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Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

thesaint.scot

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Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#111

Post by dnautics »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #79
rich_sasha wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is going to do the redistribution and how? It sounds nice, these people have too much and these have too little, let’s optimise. But redistribution via taxes imho leads to politicians having larger budgets for scoring political goals. And anyway how is it meant to work? If you equalise assets, you’ll find wealth drifting away from it again, as some eat through their assets and some invest/save. It’s a known effec…

> My personal answer, and seemingly not so popular, is education, at all stages. Former educator here, the problem with this idea is that educational outcomes are dominated by three factors: 1. More individualized education (smaller classes or tutors) 2. Children having a safe, well resourced home life 3. Smarter, less stressed teachers To get an idea of how strong (1) is it is useful to know of a result called Bloom…

Also it's not clear how to "do this correctly". The us spends more per Capita, inflation-adusted on education than it ever has in the past. Outcomes are not really getting dramatically better. The places that spend the most per pupil are often the worst school districts.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#112

Post by dnautics »

ashtonkem wrote: post #109
rich_sasha wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is going to do the redistribution and how? It sounds nice, these people have too much and these have too little, let’s optimise. But redistribution via taxes imho leads to politicians having larger budgets for scoring political goals. And anyway how is it meant to work? If you equalise assets, you’ll find wealth drifting away from it again, as some eat through their assets and some invest/save. It’s a known effec…

It’s kind of incredible that we now treat income inequality as this impossible to tackle problem with insurmountable difficulties, as if we don’t have over a century of experience of how policies can increase and decrease inequality in this country, let alone in other countries. We’ve literally done this before.

Do we? When was the last time a country decreased its Gini coefficient?

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#113

Post by hotpotamus »

ashtonkem wrote: post #109
rich_sasha wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is going to do the redistribution and how? It sounds nice, these people have too much and these have too little, let’s optimise. But redistribution via taxes imho leads to politicians having larger budgets for scoring political goals. And anyway how is it meant to work? If you equalise assets, you’ll find wealth drifting away from it again, as some eat through their assets and some invest/save. It’s a known effec…

It’s kind of incredible that we now treat income inequality as this impossible to tackle problem with insurmountable difficulties, as if we don’t have over a century of experience of how policies can increase and decrease inequality in this country, let alone in other countries. We’ve literally done this before.

I've found that American Exceptionalism is now defined as things we cannot do rather than things we can. Look at problems like gun violence or access to affordable health care. You'll be told that it is impossible for America to solve these problems that most other advanced countries have long had solutions to.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#114

Post by ashtonkem »

HideousKojima wrote: post #29
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say "wanted to do for over a century" yet "the left" has been reducing inequality for several centuries now, abolishing monarchy, aristocrary, slavery and such, introducing voting and democracy and human rights and all that kind of thing. People seem to generally like it.

Some of the earliest efforts to abolish slavery came from Catholicism, especially Catholic Spain and Portugal. Not really sure how the left can take credit for that, but whatever floats your boat

The catholic church’s involvement in the slave trade is much more complicated and morally ambiguous than you’re implying here. Popes have generally been consistent about the enslavement of Christians, but have waffled back and forth about the enslavement and transport of Africans and native Americans.

Never mind all those serfs the church used to have…

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#115

Post by danShumway »

WalterBright wrote: post #69
Barrin92 wrote: post #20

Worth reading Robert Sapolsky on the topic of inequality here[1]. Inequality itself (not poverty, and accounted for the material disadvantages ), causes about half of the difference in health and life expectancy outcomes in developed nations, makes people at a neurological level opportunistic and causes biological stress in populations which results in violence, crime, isolation, mental illness, and so forth. That's…

Maybe it's crime, violence, and mental illness that causes inequality.

Haven't we been doing "tough on crime" policy for decades now? We had the entire war on drugs, which we're really only just now collectively pulling back from and realizing was a mistake. We passed prohibition on alcohol. We did stop-and-frisk, all that crud. And our mental illness diagnoses and treatment processes are better today than they've ever been (even if the overall health care system is a mess). We know more about mental illness today than we did in the past, and we have more effective medication and psychological techniques for dealing with it. The overall reduction in violent crime over the long-term in America is a success story, we genuinely have made America safer and less violent. And yet, here we are.

So my question to anyone who acts like there's a very simple causal link from violence/crime/illness to inequality is, "why isn't your strategy working then?"

I think this kind of stuff is generally a lot more complicated than pointing to a single cause; I don't think that inequality is the single cause of every social problem. But if I am going to point to a single cause, it's probably not going to be based on the strategy that we aggressively targeted for multiple decades that didn't yield the results people are now promising. I get a little bit annoyed by people who keep saying, "no you don't understand, if we're even tougher on crime, then we'll see the results. We just haven't been tough enough yet."

At some point, it starts to feel more like "tough on crime" is a philosophy rather than a data-driven, falsifiable theory.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#116

Post by colechristensen »

tlogan wrote: post #101
colechristensen wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't directly redistribute. You set taxes and economic policies to target free-market wealth redistribution. That is, find instances where there is significant distribution of money from the poor to the rich and find ways to add friction to those markets. Like landowners renting out housing. Suck large amounts of money out of the housing market by taxing commercial loans used for residential real estate, doublin…

The problem with “just raise taxes solution” is that there is no guarantee that money from taxes is going to be evenly and correctly distributed and spent. This might work for relatively small and single-nationality countries.

The taxes wouldn’t be intended to raise money but to distort markets. Instead of worrying how the extra money could be spent a raised tax could offset a compatible tax break. I.e. raise taxes on landlords, lower taxes on owner occupied housing.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#117

Post by sib301 »

HideousKojima wrote: post #29
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say "wanted to do for over a century" yet "the left" has been reducing inequality for several centuries now, abolishing monarchy, aristocrary, slavery and such, introducing voting and democracy and human rights and all that kind of thing. People seem to generally like it.

Some of the earliest efforts to abolish slavery came from Catholicism, especially Catholic Spain and Portugal. Not really sure how the left can take credit for that, but whatever floats your boat

No one is taking credit, and surely you’re smart enough to understand that two distinct groups can simultaneously work to achieve similar goals.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#118

Post by pm90 »

civilized wrote: post #104
pm90 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You either believe in science or you don’t. A lot of scientific findings don’t make intuitive sense (like relativity). So we rely on the scientific methods to guide us to the truth rather than our primitive ape minds. Skepticism is part of the scientific method; but just saying “hmm it doesn’t feel right to me” isn’t really useful.

> Skepticism is part of the scientific method; but just saying “hmm it doesn’t feel right to me” isn’t really useful. Have you ever been a scientist? Scientists react this way to published research all the time, especially in fields like psychology where epistemic and empirical methods are weak.

The OP did not claim to be a social scientist so I assume they are a layperson and not a trained scientist.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#119

Post by rich_sasha »

colechristensen wrote: post #106
dgfitz wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have economists model how these things will actually effect the markets with the goal of turning residential housing into a bad investment and dropping prices. I imagine the costs would still get passed down to the tenants. Ignoring that for a second, rental housing isn’t “an evil thing that needs to go away.” Rental housing is very much a fundamental need for a lot of people. Military members who move every 3 year…

It's not "no more landlords", but removing many of them from the market, reducing competition. Many people want to own but are priced out of the market, and many people who do own end up leaving very large chunks of their incomes as bank profits. I'm focusing on the middle of the market where people would buy if prices were more affordable, not edges of the market where people would only buy if housing was basically…

Private landlords are basically lenders. The houses are there for anyone to buy. The landlords-to-be have the cash, or credit rating and scope for risk taking, to buy these houses and rent them out.

I’m not saying they are some kind of godsend, rather that they are present precisely because renters wouldn’t buy the houses they live in, for whatever reason. If you take away the private landlords, you’d need to find that capital elsewhere, and it seems poor people don’t have it.

State-owned housing? Mutual housing? Promoting good transport so people can live further out? Lots of solutions I think, but not sure adding friction to the current set up will do anything.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#120

Post by js8 »

Barrin92 wrote: post #20

Worth reading Robert Sapolsky on the topic of inequality here[1]. Inequality itself (not poverty, and accounted for the material disadvantages ), causes about half of the difference in health and life expectancy outcomes in developed nations, makes people at a neurological level opportunistic and causes biological stress in populations which results in violence, crime, isolation, mental illness, and so forth. That's…

See also the book The Spirit Level, which shows that inequality also negatively affects those who are well-off - they become stressed about their social standing too.

This is why naive explanations of inequality that blame the poor or the envious are false.

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