who can’t avoid waiting in jail pending trial. Either they can afford a good lawyer but somehow can’t get out on bail, or they can’t afford a good lawyer and they hang out in jail while their public defender tries their hardest while being overwhelmed.
I was a felony prosecutor for a little more than 8 years. Haven’t practiced in 5 years, so you have a sense of how dated my perspective is.
Some of the above is very sound observation, though I will clarify some parts.
It is extremely rare that prosecutors want continuances. We are trained to avoid them. The less cynical answer is the first assumption of prosecution: Your case is getting weaker from the moment you receive it. That concern gets broken out into smaller subsets: if all of your witnesses are police, you are less concerned, but as soon as you have a civilian witness, the possibility of them saying something inconsistent and forgetting important details rises. A further wrinkle: a lot of the witnesses to felonies are transient or wholly uncooperative. You do not want to roll the dice in getting them served with a new trial date.
That being said, the largest factor is the backlog versus the number of people who want to go to trial, from whatever part of the equation (defendant, prosecutor, defense counsel, judge). The problem is, even for a short trial, it backs up all the other cases by months. In the jurisdiction I worked in, the court would schedule between 8 – 10 cases for trial on a day. One went and the other 9 were continued. At best, that meant a pre-trial hearing the next week and then a trial date at least another 30 days out. So a court that starts having a lot of jury trials will start be the real stress point to the speed of case adjudication.
I know that many of the public defenders that I worked with would agree this assessment since we would have large discussions all the time about how to speed up the criminal process while not abandoning trials. The consensus was always that the funnel was insurmountable without more personnel in the entire justice system. And the most essential would be more judges, who also happen to be, by far, the most expensive.
Here in Canada the Supreme Court recently imposed time limits of 18 months for lower courts and 30 months for higher courts.
These time limits still sounds very very lenient to me. Imagine having the prospect of a criminal conviction hanging over you for a year and a half. And if you can’t afford bail, you’ll spend that time behind bars. Six months for first trials and one year for appeals would sounds about right to me.
How does bail work in Canada in practice? Is it actually commonplace for people to remain in custody because a figure has been set for monetary bail but they can’t afford it?
You’re imagining a bathtub with a steady flow, but it’s not steady at all. Sometimes its a torrent, sometimes only a trickle. If the average depth in the bathtub were low, sometimes it would drain entirely during the more trickly periods. If your goal is to maximize the throughput of the drain (and the system as a whole does want this, since drains that go dry routinely will be downsized and/or have more water routed to them), then you’re going to want to keep the average depth of the bathtub higher to avoid this situation. This has costs to the people who have to sit in cages to maintain that higher average depth, but they have no power or influence so it doesn’t matter.
Even in systems large enough to make in input relatively smoother, the water in the bathtub still makes calendaring and co-ordination easier.
Also, almost everyone involved wants to give the two sides plenty of time to come to a deal, because that’s easier/cheaper for almost everyone and, again, the costs fall on people with effectively no influence.
“Why don’t defendants push their counsel to pursue their interests in speedier resolution” sometimes they do, at which point they discover their counsel is only one step above them on the totem pole
There are lots of factors, among them: understaffed legal aid offices, underworked judges, and officious prosecutors. If this is a subject of any interest to you I highly recommend going down to your local courthouse and just wandering into a couple of courtrooms. It’ll be eye opening.
Do military courts do better? There again the defendants are typically people without any pull, but the DOD is ultimately eating the costs on every side of the process, whether prosecution or defense plus of course the work the defendant isn’t doing.
My understanding (which is based on second-hand accounts, not a careful study of the military justice system) is that the military system takes the right to a speedy trial seriously. I’m not sure how much of that is financial and how much is independent evolution or just different drivers. For instance, it’s possible that there’s more slack in the military system because so many of the people have other jobs, so trials can happen more quickly. A check of the Manual for Courts-Martial shows that they usually have 120 days, although they are allowed to delay for the list of reasons you’d expect. I think that in most cases, they don’t need to use the delays.
Doesn’t going to a court-martial in the military already imply guilt and punishment? That is, even if you’re acquitted, your career is over at the very least. And in cases which aren’t so serious, you’re “strongly encouraged” to accept non-judicial punishment?
To a first approximation, no. A Court-Martial is a military trial, and going to one is essentially the same as getting charged and tried. It sometimes happens to innocent people, and there is some stigma, but it doesn’t presuppose guilt. It might be more career-ending these days due to the zero-defect mentality the military has, but that’s a rather different issue.
(And this wasn’t always the case. In the RN, any captain who lost his ship used to be automatically court-martialed, this being essentially the process for conducting an inquiry into the loss of the ship. Most people don’t understand this, which is occasionally annoying when someone treats this kind of court-martial as a criminal one.)
NJP is a complicated issue, because the military has to function as both government and society, and there are lots of things that the civil government can’t punish that the military has to be able to. There’s a right to appeal to a court-martial in most cases, or to appeal the NJP, and the punishments are strictly limited. So yes, there is a strong encouragement to accept it.
Nope.
Yep. This is useful when the soldier knows he did wrong and just wants to take his punishment (which is limited in NJP) and get it behind him, though NJP is sometimes used analogously to a plea bargain (i.e. to frighten you with the prospect of a court martial with much bigger potential punishments so that you just give in and take the smaller punishment) as in this Band of Brothers scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMoFlaEcKoM . I don’t think this tends to happen to officers nowadays (they get letters of reprimand which are typically career enders), but it happened to one of my sergeants in 2011. The battalion staff went absolutely bonkers he chose the court martial because they were expecting they could just punish this guy they didn’t like on a pretty flimsy pretext. It didn’t even make it to trial and as far as I know he continued with his career unimpeded.
(Poll) “2020 US Presidential primaries, all parties combined”: https://voteupapp.com/shared/SJ1Iq_GmE
The voting method in the U.S. is very broken. IMO the biggest way I can help change that is to share polls showing off better voting methods. This one is super-easy to use and to understand. Help me out and try it! Share it if you think it makes sense to use a better voting voting method like this.
* Give a candidate a score that reflects your true opinion of them.
* It’s very early so there are a ton of candidates. You’re allowed to skip any if you want.
* Don’t take the results too seriously because this is NOT A SCIENTIFIC POLL.
* But do take seriously that this is a surprisingly good and easy way to vote.
I’ve included almost everyone from Wikipedia’s page on candidates and possible candidates. They’re grouped by party, then by how organized their campaign is, then alphabetically. (Note: I’ve listed Bernie Sanders as an independent since that is how he currently lists himself.)
This is the first poll I’ve made for the 2020 cycle. Future polls will use other methods that are also widely-liked among voting-method reformers. Any feedback you want to give here will be taken into account. Thanks!
I really have few opinions at this point. I put a few candidates at 25% and that’s it.
Range voting is a terrible voting system for national elections. It gives people a incentive to misrepresent their preferences as you have no incentive to give any candidate a score other than 0% or 100%.
If everyone is aware of this and votes strategically the voting method reduces to approval voting and if there are people that vote honestly, those votes just count for less.
silver_swift: On a single-scale issue (“more military spending or less military spending”) you can destroy the incentive to vote strategically by precommitting to do what the median voter wants. This may not be what the majority of voters or the mean of voters want, and some might call that anti democratic, but I do not think it actually is.
Can the same idea be adapted to an election with lots of people competing against each other somehow?
Hey, which one of you has been trolling the tinfoil hat crowd?
A couple weeks ago I stumbled down a crazy conspiracy internet rabbit hole and found the following link:
ellacruz.org/2018/10/29/martial-law-jenga/
In that page, there’s an embedded PDF, purportedly containing classified information, about a nefarious plot to undermine American culture by breaking up the US and placing people with certain personality traits into leadership positions.
The document contains a short list of people who they want to harvest genes from, and on that list is Scott Alexander, Elizier Yudkowsky, and The Last Psychiatrist.
The website attempts to do a breakdown on the document and it’s super-duper-flooper crazy pants.
Oddly enough, despite having claims to all sorts of esoteric knowledge about various conspiracy theories, the author is evidently completely unfamiliar with Scott, Elizier, or TLP, and couldn’t be bothered to Google their names.
Oh, also, warning to Scott, evidently after your genes are harvested, they don’t have a problem “eliminating” you.
That is one of the most random things I’ve seen in a while.
Yeah, that was pretty weird.
I checked out the site to see if the rest of it was like that, but it seems to be pretty standard right-wing conspiracy theories.
There was one article I thought had to be a joke, saying that John Podesta was kidnapping black babies because black people had “creamier” pineal hormones and Podesta extracts babies’ pineal hormones as a pasta sauce (or something?). But it looks like enough parts of this are standard in the conspiracy theory world that I think it might be serious.
What do you make of the document embedded in the article?
I assumed it must have been something that got ginned up as some sort of exercise or joke or something by someone around here, and then somehow got picked up by that website and thrown into the pile with all of the other conspiracy puzzle pieces.
You haven’t happened to notice any syringe-toting MIBs around looking to steal your essence, have you?
Must be something like that. I bet 4Chan was involved.
It wasn’t me, but this is amazing and I love it
It’s just wonderfully nuts, isn’t it?
I mean, even by the standards of conspiracy theorists, it’s Crazyville.
I have to say, “the creation of a series of micro-states under control of leaders engineered for philosophical strength” was not something I was expecting to read.
They are coming for your precious bodily fluids!
This sounds like a great idea, though! If there isn’t really a conspiracy to do it, can we start one?
I think first we need to figure out how to reliably engineer for philosophical strength?
Or maybe we could begin with the microstates part. That sounds like a good idea.
One of the worst/dumbest aspects of the global populist wave of the last few years, is the rise of the incredibly vague, hand-wavey phrase ‘elites’. It actually makes me slightly physically ill to hear people use this excessively broad term- please be more specific!
I guess one could throw DC policy-makers, the East Coast media establishment, Wall Street types, and Silicon Valley types into one so broad as to be almost meaningless category called ‘elites’. But- they’re different groups of people, mostly from different backgrounds and with different objectives. It is the ultimate lazy hand waving to call them all ‘elites’ and say that you’re rebelling against them, whether on the right or the left. (And yes, horseshoe theory means that much of the populism on the left & right is indistinguishable these days). What Silicon Valley wants, policy or culturally-wise, does not have much in common with Wall Street, or a wealthy person who runs a manufacturing empire, or healthcare executives- just to compare them to other corporate executives. Much of the DC bureaucracy and ‘deep state’ feels a bit threatened by the raw power of Silicon Valley, which is what many of these Congressional hearings last year were really about (not privacy- no one actually cares). Wall Street is also eyeing Silicon Valley quite warily as well. Nor does Wall Street really have that much in common with the military-industrial complex/’deep state’ in the DC/Virginia/Maryland area. It’s just silly to lump them all together.
The ‘elites’ concept also leads to extensive hyperventilating (mostly on the right, but also from the Glenn Greenwald left) about what some minor CNN anchor or New York magazine writer said on Twitter or something. These people really don’t have that much cultural power, and with the rise of Fox News/Sinclair/right-wing social media, I don’t think most of the East Coast media establishment has that much influence on how non-leftists think. Like, CNN & MSNBC don’t really have that much power guys. They’re not ‘elites’ and they don’t influence that much of American society. (Though maybe pretending that they do helps the right/GG left stir up their base, I dunno). I looked at Greenwald’s Twitter feed the other day and was just astonished at how a really smart, original thinker can spend so much mental & emotional energy over ‘this guy who wrote two New Yorker articles in 2014 said something kinda neoliberal on Twitter’.
Elites in American society do exist, but the category is too broad and they are frequently at opposite angles on many issues. Less hyperventilation here would be helpful
1. The elites have varying backgrounds but come from the same sets of institutions where they learn similar schools of thought and similar decorum, so it’s not a meaningless category. No college/normie state college/elite college background predicts any number of splits in people, even across national borders
2. The categorization isn’t about the elites directly controlling the debate or what will be said on what issue like the USSR. The elites determine what the spectrum of public debate will be. The spectrum isn’t calicified, they disagree on many things, and it’s possible for the Overton Window to shift over time, and it’s possible for people in the elite class to lose status for being totally dedicated and vocal about something outside the spectrum (it’s true that very few individual elites have real cultural influence in a cult of personality sense.) Nevertheless, the ultimate goal of keeping out bottom-up demands about debating things outside the spectrum from “populist” types is consistently and continually served.
DC policy-makers, the East Coast media establishment, Wall Street types, and Silicon Valley types have any number of opinions in common, especially about the limits of what you can say about American imperialism and capitalism and [fill in any number of excluded libertarian/right positions people here believe that I cannot adequately express.] What Silicon Valley wants, policy or culturally-wise, has tons in common with Wall Street, or a wealthy person who runs a manufacturing empire, or healthcare executives want, making sure the rules about power and ownership etc. etc. don’t shift so quickly as to leave them suddenly uninfluential and unable to adapt and remain elite, whatever form that next takes. Their debates that exist within the spectrum don’t change that, those are encouraged if anything to make it look like the spectrum is so vigorous and comprehensive that we really don’t need to engage with the bottom-up demands outside of it. The elites don’t really care about Trump, or even Bernie taking power, because neither of them is gonna change the whole structure of privilege and what it means to be elite so radically that most elites won’t survive as powerful – the truly important thing is preventing another Red October, preventing the pre-Roosevelt notion of America’s proper role in the world from coming back, and so on.
Angry everyday people often make bad criticisms of elites, and oftentimes things that aren’t really indicative of the split between normies and elites go viral as “proof” of something that they’re not, because people frequently don’t understand the political criticisms they make very well, but the core criticism about how the elite consensus perpetuates and serves to promote elites is correct. It’s not about brainwashing any particular person to have the “correct” opinions, but to make sure that there is always another “reasonable, thoughtful” person organically being created to fill a position and who serves the elite consensus out of their own good faith belief in it. So long as you can point to an endless stream of Ezra Kleins and David Frums and Tom Friedmans all with a range of other opinions genuinely agreeing to what is fair game and what is beyond the pale, you never have to refer to what a Noam Chomsky thinks, or what the mass of people think, etc. etc.
Noam Chomsky isn’t anti-elite. He’s the bad cop, Klein/Frum/Friedman (sheez, did you have to list THESE four names?) the good cop. After all, Chomsky’s main shtick is hating America — that serves the Globalist Agenda very well. (The Globalist Agenda is benevolent, in my opinion — its drawback is tedium.)
The public media image of Chomsky as the “antiwar liberal” who Just Hates America and speaks in spicy 30 second bon mots to own the Republicans definitely exists, and gets used by elites to establish a certain conception of Chomsky that explains why you’ve heard his name and assures you that you don’t have to do any further deep-diving because he’s just the professorial Michael Moore, but is totally separate from the reality of the left-libertarian anarchist who talks dryly for an hour about how we’d be better off with a stateless world of collectivist kibbutzes.
The kind of hate Chomsky has for America (which is to say, hating any imperial state that wants to establish itself as the World Police Global Hegemon) is the same thing as opposing the Globalist Agenda, because the current globalist paradigm is America+its allies in control of all the nudges and levers of international power that serve to open markets to us, convert ownership to our novel financialized instruments and convert all cultures to something that will desire our commodities and way of life. The multipolar world where America is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all but goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy is the world that preserves national distinctions and particular cultures.
There are problems with basing one’s politics on hate. In Chomsky’s case, it led to him writing apologetics for the most murderous regime of the 20th century.
Yes, this is an excellent description. For the right-wing positions you say you can’t articulate, I’d fill in mass immigration and free trade. Republicans on Fox News and Democrats on MSNBC will scream at each other all they want about abortion or gays or whatever, but they’re all lock-step on mass immigration and free trade. Those are “elite” positions because they enrich the elite and are not shared by the non-elite whom they impoverish.
Why would you expect free trade to benefit the elite and harm the non-elite? Lots of the rural non-elite are in agriculture, which is a major export industry, and all of them are consumers, hence benefit by goods being available at lower prices. Some of them are in import-competing industries–as are some of the elite.
Mexican immigrants compete with the bottom of the skill/income distribution, which may make some of the non-elite worse off. Chinese and Indian immigrants compete, at least in Silicon Valley, with people who have college degrees, sometimes post-graduate degrees, and would be included in any reasonably broad definition of the elite. Both non-elite and elite get to eat the food harvested by immigrant labor, live in buildings built in part by immigrant construction workers.
Chinese and Indian immigration does compete with the more elite people, which is probably why it is more tightly controlled. We make our higher-level immigrants jump through some crazy hoops.
Experience?
In the last 20 years of massively increased free trade and immigration, the elites have done well to great and the lower middle class has suffered enormously.
Is this still true? I know small family farms have to a large extent been bought up by a smaller number of large corporations, with increasing automation. I’ll look into how big the agriculture sector is as an employer.
The common number I’ve heard is 2% of people work in agriculture. You can probably double that when you get to people that work in agri-supporting businesses, like John Deere, maybe even more if you show your work. I’m not sure if that gets to “lots” or not when you look at just blue-collar workers, but I could see it happening.
Presumably you would need to account for how much of that 4% is in the areas you are reviewing. A quick google search says about 20% of the US population is rural. If all 4% were in rural areas, that’s about 20% of rural populations in agriculture. With a ratio that high, it’s also more reasonable to say that support industries (grocery store, entertainment, etc.) are there because of the agriculture industry.
@EchoChaos
Or perhaps just your perception, which might or might not accurately reflect either your own or typical experience?
It is my experience that the majority of homeless people and panhandlers I encounter (about a dozen per weekday) have smart phones – that is, a mobile phone and internet-connected computer more powerful than the best pair of either available to the top 1% of income earners world-wide twenty years ago.
Those folks would not have those phones but for global trade. It seems implausible to me that you could find a standard by which your statement is correct.
@sentientbeings
I am an upper class white collar professional. Globalism has been fantastic for me. I am also on the board of elders of a blue collar lower-class white and Hispanic church. Globalism has been brutal for them.
Here is a source, by the way.
http://wws.princeton.edu/faculty-research/research/item/rising-morbidity-and-mortality-midlife-among-white-non-hispanic
If rising morbidity and mortality isn’t “getting worse” then we have very different definitions.
Also “The high death rates also coincide with self-reported declines in health, mental health and the ability to cope with daily living among middle-aged whites over this same period”
That is getting worse by any reasonable definition.
@EchoChaos
In your reply, you cite an article dealing with mortality figures for white, non-Hispanic men and women in the United States over a recent period and conclude that it demonstrates
Both of those are separate from the statement with which I took issue, which was that
due to international trade.
White non-Hispanics in the United States, while probably representing a plurality of “lower middle class,” also represent a plurality or majority for other income groups in the US, including the high-end. Overall, they do better than average, though not as well as some demographic groups. The group doesn’t strike me as a valid representation of “lower middle class” for your point.
Beyond that, decline in one measure of welfare does not represent a net decline in well-being. Wealthier countries tend to have higher rates of obesity for a variety of reasons; that doesn’t mean that the increased wealth and behavioral changes that facilitate higher obesity rates reflect having “suffered enormously.”
Nor do I see any causal link between trade and increased mortality for white Americans. Do you know of one? As noted in the article, the effect was not seen in other developed countries. I also saw that the article suggested (and I’ve seen it suggested elsewhere) that the decline is largely attributable to an increase in suicides and drug-related deaths. Where is the trade link, and why does it apply only to the one group in one country?
Beyond that, why do you attribute the recent decline to trade, but not the many decades (centuries?) of improved mortality rates to more open trade? I’m open to evidence or theory.
White Americans (and long-term Hispanic residents) are the majority of workers in heavy industry where the largest amount of NAFTA caused job losses occurred, and losing your job creates a crisis of purpose. In addition, the opioids in question mostly come hidden in legitimate shipping, which a massive increase in trade has made more difficult to stop.
I understand that there is a lot to “well being”, but “self-reported declines in health, mental health and the ability to cope with daily living” is pretty clearly worse.
@sentientbeings
And it is my experience that they’re far more
Visibly homeless now than 20 years ago (all the tents, tarps, and sleeping bags).
Urban camping, but with fancy phones doesn’t seem like an improvement to me.
@Plumber
I don’t know whether visibility or actual numbers for homelessness or begging have gone up or down. My point is that there is a visible sign of a type of wealth that would be impossible for such a person to have without global trade.
Homelessness in the United States, on the other hand, has much less to do with international trade conditions than it does local economic conditions and government policies.
EchoChaos didn’t address why selecting one (briefly) negative-trending metric for one segment of one demographic in one country supports his case, while the same source of evidence doesn’t show it happening to other members of “lower middle class” in the country, or at other times, or to the corresponding demographic in other countries, despite the fact that they have also experienced trade liberalization.
In fact, even his drug smuggling example doesn’t play unless his prescription is, in fact, to restrict trade generally as opposed to “free” trade. What I infer from that is that he views exchange as something like a zero-sum game and possibly that he has conferred agency to collective entities. The same fundamental advantages from trade exist whether partners are at distance of 12 inches or 12,000 miles. In fact, I can think of a reason the long-distance trades would tend to be “better” once transaction costs get low enough, which is exactly what a global trade network free of tariffs facilitates.
I think the homeless people living on the street[1] are overwhelmingly people with long-term untreated mental illnesses and/or addiction problems, who are on the streets because we stopped institutionalizing them and stopped having the police ensure that public parks, libraries, etc., are functional public spaces. I don’t think this has much to do with immigration or trade policy at all.
[1] As opposed to the short-term homeless guy crashing on a friend’s couch or something.
@albatross11
Yeah, I think that’s correct for homelessness. Somewhat less so for panhandling generally. I mentioned government policies simply because they tend to make it next to impossible to employ people in that position even as a charity case.
I was under the impression that most panhandlers did so professionally and ruin it for the minority that legitimately need help.
Plumber’s point is that twenty years ago, that person may well have had a factory job, a house, a car, a wife and two kids, clean clothes, indoor plumbing, dignity, respect, and at least a landline telephone and a color TV and a library card for infotainment access. Now the glories and wonder of “global trade” have taken all that away from him, and here you are telling him that he should be on the whole grateful for this, because for all the things global trade took away, it gave him a shiny new iPhone in exchange.
Well, OK, probably a cheap used android. But that’s still way better than all that other stuff, right?
Try it sometime. Spend a month with an iPhone and unlimited data, the clothes on your back, and say $5/day for literally everything else. Or stop telling people that, so long as they have an iPhone, you’re going to judge their lives improved no matter what else has been done to them or taken from them.
@JohnShilling – I’d definitely rather be a working class plumber or factory worker in 1970 than homeless today. I think I’d rather be homeless today than homeless in 1970, but maybe the existence of super-rich and hedonistic adjustment would still leave me less happy, it’s hard to say.
I guess the question is what slice of the economy is lower middle class and destitute over the last 60 years – my rough perception is that (a) the poorest two quartiles are holding relatively steady by measured consumption and their non-measured consumption is probably improved somewhat, (b) everybody else is improving a little over their past counterparts, and (c) as you move up the curve, the improvements increase substantially.
It’s amazing to me that after all these decades of life, it turns out that the conservatives that screamed about the commies so long and so loudly were socialists all along. They just didn’t know it yet.
No one and nothing took anything away from the guy that used to work in a factory. For a time he traded for value for value and then some time later it turned out that he didn’t have value to trade any more. He is not owed even one half penny more than a person that’s not ever worked a day in his life. All those years of voting for people that shit all over “welfare queens” and now that’s exactly what he is. Even worse really, because he thinks he deserves to cut the line. Actually even worst than that, he wants to force everyone to pretend that he doesn’t have his hand out (he does).
He gets to vote, and we all see the unfortunate consequences, but I for one will never, ever, play his little game. Let the heavens fall, I’m not pretending he’s adding value when all he wants to do is flip the board because he’s losing. He should thought about how losers in the game were treated when he was winning.
It’s amazing how much we are lectured about outgroup homogeneity when it comes to the left, then you turn around and conflate communist and socialist.
It’s not at all amazing to me that as soon as I pick at the claim, “the precariat aren’t suffering because see, they have iPhones, and no one who has an iPhone cannot claim that his life has improved!”, there emerges instead the claim that the precariat deserves to suffer, because they didn’t learn to code when they had the chance or didn’t establish an expansive welfare state when they had the chance or whatever. That we owe them nothing, and that anyone who even notes that they are a suffering must be some sort of hypocritical commie socialist.
It doesn’t amaze me, and it doesn’t disappoint me, because it’s exactly what I expected. Opinion of humanity: properly calibrated.
If you don’t mean it, don’t say it.
No one and nothing took anything away from him.
And yes, we owe them nothing more than we owe anyone else. A very selective empathy for a slice of the poor doesn’t make you some kind of saint.
Wanting to impose protectionist barriers and limit immigration are neither one defining features of socialists or communists.
@John Schilling
I didn’t.
Where did anyone claim that?
The phone provides an example of an incredible piece of technology offered at a price that even people without means can meet, and the technology can only exist at that price because of the benefits of markets and international trade. There are, of course, many other examples.
No one example necessarily offsets sudden unemployment “caused” by competition with a foreign firm, but brad’s response addresses that. Companies fail. Industries change. That’s true with or without international trade. The only way to “protect” people from the threat of structural unemployment is to impede competition generally – trade is just one piece of it. Doing so by government edict, by constructing barriers to entry or implementing protectionist policies, just means that everyone else is impoverished.
I think my point of view is almost opposite of yours: I think a definition of “elites” that includes “DC policy-makers, the East Coast media establishment, Wall Street types, and Silicon Valley types” is a useful grouping for mapping the world.
This group overwhelmingly went to the same 10 colleges (maybe 20–Ivies plus the elite liberal arts colleges plus Stanford), and overwhelmingly is insulated from the difficulties of Detroit, Appalachia, the ranching country of the West, and the farming country of the Midwest. It overwhelmingly is in the “blue family” portion of the “red family, blue family” dichotomy. (That’s the best red-blue dichotomy I have seen.) Sure, there are inter-group quarrels–but none of these people are openly, virulently opposed to two-income families, or to divorce, or to treating homosexuality as OK in public, or to large-scale immigration.
In my experience many of these people came from the Midwest (especially Ohio for some reason). Fewer, but still significant numbers of them, came from the south, including Appalachia. Can’t say I’ve met too many from ranching country or Detroit. Also, at least on Wall Street and in SV, there’s also plenty of people from Bangalore and Shanghai.
Yes, definitely some of us (and I’d count myself to be in the group “elite”, if only barely) come from Appalachia: I do. But the difficulties of Appalachia aren’t mine; I grew up there, I have family and friends there, but I don’t get directly worse off if the local mill closes.
If that’s all you mean it seems like a pretty pointless criteria. People living in Appalachia don’t get directly worse off when rents go up in the Bronx or for that matter when a meat packing plant in Iowa closes.
Are people who went to Stanford part of the East Coast Media establishment?
Apologies if this is too snarky, but I’m not sure I had seen that term before, and it seems weird to see Stanford grads as am implied part of it.
I mean, it’s a fair criticism that most of the influential/culturally important media companies are located in New York and DC. Where individuals who work there grew up or went to college I think is kinda irrelevant. Just like how movies are generally made in SoCal & tech companies in the Bay Area, etc.
I’m a born, raised and present New Englander, and I have to say in my brief forays in life to the West Coast, I was bit taken aback at hearing ‘East Coast whatever’ used as a slur or derogatory term. I didn’t realize there was any hostility there. To be 100% honest, we certainly use ‘Southern whatever’ as a slur, and look down on the South in general. It seems like everyone in New England knows the plot of Deliverance & uses it (jokes about banjos, etc.) to mock the South
@hash872,
I think the gnashing of teeth about “elites” is great (as long as there’s some actual leveling involved).
There’s “elite” cameramen, waitresses, and welders, but usually what’s meant is an economic and a political elite, though sometimes (more darkly) a “social elite” meaning ‘people with viewpoints that are in the minority’ is meant.
A very narrow ‘political elite’ would be the Supreme Court Justices, and a narrow ‘economic elite’ would be billionaires, more broadly anyone with above median education and income who doesn’t have to do heavy lifting qualifies.
I’m part of the proletariat and my wife is part of the bourgeoisie, and had she staid the extra year at law school she’d probably qualify as “elite”, as it was I enjoyed reading her alumni magazines until they cut her off for not donating.
Plumber, it seems to me that if you’re proletarian then your wife is proletarian. But I see skilled tradesmen as nobility, not a section of any proletariat: the difference between skilled tradesmen, who hold themselves proudly erect and converse with dignity and evident wisdom, and “students” aiming for “business” and “communications” credentials (in other words aiming to perform roles that would have been performed by slaves in the Ancient World) not to mention their bug-like “teachers” (such as me) is profound and obvious.
Is that nobility in the sense of the aristocracy or in the sense of noble savages?
In the sense of noble horses vs. alligators and hippos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morganatic_marriage
Other than that I was of the opinion that actual wives generally inherited their husband’s status, but the reverse was not true.
@Aging Loser
That’s very kind, but I don’t own the tools I use to make my living, I suppose I own my skills, but most everyone who’s worked a day has some, somewhere I have a document that show’s that I completed an apprenticeship as a plumber but only my Union and some government entities recognize that whereas my wife’s college diploma that she owns is recognized more, and if she hadn’t dropped out of law school that would’ve clinched her status, but she has money (admittedly some that I gave her over the years) with which she bought property, and unlike her I don’t save money to invest (I just hand it over to her).
She lives off her saving, investments and the wages from my labor, I just live off the part of my wages that I keep for gasoline and corned beef sandwices.
I don’t see the problem, but that’s perhaps because I simply oppose people having any privileges or power over other people, and your description seems to boil down to precisely that. If I complained about murder, would you also protest that I’m imprecise because each murderer is a different person with different motivations?
(Of course there’s no denying that the populist message is often used for selfish, dishonest or simply insane purposes. I just don’t see why it should affect our semantics. Especially since this happens to all political and social messages.)
Also, I would just like to point out that if we put all the things you mentioned together, the term is still much less broad or vague than “the 1%”.
Isn’t this inevitable for any sort of collective action? If you want a lot of people to work together, you need to be able to punish defectors.
I don’t think “elite” implies an individual with power in any direct sense–the ability to give orders that he can compel others to obey.
Consider H.L.Mencken, who was described by Walter Lippman as “the most powerful personal influence on this whole generation of educated people.” He had no direct power, but a great deal of power in a different sense.
I don’t see how you can avoid some people having power over others in that sense.
There also appears to be an aspect of insulation from the problems of the…whatever we’re calling the non-elites in this paradigm. Insulation from high crime areas, insulation from poverty (especially true poverty), insulation from low-level consequences of their actions, etc.
This is not a “can get away with anything” kind of group, as that would be a Hard power. Instead, it’s a more subtle softness to their interactions with people and environment. I believe that’s at the core of the Progressive meaning of Privilege.
“Elites”, as in coastal elites, is a more critical way of saying upper-middle-class to upper-class professionals. They’re roughly 5% of the population and control something like 90% of the national wealth and make incomes that are, at a minimum, twice the average national income by their mid twenties. They are a hugely disproportionate amount of the staff of places like Congress or the CEO’s office at Facebook. They have similar habits, preferences, politics, and attitudes, which they tend to form through elite schooling or by conformism within institutions themselves. They tend to concentrate in specific cities and neighborhoods within those cities. They tend to have cultural shibboleths that exclude people not like them. They are also a relatively new group, having pulled ahead within the last few decades.
On both the left and the right there is a feeling these people are solidifying into an aristocracy or at least a gentry. There’s a feeling they are pursuing their narrow class interests. And most critically, there is a feeling that they do not have the legitimacy to do so.
You’re right that mainstream Republicans are more critical of them than mainstream Democrats. That’s because they are mostly mainstream Democrats. But Leftists who are dissatisfied with the Democratic mainstream tend to be upset with how the Democratic party is increasingly catering to this group’s interests. Catering to them precludes anything truly revolutionary and sometimes hurts other constituencies.
I agree with most of what you said, except it’s not the 1% sneering at the 5%. It’s the 5% sneering at the 20% or someone from that class (ie, without the proper class markers) making it into their income bracket. To be really specific (it varies from year to year), I’d say in 2017 that group was about the top 6%.
Basically, you say it’s only doctors and high powered lawyers (the 1%, whose households make an average of $435,000 per year). I say it’s almost anyone who graduated from an elite school and went on to a successful professional career (most of the 6%, whose households make an average of $220,000 per year).
Put another way, I’m talking about a group with an average household income three times average. You’re saying it’s the group with seven times the average income. But the disunion really starts around 94%. At that level, incomes begin increasing more rapidly. The rate of change accelerates. There’s effectively a statistical gap there. And one that can’t be explained by the hyperwealthy, who all live in the 1%.
If we’re getting really specific, I’d say you do have to be born into it, as seen by the fact you were accomplished even in the beginning of life. As a teenager you need to be already going to the ‘right’ schools etc. But yes, it’s not just an income thing. There are definitely people that high up who aren’t part of that group.
They’re generally looked down as parvenus (McMansions, as you said).
Any definition of “elite” that’s less than 50% of the population is validm
What do you think of this article in the Atlantic: The 9.9 Percent Is the New American Aristocracy?
There’s been a lot of good discussion the past few months about the “new aristocracy.” See Ross’s stuff I linked @Plumber last thread and Helen Andrew’s old piece in The Hedgehog Review.
I suspect they chose 9.9% more for the roundness of the number than statistical accuracy. I doubt they would seriously object if I said, “It’s not the top 9.9%, it’s actually the 4.9-7.9%.” Also, I think aristocracy is slightly overselling it. I see them more as gentry from which aristocracy/nobility like Zuckerburg or Obama emerge. Their children tend to sink back into the gentry again.
The other thing is that this gentry does not encompass the entire elite class. That’s a huge issue that I think is driving a lot of our politics. The Republicans are increasingly attracting members of the non-gentry elite who are becoming aware of their status as a lumpenelite.
People who have money, influence, or power but didn’t come from the right backgrounds or gain it through the right institutions. People whose money and power come from unhip areas or ‘problematic’ industries. These people have powerbases the gentry do not understand and are often seen as more legitimate by their followers than gentry or national elites.
This piece makes the same mistakes that dozens of the anti-inequality pieces have made. It assumes that income and wealth deciles are static and that the people in it now are the same as last year and next year.
link text
12% of Americans will spend 1 year + in the “1%” of income, 39% will spend a year in the top 5%, and 73% will spend a year or more in the top 20%.
This isn’t an aristocracy.
My, rather limited, personal experience backs what other people are saying here.
When populists talk about elites, we aren’t talking about just the Soros or Rockefeller families but also about the kind of people who can plausibly run into a Soros or a Rockefeller at a social event without getting tackled by a bodyguard. The sort of people who write the policy white papers or give the elevator pitches that eventually determine the laws and customs the rest of the country has to live by.
For example, I’m a schmuck from a long line of schmucks going back for generations. But because of my graduate school and the hospital my lab is in, I’ve been at more than a few events with 0.1%ers in attendance. They probably wouldn’t want to talk to an underdressed PhD student, although I didn’t test it to find out, but they seemed happy to talk to the big-name doctors and professors. And we’re not talking Nobelists or anything, just people who might be well-known in their fields but are on a first name basis with myself and most of the other grad students.
If you know someone who knows someone who knows a Soros or an Arab prince, you’re part of the elite. Even if you yourself aren’t rich or famous, you have a degree of access which is extraordinarily valuable. It’s soft power but it’s very real.
I think access to power is overrated. I think knowing what to do with it, and having the confidence to approach them matters.
Maybe because America is an immigrant’s country, and people move constantly from state to state, access becomes harder. But in the Basque country, Basque people with local surnames have extended families that are all residing in one place, so some of them end up being influential.
Such an access doesn’t amount to much. What matters is frequent contact with that person. Going to church with them; seeing them in the pub, being in the same PTA… Establishing a relationship with power, and getting close to them. But then, let’s say you are friends with an important politician. What do you do with it?
I agree that framing of political conflict as People vs. Elites is overused. But I also think there are certain issues where majority of voters supports some policy which majority of elites opposess. If then elite position prevails,I would say we really have example of elites blocking popular will.
I also think that power of the elites in liberal democracies is strongly connected with anti-majoritarian elements of their constitutions. Anti-majoritarian elements build status quo bias into political process, which is good for elites.
Brexit is happening against the will of British elites partly because those are weaker than elites in other EU countries, and British constitution is perhaps most majoritarian from all constitutions of EU members.
Btw. I am not a fan of Brexit and thus am forced to conclude that elite power is sometimes a good thing.
It’s interesting to think about qualifying the term “elites.” For example, elites in politics tend to be more-or-less immune to consequences for failures–they can almost only fail upwards. Elites in terms of business tend to have great gobs of money and very little free time for anything but managing their business. (So they often “write” op-eds or books alongside ghostwriters who do all the actual writing.)
ISTM that there is a common shared worldview that appeals more to the people at the top of business, academia, government, finance and media than it does to most other people. Some of that is shared culture, some is similar educational background, and a lot is similar incentives.
I would say that for something to count as “elite consensus”, you need alingment of political, business and “cultural” elites. There are other powerful elites, like legal, diplomatic and in some countries military, but they do not have to be part of prevailing elite consensus.
I however do not think that US political elites are immune from consequences of their failures. It is pretty much definition of liberal democracy that elites are responsible for consequences of their actions. Sure, they could get away with more than normal person, but they cannot go on and terrorize serfs with impunity, like in some other political systems.
Is “elite” any more vague and overbroad than “capitalists”, “the rich”, “the bourgeoisie”, “the privileged”, “the patriarchy”?
I mean, if you’re gonna be a populist it’s almost a tautology that you have to have a defined powerful minority that you are fighting against. Letting this definition be somewhat vague is inevitable, as you try to fit all your opponents into that box.
FWIW to the extent there is a useful version of “elites” I think it maps pretty well to Scott’s original formulation of the “Blue Tribe”.
As for cultural power, I find a useful heuristic for whose bubble you’re in is “can I make an insulting joke about the sitting president and fully expect everyone in the room to laugh”. Despite living in a state that voted for Trump, and growing up exclusively in counties that voted for Bush, Dole, and Bush, the amount of time I spend in an anti-Trump (and pro-Obama, anti-Bush before that) is surprisingly high, mostly as a result of my whole social circle being upper-middle class and college educated.
It’s not so much that MSNBC has influence over everyone, including conservatives. It’s that it can feel like they (or people who agree with them) have influence over all the people with harder forms of power.
Exactly, at the core it is a culture with quite a few shared norms & values that another culture considers harmful to themselves (and vice versa, but the former culture tends to have power).
“Capitalist”/”bourgeoisie” isn’t vague at all. It is easy to rigorously extrapolate from the categories of classical political economy.
A “capitalist” is someone for whom the largest (plurality) percentage of their expected lifetime earnings comes from capital (profit, dividends, interest, and capital gains). This can be further subdivided: if a plurality of their income comes from capital gains, that person is effectively a merchant capitalist. If a plurality of their income comes from dividends + interest, that person is a financial capitalist. If a plurality of their income comes from profits, that person is an industrial or “commercial” capitalist.
If a person hoards inherited money but does not invest it as capital to obtain an income, and instead gradually draws on it for living expenses, then that person is not a capitalist, but instead a miser. Or, if a person becomes “wealthy” (as colloquially defined) through, say, wage income, but does not invest that money as capital, then that person is both a proletarian and a miser, not a capitalist.
If a plurality of a person’s expected lifetime income comes from rents, that person is effectively a rentier, or “landlord” if those rents are on land.
If a plurality, but not a majority of a person’s expected lifetime income comes from wages or salary, then that person is a small capitalist (“petty-bourgeois”).
If a majority of a person’s expected lifetime income comes from wages or salary, but that person is paid handsomely in order to purchase their allegiance to working as a direct enforcer onto others of the wills of capitalists or landlords, then that person is a labor aristocrat. This could include, for example, managers, CEOs, police, and corrupt politicians who are rewarded handsomely for being the direct servants of the interests of financial capitalist shareholders (assuming that such CEOs are only paid in salaries not contingent on their companies (if they are paid mostly in company stock, then they are capitalists) and assuming that they do not then accumulate capital income to dwarf their initial salaries).
If a majority of a person’s expected lifetime income comes from wages or salary, and that person is not an enforcer onto others of the wills of capitalists and/or landlords, then that person is a proletarian.
I’ve got a question about Trump’s wall. I’ve seen a handful of arguments over and over for why it won’t work. What are the pro-wall rebuttals for these arguments?
1) Most illegal immigrants arrive legally and then stay longer than they’re supposed to. A wall would do nothing to stop these people.
2) As for people who do cross the border illegally, the high-traffic areas already have fences. Illegals get over the fence with ladders or under it with tunnels. The same measures would work against a wall just as well.
3) Drugs smuggled across the border mostly come hidden inside vehicles that go through official ports of entry. A wall would not stop these drugs.
I don’t know enough about the drug trade to speak to 3, but 1 and 2 have standard answers.
1. Visa overstays are a problem and need to be dealt with, but unlike border crossings there isn’t a “permanent” way to deal with them. Policy changes on how visas are granted or increased resources to deport people who overstay their visas can be quietly rolled back by future administrations; you can’t quietly demolish thousands of miles of steel barriers. Even a smaller, more poorly funded border security force in the future will be aided by a wall but changed visa policies can simply be ignored or changed back.
2. The fencing you’re talking about on the US-Mexico border has already led to a large, seemingly permanent, reduction in illegal border crossings. Other countries with walls across their entire borders have seen illegal crossing drop by as much as 99%. Extending and upgrading the existing barriers along our southern border will almost certainly reduce the ease of illegal immigration, and do so in a way which is hard for future administrations to roll back.
I’ll have a go, for argument’s sake.
But it might stop their friends and families who are unable to obtain legal entry, and the wall still serves as a visual representation of the idea “you have to enter this country in an approved way, or not at all.”
Part of the incentive for legal immigrants to overstay is that life is better/easier in the US than back home. If the deal is that Mexico will pay for the wall in return for foreign aid, AND assuming that foreign aid gets to where it needs to go (I know, I know) then to the extent that foreign aid improves the life of the marginal Mexican relative to the life of the Mexican living and working in the US, their incentive to stay will be reduced.
Not ‘just as well’. The wall increases the cost of crossing the border, in many cases prohibitively. Having to erect enormous ladders or wall-scaling equipment or excavating tunnels is time consuming and dangerous, which regulates the flow of illegals by filtering out those who cannot bear these costs. It’s also easier to detect these activities vs. someone just walking through no-man’s land.
You can’t keep drugs out of a federal prison, and in prison they check your ass. So yes, the drug argument is one of the hardest to make.
The power of trivial inconveniences.
Aside from the bit where many of the wall’s supporters either don’t understand or don’t agree with the factual assertions you make regarding the wall’s impotence:
It’s a symbol. Symbols matter, particularly in politics.
The wall would symbol an enduring American commitment to border security, making it something almost literally carved in stone rather than a fickle matter for politicians to change their minds about every other year.
It would symbolize, to prospective immigrants, that they are not welcome here. Well, at least so long as they aren’t receiving letters and care packages from their relatives in the US saying that once you get past the wall it’s all good, nobody really cares.
It would signal to dissenting politicians that the American people are committed to border security, and that they’d better get with the program – because if they don’t, they’ll be “destroyed” by video clips showing Mexicans with scaling ladders crossing the wall that Trump built and they in their turn have left unpatrolled.
Most importantly, it is a symbol of the great day when Trump Owned the Libs, proving once and for all that he should win the 2020 presidential election because he is a Winner who can Make Deals and Get Things Done, and not everyone will notice that they are expensive practically useless things.
You keep saying this without evidence. It is not true. I am not interested in “owning the libs.” I am interested in fixing the border. There are a million bad things about everything going on there that a wall would do much to alleviate, regardless of the ownage status of the libs.
You keep saying this without evidence.
And you do so in the company of people who take an unsettling amount of pleasure in Owning the Libs, most of them not even disguising their intentions in that regard. If you genuinely are the One Sane Trumpist with a rational argument for enhanced border security, it is long past time for you to start providing actual evidence for a material increase in border security for a wall as weakly patrolled as Trump’s would be under current budgetary constraints.
1) and 3) are correct. 2), while it would be theoretically possible to scale the wall or dig tunnels under it, it would be considerably more difficult than with a fence.
Other have mentioned the permanence and the symbolic value of the wall. I’ll also had the PR value of avoiding immigrants getting in trouble while they cross, like sick children forced by their parents on extenuating hikes through the desert and then dying in Border Patrol custody. These incidents are rare compared to the number of crossings, but each of them results in the leftist media making noise about Trump murdering children, Trump separating children from their parents, and so on. The wall will put an end to these events.
For number 1, you’re right – but the argument is that at least we’ve laid eyes on the overstayers and deemed them safe to let into the country at some point. The wall is supposed to reduce the number of people who come in that nobody vets.
For #1: You can vet tourists.
You check that the person hasn’t been deported before. Then you check that they have a means of support, and a bunch of social ties that will bring them back home.
Those people could still overstay, but I care way less about some Mexican Math PhD who overstays a tourist visa than I do about the career criminal who’s already been deported twice.
I’d like to drill down on the claim that “most illegal immigrants arrive legally”. It’s arguably true, but the truth is complicated. I’ll use numbers from 2017 Center for Migration Studies report (which I’m reading for the first time, please correct my errors if I’ve misinterpreted): https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/233150241700500107.
It’s true that a majority (66%) of recent new illegal immigrants entered the country legally. But it’s also true that a majority (58%) of all undocumented residents currently living in the US arrived illegally. Historically, the majority of illegal immigrants arrived by crossing the border illegally, whereas currently they arrive primarily by legal means and then remain illegally.
Even today, from Mexico (65%), El Salvador (90%), Guatemala (75%), and Honduras (80%), the majority of new illegal residents still arrive by crossing the border illegally. From Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic it’s about 50% overstay and 50% illegal entry, and from all other countries, the vast majority (99%) enter legally and then overstay.
What’s happened is that over the last two decades, the rate of new illegal immigrants from Mexico and Central America crossing illegally into the US has dropped sharply, and is now about 1/10 of what it was. Part of this is due to stricter border control, and part is do to changing economic conditions reducing the desire to immigrate.
So what does this imply for a wall? I think it says that a wall may be effective in further reducing the already reduced immigration from Mexico and Central America. It looks like about 200,000 people per year are crossing the border illegally. If we were to assume a $20B wall with perfect effectiveness and a 1 year life, that means we’d be spending $1,000,000 to prevent each of these entries.
Obviously it would last longer than 1 year, and be less than 100% effective. What’s a justifiable cost? I don’t know. It seems like the bigger question is not what the immediate effect would be, but what the carry-on effects are. Does having a really big wall on our southern border make it more or less likely that the US will have a prospering economy in 20 years? In 100 years? What about for Mexico? Do we care, or are we trying to optimize just for what happens in the US?
2) As for people who do cross the border illegally, the high-traffic areas already have fences. Illegals get over the fence with ladders or under it with tunnels. The same measures would work against a wall just as well.
No rebuttal as such, but I’m interested to know that if the wall is so useless, then why all the objections? “Oh it would be a massive waste of money” – okay yes, but there’s a lot of spending in government budgets that some group says is a massive waste. So you build a big useless wall that doesn’t stop immigration – why does that get the Democrats or the “we should be compassionate and allow anyone who wants to enter to come in, since they are in need” set so hot under the collar? At the worst it’ll be some big government works project and maybe contracts for steel fabrication of the fencing can be steered to American companies instead of overseas, and there will be temporary construction jobs on the border while it’s being put up.
I can see the objections on symbolic grounds as in “this is why we should pull down Confederate statues” but I don’t get the “the wall would be useless and also would stop the helpless and needy getting through” objections.
Because it’s a bit of both (it’s not a very cost-efficient way of keeping people out, and it will nonetheless succeed in keeping a certain number of people out), and people are prone to exaggerating their arguments, especially in heated discussions?
I would also like to note for the record that I’m against both raising walls for symbolic reasons and pulling down statues for symbolic reasons, because in both cases, the symbolic reason is sticking it to Those Filthy Insert-Noun-Here, which I consider the very worst reason to do anything.
I’m going to offer an alternate explanation:
Most wall supporters are keenly aware of the limitations of a wall, but it’s the option least vulnerable to sabotage by political opponents.
We’ve got immigration laws on the books right now; the last couple decades have been devoted to proving that the biggest challenge to enforcing them is not logistical but political. A large faction of the USA electorate and political class do not want to reduce illegal immigration, they want to ignore or encourage it.
So, you can pass laws requiring companies to only hire citizens or people with valid work visas, but then those laws won’t get enforced. You can set up agencies to police the border and handle immigration issues, and then the other guys will manage to elect a president who will direct them to ignore any case involving a child, and then you’ll get a surge of border crossers, now with kids in tow. Try to start enforcing again later, and you get various city and state governments deciding that they’re “sanctuaries” where immigration law won’t be enforced. Or you’ll get judges in one region issuing nation-wide injunctions against every attempt you make to accomplish anything.
Basically, the question isn’t just what method will be the most effective, but what method will be the hardest to undermine when your opponents in various levels and branches of government decide to thwart you.
A wall is dumb, but if it ever got built, by its nature it’s a very resilient form of dumb. You can’t order a wall to let through photogenic orphans preferentially. It doesn’t (quickly) stop existing if you ignore it; getting rid of it requires actual effort and money to be devoted to the task. You don’t need San Francisco to cooperate for your wall to continue being a wall.
Lots of things would be more effective than a wall if they were executed well, but good-faith execution is not possible in the current poliical environment. Wall is a plan that theoretically doesn’t depend as much on good-faith execution.
Solid point.
Without sufficient patrols, the wall isn’t any more effective than any of those. I mean, you can cut your way into a bank vault with dental floss if you have a long time with no interference from the police. Physical barriers are only useful for reinforcing your guard forces–or, the more pithy saying used by military engineers–“Obstacles without overwatch are useless.”
Is there any indication that Trump doesn’t want sufficient patrols? I thought the whole fight was about additional wall funding, in addition to regular increases in existing border enforcement funding.
Even if subsequent administrations can defund patrols, the OP point still remains – they would have to do that. To the extent there’s any political damage in “Pres. Kamala Harris defunds border patrols” headlines, they have to incur it. Moreover, subsequent-subsequent administrations could re-undo it and re-up patrols. If mostly everyone agrees border barriers are force multipliers, then the ability to fully fund patrols (when you have the political ability to do so) is still a useful thing to increase the amount of border security when you’re in control, even if your opponents can render it less useful when they are in control.
Also, I don’t mean this flippantly, but let’s say hypothetically Trump hypnotizes his opponents and gets his YUGE 30-foot wall from sea to sea. It may be wasteful, it may be environmentally unfriendly, and it’s certainly possible to bypass it, but are its opponents literally arguing that nobody would be deterred, that alternate-wall-world would have identical illegal crossing rates to no-wall-world? That seems to just be the common fallacy of ignoring marginal effects.
Youtube lectures
One of my favourite hobbies is watching university lectures on Youtube on topics that are outside my field of expertise. I amaze myself at how much enjoyment and learning I can get out of them if the teacher is good – a well-delivered lecture can teach me things I never thought I could grasp if I just read it in a textbook (or had a bad lecturer).
These are some lecture series that I have re-watched numerous times for pleasure, and would recommend:
Leonard Susskind – Statistical Mechanics (Stanford)
Robert Sapolsky – Human Behavioural Biology (Stanford)
Carl Bender – Mathematical Physics (PSI – Perimeter Institute)
Joseph Blitzstein – Statistics 110 (Harvard)
Even though they are mostly math/physics based, none of them “feel” like you’re being taught math. I feel like i’m being taught how to conceptualize interesting problems and approach hard problems creatively. All the above lecturers also share a very personable, laid-back style, but with an emphasis on precise speech that really hits the spot.
Does anyone have any recommendations of their own to share? I’d be interested in Law, Psychology, Engineering and Computer Science, but really anything goes if the lecturer is good.
Here are my game theory lectures.
I haven’t listened to the others, so this isn’t comparative, but I strongly second the Sapolsky recommendation. I downloaded the entire series as mp3 files through one of the countless websites that does that and listened to it as my podcast for a month, which worked fine except in a few awkward areas where I had to guess from audio context what a graph that he was referring to might look like.
Yep, I’ve listened to most of these recently in preparation for returning to his tome Behavior.
The National Committee for Fluid Mechanics Films made a series of lectures and demonstrations on fluid mechanics in the 1960’s that are pretty good: http://web.mit.edu/hml/ncfmf.html
I enjoyed David Blight’s lectures on the Civil War and Reconstruction, and Dale Martin’s lectures on the New Testament.
I do the same. Some lectures i highly recommend:
Geometrical Anatomy of Theoretical Physics by Frederic Schuller
International Winter School on Gravity and Light by Frederic Schuller
Here you’ll also find a Lecture on
Quantum Theory by him as well as two more physics lectures in german.
If you google the lectures you’ll find lecutre notes online for most of his lectures.
Sapolsky is legit. His recent book Behave! essentially covers the same material, and expands it.
He’s a bit too willing to trust unreplicated and fuzzy studies, but I’ve never read/seen anyone else who approaches his problems with anything like the same breadth as he does.
I don’t know if it counts as a “take” on the war, but I have a book that’s just a collection of letters American soldiers sent home from Vietnam. It’s gripping and fascinating stuff on many levels. I can’t remember the name of it offhand, and a quick DDG search suggests there are several dozen similarly-themed books, though most of them seem to stick with just one soldier or another. Next time I’m over by my bookshelf and I remember to, I’ll look for the book and then reply back later with the title.
OK, the name of the book is “Dear America: Letters Home from Vietnam” (available at your favorite or least-favorite online mega-retailer). Apparently it inspired a movie.
In the past week I’ve redd (in a book called CULTS OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE by some French professor) that there were a lot of Baal-cults originating in various Syrian towns featuring a meteorite as the sacred object; moreover, these Baals, who were identified with Jupiter, were seen as omnipotent universal rulers. This is kind of interesting, don’t you think?
Any chance of more details (such as name of author)? Off the top of my head:
(1) Sacred stones in the East – yes; meteorites – yes, not very common but indeed. The Black Stone of the Kaaba is speculated to be something of this nature
(2) “Baal” as the Lord of the City and tutelary supreme deity of that city – yes, from Mesopotamia, in the usual form Bel. “Baal” as we know it from Phoenician/Canaanite practice that gets mentioned in the Bible. Roman syncreticism and habit of looking for nearest example when encountering native gods (e.g. associating Ogma with Hercules) meant giving the ruling deity of whatever pantheon the title of Jupiter or identifying them with Jupiter (and vice versa)
(3) In the context of Roman syncretic religion of the late period, I’m thinking mainly of the ill-fated Heliogabalus, the young Emperor from a Syrian family who was pushed into the role by his granny, and who as High Priest of the cult back home – which included the Black Stone of Emessa – introduced it to Rome and tried to replace Jupiter with Elagabal as the supreme deity. Solar deity in origin, the cult image was the aforesaid “stone not shaped by human hands”, the meteoritic Black Stone of Emessa. That’s mostly what your French professor seems to be aiming at, at least to my opinion.
The author’s name is Robert Turcan. (The book was in the next room.) He has a lot to say about your second and third points. Your first point looms overhead, of course — especially given the resemblance that these Baals already have to the deity in question. (A very different religious attitude from the one associated with Great Mother / Dying Son-Lover cults.)
Thanks for that, I’m assuming this is the book in question?
Les cultes orientaux dans le monde romain (1989), Paris, Les Belles Lettres, coll. « Histoire », 1992, 2e éd. (ISBN 2-251-38001-9)** (en) The Cults of the Roman Empire, Blackwell Publishers, coll. « Ancient World », 1996 (ISBN 978-0631200475) (trad. de la 2e éd.
Which, if I can go by the blurb on Amazon, is about folk/everyday religion in Roman society as contrasted with the official myths. And the point is fair enough; as in Egypt, on the grassroots level people were concerned with gods like Bes rather than the great deities like Amon and the whole revolution in theogony attempted by Akhenaten.
Rome, as an empire, was a whirlpool that sucked in all kinds of influences – “all roads lead to Rome” – and imported religions, along with practitioners of such living in Rome, competed and flourished there on all levels. Well-off Roman matrons would totally have been the stereotypical Western Buddhists and yoga classes if such had been available to them. Magic rather than religion as such was what the common people were interested in, the same way folk religion everywhere tends to degrade into superstition if not checked. And stern moralists yearning for the Golden Age purity of the Republic would launch polemics against corrupting foreign influences – see the tension between the official state adoption of the cult of Cybele and the restrictions on the priesthood, the galli, where Roman citizens could not be priests until this restriction was lifted during the reign of Claudius.
Turcan’s book is worthwhile. It is, however, a very typically Continental piece of scholarship. There are basically two schools of thought on religion in the Roman Empire: an Anglo-American strand, which emphasizes state, public rituals and downplays mystery cults, the role of faith in paganism, and so forth, and a French-Belgian-Dutch-Italian strand, which focuses on empirical study of things like mystery cults, often on an older theoretical basis. In their works, one still, very often, encounters a category of “oriental religions,” now entirely out of favor in the English-speaking world, along with the assumption that civic cult was moribund by (let’s say) 200 A.D.
That’s admittedly an oversimplification, as the great figures of the first (actually, newer) strand include John North, the late Simon Price, Mary Beard (all British), and (perhaps above all) the Luxembourg-born Frenchman John Scheid. The originator of the Continental strand is the great Belgian, Franz Cumont, and the continuator the (now also deceased) Dutchman, Maarten J. Vermaseren, long-time editor of the Brill series Études préliminaires aux religions orientales dans l’Empire romain and a great expert on the cults of Mithras and Cybele/Magna Deorum Mater Idaea (as the Romans called her).
That series is now called “Religions in the Graeco-Roman World,” which rather links us back to the Anglo-American school of thought. Of course, there are many people who belong to both camps or neither, and the staunchest champion of the old idea of coherent mystery religions which resembled one another and Christianity seems to be a Spaniard, Jaime Alvar (again published, in translation, in EPRO/RGRW).
Turcan is that sort of scholar: very learned, but he tends to assume that the civic cults of the Roman world had stopped attracting real devotion by the High Empire, or maybe earlier (so, before the Christian apologists started attacking them). Someone like John North, conversely, thinks that civic cults matter very much–though mysteries and philosophy and all that do, too–and that the apologists tend rather to attack an overly stereotyped picture of still-living cults.
If I could recommend any one book on religion in the Roman Empire, it would be the first half of Robin Lane Fox’s Pagans and Christians. Highly readable, very learned, and not too focused on these sorts of disputes (on which, I am sure, I have said far more than you ever wanted to know!)
The Greek Magical Papyri of Hellenistic Egypt are so interesting in this regard. Magicians took an interest in the relationships between gods that led to rituals like “make an idol of Thoth in baboon form wearing Hermes’s helmet, then command Hermes to help you in the name of Yahweh.”
I think it’s interesting, yes.
As for identifying the Baals with Jupiter, the Greeks and Romans believed that everyone worshiped more or less the same set of gods with different names. So they’d learn about foreign gods and think “oh, that’s Zeus/Jupiter” or “oh, that’s Ares/Mars”, etc. This is called “interpretatio romana” or “interpretatio graeca”. It’s part of the reason so many Roman myths are just Greek myths with the names changed. It’s also how five of the planets got their names (originally named after Babylonian gods) and how the days of the week got their names (named after planets, then translated into English with the names of Saxon gods).
I wonder why early Christian thinkers decided that the pagan gods were devils rather than misunderstood good angels. The latter option would have been more a more amiable solution.
Lewis briefly suggests this in That Hideous Strength.
That seems trivially obvious to me and mostly boils down to two elements.
1. Even if Christians called them angels, the fact that their followers called them gods would make them fallen angels and therefore devils. The whole “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” kinda makes regarding them as beings of light impossible.
2. Nothing unites an in group like having a clear out group. The early church was either persecuted (for a couple hundred years) or cleaning house (getting rid of these other religions). Drawing a clear line between the early church and “those evil pagans” makes it easy to establish the desired tribalism.
Nick — Yes, those planet-spirits at the end. In Surprised By Joy doesn’t he say that the Greek myths are beautiful and the Norse ones sublime? And his friend J. R. R. imagines gods as angels.
Woah77 — “no other gods before me” is compatible with the other gods being lower-ranking superpeople. Your second point seems right, though. Hmm … I wonder whether it’s a general rule that successful new mass-converting religions have to denounce the old ones as evil.
Early Christians would have been familiar with the tales pagans told about the actions of their gods, such as Zeus’ tendency to copulate with everything in sight, the constant infighting, and a strange tendency to eat each other. Those would have been enough to put them firmly in the “fallen” category.
What @Jaskologist said. Augustine goes on about this at length in the first part of his City of God; he says essentially, “Just look at the stories the pagans tell themselves – isn’t it obvious they’re talking about immoral demons whom don’t deserve any honor at all?”
Well, the key thing to realize is that the pagans themselves both believed in demons and worshiped them. I’ve discussed this (as a resource for modern fantasy world-building) in a blog post. Two texts are especially helpful: the pagan Apuleius, On the God of Socrates, and Augustine, City of God 8, which builds explicitly on Apuleius.
In short, the Christians thought that the pagan gods were demons for two reasons:
1) Because their scriptures said so. Ps. 96:5, which reads as “For all the gods of the nations are idols” in the Masoretic Hebrew text, says “For all the gods of the nations are demons” in the Greek Septuagint (where, by the way, it is Ps. 95:5, because the Septuagint combines Ps. 9 and 10 into one). New Testament citations can be multiplied (e.g. 1 Cor. 10:21, Acts 16:16-18).
2) Because the gods acted like demons, oppressing people with fear, spirit possession, demands for money, obscene stage performances (a key point for Augustine), and so on; and, crucially, they could be neutralized by Christian exorcism. That last text is especially interesting here: in Acts 16:16, a slave-girl from Philippi is said to have a “Pythian spirit”; that is, she was a fortune-teller associated, somehow, with Apollo, one of the primary oracular gods. She follows Paul and his associates around, calling them (in the ESV, for example), “servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation.”
The “Most High God” (theos hypsistos) is a subject of considerable scholarly controversy and speculation (if you’re interested, I could name some articles). The name has obvious similarities to biblical titles for the One God of Israel (especially El Elyon), but that doesn’t mean that they are the same divinity, either socially or in fact. Possibly the object of the worship of at least some of the “god-fearers,” the Gentiles interested in Judaism, he may be the same as Zeus Hypsistos, and so is in some sense “pagan.”
Along, perhaps, with an awareness that the girl could be mistreated by her owners after she lost her prophetic powers, that ambiguity might explain why Paul took so long to deal with the slave girl. Anyway, he does deal with her, silencing the “Pythian spirit” with a word. This is something Christians claimed all over the place that they could do, even to the point of being able to prevent successful completion of oracular enquiries by pagan emperors; it is such an incident that seems ultimately to underlie the last, ten-year-long empire-wide persecution of Christians under Diocletian, Galerius, and Maximinus Daia (303-313; see Lactantius, On the Deaths of the Persecutors 10-11).
Now, Augustine, for one, actually allows (at least rhetorically) in City of God 8.24-25 that the angels are the good ‘gods’ of Apuleius; they do not, however, detract from the worship of the One God, nor do they have anything to do with the demonic meddling of pagan worship.
This isn’t pure ideology, nor is it simply in-group/out-group building (“othering,” as some scholars like to call it). It is a series of empirical claims about pagan religion and the world in general: there are demons; pagans admit that they propitiate them, even though they are fickle and given to evil, some of it secret, much of it obvious (again, stage performances, which were held in honor of pagan gods, are an especially good test-case for the gods’ virtue); being evil, they cannot really (so Christians argue) have anything to do with the really good gods or Supreme God; in fact, pagan worship looks like the kind of thing a demon, not a good god, would have invented; and so the “gods of the nations” really are demons simply, not good gods who exist somehow above and beyond the demons.
On top of all that, of course, you have the tradition (rooted in, but not quite laid out by the Jewish Scriptures) that a powerful angelic ruler rebelled against God in the distant past. On one level, the many cults of the nations are just human institutions, established, maybe, to deify dead rulers (a favorite argument of the Latin apologists, which occurs sometimes in the Greek Christians, too, this is again not just Christian polemic–many pagans entertained the same theory). On a deeper, spiritual level, however, they are a millennium-spanning conspiracy against God, intended to destroy the human race for all time. But (and this is the apologists’ key point), the battle has already been won, in three days’ span in Roman Palestine, and someday Christ will return in glory, to establish an everlasting kingdom and judge the living and the dead.
From this perspective, Christianity is not just one “religion” competing with other “religions”; it is the only true worship, given by the liberating power of the God who has destroyed death and will cast the devil in chains and fire forever. Pagan cults, conversely, are a set of wicked schemes to entrap, corrupt, and destroy humans and their societies.
Does that make sense? To some of us, I admit, it will seem like so much fantasy, but people really believed and still believe this, every bit as much as they believed in the power of Asclepius to heal his worshipers or they believe now that modern economics, climate science, or technological know-how will improve the well-being of the human race.
Seconding this. The apologists weren’t mean-spirited people interested in hate as a team-building exercise: they were interested in having beliefs that fit the facts.
I’m not entirely convinced, because the pagans also told stories about how wicked men were and only taboos imposed by the Olympians restrained them (e.g. “you can’t kill Socrates while Apollo’s holy ship is at sea”, “you can’t make baby stew because Zeus will punish you”), but that just shifts the model to “these gods are neutral angels rather than demons, and humans are worse than them.”
One has to recognize, I think, that a person’s view of the facts is generally shaped by prior convictions. The apologists’ reading of pagan religion is sometimes embarrassingly unfair; but then, so are the scraps of pagan criticisms of Christianity. This does not mean, of course, that either side (we might, as a first-order approximation, simplify the diversity of pagan and Christian beliefs, when they came into conflict, as two “sides”) was simply making things up, only that they were human, and humans do like to make gotchas as well as substantive arguments, which both sides also offered.
That said, yes, there is a link between the gods and morality in both Greek and Roman religion, but it is not systematic, and (as Augustine, for example, complained), the gods never tried to correct everyone’s morality. There are no priestly sermons, and there is no Law of Homer to match the Law of Moses. There isn’t even a coherent pagan religion that would tie the mythic Olympians to the gods of the various local shrines who share their names (on that point, Christians were absolutely in agreement with pagans). The lack of moral teaching in his religion also troubled Julian the Apostate, but then, there is a reason he is called “the Apostate”: he knew much better what he was up against.
Doesn’t the Church demand money and expect people to fear God?
That last text is especially interesting here: in Acts 16:16, a slave-girl from Philippi is said to have a “Pythian spirit”; that is, she was a fortune-teller associated, somehow, with Apollo, one of the primary oracular gods.
Slightly off-topic, but back in 2013 the then-Presiding Bishop of The Episcopal Church preached a sermon in Curacao in Venezula and included a digression, since it was part of the readings for the service, about St Paul and the slave girl. It got her rather a lot of heated attention from the more traditional sorts of believers:
As you might imagine, going against centuries of exegesis about the slave girl being possessed by a demonic spirit and instead speculating that God was speaking through her (and Paul was a big ol’ meanie for ‘exorcising’ her) was deemed to be a novel interpretation, to say the least!
@Deiseach: This is why Episcopalians are heretics that freak out the Third World Anglicans in communion with them, yes.
Bullseye:
Fear, yes, but also love. This isn’t without pagan parallels (though fictitious and possibly ironic, Apuleius, Metamorphoses 11 is a moving and easily-found example). But, to the Christian, the gods of the nations seemed to engage in a lot of trickery: fake oracles, fortune-telling, and other such frauds. You’re right that I oversimplify in calling this oppression through “fear,” as the word can denote religious awe, as well, which ancient Christians did not denounce, but rather argued that it has only one proper object.
Maybe some churches have demanded money for membership, but rejection of the giving of forgiveness or spiritual blessings for money is bedrock Christian teaching. As one apologist (Lactantius) said, “We don’t sell the water.”
There is a claim that in Greece local deities were ‘baptised’ and retained under the name of Christian saints (not just Greece for that matter, see the interpretations about St Bridget).
The fourth century bishop St Athanasius wrote “Against the Heathen” where he sets out the development of idolatry from a Christian perspective (quote in part below):
It’s all but explicit in one of the Byzantine works on St. Thecla, the fictitious virgin-companion of St. Paul the Apostle (this is, I think, the second half of the fifth-century Life and Miracles of Saint Thecla). The saint even haunts a grove, like pagan divinities do; it’s been years since I read the text, but I think it’s the old precinct of some pagan divinity driven out (as the text tells us) by the true God.
That sure sounds to me like a continuation of older kinds of pagan piety, just with the Holy Trinity at the top of the religion. It is not, however, a baptism of the pagan gods straightforwardly; rather, of the manner and (I think) location of their cult. Thecla is not a pagan divinity; she is, however, perhaps being treated like one.
Now, to be fair, I might mis-remember the text, though I certainly do remember having these thoughts about it when I read it.
Athanasius’s appeal to ruler-deification is very typical of the apologists. The most detailed statements are, I think, in Lactantius, Divine Institutes 1, and in Eusebius’s massive Preparation of the Gospel. Both depend ultimately on a rather strange, lost book by the third-century B.C. writer Euhemerus of Messene, which told of the (mortal) gods’ lives and doings in a kind of Utopia called Panchaea, in the Indian Ocean. After him, the theory is often called “euhemerism” nowadays.
I have no idea if its well grounded or just the kind of blue-sky-speculation and/or crockpottery that pop science reporting loves, but there was recent reporting of at least some evidence suggesting a Tunguska-like event in the ancient Levant that could have been the basis of the Sodom and Gomorrah story. If this were the case, it doesn’t seem crazy that the area would see spiritual significance attached to meteors in other contexts as well.
That would explain why there were so many meteorites in the region. I wonder what happened to them all — other than the one currently in Mecca.
Baal literally means “the Lord” in proto-Semitic, it was a title used for both people and gods, and it was most commonly associated with the male storm god Hadad. Obviously the Romans would pattern-match any dominant male storm god with Jupiter.
Interestingly, many traditional pagan religions had a male storm/thunder god as their primary deity. In the case of Indo-European religions, it is believed that this god archetype originates from Dyēus Phter (“Sky Father”) of the hypothetical proto-Indo-European religion. But the archetype is also found in the proto-Semitic and Egyptian religions.
I’m wondering whether the 1 Kings 19 “still small voice” passage is sort of a critical commentary on this image (especially given that Elijah had previously managed to get his god to make it rain and on a different occasion to shoot fire down out of Heaven and burn up 52 guys): “And behold, the LORD passed by, and great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake,; but the LORD was not in the earthquake; And after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice” (King James translation). (Hebrew text has the four-letter name where the translation puts “the LORD”).
Yes, it is. By Mohammed’s own testimony, the Kaaba was a pantheon building, and the Black Stone matches a pattern of West Semitic religion, at least in Late Antiquity (I’m not aware of any meteorite cults in west Syrian or Levantine cities of the Bronze Age).
I’d be interested to see answers to a rhetorical question that ‘brad’ posed late in the last OT. It was a back-and-forth with ‘sandoratthezoo’:
One answer would be that Obama’s “statue” was Obamacare, which eventually passed in a modified form after great opposition from the Republican party. But I don’t know how parallel the situation is: was the Affordable Care Act primarily opposed because because of symbolism (an opposition President getting their way) or because of genuine opposition to the contents (fear of a first step toward nationalized health care).
I think at least some of it was the contents of the law. If we assume instead a literal statue — something the opposing party is offended by exclusively because of the symbolism and the perception of waste — this would actually seem like an excellent opportunity for compromise. In this case, yes, I would expect to see a trading of favors. Obviously one would always prefer a “major policy victory” over a “minor” one, but if one could extract a major concession, the trade would seem worth it.
By contrast, if we assume a policy that’s viewed as outright harmful, one would be less likely to compromise. Is it fair to look at the degree of opposition to a border wall, and the seeming lack of willingness to compromise, and conclude that the Democrats believe that the wall is actively harmful to the nation, beyond just not wanting to allow Trump to have a political win?
You really think Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan would have shepherded a bill through Congress to build this:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/25/horse-turkmenistan-president-statute-berdymukhamedov#img-1
on the Mall for a three year moratorium on new Endangered Species Act declarations?
Wow, that is quite some statue! I searched but couldn’t find a price for it, but I did find some earlier planning costs of $70 million that I think were for the same design. Given the rate at which Turkmenistan churns out dramatic statues of its strongmen (this replaces a rotating golden statue of his predecessor), they may have some efficiency of scale that the US doesn’t have (yet).
But this does give a sense of scale for what a $10B statue would look like: approximately 100x of the gaudy colossus you linked. Alternatively, it gives a sense of what $5B toward a wall represents.
So no, the Republican’s wouldn’t shepherd it through for a temporary moratorium on the Endangered Species Act. But the real question is whether they’d trade it for $10B toward a wall. My guess is that they might make the trade if they thought there was no other way that it was going to be built, but wouldn’t consider it if they thought they had a chance without making such a major concession.
Do you think there is nothing that they’d trade for allowing such a statue? And in turn, is there really nothing that the Democrats would trade for a gaudy wall in honor of Trump?
I definitely think there are things that the Democrats would trade (and vice versa). In terms of immigration the DREAM Act would almost certainly do it. But the notion that it’s only $5B which is nothing in the context of the overall budget and so they should be willing to trade it for any minor little thing, is I think naive. Symbolism matters–to Republicans and Democrats.
Did you forget the part where Obama’s opening bid was to abandon the plan his constituents liked in favor of the plan written by his opponent? To argue that GOP opposition was based on the bill’s content is to suggest that they would’ve argued just as strenuously against Romneycare. That seems unlikely.
This is untrue. Politifact rates it half true only because of the phrase ‘proposed’ or ‘written’, since it was similar to an idea Republicans had. If it was claimed the Republicans had actually proposed a bill or attempted to pass anything like it, it would be downgraded to a lie.
This is yet another example of pretending to compromise and then acting angry when the other side doesn’t accept the ‘compromise’ they never asked for or agreed to.
I can’t tell if you’re claiming that Romneycare is totally different from Obamacare, or that the public mandate wasn’t really the Republicans’ plan even though Romney ran on it.
I’m saying that you’re repeating a quasi-lie that is popular in Democratic propaganda. I have cited a source that shows it to be so, from an organization that strives for neutrality and whose only purpose in life is to fact check political claims.
Romneycare was written by the massachusetts state legislature, not any republicans, and was passed over a number of romney’s line item vetos.
And there was no “plan democrats liked” that was abandoned. The ACA was written, from the beginning, to keep the entire democratic caucus on board, and received considerably more criticism from the RIGHT of that caucus than the left. the idea that the ACA was a sop to the republicans simply isn’t accurate.
So, Romney was actually against Romneycare, and Obama modeling his proposal on it was an appeal to the left rather than the right?
Sounds like I’ve hopped timelines again…
@dick
You seem to have. Romneycare was written mostly by this guy. Romney wanted something more modest, but his vetoes to that effect were overridden. that it was called romneycare doesn’t change the facts that it was a plan written by the left, with left wing goals, that appealed far more to the left than the center or right, as evidenced by the fact that when it was coming down to the 11th hour, it was Ben Nelson and Joe lieberman getting their arms twisted and bread buttered, not bernie sanders.
For that matter, Obamacare ought to more reasonably called “Pelosicare”, no? Obama had general positions but I thought most of the detail wrangling happened among the Democrat caucus in Congress.
@gdub
Reid-care would be more accurate. the most important wrangling was done in the senate, and he led the effort.
I’m ashamed to admit that I kind of knew that, but the name “Harry Reid” was escaping me and I was too lazy to Google so I went with Nancy.
There wasn’t an actual bill proposed, but the original genesis of Romney/Obamacare was as a Republican policy counter to the (failed) Clinton administration healthcare reform. (Note: that is rated mostly true by the Politifact article linked above.)
The Obama White House explicitly adopted the Republican plan in a (failed, dumb) bid to get some Republicans onboard.
On the other hand, it turned out to be accidentally kind of brilliant, because it was the reason the GOP was left absolutely flat footed when they actually had the chance to pass their own – they had just spent almost a decade railing against their only actual idea on the topic, and had nothing left to actually propose other than “Everyone just loses coverage, it’ll be cool, trust us.”
@MrApophenia,
Not quite. That’s been claimed, but the actual person involved gave a different account in 2012.
The reason the GOP didn’t come up with a single alternative at the time is that they also have factions and disagreements and have to satisfy people. Remember, at best until this month, they only had a couple of vote margin in the Senate for anything, including a couple of “moderate” Senators.
The problem wasn’t that they didn’t have an alternative, the problem was that they had at least three (and more if you count non-major proposals with any actual chance of passing). They extended from the “Let’s just tweak the ACA, get rid of the worst parts, let HHS get rid of most of the bad regulatory parts and call it repealed” compromise (within the GOP) version McCain famously killed literally at the last minute, to complete repeal combined with competing proposals to free up the State insurance markets via various methods of allowing State-crossing competition.
Obviously, they didn’t manage to get any of that to pass when it counted, i.e. when the Senate could vote on it without a 60-vote super-majority during reconciliation (which also limited them to the tweak version, reducing some of the internal GOP arguments, because of the limitations of the reconciliation process precluding doing too much more). That experience probably also contributes to some of the attitudes towards the wall funding, as without an actual ACA repeal, they (including Trump) need to accomplish more to be seen by their constituents as effective rather than useless or as breaking promises.
On a related note, I think a big and underappreciated driver of polarization is the end of pork barrel spending and the various regulations against bundling that way. It used to be, if you needed to convince a couple of Democrats or Republicans to defect, you could pass the “Federal Omnibus Healthcare Bill that also Builds Very Nice Public Infrastructure Projects in Five Key Swing Vote Districts Bill”. Now the healthcare bill needs to stand on its own. So the Border Wall bill becomes about the Border Wall and can’t be, “Bill to Build a Border Wall and also other Infrastructure Projects in Key Districts (hint hint).”
This is good in one sense. It means representatives are always voting on the actual policy. But it does effectively raise the bar for getting anything passed. It lowers the cost of opposition. The Democrats aren’t really giving anything up by opposing the wall, whereas bundling it with something they want would make it more painful. Maybe they would decide to oppose it anyway, but it would be because it was actually that bad, not because they have an incentive to oppose anything the other party proposes (which both sides do).
Pretty much this. As a centrist/anti-populist type, this is my big concern around ‘campaign finance reform’ and ‘getting money out of politics’ which I hear a lot from the left. I’m concerned that removing some of the pork & thinly disguised payoff system will lead to less corrupt but much more ideological politicians, on both sides. I feel like we’ve seen this with the disappearance of earmarks/pork barrel, as you explain. With the money aspect gone, the shrill ideology & purity wars aspect of American politics has increased quite a bit.
I’m also basically a capitalist, and while there are a lot of externalities inherent in the ‘money in politics’ system- large corporations and wealthy people have a basic & centrist interest in a functioning, healthy society & country. This is extremely not true of ideologues. Maybe Big Bad Chemical Company’s Congressional lobbying leads to some weakened pollution laws, but I don’t think BBCC is going to, like, fund a militia or antifa or some radical armed group that basically calls for bombings or violence against their political opponents. I think full-on fanatics on both the left and the right are sort of inching their way there. More corruption and less ideologues in power please
I’m not even sure it’s corruption really. I see it more as a sidepayment. I mean, obviously no one is advocating we let Congresspeople get outright bribed. But let’s say there’s a policy involving water rights along the coasts. The interior districts don’t care about that, right? So they default to their ideological positions. But if a bunch of representatives get together and ask for a series of projects in exchange for their support, then it becomes a negotiation. Do the Coastal Representatives think what the Interior Representatives want is a fair trade? If they do, then the bill gets passed and both interior and coastal districts get something. That seems like a good thing to me.
Also, to be frank, it makes contests less absolute. Let’s say the Democrats can’t stop the wall for some reason. If sidepayments are allowed, the Republicans have an incentive to give them something in exchange for not opposing it too strenuously. The Republicans still get more and so ‘win’ but the Democrats get something too.
Eh, this ignores that in the USA the companies just somehow convince the police to shoot at the workers so they have no need to build an armed militia; the people pay the militia with taxes anyway.
My impression was that the “money in politics bad” was less about pork barrel spending and more about money being used to get there, but that might just be due to the already-implemented decline in pork. Any of the old-timers here able to enlighten me as to what the talking points were like a decade or two ago?
I for one am very much in favor of “money -> political power bad” but sympathetic to “political power -> money for constituents is fine”. The ability to negotiate and compromise are good things but the zeitgeist seems to want to shun anyone who dares try it
I agree. Isn’t the reason we have local representatives (instead of national all in one bowl representation) that regional preferences can be accounted for?
In Spain, local preferences are only accounted for the Basques and Catalans, who have their own parties that negotiate with the national parties of all colors. And it has made us richer. Other provinces don’t have that, because Spanish national parties enforce the party rule when voting in Congress. I think that more stronger regional parties would actually be good for Spain, because then regional preferences for spending and adjustments to laws would be accounted for.
Between a wall and a policy, a wall is a lot easier to dismantle when the opposition get into power and want to do away with it. Compare how easy it would be to pull down sections of the existing border fence with trying to get the Affordable Care Act repealed/changed. One of these things could happen in the morning, the other is a gigantic morass that nobody seems to want to touch despite all the pontificating about it.
So I do have to think the symbolism is what is important here, else the Democrats could give in on building the physical fence/wall and plan to quietly dismantle it when it’s their turn to be back in power, rather than agree to some policy that would be written into law about reducing immigration or deporting illegal immigrants living in the US already.
It is not easy to get rid of any culturally symbolic structure ( which the wall would be). Consider all the drama surrounding various confederate monuments lately.
I’m also going to register my official complaint that the person complaining about Americans talking about Irish politics is talking now talking about American politics, which I would be inclined to do regardless of how our views aligned.
I thought it was a Canadian on YouTube talking about Irish politics (but I didn’t watch more than ten seconds).
Was he an American?
I’m meant to generalize to “people talking about countries they don’t live in” but did a bad job and accidentally specified American there, I think you are correct.
To be clear, I’m confident in saying that video was profoundly stupid without even watching it (I just navigated to it to see what is going on). I certainly don’t want to be seen as siding with that particular person.
I accept the rebuke, and I will gladly listen to anyone discussing Irish people overstaying visas or trying to immigrate over quota. We’ve recently haddiscussions about this, trying to take up the unused Australian quota for visas.
I don’t think Irish people illegal in the US should get special treatment, not even for the “been living here ten to twenty years” type. They’ve had plenty of time to try to get on the citizenship or legal status ladder, and if they haven’t tried, then they’ve assumed they’re not eligible and are gambling on not being caught. Well, when you gamble, sometimes you lose, and I don’t see why they should evade penalties.
Critically, the ACA is actually useful. Dismantling it without stripping hundreds of thousands of affordable care would’ve been impossible.
So would be a wall.
It is likely that a wall will achieve a higher percentage of its stated goal than would the ACA, which had an effect on American life expectancy that rounds to zero.
Link? I’m surprised it’s even been long enough to study the matter properly. Also it seems like it’d be make more sense to judge it by its direct stated goal (reduce the number of uninsured Americans) rather than a secondary and much harder to measure metric.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/hus/contents2017.htm?search=Life_expectancy,
Life expectancy is neither hard to measure or secondary, right?
Healthcare is to improve health, so if we’re not doing that we’re straight wasting money.
It seems to me that “how many Americans are uninsured” is the secondary metric and “are Americans healthier and living longer?” is the primary when we’re talking healthcare.
If making 100% of the population uninsured increased our life expectancy a year, I would do that in a heartbeat, and I hope you would too.
I was asking for the link to your source. Yes, life expectancy (or at least, the effect of some intervention on it) is hard to measure, you need to control for subtle confounds and you have to do lengthy studies. For example, one major effect of the ACA was insuring a lot of people aged 18-26; I don’t know how anyone could confidently say that their life expectancy has or hasn’t changed as a result yet.
I thought it was pretty unambiguously clear that a) being uninsured is bad for longevity, and b) Obamacare decreased the number of uninsured people dramatically. This is why I was surprised at your suggestion that it didn’t affect life expectancy much, and asked for the source.
I did link it. It’s the CDC’s report on life expectancy. If you know a better source than an actual government report on life expectancy at birth I would be interested.
Linked again, the figure for all Americans, but there are others broken down by race, etc.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hus/2017/fig20.pdf
I realize these are different priors, but I don’t find point a to be persuasive at all, and it didn’t surprise me at all that Obamacare didn’t move life expectancy.
Do you think this study really shows that having access to the medical system doesn’t improve health outcomes? I’m trying to understand the causation here, the implications seem to be that all the claims of modern medicine’s life-saving ability are fundamentally incorrect.
It’s going to take a lot more rigor, for me to accept such a paradigm-shattering conclusion. (And if we did accept it, I hope you would join me in pushing for the FDA to shut down access to all known medicine and healthcare.)
No, I don’t think that. I am making an absurd hypothetical to discuss what the end-goal is.
If the end-goal of ObamaCare is “have fewer uninsured people” I am pointing out that is a bad end goal.
The actual end goal should be “life expectancy for Americans is rising”, because that’s what we actually care about, not the intermediary of insurance.
Being uninsured is absolutely not the same as “having no access to the American medical system”. I have a good friend who had a major and serious life-threatening disease with no insurance at 29 (this was in ~2007). He had full access to the American medical system and it saved his life. Never once did his lack of insurance prevent that.
I think the actual evidence on availability of health insurance affecting life expectancy suggests that there’s not a lot of noticable effect.
This MR article discusses and links to a multi-year Rand Corp. study that showed little or no health benefit for people with access to free healthcare.
More recently, there was a study involving giving more people Medicaid in Oregon, discussed here and here. Those include links to the original studies.
The way I understand these results (far, far from my areas of expertise) is that it seems really hard to find a measurable health benefit from giving people better insurance. It seems like there *should* be one, but it doesn’t seem to show up in the best two studies we have. Presumably part of the reason is that you’ll go to the doctor if you’re really sick or badly injured, and probably get treated, even if you can’t afford it–you’ll just get some crazy bill you can’t pay. So even if you have no insurance, you’re not going to ignore crushing chest pains or hope that compound fracture takes care of itself. On the other hand, insurance lets you go to the doctor for minor stuff more readily, but most of the time, that probably doesn’t help much–the doctor tells you to lose weight for the 50th time and then prescribes you an unnecessary antibiotic for your cold.
(Apologies in advance for piling on)
The ACA is, from my probably-blurry economic standpoint, misdiagnosing the problem: healthcare is expensive, doctors are overworked, and limited insurance serves as gatekeepers to who can see the overworked doctors (at the price of lots of money and paperwork).
The solution should probably involve training and/or retaining more doctors, rather than adding more paperwork to the gatekeeping.
To use a similar-ish metaphor: doctors are gyms, insurance is a gym membership. The ACA required people to sign up for gym memberships.
(Personal experience so far: signed up for one, tried using it and doctor was a gynecologist; signed up for another to avoid the tax penalty, tried using it and doctor didn’t exist; signed up for a third and the next available appointment’s not for another three months)
@EchoChaos
You can’t just look at two data points and assume the thing you’re interested in is responsible for the change between them.
@albatross11
It seems like you’re reading an awful lot in to that one study. I would expect that the result of paying for Alice-but-not-Bob’s healthcare for 5 years is that Alice would be richer than Bob, not healthier.
Stuff like this seems a lot more relevant, and while there are some caveats (e.g. it’s not clear that going uninsured for a while in your youth has much if any effect), the overall conclusion is the one you’d naively expect:
When you pass a bill that you say will improve Americans’ health and Americans’ health doesn’t improve at all it is fair to question the effectiveness of the bill.
Especially when said bill costs over a trillion dollars.
Let’s not pretend that if Trump’s wall is built and there was an increase in illegal immigration in the next decade that liberals would accept “You can’t just look at two data points and assume the thing you’re interested in is responsible for the change between them.”
Seems like there would be a ton of confounders in any study comparing the insured to the uninsured. I mean, just for one, the insured are mostly in households with a solid, steady income stream, the uninsured mostly aren’t.
Outside of a few areas that don’t appear to have any low hanging fruit left healthcare has a tiny impact on life expectancy in developed nations. The gap between the US and Europe is largely (entirely?) explained by the difference in violent deaths, as from murder and car accidents. That leaves perhaps one avenue where greater coverage could lead to higher life expectancy, but otherwise its a dubious measure or goal to have.
@albatross11
I still feel like you’re just breezing past the idea of preventive care here. The logical conclusion would be that modern medicine is only helpful if you are suffering from something so dire that its worth bankrupting yourself to fix- and anything less is useless/counterproductive.
Insofar as “modern medicine” speaks to the standards, environment, technology, education, accountability, CYA behavior, and all associated overhead of healthcare providers in the US today, this is, as far as I can tell, true. Also, I hate it.
@EchoChaos
I agree with you that Obamacare, like health insurance expansions generally, probably has negligible effect on life expectancy.
I think, though, that you’re employing a fallacy of false dichotomy between “increasing life expectancy” and “increasing insuredness for its own sake.” Insuredness has a lot of other follow-on consequences that have stronger evidentiary support than life expectancy effects: notably, on financial security and psychological well-being (see e.g. the Oregon Medicaid study for an example of how these two can have clear effects on them achieved without any clear effects on health outcomes). I think some of the more honest defenders of Obamacare would concede that it doesn’t affect broad health measures like life expectancy but argue that these other effects are worth it on their own (which I don’t personally agree with but which isn’t a crazy or illogical argument).
No one is saying you shouldn’t question it, just that you’re questioning it wrong. I’m going to bow out now.
Guy in TN:
This isn’t my field, but my impression is that it’s pretty hard to see the effect of added preventative care in the available data. That raises the question of whether that’s because a lot of the added preventative care is not all that useful (giving healthy 20-year-olds an annual check-up) or is swamped by other harmful unnecessary medical care (antibiotics every time you get a cold).
Probably we already get a big chunk of the available benefits from preventative medicine by requiring childhood vaccines and eye/ear screenings, and by making sure that everyone over 65 has Medicare so they can get the preventative stuff that makes a lot of sense as you get older[1]. (You ought to be getting occasional colonoscopies, mamograms, PSA tests, etc., earlier than 65, but I bet the benefit usually gets bigger as you get up into your 60s. Someone please correct me if I’m wrong.)
[1] Health improvements in old age also have less of a visible impact on life expectancy, since completely curing something that was about to kill you at 75 probably doesn’t extend your life by more than another 10-15 years.
This is not clear from the Oregon study, it is only clear if you make the claim that mental health has nothing to do with social statues/comparing oneself to your peers. It also didn’t measure the costs of the program, and only covered roughly 1/10 people who were on the wait list. A full program would be between 3 and 20 times more expensive which would have large potential repercussions on its own for mental health.
@albatross11
So we’re faced with two possibilities here:
1. Going to the doctor is actually bad or useless, if you are either older than a child and less than 65, for anything less than a procedure or medication so direly needed that it is worth bankrupting yourself over. (This still indicates that much of what we know about the science of modern medicine is wrong.)
2. There is something wrong with these studies. Giving 18-65 year olds access to doctors and medication for non-extreme emergencies is good for their long-term health, its just difficult to find in the data for some reason.
From my experience from reading SSC, with Scott documenting how counter-intuitive results are often the ones most likely filter into mainstream discourse, only to be discredited years later, guides me into thinking option 2 is most likely correct.
You can refuse to believe the evidence because your gut says otherwise, fine, but expect people to remember the next time you want to refute their gut feelings with outside evidence.
The conservatives’ efforts to make health care more market-oriented is ultimately frustrated by the fact that people tend to be poor consumers of medical care. They have, again, gut feelings of what is important, but these gut feelings do not translate into actual results.
Most screening tests are useless. Most annual check-ups are useless. Try to tell people this and they’ll put their hands over their ears and say “come back when the evidence agrees with me.”
Guy in TN:
I think the actual result would be something more like:
“The extra health care consumed by a person between 18-65 when they’re given insurance does not increase life expectancy.”
I don’t think this contradicts anything we know about medical science–it just implies that the *additional* health care being consumed wasn’t helpful on net.
It’s easy to see how this can be true. A healthy person in a doctor’s office has a nonnegligible chance of catching something from another patient, another nonnegligible chance of getting a false-positive on some screening test requiring harmful medical intervention (biopsy, imaging), and a very nonnegligible chance that any treatment they receive will make them worse due to side effects, the doctor / nurse / pharmacist screwing up, or the patient screwing up.
Sum up the expected impact of all those negatives for a marginal visit to the doctor (one you’d make with insurance but not without it), and then sum up the expected positive impact. There’s nothing in the laws of nature or the science of medicine requiring that sum to be positive, and plenty of plausible reasons to suspect it could be negative (based on reported statistics on medical errors).
This is a general reply, not directed at specific claims, but as relevant observations and speculation.
The best preventative care isn’t done at doctor’s visits, its actually pretty poor preventative care done there. Take getting your teeth cleaned at the dentists office, getting it done twice a year is probably better than not getting it done, but 99% of the value of preventative dental care is in daily brushing, flossing and diet. Making it a national policy of semi annual dental visits for everyone probably won’t have a huge impact on dental health, it might have some categorical impacts where there are more fillings and fewer root canals (but it also might not), but the baseline assumption should be minimal impact seeing as how the 363 days a year you don’t go the the dentist are more impact-full than the 2 days you do.
If the semi annual dental visits increase the quality of daily oral hygiene then you might get substantial improvements, but my guess is that there is a tide of push back that you naturally get. When you outsource something the general trend is to think less about it, that is after all one of the major benefits of outsourcing. Convincing people that its a big deal to visit the dentist is likely to diminish other oral health tasks in their minds. Convincing them that overall oral health is a big deal is likely to diminish the importance of something else in their minds.
The prevention myth persists because it means we can reduce costs in a pain-free way. There are journals dedicated entirely to the economics of medical care, and they have studied lots “common sense” prevention techniques, and some actually work, but lots do not.
And the ones that do work are almost always already being done. (Vaccinations and pap smears are great but you can’t keep on doing them over and over to get even better outcomes.)
I believe at least a weak form of this. Doctors are where the sick people are, are quite expensive in time, money, and mental effort, and are indeed useless for many ailments people might hope they can fix.
But for poor people, “additional healthcare” is synonymous with “any healthcare”, since without health insurance they would not be able to afford doctors and medicine (again, the caveat of putting aside life-threatening emergencies worth going bankrupt over). The additional margin of healthcare a wealthy person would consume when given insurance is tiny, but the additional margins for the poor are massive.
I suppose one could make the argument that the net-benefits of giving poor people any healthcare at all is outweighed by the negatives of people with higher incomes over-utilizing it when they have insurance. But again, while this does not exactly disparage the entire medical system, it does paint its usefulness in a very dim light.
If you are serious in accepting this conclusion, the logical next step would be to drop your health insurance. Since the data shows that it incentivizes negative health outcomes, it would likely be a net-harm to your health.
Part of my skepticism of these claims, is that they seem to be only administered when someone is advocating for enrolling people in government-run health insurance programs. When people advocate for enrolling in private health insurance, the conclusions seem to be forgotten. (I’m not targeting you here Albatross11 as you havn’t made these claims, rather I’m making a general observation)
@Guy in TN
I would advocate against someone paying for a health plan that gave them a substantial number of additional doctors visits instead of a plan that only covered extreme costs because those extra doctors visits have no effect on life expectancy. And paying extra for nothing is economic stupidity on a personal level.
That is the exact plan that I have for my family. It’s the highest deductible plan with the lowest out of pocket max that I could find. It penalizes lots of little visits to the doctor and saves my finances if, heaven forbid, something catastrophic happened.
Depends on your risk aversion and the cost to you of having health insurance, and your confidence in your own ability to not seek placebos from men in white coats.
But recall that part of the purpose of ACA was to get people who were making a rational decision not to be insured to join the pool and help subsidize it for everyone else. Hence the
finestaxes.Outside of a few weird counties where the companies are gaming the system, its still cheaper to pay the uninsurance tax than it is to pay premiums on the exchange market.
So for those of you who believe health insurance has net-negative health outcomes, and are making a rational decision to avoid it, the ACA still makes it easier for you to go uninsured than insured.
Guy In TN:
Poor people without insurance still consume healthcare, they just don’t consume as much. A doctor’s visit isn’t *that* expensive. You go to the doctor if you’re really sick. But you don’t go for minor stuff.
My interpretation of this, again as a non-expert who may be missing a lot, is that at the margin, I should be less inclined toward going to the doctor/taking my kids to the doctor. I should be looking for reasons why this particular optional trip to the doctor is likely to have a positive health benefit. For stuff that’s marginal, it probably won’t.
This isn’t something I just apply to government programs, nor is it some kind of motivated attack on Obamacare[1]. It’s the best data I know on the question of whether giving people free healthcare improves their health.
[1] FWIW, Obamacare seems like a mess to me, because it was necessary to keep all the insurance companies happy. I’d prefer giving everyone catastrophic health insurance (paying out at Medicare rates), and funding it out of general revenues.
Well yes, of course, but not easier than before; that’s the point of incentives, to change behavior on the margins.
Anyway, it’s nice to have insurance of some kind unless you are comfortable with financial risk and so long as you know better than to go to the doctor for sniffles, it will be a positive thing in your life.
That doesn’t mean that the benefits of the ACA will show in any of the metrics it was intended to impact.
There’s an interesting implication here I just thought of:
So the claim is that the problem with health insurance, is that it greatly reduces the price of accessing healthcare, to the point that it causes negative health outcomes due to over-utilitzation.
Okay, lets run with it. If this is true, then anything that reduces the price of healthcare ought to be met with the same skepticism. Improving technology that allows for cheaper treatments might be a bad thing. Generic drugs, definitely. Eliminating expensive licensing requirements. Even the goal of having itemized up-front pricing, to prevent “surprise” bills.
All these plans are intended to lower the price of healthcare. And if they are successful enough to reduce it to having-insurance-like levels for the non-insured, that would be a bad thing.
Is this correct?
Agreed, I think this is more or less what Germany does, right? The government pays the premiums for what amounts to HDHP insurance on everyone’s behalf out of tax revenue, individuals select one of the private insurers (who compete on price and service, but have to meet minimum coverage levels similar to the ones for HDHPs here), and can pay extra for better insurance that covers more. (I’m asking, not telling – this isn’t a subject I know much about and I could be oversimplifying this, or confusing Germany with another country)
So you’re saying that our health care system should be run like lobsters.
Whether that’s a problem (let alone the problem) or not depends on many things, but it is offered for a plausible explanation of why the passage of ACA, with it’s mandates and exchanges and subsidies, did not meaningfully impact life expectancy measurements. (Beware the man of one study, etc.)
The revealed preferences of many people is to use medical services more. Whether that increased usage merited the changes of the ACA depends on what you wanted to accomplish.
But I would say that one problem with the US medical system which that bill exacerbated is that it it tries to use an insurance model as a managed care model. It makes a great deal of sense for everyone to have coverage for some measure of medical treatment for conditions/diseases which are largely beyond their control* and for which treatment is, for various reasons explicable and not, extremely expensive. I would be open to some form of universal catastrophic coverage.
On the other hand, people use the medical system more that is necessary for health or other public interest reasons, partially due to ignorance or fear or impatience, and removing all hindrance to this kind of treatment will be costly without much pay-off, and also possibly create perverse incentives in terms of risky behavior, diet, etc. (I say possibly because of course the treatments do not remove the pain of, say, a motorcycle crash or obesity, but they may have an effect on the margins).
*Acknowledged that this is a very contentious category with fuzzy boundaries.
No. The claim is that mandated and subsidized insurance divorces costs from outcomes which prevents good decision making.
I’m guessing you’re responding to me; if so, the answer is no, it’s not correct.
Increasing the supply of health care via technological advance is a good thing; via paying for training more doctors, very probably also good (overpayment is possible, but that comes with evidence like ‘doctors get a reputation for being slackers’).
Mandatory health insurance does not increase the supply of health care, as measured by doctor-attention-hours: it redistributes who gets access to the existing pool of doctor-attention-hours.
Guy in TN:
I’d guess that lowering the price of healthcare across the board would not actually increase lifespan or make people notably healthier in a measurable way. That’s not saying that doing so would be bad–it’s just saying it wouldn’t make people live longer or healthier, but it would cost less so we’d have more wealth for other stuff.
@baconbits9
I don’t understand the logic here. It seems like divorcing costs from outcomes is the only way to make clear-headed medical decisions. Because in one scenario, your only consideration is what is best for your health, while in the other you have to make a trade off between health and monetary cost.
How does introducing an additional burden make the initial decision any easier?
For example, let’s say I’m trying to start walking for exercise. In order to maximize my health outcomes, I need to decide whether I walk two, three, or four miles a day. Walking at the park is currently free.
Would introducing a cost to walking in the form of a tax or usage fee, in order to “tie together cost and outcomes” as you say, be beneficial for my health? Would it help me arrive at the optimal health decision?
@Guy in TN
On some level there are always opportunity costs to consider (which is why few people walk 4 miles a day – though I guess I should point out that I do). I think a more salient criticism is that that health is largely a welfare rate limiter – very few people will trade an untreated torn ACL for a lamborghini, despite the fact that the lambo is “worth more,” economically speaking. The problem isn’t that divorcing healthcare from costs leads to bad decision making (possibly true), but that allowing providers to set the cost of healthcare means some people have no way to avoid dying of ketoacidosis. The argument that manufacturers should be setting the price at a level that maximizes revenue rather than at a level that maximizes access doesn’t seem to hold much water here for me.
E: better link.
@Skivverus
I wasn’t responding to you particularly, but EchoChaos, Albatross11, Edward Scizorhands, Randy M, and other who were arguing that having health insurance actually produces net-negative outcomes.
But I’ll chime in anyway.
Mandatory health insurance actually does increase supply. This is because it increases demand, which raises the price of the good. The price of the good is one of the primary factors in determining the level of supply.
@GuyinTN
I think there are some problems with your model of healthcare.
First is this.
Supply is actually gated by entrance into the qualifications of MDs, RNs, PA,s etc. We’ve had a critical shortage for decades and these professions have been making bank for decades. We aren’t getting more people in because states and the feds have extremely strict licensing reqs.
My second point is that I don’t think you understand how healthcare works for people without insurance, or at least have a low level of insurance (which I have always had because I prefer a catastrophic plan). So I will walk you through.
The vast majority of ailments a person has are trivial. Typically, you ignore them in a high-deductible situation. This is actually a benefit for you and the system, because almost all things are viruses and the system can’t help you. For instance, I went on a vacation 2 summers ago, I came back and somehow a sinus infection + the flight resulted in me losing all taste for several days (alongside other normal symptoms). I treated this with showers for 3-4 days (and by the way, this loss of taste was extreme, like I could drink hotsauce and feel nothing until it burned my ass on the way out). That failed so I finally caved and went to a Walgreens nurse who told me the correct OTC thing to buy for $150. I was fixed in a few days, but I actually feel cheated out of that $150 because I could have just gotten the OTC thing for free if I had known, and google/webmd failed me on the lack of taste thing. They all said it was a scary symptom.
So, as we see, the typical non-bankrupting interaction one has with the medical system is useless for the 18-65 group, and even if it is useful (say I had a bacterial infection that needed antibiotics), is extremely affordable. Thus, its fairly obvious that the subsidy of such care is not efficient.
@Clutzy
The number of physicians in the U.S. (both as a total and as a percentage of the population) has been growing steadily since the 1970s. (here, here) Obviously licensing requirements might prevent this from growing as fast as otherwise, but the theory that “supply isn’t growing” doesn’t hold.
“Affordable” varies based on both individual wealth and price of treatment. You gave an example of a treatment that cost $150 dollars, and luckily you could afford it. That’s great. But you can’t extrapolate your anecdote into a society-wide rule. I do not buy the idea that all health-consequential treatments an 18-65 might find useful will necessarily fall within the range of affordability.
If you were poor enough, even $150 might have been too much money. And if the treatment was expensive enough (possible tumor? Better do a MRI for a few thousand), then an important preventive treatment might be missed.
As someone who makes ~$20,000 (too poor for health insurance and too rich for Medicaid) trust me, there’s no need to “walk me though” what healthcare is like for people without insurance.
Guy in TN:
So, how would you account for the two studies I linked to? They don’t show any significant improvement in health outcomes for the people given better insurance. (I don’t think there’s any evidence people were made worse off, but also none that they were made better off.)
Maybe there’s some reason they’re both flawed, but that’s two high-quality randomized control trials of the idea that giving people insurance improves their health, which don’t show the expected result. It’s an unintuitive result, and maybe there’s some other thing that explains it besides my guess that at the margin, healthcare usage doesn’t make people healthier, but those results do seem to want an explanation.
I’m not introducing an additional burden, the burden exists. Medical care costs money, and you are just hiding the costs. Its econ 101 that when you hide costs in this way you get over consumption of the good, ie consumption in excess of the value it is producing. It is easier to make A decision, but it is harder to make a good decision.
So you ARE saying we should have health care based on lobsters!!!
I didn’t say what Guy wishes I said, or thinks I said, or imagines I said, or hallucinated I said. I didn’t say shit about insurance.
I’m skeptical that more healthcare produces better results, especially when the people advocating for dumping more health care onto the system, when presented with the research about what care does and does not work, refuse to look at it and want to wait for research that confirms their priors to come out.
I even pointed out parts of the health care system with known-positive results, like vaccinations or pap smears. But how many more of those can you do?
And once you slice off other things that are known to be good — and I mean actually known to be good, not some guy’s hunch of what they figure must be good based on hunches no better than old wives’ tales — that leaves the rest of the field looking even worse. So, yes, get people vision care for poor eyesight. And people with chronic conditions definitely need to keep seeing their doctor. And diabetics need more reminding to take care of themselves.
If someone wanted more nuclear power, but when presented with any evidence about prior nuclear disasters refused to consider it at all because obviously nuclear power is good and better, and refused to take prior failures into account, would you have any faith in their arguments?
I mean, here is just one more example to pile on: the guy who discovered PSA, which is used to screen for prostate cancer, keeps on shouting that it’s a useless or even harmful test. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/10/opinion/10Ablin.html There is lots of evidence that the tests are harmful and should only be done in very specific circumstances: https://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/21/new-data-on-harms-of-prostate-cancer-testing/ But people hate hearing this and they keep on ignoring it.
Er. Your first link shows doctors per capita pretty close to flat (and below other countries), with the data ending in 2011; your second link doesn’t have data after 2009, which makes it a touch useless for determining the effects of the ACA one way or another.
Bonus points: Relate single-payer healthcare to forced monogamy.
@albatross11
When you get extremely counter-intuitive results that implicate large swaths of currently-existing science as incorrect, skepticism is warranted. Regarding the 1974-1982 study, this was when healthcare was a lot cheaper (so making it free is less of an advantage), and 40-years behind in medical and technological advancement (so the positive effects of healthcare would have been diminished).
Regarding the Oregon study, I havn’t read it myself but this commentator suggests that indicators such as blood pressure and cholesterol were actually improved, just the sample size was too small for the effects to show as statistically significant.
@baconbits9
Ah, I see the issue here. In your view, the “good decision” is the one that maximizes economic value, in my view its the one that maximizes positive health outcomes.
We’re talking past eachother; I don’t care about economic value at all.
@Edward Scizorhands
I’m confused. Is your argument that “more healthcare might be bad, but expansion of health insurance might be good”?
I don’t know how else to read your strident objections to my interpretation. I assumed that the people, such as yourself, who are arguing that more healthcare might be net-negative are also against expanding health insurance, since it increases the amount of healthcare by providing it to people who coldn’t afford it before.
I am trying to correct a common misconception. If you keep on thinking that more health care means better health because of your gut feelings, that is the misconception to be addressed. If you want to apply your misconception to insurance or economics or tax rates or whatever, it’s arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. I can’t analyze how applying an incorrect principle to a problem will work because the principle is incorrect.
An insurance product that denied people procedures that failed a QALY test could both 1) give better results and 2) save money. But people hate this. Because they know in their gut that more health care is better health, always, and anyone saying something different is pulling some kind of con, and if the studies agreeing with them, just ignore those studies.
Or kill them.
Insurance isn’t good at applying those tests, and it can’t be good at applying those tests because insurers make these decisions via policy changes, not by actually applying the test on an individual basis. As long as you use price as a proxy for a QALY test there will be people who overconsume healthcare and people who can’t afford to be alive.
Yes, some people will miss the cut-off for their care being “worth it.” Yet another reason that providing health insurance is a different beast from providing health care.
No, this isn’t the distinction. Decisions are based on values, and you cannot make a good decision without them.
A common complaint from doctors who serve poor neighborhoods is that a person will come in and get diagnosed with a virus and the prescription is basically fluids and rest, but they wont leave without a prescription for antibiotics (and if they do leave it will frequently be to go somewhere else and try again). Why would you go to an expert and not listen to their opinion?
A common complaint from a different class of doctors is that while they know that rehabilitation has better outcomes than surgeries they also know that 90% of their patients will show up for the surgery and 90% won’t complete the rehabilitation. Why don’t they listen to their doctor?
Well doc its just that I know I won’t go through with the rehab. Really? The prospect of being able to walk without pain for the rest of your life isn’t enough incentive?
People inherently value things that they get for free LESS than things they pay for. Price relates to scarcity, the less of something there is, the harder it is to get it, the higher the price, and the higher the value. The reverse is also true, the easier it is to get something the less you value it.*
Don’t take those antibiotics for a virus, they actually hurt you by killing off your gut flora and do nothing for the illness!!!
Oh well, if I get sick from the I’ll go back to the doctor.
Don’t have knee surgery, the replacement ACL will degrade!
Oh well, 10 years from now I’ll get it done again.
There is no distinction between “economic value” and “better medical outcomes” here. Economic values were discovered, they were people’s actions based on their values that were translated into a framework, they weren’t invented in parallel.
This is Mises’ economic calculation problem, and Hayek’s Nobel prize. Prices contain information that goes both ways. The seller is telling the buyer that “this is the price I will give this to you for”, and the buyer is telling the seller that “this is the price I will pay for it”. This represents their VALUES. In Econ 101 they tell you that if I have an apple and I prefer an orange and you the opposite then we can trade and both be better off. The “economic gain” here isn’t growth, its a satisfaction of values. When you divorce prices and costs you divorce values from goods and services, and you cannot generate better outcomes without values.
*The reverse is also true. Doctors see more and more marginal cases and it wears on them. If 99 cases out of a hundred are borderline then they expect every case to be borderline, the constant complaints of fatigue and irritability that are associated with stress (ie life) drown out the 1 guy with the early stages of a serious blood disorder.
@Edward Scizorhands
I’m in agreement that the graph with the x axis “amount of healthcare” and the y axis “health outcomes” is a bell curve. So of course, more healthcare is not always better: There’s an optimal amount of healthcare that maximizes health.
The situation in the U.S. is that a certain segment of the population (those just too wealthy for Medicaid) is receiving close to zero healthcare at all, outside of what they can buy at an over-the-counter pharmacy. And without Medicaid, the number would be even higher. We’re not talking about just things like regular checkups and screenings, but rather basic healthcare needs such as “I have a weird lump”, “There’s blood in my cough” or “I have tapeworms” that are non-emergency, and therefore not worth bankrupting yourself over.
If these studies are true, then providing even that kind of healthcare to people who couldn’t afford it otherwise is net-negative. Pretty unlikely.
It’s not a matter of cutoffs, though. This dynamic exists on a continuum, and there’s no good way to set an equilibrium even if you price discriminate aggressively because there are no good tools for price discrimination. Money might be the best tool we have for forcing people to acknowledge the tradeoffs they’re making, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good one when it comes to goods like healthcare. The failure mode for you being marginally priced away from a Lamborghini is that you don’t buy one. The failure mode for you being marginally priced away from healthcare is that you die. Or that you live an unhappy, disease-ridden life.
You can put a price on life. Scott has an excellent article about it but LiveJournal has put it behind a registration wall: squid314.livejournal.com/260949.html Health care systems run by adults know and acknowledge this.
The failure mode for not using price signals is shortages as resources get misallocated. This is also a “people die” scenario.
@baconbits9
So much confusion in he English language, with the conflation of the word “values” to mean both “economic value” and “moral goals”. Surely the standard economist’s position isn’t really that a person’s actions (their “revealed preferences”) is a window into their internal desired outcomes. That’s just laughably absurd to me.
“Ah, I see you are in prison. You are revealing to me your preference that you like to be incarcerated, very interesting”
“Ah, I see you are dying of hunger, but have no money to buy food. So sad to see a suicide.”
Bonkers. You absolutely cannot conflate these concepts, for this and other obvious reasons. Moral values and “economic value” share nothing but the same unfortunate etymology. You cannot infer my moral objectives via prices, and if Mises and Hayek really claimed you could, that just shows the level of intellectual bankruptcy economics has reached.
@Jaskologist
There’s only misalloction in the sense of not maximizing economic value; using non-market means does not “misallocate” in the sense of providing worse health outcomes. This is because dollars≠health units.
From an empirical standpoint, this has been validated by not observing negative health outcomes in countries that have abandoned market allocation of healthcare.
As I said in another thread, given that I can’t afford large medical bills at the moment, my plan of action if I find myself in a position to incur them is to kill myself, as it’s better than paying to tell a doctor I can’t afford treatment and then dying painfully. The fact that I consider this a rational choice and fixate on suicide might be psychologically unhealthy, but clearly it’s not a major issue, since I would choose to pay to be evaluated if it were. Obviously.
While you can definitely put a price on human life, I’m not convinced that an optimal system lets someone die if they don’t have $700 on hand.
I am entirely certain that this is not what would happen. Please vigorously pursue the matter should it become personally relevant.
$700 is well under the threshold for letting someone die. Rough estimates of the price of a QALY in the first world is $20,000 to $60,000, depending on the system.
@Randy, Edward
For the second time in this thread,
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/09/01/641615877/insulins-high-cost-leads-to-lethal-rationing
This is an inevitable outcome of pricing healthcare on the market because people cannot capitalize on QALYs. You can’t avoid outcomes like this; you can only hope it doesn’t happen to very many people. Being one of the people [something like this] could easily happen to is extremely unpleasant.
E: to be clear, I could afford a $700 bill. I couldn’t afford a $5,000 bill.
not observing negative health outcomes in countries that have abandoned market allocation of healthcare
Which countries are you talking about?
I didn’t say it was the system we had now. I would prefer a sane, rational system, like most other countries have, where medical procedures need to pass an implicit or explicit test for effectiveness per dollar. Unless he needs $700 for insulin every 4 days, those systems would have him covered. Because they didn’t blow their money on useless stuff, they have the money for the insulin.
No, that is not what is happening here. Economic value is a subset of individual values, and moral goals are a subset of individual values. I am not conflating the two, I am describing how they are similar in this circumstance.
I didn’t make a single claim that relies on revealed preference, I made the well documented claim that people react differently toward goods that they get for free and ones that they pay for.
Beyond that your childish characterization of revealed preference demonstrates that you don’t understand the concept even a little. The revealed preference of a person in jail is not that they “like jail”, it would be that they thought the costs*likelihood of going to jail were worth the action the crime that they committed. They would only have a revealed preference for jail if they showed up and offered to pay the warden for the opportunity to live in prison.
Economics is fundamentally about the choices and actions that people make, the only way that economic value and moral value share nothing is if you are claiming that the things you do are not at all influenced by your morals.
@Edward
That makes sense, and I should note that I’m mostly pushing back against the pro-pricing-mechanism side that uses the argument you’ve outlined. That said, I’m somewhat also making an argument against any particular value-estimating algorithm. I think the time-dependent drawback of the pricing mechansim is exacerbated here, but I don’t think other mechanisms are necessarily better. Which, yes, leaves me in a rather bad position, but I’m not taking a constructive side in this debate.
@baconbits9
Alright. To rephrase my earlier post in a way that more suits you, my subset of individual values does not contain the normative goal of “maximize economic value”, but it does contain the normative goal of “maximize health outcomes”. Hence, talking about economic value is non-persuasive for me.
Its true that they are similar, both being normative claims of how humans ought to behave, but not much beyond that. (Normative goals that we probably both disagree with, such as “miscegenation is bad” are also similar in the same way)
@Clutzy
Can you share what this thing was? I’m curious, for unrelated reasons.
@baconbits9
All human action, of course, is based on the underlying moral values people operate under. Taking away prices doesn’t change this, I’m pretty sure its not physically possible to divorce human action from human values.
For example, walking in the park is free. My decision to walk in the park or not is still a reflection of my moral values, i.e. “what I’m trying to maximize”. Despite walking in the park being free, I can still use it to readily generate outcomes that reflect my moral values without using prices (in fact its even easier to do so).
So if you have a choice between other things you value and better health outcomes you should always choose the latter, however small the ratio of health benefits to other things is? I find it hard to believe that you think that.
Consider the simplest case–diet. There is presumably an optimal diet from the standpoint of health. If it consists of things none of which you like, should you still eat it instead of the slightly less optimal diet that you like? That is the logic of your position.
Similarly for lots of other things. Driving places in a car involves some risk of accident and negative health outcomes. Does it follow that you should never drive anywhere other than to the doctor? Certainly not to an SSC meetup.
My suspicion from what you wrote is that you think of economic value as entirely divorced from anything that matters. If so, are you indifferent between the lowest income life at which you get an acceptable set of health outcomes and the same health outcomes with a much higher income? Happy to live in a (sanitary) barracks, eat (nutritionally adequate) tasteless and boring food, never travel to other places, … ?
I don’t believe it.
Would it help if I told you that economic value, as economists use the term, is an (imperfect) proxy for total utility? Do you not care about that either–give it zero weight as against health outcomes?
I can’t recall actually, but I think it was Mucinex DM
@DavidFriedman
Economic value matters to me, in as much as it can be used to improve health outcomes. So yes, in some cases I might choosing to improve economic value, if it was the most effective means of achieving a health outcome. But the means of achieving a goal isn’t the goal itself- I would also gladly destroy economic value, in situations where it improved health outcomes.
I’m a utilitarian. I see health outcomes as fantastic proxy for human well-being, its difficult to imagine something else more closely allied to the concept of utility. Of course, I’m aware some economists believe that money is a better proxy for utility than human health. It seems to be the underlying belief that motivates much of what think is highly mistaken reasoning by libertarians around these parts.
Typically, by the time we get to this point in the conversation, my interlocutors have lost steam, or new open threads have appeared. I should just come out of the starting gates with “dollars ≠ utils” the next time I start to smell the whiff of Coase Theorem in the air, to fast-forward the conversation.
You think that someone who lives a long and healthy life during all of which he is entirely miserable has high utility? That’s what you seem to be saying.
Value isn’t money–no economist suggests that the way to maximize value is to have a hyperinflation. You are rejecting ideas you don’t understand.
At the individual level, willingness to pay is a pretty good proxy for utility. If I am willing to pay five dollars for an ice cream cone but not willing to pay five dollars to go to a movie, that’s pretty good evidence that I believe I get more utility from the former than the latter. If I am willing to pay no more than five dollars for the cone and no more than four for the movie but willing to pay ten dollars for a book I want, that’s pretty good evidence that I believe the sum of the utility of the movie and the cone is less than that of the book.
Do you have a problem with that?
There are two reasons willingness to pay, which is what economic value represents, is only an imperfect proxy for utility. The first is that the individual may be mistaken–he may choose A over B even though he would actually enjoy B more than A. The second is that we need to sum value across individuals, and the fact that John is willing to pay five dollars for a cone and Joan only four for a movie doesn’t imply that John gets more utility from the cone than Joan from the movie, because a dollar may represent more utility for Joan than for John.
These are problems that economists have been aware of and discussed for well over a century now.
I note that you did not answer the question of mine that you quoted, so I will repeat it:
That is the implication of the position you are taking, and I do not believe it is your actual view. Am I mistaken? Do you believe that individuals should sacrifice all other values in order to get the best possible health outcome, however little the gain in health is that they get for the sacrifice?
Is that how you live your life?
Well yes, these are exactly my main two objections to using economic value as a standard-unit proxy for utility. To summarize:
1. At the individual level, a person could be making decisions in an unsound state of mind.
2. The utility of a dollar, like the utility of any resource, varies from person to person.
I’m looking forward to your response from here, since we seem to be getting to the heart of the matter.
If you want to call me out for being slippery here, you have every right, and I apologize for being ambiguous.
But yes, physical health its not everything. The original conversation was regarding the question of how healthcare impacts life expectancy. And while I think physical health is pretty close to as good of a measurable proxy for utility as we are going to see, human well-being (which includes mental satisfaction) is really the true terminal goal here. Human well-being, which includes both physical and mental aspects, is the essence of utility.
So to answer your question, or at least clarify the situation: I will always advocate for maximizing human well-being, which isn’t necessarily synonymous with human health, but they are highly correlated. If I make the choice of increasing economic value, it is only because of how it relates to increasing human well-being in the particular circumstances. (In other cases, destroying economic value could conceivably be the option that increases human well-being)
This seems to me to be getting a little too close to the parody of a “Broccoli mandate” people would joke about during the early PPACA days. And I don’t think that is all that fruitful.
I think the more fruitful thing is to discuss how much of health outcomes are largely out of control of the “Healthcare system”, in particular obesity, drinking, smoking, etc. And a country (like the US) that is bad on all those measures will not get much benefits in life expectancy by getting fat chainsmokers in front of doctors, particularly when they don’t pay for the doctor and thus don’t have the emotional investment.
And I think that also helps explain the counter-intuitive studies. Without patient investment, doctors are mostly useless, and without you feeling that pain in the pocketbook, you don’t have any incentive to change behavior. And maybe its good for most people to skip a few meals and each just rice for a month to recoup the cost of a doctors visit, because doing that is a greater benefit than the doctors visit itself.
@Guy in TN
Do you have evidence of that? This link, which uses survey data from the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey, notes that the uninsured per capita medical spending in 2001 was $923 while full-year privately insured spending was $2,484. This data point shows the uninsured spending less on medical care than the insured, but does not indicate the uninsured receiving close to zero health care. The survey data also show that 11% of the insured use emergency medical services in a given year and that this is the same rate for the uninsured, an indication of similar health care usage rates for emergency situations.
I think the more fruitful thing is to discuss how much of health outcomes are largely out of control of the “Healthcare system”, in particular obesity, drinking, smoking, etc. And a country (like the US) that is bad on all those measures will not get much benefits in life expectancy by getting fat chainsmokers in front of doctors, particularly when they don’t pay for the doctor and thus don’t have the emotional investment.
First, the US is much better on smoking rates than most other first-world countries. We are bad on obesity, but other countries seem determined to catch up as fast as they can there.
Second, is there evidence that making people pay for the doctor makes them more likely to take care of themselves?
I think there’s a lot that market forces could do to improve US health care spending efficiency, but you can’t just ladle “free market” on top of the system without understanding it. It’s the same error as people on the other side you think you can just inject parts of what-we-imagine-are-European-policies into the health care system and expect better results.
I’m extremely skeptical that having to pay your own health costs leads to noticeably better health. Being in poor health is its own disincentive, and a little extra monetary loss probably doesn’t add much.
OTOH, having medical care subsidized is virtually certain to increase your consumption of it. So it’s really important to work out whether that increased consumption of healthcare is going to actually improve things for you–otherwise, we’re just arranging to spend a bunch of wealth doing something unproductive. We’ve already got tons of that going on (TSA, expensive teacher certifications), and we don’t need any more.
What you wrote and I objected to was:
That is a very different claim from “economic value is not a perfect proxy for what I care about, hence there are situations in which I would prefer an outcome where economic value is lower to one where it is higher.”
After all, there are also situations where you would prefer an outcome where health outcomes are worse to one where they are better.
Economic value is a measure of the degree to which people get what they want, with interpersonal comparison done as if the marginal utility of income was the same for everyone. I assume you believe that, as a rule, it is a good thing for people to get the outcomes they want.
Start at the individual level, to avoid the interpersonal comparison problem. Consider two mechanisms for making decisions about an individual’s health care:
A: The objective is to maximize health outcomes. If health outcomes can be improved at little at the cost of someone working twelve hours a day at a boring job instead eight hours a day at a job he enjoys, that is the preferred outcome, and similarly if they can be improved a little at the cost of his eating boring food instead of what he likes to eat.
B: The objective is to maximize value, defined by individual willingness to pay. Health outcomes are valuable. But if an improved health outcome that the individual would be willing to pay a thousand dollars to get requires him to give up something else that he would be willing to pay two thousand dollars to get, he does without the improved outcome. In my (obviously loaded) examples above, he takes the job he enjoys and eats the food he enjoys.
At the individual level, do you prefer rule A or rule B? If you prefer rule B, then it makes no sense to say that you do not care about economic value at all. Indeed, if you prefer rule B only in the sort of loaded cases I have offered, it makes no sense to say that, since that means (roughly) that you want to maximize (health outcomes + K*economic value) where K is not very large.
So much for the individual case. Economic value is more problematic for the multiperson case, a point recognized by Marshall who (I think) invented the idea, although not the label. We could discuss whether it is a pretty good proxy or a pretty bad proxy another time.
Instead, consider that you face the same problem of interpersonal comparison with your preferred criterion. Does an extra year of life expectancy for a happy person get the same weight in your calculations as an extra year for a miserable person? For a twenty-year old (dying at 21 instead of 20) as for a ninety-year old? How do you trade off different health outcomes–life expectancy vs quality of life measures? It’s only by ignoring those problems that you can treat your criterion as if was really unambiguous.
This runs afoul of Objection 1, the unsound state of mind. So I would not say that I strictly want people to get the outcomes they want. But we can set aside this aside for now, since I would agree that in most cases it is good (assuming we aren’t dealing with children, the mentally handicapped, drug addicts, ect.)
I prefer rule B, but it could be improved. “Ability pay” is a fine way to order the set of possibilities a person has, in the subset of actions called “purchasing things they can afford on the market”. But “purchasing things they can afford on the market” does not contain all the actions the in a person’s possibility space. It does not count for non-consensual transfers, for example.
Since the objective is to maximize utility, if a non-consensual transfer improved their utility more than a market action, that would be the best choice IMO.
I never claimed comparing interpersonal utility was unambiguous! Its a messy affair, but I think humans have the mental tools to do it. It must have been a necessary part of out evolution- how else would a mother know the needs of her child, for instance? The child expresses no economic value on the marketplace.
So in regards to Objection 2, the difference is that only one of us is trying to use a standard measure of interpersonal utility comparison as the backbone for their assumptions. When I argue that transferring wealth from the rich to the poor increases net-utility, there’s no function I can plug a number into for this. This “utility calculation”, such that it even exists, is based on intuition, communication with other humans, and personal experience. And if that sounds ridiculous, well, I think it beats making an analysis that relies on an unproven assumption (that the dollar represents standard utility) that tends to grind against all of our utility-comparing evolutionary instincts.
We could take a poll of people in countries all over the world, and ask them “is a dollar worth more to a starving man who wants to buy a loaf of bread, or to a billionaire”, and I am sure the outcome would be unambiguous. And yes, this interpersonal utility comparison can’t be quantified; if we asked them “well how much more is it worth?”, we’d probably get blank stares and confusion. But to insist on finding and using standard unit of quantification, despite good evidence that this standard unit is deeply flawed, is just looking where the light is.
Which is why I said “as a rule.”
Yes. Of course. What does that have to do with the question of whether, at the individual level, the right rule is to maximize value defined by individual willingness to pay?
You have something that you very much want—you would be willing to pay a hundred dollars for it. As it happens, it is for sale for a thousand dollars, which is more than its value to you. Fortunately (from your standpoint) you have the alternative of stealing it. Doing that will require you to spend a day casing the joint, breaking in at night, etc. The same amount of legal effort could earn you fifty dollars. So rule B implies that you steal it. We’re applying rule B to maximizing value for one individual at this point.
I wrote:
You replied:
I was talking about the criterion you had asserted and I had attacked, which was not maximizing utility but maximizing health outcomes. The problems I offered had to do with health outcomes not utility.
As I thought would be clear by my examples, maximizing economic value at the individual level is a good, although not perfect, proxy for maximizing utility. It is a better proxy than maximizing health outcomes because it includes the value of health outcomes along with value of everything else the individual values, whereas maximizing health outcomes ignores all the other things the individual gets utility from.
I wasn’t arguing against utilitarianism. I agree with you that interpersonal comparisons are possible, although we don’t have a very good way of making them. I will be happy to discuss why I think maximizing economic value may be the closest to maximizing utility that we can construct institutions to achieve, an issue that goes back to Marshall, who was a utilitarian, but that wasn’t the point I was arguing.
What you wrote, again, was:
Do you now agree that that is false? If you want to maximize utility you do care about economic value. Caring about it doesn’t mean that you favor whatever increases it, any more than caring about health outcomes means that you favor whatever increases them.
My misunderstanding. I thought by “willing to pay”, you meant strictly “willing (and able) to purchase on the market”, not including non-consensual transfers. So yes, definitely going with rule B for the individual level now.
This is the core of our disagreement, I think. In this whole previous conversation, people been claiming to calculate net-value by using dollars as standard proxy unit. This is what I object to.
You’ve convinced me that I was perhaps being flippant in disregarding the concept as a whole. But still, the question of the best economic institutions necessarily operates at the society-wide level. There’s really no way to talk about “maximizing economic value” in a political way that doesn’t involve interpersonal utility comparisons. And the standard use throughout not just this thread, but most discussions anywhere, is to use the phrase “economic value” as shorthand for “aggregated economic value, with dollars as the standard unit”.
But yes, if you mean “economic value” strictly in the individual sense, as you describe in rule B, I would agree it is good.
Thank you–it is a rare pleasure to argue with someone willing to admit when he was wrong.
That’s a slight exaggeration. In some cases, one is comparing alternatives which don’t redistribute. Suppose, for instance, that we are considering a law requiring everyone to buy health insurance providing certain benefits, but not providing any sort of subsidy, price control, or the like. The immediate effect is to force someone to spend money on health insurance even if there are other things he would rather spend it on.
Even then there are some complications, since one could argue that if he is uninsured and gets sick someone else will end up paying for it–but consider the case in a society sufficiently heartless so they won’t. Also, the law increases the demand for medical services, raises their price, and redistributes some from patients to doctors. So assume a world where the supply of doctors is perfectly elastic.
At least in that artificial but not logically inconsistent context, one can prefer the solution with higher economic value without worrying about interpersonal comparisons.
I agree that in most contexts, arguing for maximizing economic value from a utilitarian position gets you into interpersonal comparisons. But, as I pointed out a little earlier, that problem arises with your earlier policy of arguing for maximizing health outcomes, since there too you have to decide how to compare health outcomes across people. Indeed, you have a second problem that economic value doesn’t–deciding what the tradeoff is for different health outcomes for a single person.
This OT is winding down, so perhaps at some point we should explore in another one what to me is the interesting question, which has nothing in particular to do with health. In designing social institutions, is there, from a utilitarian standpoint, a better maximand to aim at than economic value (aka economic efficiency)?
You might be interested in the discussions in Chapter 15 of my webbed Price Theory and Chapter 2 of my webbed Law’s Order. But there are additional arguments relevant to the general proposal for income redistribution to increase utility.
I’ll look into these chapters and get back to you at some other time.
Thanks again for the level-headed discussion- it’s always a pleasure.
The ACA seems to have succeeded in moving a lot of people from the category of “uninsured” to “insured” in a way that is mostly not financially ruinous.
Whether it has actually delivered “affordable care” to anyone who didn’t already have it (other than the small group with chronic, previously uninsurable conditions) is much more dubious.
The “affordable” plans still cost hundreds of dollars a month per person and have huge deductibles for anything other than “preventative care” (the value of which is often overstated – outwardly healthy 20 and 30 somethings getting routine physicals is basically wasteful make-work). The premiums are subsidized for the low-income, but then they are basically back where they started, paying out of pocket for most care to meet the deductible.
In any case the ACA does not seem to have done anything to “bend the cost curve”. Health care is just as expensive (and getting pricier) as ever, we’ve just lightly shuffled how paying for it gets distributed.
Didn’t that largely consist of young adults for whom insurance was a bad deal to start with, a worse deal after the ACA, by limiting how much more insurance companies could charge for older customers, forced the young to subsidize the old?
Both, obviously. The ACA has real and substantial consequences beyond being a symbol of Obama’s victory, and people can support or oppose it on that basis. Before anyone had ever heard of Barack Obama, Republicans were talking about a range of vaguely ACA-like things and saying either “this will do bad things and we should oppose it” or “this will be less bad than what the Democrats will otherwise shove down our throats, so we should try to preempt them with it”. Then it turned into ‘Obamacare’, making it both personal and political at the same time.
If a thing has no substantive effect other than to symbolize the victory of one faction over another, then of course the other faction will vehemently oppose spending tax money on it, and that will be the end of it unless the winning faction has the power to basically write budgets to their own demand. Which is by design a rare and difficult thing in the United States.
Was that a back-and-forth? I took brad to be agreeing with me and expanding on my point.
I will say that I don’t completely love the analogy because a statue of Barack Obama would to some extent symbolize only the man Obama, while a border wall would, I think, much more pointedly symbolize not just Donald Trump, but also his immigration policy specifically, including the non-wall and non-border-security parts of his immigration policy.
Fair, but whatever it’s flaws I still think it is a much better analogy than the ACA. Love it or hate it I don’t think anyone thinks the ACA was of predominantly symbolic consequence. Death panels is a significantly different objection to expensive middle finger to the world.
Agreed.
in terms of actually making people healthier, yes, I think the ACA was predominantly symbolic. It spent an enormous amount of money, there is little to no solid evidence that it made people healthier on average, but, hey, it did royally piss off those benighted red staters.
Making people healthier on average isn’t the only possible benefit of a health-care law. Reducing cost and uncertainty are tangible, substantial benefits that could plausibly be achieved by something like the ACA.
And when determining whether a thing is “symbolic”, what matters is not what it actually accomplished but what was plausibly intended by the people behind it. Operation Barbarossa wasn’t a symbolic gesture of Germany’s contempt for Russia; it was a serious material effort to actually conquer Russia that just happens to have failed. I have no reason to doubt that many backers of the ACA seriously intended to materially reform the US health care system.
But by that metric, the wall is a serious attempt to make sure that all visitors to the United States are people that we have vetted to ensure they will be a benefit, if only short-term.
@John Schilling says:
Sure but the evidence it did either is considerably weaker than the evidence that a wall makes crossing a border more difficult
just as the backers of a wall seriously intend it to materially improve the border crossing situation.
It’s kind of unusual for a brand new poster to begin his posting career here with so many aggressively partisan posts, no?
Do you mean me or wunderkin?
I’ve been posting semi-regularly for a while, on both non-partisan and partisan topics.
Yeah, I recognize your nym EchoChaos.
Did anyone here listen to the NYT Daily’s interview last week with Will Hurd, Republican Congressman from the big border congressional district in Texas? I’d be interested to hear what people thought. I’m a Democrat and I was impressed.
My impression listening to him is that despite the insane level of posturing going on right now, that a large portion of Democrats and Republicans agree about the components of a plan to address border security. These include more staffing, technology, legal system resources, a plan to address the real crisis in the northern triangle, and in some areas, strengthening or adding physical barriers. Most of the folks who are deep in the weeds on these issues seem to agree that “wall” is the least part of a solution, but that in some areas “wall” has been and will be helpful, as long as it comes with these other components.
Will Hurd sounded pragmatic, non-ideological, and entirely reasonable. I don’t usually feel that way when I listen to politicians talk about anything. The impression I had is that the grownups on this issue, the ones who have done serious work on it for decades, have solutions and agree about many of the solutions, and the solutions sound both reasonable and feasible.
There are bigger questions and deep disagreements about immigration policy in general in this country, but “border security” seems to be an issue that in the actual details, a lot of policymakers agree on.
I don’t care whether the ACA was seen as an “Obama vanity project” to his opponents and I don’t care about whether “wall” is seen as a “Trump vanity project” by his opponents. I’m interested in whether policies are solving real problems.
From where I sit, protection for people with pre-existing conditions was a real solution to a real problem. I work in healthcare and I see the effects of that. I don’t work in immigration or national security, but I’m willing to believe the people who do work in those areas when they say “the courts can’t handle this volume” or “most of the heroin is coming through deep ports and more Coast Guard staffing would address that.”
I’m very interested in all of us being able to have better conversations, so I do get particularly frustrated when the national conversation advanced by our leaders is essentially “wall is good like wheel” and “wall is about Trump’s small penis.” I mean, my god, really, is that the best we can do?
Yes. A national conversation by definition can’t be all that sophisticated. It’s gotta be lowest common denominator stuff. I don’t think there are good examples of a national conversation ever being sophisticated. I’d be interested in an example really. Though it’s a fuzzy term.
Do you maybe mean a conversation, where only the wise, skilled, virtuous, generous, kind and insightful speak and in good faith and with an open mind?
Yes precisely, and let’s silence everyone else. No no, let everyone speak. Just let’s maybe defer a little more to the ones who know what they’re talking about because they’ve been working for a long time on whatever the stuff is. More listening, less random opining.
On a related note, this conversation about the Symbolism of the Wall has led me to the proposal that we form a parallel U.S. Government of Symbolism, with a parallel presidency and legislature charged only with hashing out issues pertaining to symbols. And let us require that they make all decisions by consensus rather than majority rule. Then meanwhile, back over at the regular U.S. federal government, anytime an issue comes up that is mainly about symbols, it gets referred over to that parallel structure for endless discussion so that what’s left behind for the regular government to work on is solutions to real life problems. I know, I know, terms and definitions and whatnot, but it’s a beginning.
We’ve never had good government, only less of it. I don’t believe in the possibility of good government, the concept seems to lack empirical support. So I doubt that your dual system would work. We’d get one symbolic government and another that turns quickly into what we have now.
A part of the problem is that you’d be making a deal with Trump, whose record is just taking your money and riding into the sunset with it, and never upholding his part.
Given the stories of how he has stifled contractors and refused to pay, why would the democrats risk a deal with him, particularly if Trump tweets at least once a week insulting them.
At least the music store owner has the excuse that Trump never tweeted insulting him to say he didn’t realize Trump was going to just refuse to pay him.
Is it fair to look at the degree of opposition to a border wall, and the seeming lack of willingness to compromise, and conclude that the Democrats believe that the wall is actively harmful to the nation, beyond just not wanting to allow Trump to have a political win?
Since no one is answering this explicitly, yes, I believe the wall is actively harmful to the nation. Immigration is one of the most important things that makes America great, and higher immigration would solve a great many of our problems. A wall tells the world that immigrants are not welcome.
This is not to say that I wouldn’t trade it for something, but it would have to be something fairly significant.
This question is honest, not malicious, but do you not think that America was great before the great waves of immigration in the mid-late 1800s or between 1920 and 1960?
Most people point to those periods as the most American periods and definitional to our country. The Era of Good Feelings, the Roaring Twenties, the Second World War, heck even the Depression we came together as Americans to fix our problems.
I don’t think pointing to the early to mid-20 century as a “great time”, notable for the Great Depression, apocalyptic World Wars, and roving bands of domestic racial terrorists, is going to be convincing for anyone on the left.
The “golden years” reputation is just from nostalgia from those who lived it, and the difficulty in separating 50’s-60’s television re-runs from real life for those who didn’t.
I didn’t say it was a great time. I said America was great during it.
Those are two entirely different statements.
In World War II America was great during a difficult time.
In the Great Depression America was great during a difficult time.
To me, obviously the fact we allowed virtually no immigration during those two decades did not reduce our greatness.
If you think that America can’t be great without allowing large numbers of immigrants you need to say that we weren’t great then.
What was great about america during the great depression? We elected our only president for life who spent several years making things worse, undermined longstanding democratic norms, and lied us into a war. He did these things with excellent personal style, admittedly, and I even agree with some of those decision, but I fail to see anything great about our conduct.
When talking about domestic affairs, the things that happen within a country are not inseparable from the country they are happening in. The Great Depression, for instance. Is your position that: “America was great, it was just the ideas, policies, and behavior of Americans that led to the Great Depression- those were bad”.
I think the Great Depression is evidence that America was not, in fact, great at the time. Particularly because economic historians tell me the problem originated within in the United States.
I am actively stunned. We are speaking such different languages I don’t really know what to think.
I disagree with FDR in virtually all his economic policies and think they were foolish. But they were the foolishness of genuinely wanting to help fellow Americans, a greatness of spirit in a country with a foolish decision in how to implement that.
Do you think that America’s greatness is solely defined by Presidents or policy?
Because to me America’s greatness is her people, and they were as great in the 30s as ever, and their greatness showed, no matter how foolish the way.
In order for the word “great” to have meaning, you have to have examples of “not-great”. To say “Americans were great in the 30s, but then again they are always great” dilutes the word into meaninglessness.
I can point to times in U.S. history where (in my opinion) the attitudes/behavior of American were worse than in other times in U.S. history. And these low points are what I’m calling “not great”.
Sure. Germany in the 1930s wasn’t great. The Soviet Union wasn’t great. Maoist China wasn’t great.
America has been great from 1776 to present. We’ve done some shitty stuff during that time period, but if you believe America is ever great, then whether we’re accepting immigrants at any particular period is not to me an important component of that greatness.
The Soviet Union legally had purely open borders under Lenin (Stalin cracked down on them). Doesn’t make the Soviet Union under Lenin great.
Are you a true “open borders” advocate, or are you okay with preventing illegal crossings as long as it’s not done with physical barriers? It’s that second distinction I find hard to justify.
Physical barrier opposition can be rationally justified in three ways:
1) They act as barriers to animals, too.
2) Implementing them requires the forceful taking of private property which has other uses.
3) Implementing them over the entire border requires either impeding on Native American sovereign land, or walling up those reservations entirely. Either way you’re either seriously screwing with their sovereignty and right to move within their lands, or turning them into the neck of a funnel.
Those are practical concerns, not moral ones. Or at least, the moral issues implicated are related to side effects of wall-building, rather than the mere fact of including physical barriers in your immigration control scheme.
I do not think $5.6 billion of “wall” — whatever that ends up actually meaning in the end — is harmful to the country. I think it won’t amount to a hill of beans, symbolically or pragmatically.
I do think it’s harmful that a president be allowed to hold the government — including its employees and its citizens — hostage in order to circumvent the constitutional powers of Congress when he cannot get what he wants. And I think it’s harmful when legislators do not behave as an independent branch of government, bringing bills to the floor for a vote, so the president can veto and make a case for his veto or not, when all indications are that there are votes for a bill to pass.
The harm currently being done, to my mind, is to our system of governance, and it’s not clear to me how easily this harm is later repaired. Up against that harm, $5.6 billion of literal, symbolic, metaphorical wall is utterly insignificant and will be quickly forgotten. With or without a few more hundred miles of border wall, we will still be a country that is deeply confused, ambivalent, and conflicted over immigration policy, and we will continue to be a destination for desperate families fleeing violence and for huge amounts of drugs. Those will still be our problems to figure out either way.
In what way is Trump circumventing the Constitutional powers of Congress?
He’s making a request that they put into their budget. If he were spending money without it being properly appropriated, THAT would be an enormous violation, but all he is doing is requesting that a specific appropriation be in the bill and threatening a veto if it isn’t. A veto that could absolutely NOT be overridden. Pelosi got a vote of 239-192, so even if 100% of Senators voted for it, there isn’t a margin to override a veto.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/03/politics/house-votes-shutdown-wall-spending-bills/index.html
Incidentally, the last President DID spend without appropriations, and the Court smacked him down for that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_House_of_Representatives_v._Azar
The current system is a mess. Destabilizing is probably help change it for the better. Or it possibly might, whereas business as usual guarantees more rot to accumulate, which might mean it will eventually die, taking more people with it when a real crisis comes along. A petulant president exposing weak points is better than a global pandemic killing millions and people later saying “Huh, those people sure didn’t do themselves any favors.”. I think for many people that was the promise of Trump. A severe blow to the dysfunctional status quo, messy as that is. A controlled, but more or less harmless forest fire.
What does severe damage to your system of governance really matter compared to the harm it does, when it’s unharmed? Does it matter, whether you beat a dead horse or one that’s more interested in kicking you in the face and eating all your food, than it is in bringing you places? The current system is fat, old and downright malicious and that makes it fragile and an existential risk in it’s own right.
Don’t know if Trump is good or bad in the end compared to whatever Clinton would have done. Because I just have no good way of gauging existential risks
But when planes can’t fly, because the TSA isn’t showing up, I think good, maybe people will see that they’re just in the way.
When the planes are grounded, maybe people will see that who’s just in the way? What are they in the way of and how does getting them out of the way help?
In a controlled burn, the people doing it know a lot about the ecosystem they’re in, they have data from prior burns, they have subject-specific knowledge and skills, and they have a plan. It’s a science and engineering kind of endeavour.
Wanting to generally burn things down and hoping that it somehow leads to some better kind of a thing, that’s just rage. Rage is a normal, primitive kind of human emotion, but I don’t think it helps to mistake it for a controlled burn or for any kind of strategy for change.
Oh, sry that might have sounded bit angsty. i don’t care whether things burn down, but I’ve got the suspicion that if everything breaks down now, ot could be better. I’m thinking about Iceland which didn’t get a bailout during the Euro crisis and in short order all it’s banks went bankrupt. Harsh, but it recovered from it quickly. Then there’s Greece, who got bailout after bailout with worse and worsening conditions. And it malingered for decades, it’s national pride utterly humiliated with it being told what to do. I very much bet on endless horror vs horror without end. The USA reminds me of Greece. Less directly corrupt, much more callous though.
@Chalid
Immigration from the South made America great? I thought that’s what made you guys so fat.
As an European I wouldn’t feel more or less welcome as a potential immigrant. A wall really shows “You are not welcome” to Mexicans and other South Americans. Don’t think Canadians, Chinese or Africans would care either. We (Europeans) just don’t come in larger numbers, because we specifically aren’t welcome. Immigration and naturalization is a years-long arduous process, that only filters for the best and the ones with the most endurance. Or at least people with a college degree, which you apparently don’t need from Latinos. Also American college costs money and is weird.
Not saying you must have us, it’s fine whatever, but uhm…..the world is larger than just south of the border.
America is not welcome to anybody, but illegal Southern border crossers in a certain sense and “the world” does not harbor any delusions in that regard.Why would it?
I’m skeptical the wall will have much effect on how welcome immigrants feel. After all, we have had border patrol and INS/ICE raids on employers and illegal immigration as a political topic for decades, and we still have lots of immigrants, whose kids all end up speaking perfect English and being generic Americans who also speak Spanish (and whose kids will learn a few words to speak with their grandparents).
@Chalid
I didn’t mean to say, that Americans are unfairly discriminating against Europeans, in fact, I suspect they like European immigrants more than Latino immigrants.
But the American system just really hates people emigrating and doing it illegally has very little upside for Europeans, but does so for Hondurans, Mexicans and so on. Making illegal immigration harder by wall has absolutely no bearing on people, who wouldn’t have anything to gain from illegal entry.
So I think the argument is just a bit off or dishonest.
Because you’d really have to make the argument, why America is loosing out by being less welcoming to illegal, low-skilled immigrants, who don’t mind breaking your laws (not that I blame them, it makes perfect sense for them to do) and why they are important for America’s greatness. What do you see in those people specifically, that you would like to see more of in America? Because that’s what the wall is about.
Not about some vague idea of America being a welcoming place, because the hell it isn’t.
Because the way I see it, America’s greatness did not stem from Latin immigration, but mostly from European and Asian immigration. Broad strokes of course.
Sorry for being a bit sarcastic with the TexMex/fat American joke.
When Americans are discussed, it quickly turns to those. Probably should not do that, when talking to Americans.
I wasn’t going to say anything originally, but… ouch 🙁
@Hoopyfreud
Yeah, I talk like that in person, but tone, a playful context and timing makes stuff like that work (without me making people either cry and/or wanting to punch me). But since all that is lost in text and many people can read this… I inevitably sound like a total jerk to someone, if not everyone. I don’t know, gotta figure that out, I guess.
Sorry, about that one 🙁
Sometimes I realize stuff like that hours later and wish I could still delete.
The analogy with the statue is false, because a giant Obama statue would be viewed as silly by everyone whereas the wall would cause feelings of winningness and losingness on the respective sides due to its connection to policy (even if it’s actually purely symbolic). It’s difficult to come up with an exact analogy, because there’s no group I can think of with a relation with Republicans like immigrants have with Democrats. Maybe imagine if Obama had an expensive plan to tear down statues of Confederate heroes and replace them with ones of civil rights activists or something.
One could see the goal of “expanding coverage” despite repeated studies that that has little to no impact on health as something similar. See the ACA discussion a bit further up the thread.
Sandor’s comment on the past thread was in reply to me, but I’ll reply here since that thread is mostly dead.
I kind of reject the premise, both of sandor’s comment and brad’s reply. I don’t deny that there is symbolism associated with the wall one way or another, both in the barrier itself (but again, there is lots of imposing looking barrier already in place that Democrats voted for) and in Trump succeeding in building it. But my objection is not to “Democrats are against Trump’s Wall”. I also don’t object to practical arguments about the utility of the wall. My objection is to Pelosi and Schumer’s argument that “walls are immoral”, and the whole general thrust of “border barriers are racist, full stop”.
This is hyperbole, demagoguery, and scare-mongering, and these same Dems frequently call out Trump when he uses such tactics. And walls weren’t “immoral” or “racist” when the same Dems were in favor of border barriers and tougher stances on illegal immigration. So it’s also hypocrisy twice over.
So yes, it’s about symbolism, but it’s mostly the symbolism of base politics, of keeping the other guy from scoring a win against you.
To brad’s example – it’s perfectly reasonable for the GOP to be against Obama’s $10B colossus. But for one thing, there is at least an argument to be had over border security, and I do think substance matters somewhat. For another, if “$10B colossus” had been a key part of Obama’s campaign that he’d won election on, it would be hard to fault him for attempting to deliver on a campaign promise (still okay to fault him for a dumb idea in the first place). Same goes here… whatever happened to “elections have consequences”?
Addendum: On the “symbolism” front, I think trying to draw a fine distinction between “a wall” and “an unusually sturdy fence patrolled by men with guns” from a moral / symbolic standpoint is silly and self-serving. Someone getting arrested at gunpoint still dripping from the Rio Grande is every bit as symbolic as the same person trying to scale a wall. You’re either in favor of preventing people from freely crossing borders or you aren’t – how you go about accomplishing that is just details.
I thought part of the argument is over the kind of border barriers, and the particular stances to immigration.
The claim is that it’s more than just details.
That’s a lot of parsing to read into “walls are immoral”.
See my addendum – from a moral standpoint, what’s the difference between preventing people from crossing with a concrete wall, or with a series of tall, closely spaced metal slats (in both cases, backed by armed agents)?
If the way you keep out illegal Mexican immigrants is by letting them cross the border then spotting them and deporting them, that’s almost bound to result in legal residents who look Hispanic getting hassled, occasionally deported. Similarly if the way is by pressuring employers to make sure their employees are legal.
So a wall is less racist than the alternative way of achieving the objective it claims to achieve.
It’s also likely true that the people most deterred by a wall are the ill-prepared and the young/old/weak who, without a wall, might be tempted to try and cross the inhospitable desert and die.
> in both cases, backed by armed agents
Authorized to do what? If they can only use force to defend themselves/other from severe bodily harm, it’s status quo where you have to put effort into capturing the crossers, care for them, and put them through a long adjudication process.
If they can use lethal force to stop anybody crossing the border at somewhere other than an authorized and marked border crossing I think will be far more effective. But I don’t think that this is politically palatable.
Well there’s been another election since Trump took office – does that not get to have consequences?
There was one in 2010 where the Democrats got absolutely murdered. Worse than 2018 was for Republicans.
ACA is still the law, last I checked.
The ACA was passed into law before the 2010 elections. If Trump had managed to build the wall in 2018, it would still be the wall. If he had managed to enact and fund wall-building legislation in 2018, it would probably still be the law – there’s a strong status quo bias in the US political process.
There hasn’t been a presidential election, and the president absolutely has the power to veto spending bills that don’t fund his preferred policies. Obama certainly did, which is part of why ACA still stands. Obama had the advantage of his policy already being law, so he could let the government muddle on with continuing resolutions – it’s harder to defund something through shutdown chicken than fund something new.
I mean, Trump absolutely can be faulted for waiting until now to push his wall, but it’s hardly crazy for him to want to deliver before his campaign for 2020 starts in earnest.
@gbdub
Hyperbole, yes. Hypocrisy, sure. But demagoguery and scare-mongering, I think those are bridges too far. I think that’s some hyperbole from you.
I don’t see why bare plausibility, and I agree it’s there, changes the calculus much. It’s perceived to be a monument to Trump’s ego and disdain for the world. If the GOP perceived something to have been a monument to Obama’s ego it would have been a similarly “sacred value” level thing to oppose it. That’s human nature, and it’s a very gray tribe type blindness to say “what’s $5B in a budget of $2T, why not trade that off for a minor policy win?” while ignoring that human nature element.
I don’t really see what you mean. By all means he can try to deliver on his campaign promise, but the Democrats in the House were elected too. And just because you can’t blame him for trying doesn’t mean you can’t blame him no matter what that trying involves.
Isn’t “my opponents are all ipso facto racist” kind of a central example of demagoguery? And what are all the comparisons between Trumpism and fascism but trying to scare people into thinking that we’re mere steps away from sending Mexicans and Muslims to gas chambers?
I don’t disagree with anything in your last paragraph.
I guess funny isn’t the right word, but it’s a striking difference in perspective that my mind would far sooner have gone to a a racist whipping up hatred against a different race as a central example of demagoguery, than to all my opponents are racist as such an example.
@brad
Some people need a reminder that their favorite politicians really, really, love whipping up outrage for stupid, false reasons too.
Yes, it’s a fair point. My observation was not intended as a criticism. I think it is interesting on a cognitive biases level.
I said it was a central example, not the central example.
In my mind both racism and calling everyone a racist are subsets of the same superset, “argument from my opponents aren’t worth engaging as people”.
In either case, it’s an emotional rather than logical appeal, hence demagoguery. It’s not weird that you’d think of “racist” first, just since some of the most famous demagogues have been racists. It’s a blindspot if you don’t recognize that calling the outgroup racist tickles the same sublogical tribal center in the brain as calling them [racial slur].
Sooo, the other day someone mentioned spoilers for Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated to me, and now I’m checking it out. I have almost no previous knowledge of the franchise (I didn’t have Cartoon Network until like 1999, by which time I was too old for the old shows they ran incessantly before raising the capital for original shows), but this is surprisingly intelligent. It starts with the Scooby Gang as high school students in Crystal Cove, California, “The Hauntedest Place on Earth”, doing their old formulaic gig of revealing that the monsters are actually men and women scaring the locals to cover up money-making schemes. This time, though, there’s a story arc with a previous generation of “Mystery Incorporated”, where the gang’s Fred and the sapient parrot turn out to be arc villains. But why did they go bad? Because
ZV vf oebhtug gbtrgure ol n fcvevghny Ragvgl gb or vgf hajvggvat cnjaf. Gur Ragvgl’f snibevgr gnpgvp vf gb znavchyngr gur arhebaf zrqvngvat gur fva bs terrq, juvpu pnhfrq gur cneebg Cebsrffbe Crevpyrf gb orgenl uvf uhznaf, oernxvat hc gur Tnat naq znxvat gur Serq zngher vagb n plavpny cnja. Nccneragyl gur Ragvgl jvyy or qrsrngrq orpnhfr n qbt’f frafr bs terrq bayl nccyvrf gb sbbq, znxvat Fpbbol gur vapbeehcgvoyl cher Fnzjvfr gb uvf Fnheba.
So how does the Scooby Gang react to discovering real supernatural entities? They all apply to Miskatonic University when they graduate high school.
I really enjoyed it, but it was definitely a weird series. By marketing it was for kids, but they had a shot-for-shot remake of the Red Room including the gibberish language from Twin Peaks, using the original actor. Like, who the fuck is the intended audience for this?
Holy shit it’s real
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97AKy7mViBg
I don’t know how I feel.
It actually gets weirder; I hesitated to talk about that scene, because the way the show is structured the weirdness creeps up on you, so that’s sort of spoilers. The plots of the earlier episodes are similar in structure to the old Scooby-Doo series, and it gradually introduces the real strangeness bit-by-bit. Once they introduce H.P. Hatecraft in the middle of the first season–played by Jeffery Combs, who was the titular character in Re-Animator–it starts to take off.
By the end of the series, gurl’er qrnyvat jvgu n shyy-ba Ybirpensgvna zbafgre naq juvyr jbexvat gb svtug vg bar bs gur punenpgref trg’f rkrphgrq jvgu n znpuvar tha. Vg’f pneevrq bhg ol Anmv ebobgf npgvat ba gur beqref bs n gnyxvat cneebg, orpnhfr guvf *vf* fgvyy Fpbbol Qbb, ohg lrnu, gung unccrarq.
I assume that it’s intended for the creators, who got hired to make a kids show, got bored with it, and decided to cram in as much interesting stuff as they could get away with for their own amusement.
I’ve just finished the first H.P. Hatecraft episode, and I can only say the answer is “adult nerds.” Nothing in the episode is age-inappropriate, but it’s all about a Lovecraft expy and guest stars Harlan Ellison voicing himself and Ernesto Guevara singing a rock song about equal rights for Old Ones. If this show needed to appeal to kids to stay funded, I’m not seeing how!
There’s even a college-aged expy of Robert E. Howard and Hatecraft saying he pretended his monsters were real “to break into the lucrative world of plush toys.”
… also, while nothing in that episode is age-inappropriate, there’s a running gag that’s sexually-charged and requires knowledge of meme culture: Fred loves traps. He even has a subscription to Traps Illustrated, which he hides under couch cushions and insists “I only read it for the articles!”
So yeah, target audience = ???
Fucking what
Come on, folks, Parental Bonus is a well known trope! This is far from the first show to have jokes only adults would get; if you don’t believe me, watch some of your childhood favorites again.
@Hoopyfreud
I assume (maybe you already realized this) that the joke is supposed to be a play on words with the “traps” they encounter during their mysteries. Like a rug stretched over a pit, or a trip-wire, or something.
No, I mean, I get it, but also what
If this is proving anything, it’s that there must be a market out there after all for smart, funny Scooby Doo programming. Netflix, you know what you have to do.
I find it strange that they were able to get the original actor for a Scooby-Doo parody, but not for the new season of Twin Peaks.
Wait, Scooby Doo was set in Crystal Cove? I used to live a couple of miles from that place and go on hikes there.
EDIT: Read the articles you referred to, feel lied to in the same way you do.
Yep! They took a real town and explained its name as meaning the cove where Spaniards buried the crystal sarcophagus of an alien god, which is kind of nuts.
Like I said, I don’t know enough to say when this changed. Apparently there was a Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby-Doo in the early ’80s with real ghosts and Vincent Price playing himself as a warlock.
Scott, Tim Minchin lied to you! Pay close attention to the original Scooby Doo, Where Are You!: there is a gag every episode involving an unrelated supernatural phenomenon, which Scooby and Shaggy either don’t notice, or confuse for the villain of the week. The real story of Scooby Doo is a gang of flat earth atheists stumbling from one haunted mansion to another, snooping around just long enough to find a mundane counterfeiter or treacherous relative after a fortune.
If we ignore certain crimes against humanity, then it’s not until they’re adults that they face the occult forces eating away at the outskirts of their world.
I don’t recall that. As I recall, most episodes would end with every apparently-supernatural detail being explained, but sometimes there’d be an extra bit where after the villains were caught the supernatural phenomenon would recur, freaking the gang out until Scooby took off the mask, laughing. Or Shaggy would ask about one bit which would remain unexplained.
Let me give you an example: this scene from a collection of clips by Warner Bros. A disembodied hand taps Velma on the shoulder. She, Shaggy, and Scooby notice it and run. The monster comes round the corner, wondering where his prey went. The hand is evidently not part of the wax phantom’s haunting—it actually interrupts his task of scaring the bejeezus out of them—and a disembodied, fully articulated hand that can appear out of nowhere sounds pretty supernatural.
I was reaching by saying it’s in every episode, but the gags generally happen when it’s Shaggy and Scooby and alone, and generally in the middle of the episode.
I have a deep and abiding fondness for the Scooby Doo franchise (our RPG group is fortunate I haven’t soapboxed about the greatest animated trilogy of all time yet), but I didn’t have cable when this show was airing, so I’ve largely missed it. Where are you watching it at?
It was on Netflix when I watched it, but it’s been a few years. I’m debating rewatching it if its still there.
I checked just now and Netflix doesn’t have it, right now at any rate. It’s “currently unavailable” on Amazon Prime Video too, but I guess I can do the 7-day Boomerang trial and binge it? Hm.
Nick: Yeah, free trials to binge a single paywalled show is the way to go. The downside of that is this has 52 episodes, way more than, say, Youtube Red’s Cobra Kai.
Thanks very much to:
@Le Maistre Chat,
@DavidFriedman,
@EchoChaos,
@Hoopyfreud,
@johan_larson,
@Incurian,
@theredsheep,
@Nick,
@Atlas,
@March,
and
@Don_Flamingo
for your kind suggestions for page and screen in the last thread.
A few of your suggestions I’m familiar with (and have indeed liked!), but by far most I didn’t know about.
Much appreciated!
You’re welcome! Let us know what you think of your discoveries.
Always happy to help!
A tony company in Silicon Valley has a problem. It’s a couple of decades old now, and many of its more experienced employees have grown very wealthy as the company’s share-price has soared. These people have easily enough money that they could just quit tomorrow, which is a problem because it makes them impossible to discipline. They also have so much critical knowledge of company systems that it’s impractical to just replace them with more pliable new staff.
The company has therefore asked for our help. They would like to encourage their senior employees to pursue activities that stretch the budgets of even millionaires and deca-millionaires, in order to keep these fellows mindful of their next paychecks. What activities would be suitable?
What is a tony company?
One that sells men named Tony.
You’d think that would be unconstitutional slavery, but maybe they just have great lobbyists?
Huh, I read toy company and thought ‘Meh, not in the mood for a challenge, that’s going to be that weird’ and stopped reading.
One that’s wealthy, influential, or highly respected. Probably all three. Think Microsoft in 1995 or so. (link)
Huh, that’s a new one. It sounds British to me for some reason, maybe just the unfamiliarity.
Thanks for the link!
It’s one of the bullshit words that was invented for the GRE.
Not to toot my own horn, but I picked up the vast majority of those “SAT words” just from reading a lot as a kid. Maxed out the verbal portion of both the SAT and GRE with minimal studying (math was a completely different story…).
Tony as an adjective was completely unfamiliar, to the point that I was reasonably sure it was a typo.
I’m familiar with the word, but still thought it was a typo because I wouldn’t typically apply it to company. I also thought it was British, but the OED calls it “Colloquial, originally US”:
1. Having a high or fashionable tone; high-toned, stylish; ‘swell’.
1877 R. J. Burdette Rise & Fall of Mustache 177 He’s a toney old cyclopedia on the patter.
1880 Harper’s Mag. Jan. 209/2 He just put on heaps of style..you know—regular tony.
1886 Pall Mall Gaz. 24 Sept. 5/1 Nevern-square, with its comfortable and, as the Americans have it, ‘tony’ residences.
1895 S. R. Hole Little Tour Amer. 270 Well you see, it is so toney.
1901 H. Lawson in Blackwood’s Edinb. Mag. Apr. 478/1 The furniture looked as if it had belonged to a tony homestead at one time.
1920 D. H. Lawrence Lost Girl xii. 299 The really toney women of the place came to take tea.
1922 J. Joyce Ulysses ii. viii. [Lestrygonians] 153 Theodore’s cousin in Dublin Castle. One tony relative in every family.
1959 D. Barton Loving Cup i. iii. 60 Have you got your dinner-jacket with you, old man?.. I’m afraid we’re very toney these days. We seem to get tonier.
1966 ‘J. Hackston’ Father clears Out 84 Father, dignified and collected,..entered the calm, cool tony atmosphere of the Commercial Hotel.
1982 A. H. Garnet Maze (1983) iii. 14 He was charming..what Cyrus’s mother used to call a ‘toney fella’.
It wasn’t new to me, but I couldn’t think of an etymology. Apparently it came from high-toned. Interesting that the connotations evolved separately.
@johan_larson,
I understood “tony” as meaning close to “ritzy”, “upscale”, “swanky” and the new term “posh, but I’ve watched many films from the ’40’s.
What is a tony company?
I assumed “high-toned” as in posh and swanky and appealing to the high-end, based on slang from hard-boiled detective fiction? Stylish and luxurious and in the best possible taste is their selling-point, whether or not they actually are or are only appealing to vanity and conspicuous consumption.
As to the company, their most immediate need is to translate that institutional knowledge either to “written down in a manual” or passed on by training a new generation, and enough of them so that in future no single employee can be so indispensable as to be able to go “eff you if I don’t get what I want, I’m walking and this place will collapse without me”. Maybe appeal to their vanity and self-importance by flattering them they will be mentors with a picked coterie of high-quality protegés, and depending or not if the whole “diversity inclusivity SJ” angle works, that these protegés will be “women’n’minorities” and the old hands can be flattered up to the eyeballs with all manner of awards and praise for “increasing diversity in tech” and the rest of it.
If they already have the fuck-off money, keeping them mindful of their next paycheques is not really going to work as a stick, so the carrot of “only you can do this Really Big Project (and here’s your very own team of minions to assist and be ordered around) (and we’re hoping you won’t realise we hope the minions will pick up enough of what you know so that if you decide to walk out in the morning we can keep going)” may be the way to go.
Hmm – Silicon Valley? Big fancy difficult expensive project? How about inventing the invisible runs on pixie-dust all-tech no humans customs border that means no hard border between the UK and the rest of the EU, most especially between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, that the British government was promising would make Brexit a breeze?
That’s easy. Status goods.
I was going to suggest second or third wives. Divorce gets expensive when there’s real money on the line.
That’s a high tax rate, which discourages high earnings.
Extreme skydiving. Mountain climbing on Everest. Yacht racing is always a favorite.
No need to worry about mere millionaires in SV, though, they’re struggling to make house payments.
If they die you lose their accumulated knowledge.
Early retirement.
If you are interested in the long term survival of the company, then replacing them is only a problem if they leave en masse. Ideally, you would get them to retire one at a time, after imparting as much critical knowledge to their replacement as possible.
That’s the wrong solution.
Google faced the problem some time back–the best of their early employees had gotten rich. The solution was to make the environment one that people would enjoy enough to stay working there even if the salary was not very important to them. That included lots of high quality free food, the option of spending a certain amount of their time on their own projects, and a variety of other things. Probably not true any more, the firm having expanded a lot, although I gather the food is still good.
Some more things along these lines that I think are important to retaining those of my acquaintance at companies like this:
— Pick-your-brain access during the workday to an incredibly wide variety of very smart people who know a lot about almost anything under the sun, not just techie things. If you want to learn from professional-level translators of poetry, or opera singers, or sommeliers (to pick a few non-hypothetical examples of which I have firsthand knowledge) you can find them among your coworkers. This is one of the best ways in which it’s “like college with a paycheck” as the cliche goes. Top-achieving large-tech-company folks tend to be the sort of perpetually curious polymaths for whom this is a particularly awesome benefit.
— Institutional support in time of need, at a level that can be tough even for most rich people to find. During the chaos of Travel Ban Attempt 1.0, tech companies were known to turn their world-class platoons of immigration lawyers to the task of getting affected employees back into the US. Similarly for employees caught up in civil unrest or natural disasters. Being an employee of one of these companies can feel in many ways like having an extra passport from a small rich country with a top-notch diplomatic corps, and now that Peter Thiel got bad press for doing it, it is much harder to go the New Zealand route to this.
— The chance to work on problems where not only do you have agency in choosing the problem, but you can use the company’s scale as an unsurpassed and hard-to-surpass impact multiplication lever. As much as Mike Judge and others like to parody it, and as much as they’re often right to do so, it really is true that many eminent techies are motivated strongly by the desire to make the world a better place. And it is just easier to do so, and a fortiori easier to feel you’re doing so, when you can launch things that immediately affect the lives of many millions of people, even though large-company bureaucracy makes those things harder to launch than they would be at a startup.
All of these things are *way* more important to retaining long-timers than any amount of money these companies could spend on traditional compensation.
As a Googler and a David Friedman fan, that last point is particularly important to me. I recall an aside in either _Machinery of Freedom_ or _Hidden Order_ (not sure which) to the effect that capitalism’s popularity suffers from most people’s inability to multiply by large numbers. The example given was something like: under capitalism, you can make big money by formulating a slightly tastier minty flavoring for toothpaste; capitalism’s critics would say that this is a waste of effort; but if you multiply the number of people who brush their teeth by a reasonable estimate of the increment of utility they get from the slightly tastier flavoring, you find that it’s not a waste at all.
I have spent a good deal of my time at Google laboring, often for long periods, to make changes that e.g. shave 10 milliseconds off the average time to perform some very commonly performed user action. When talking about how awesome I think it is to work at Google, I often argue: multiply that 10 milliseconds by the number of users who perform that action every day and reflect on how much time you’ve saved humanity in aggregate! I realize now that this is a compelling argument to me in significant part because of the toothpaste flavoring analogy. So, David: thank you for motivating me to do more good for the world in this incremental way!
I’m always happy to do good at zero marginal cost.
One of my friends programs for Google, and he says the time to work on his own projects was never available.
Anyone else have more information one way or the other?
It was available at one time (my older son has worked for Google on and off). I think it is normally not available now.
During my time at Google, I found 20% Time (as it’s called) to be for real. I heard about some people getting pushback from their managers about it, but I never did. That said, it was unpopular; less than 5% of Googlers participated. I got the impressions that whatever you did during 20% Time basically didn’t count at performance review time; you were assessed on your assigned work only. So if you were looking to advance, 20% Time was just a waste.
Were there people whose 20% time ended up producing something very valuable, making it a plus rather than a minus for their careers?
Not that I noticed among the people around me.
I seem to remember some major system was started on 20% time. Orkut, perhaps.
I explain to them that they don’t have to outrun the bear, they just have to outrun the alternatives. If working at TonyCorp will get them more money than an alternative option, give them more prestige, and make them even wealthier, they will do it anyway. And firing them will still be something they fear, since it forces them into one of those inferior alternatives.
Most people do not stop working because they get rich. They either demand their work gets more pleasant or move on to bigger challenges for even more money. If your company has grown enough to justify all those millionaires, neither is really a problem. Catered sushi lunches and big interesting problems with multi-million dollar payouts will keep them interested. And will make you more than you have to pay.
Charity is a standard answer.
Non-monetary incentives or replace them.
You got to make working there more appealing than fucking of and sitting on a beach. This is not so insurmountable a challenge as it seems, since mostly these people will be very interested in their area of specialty, so good food, nice office, reasonable hours and generally high morale will probably do it, even if you are never going to get another crunch sprint out of them.
If you cannot deliver on this, find replacements who are hungry.
Space tourism, maybe (tickets in the six figures per person)?
Private jets (expensive, and “fly without being groped” shouldn’t be a hard sell).
Encourage them to endow charitable foundations.
In the Bay Area, finding things for “millionaires” to spend money on is not very hard. It’s called a house.
Like, it’s probably around $5 million before you start getting large numbers of people saying, “Well, I just don’t want more house than this.” (Outside of the dedicated small-house enthusiasts). My friends just bought a $3 million house in Outer Sunset and, you know, it’s a nice enough 3 bedroom, but it’s not like you look at it and say, “Wow, there’s nothing that could make this house nicer. You could add more bedrooms, but who needs them?”
Now, if you’re trying to eat the wealth of someone who has $20 to $30 million, that’s somewhat harder, though it doesn’t seem that impossible. I think that the standard answer is just, like, “rich person culture,” where you start paying much more for goods that have only marginal improvements over very much more modestly priced alternatives, and that typically happens kind of organically. You know, that’s where that $5 million house doesn’t seem like it’s good enough anymore and you pay tons more for the perfect view or whatever it is you value. Where you start going on vacations that are not really that different from what you could do on a $5,000 budget, but spend $50,000 on them instead.
If your net worth is $30m, and you’ve sunk $5m into a house and are trying to live relatively conservatively on what cash the rest of the stuff can throw off at 3%, that’s $750k per year, taxed down 20% to $600k per year. You can eat that up pretty easily in the Bay Area with tuition for a couple of kids, a couple of expensive vacations a year, and then just generally living very well.
That might be true in San Francisco. In Los Gatos, at about two million dollars you can get as much house, in quite luxurious style, as anyone who doesn’t have a lot of kids would have much use for. That’s still very expensive, of course, but not quite as bad as your figure suggests.
It’s fun to use Zillow to compare housing prices in different areas–and leaves residents of the Bay Area feeling very jealous of people who live in New Hampshire.
I just checked on redfin, and I she with you, $2m seems to go much farther in Los Gatos, which kind of surprised me: I thought that Los Gatos was pretty expensive. I guess it’s fairly far from most non-Netflix jobs.
The peninsula is mostly as expensive as SF or more.
Judging by Zillow, San Jose, where we live, is probably a bit more than Los Gatos (where my son and daughter-in law were house hunting–why I’m familiar with prices there), but not hugely more.
Lots of parts of San Jose have bad school districts or kind of run down neighborhoods, though. And the nice parts of San Jose are quite expensive (albeit, yes, not as pricey as SF or the peninsula).
The main area my son and his wife were looking at was the unincorporated part of Los Gatos, up in the hills. As best I can judge, the schools there are very good.
I don’t know much about San Jose schools, but where we live is certainly not a run down neighborhood and, as best I can tell, a relatively small house costs about a million dollars. My guess is that you could do quite well for two million.
A better solution would be to set up an in house status competition rather than try to get them to make financially irresponsible decisions.
There’s always an internal status competition. The trick is to keep the losers from leaving, because someone’s still gotta do the work.
Too bad. I know when I’m on the bottom and arranged a more streamlined exit for myself.
Isn’t an in house status competition what Microsoft blames for a decade of underperformance?
In that it turns the game amongst employees from being positive-sum to zero-sum.
Collaboration quickly gives way to backstabbing when there’s 3 people in the plane but only 2 parachutes.
Stock options for 2x+ what they are worth now, that vest sometime in the future.
It’s one thing to think “I don’t need more money”. Psychologically it’s something else entirely to throw away gobs more money.
Their own vanity foundations to fund R&D into solutions to disease, education, climate change, etc. Isn’t that what their brethren at the top already do?
Then they get competitive bragging rights to how much they’ve been able to put into their foundations in any given year.
Cool idea. Motivating and at least somewhat useful.
I’ll again post the summary-of-Flynn-effect-developments link:
http://conversableeconomist.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-flynn-effect-rising-iq-scores-over.html
I think some people here may be interested in reading that.
If the U.S.A. has also experienced those loses it would be easy for ne to think of a social-economic correlation; but since the U S.A. is an outlier I’m stumped
Since they are looking at national averages, the first thing I would investigate would be immigration/emigration patterns.
The variations hold within families, which rule out compositional effects very thoroughly. I suspect declining quality of food – that is, more frozen dinners and the like is the most likely culprit, though there is also the ever present possibility that we are poisoning ourselves again, in great big leaded gasoline 2.0 event.
Reduction in physical exercise in the US? Has there been?
There was some discussion here recently about the nootropic effects of nicotine. Does the decline correlate to reduction in smoking at all?
I think the first thing I’d check is if there is anything that has been a new substantial change to our diet. For example, if the amount of grains relative to meat had changed dramatically from historical norms (in either direction).
Or if we’re eating a new calorie source a lot (lots of people love to blame Big Soy).
This widespread and cross familial has to be something environmental, I would think.
Wouldn’t this be the absolute expected situation? Genetic components of intelligence can’t possibly grow that fast, and environmental factors would top out fairly quickly (better food is only going to get so much better, etc.). I would expect a few solid generations of eating healthy (by historic standards) and being free from obvious deleterious effects would lead to the effect topping out.
Is there any reason to expect the Flynn effect to work permanently?
I think the issue isn’t “topping out”, it’s that in these countries it has begun to revert to the mean.