Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

thesaint.scot

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 223 posts

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#121

Post by Valgrim »

dgfitz wrote: post #93
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…

> 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…

The amount of people who "need" to rent for whatever reason is at least an order of magnitude smaller than the amount of people who are forced to rent because all available housing is for rent instead of for sale.

For example, there are a lot of people buying cars, and a lot less people renting cars, and for similars reason you stated above. If the housing market was balanced (as in not "completely cornered by landlords"), i'd expect a similar ratio of housing rental vs ownership, even taking into account the depreciating nature of cars.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#122

Post by Cederfjard »

civilized wrote: post #83
jl6 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no reason for my health to be harmed just because someone has more than me. Being angry all the time can harm your health. Maybe being envious all the time can too.

Then envious people can work on themselves, as we've always understood envy to be a moral problem.

Well, but is it possible that this is a very fundamental part of human psychology and thus not very easily overcome, especially on a societal level? Maybe we’re as hardwired to be stressed and anxious when we see someone else with more resources as we are to start looking for food when we’re hungry.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#123

Post by ashtonkem »

dnautics wrote: post #112
ashtonkem wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The period between 1945 and 1970 in the United States really stands out. Improving wages, narrowing gap of health outcomes across racial groups. It wasn’t a perfect time, but clearly metrics were getting better.

Conversely, we can observe the effects of policy since the 1970s and declare it to be a failure. Despite long periods of economic growth, income inequality continues to grow.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#124

Post by civilized »

Cederfjard wrote: post #122
civilized wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then envious people can work on themselves, as we've always understood envy to be a moral problem.

Well, but is it possible that this is a very fundamental part of human psychology and thus not very easily overcome, especially on a societal level? Maybe we’re as hardwired to be stressed and anxious when we see someone else with more resources as we are to start looking for food when we’re hungry.

Or maybe it's something people can and should get over, as many traditional moral systems have taught.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#125

Post by kansface »

pm90 wrote: post #96
civilized wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe it. I think it's woo. There's no reason for my health to be harmed just because someone has more than me. I'm open to being proven wrong, but I think this is another social science fad, another victim of academia's ideological blinkers and confirmation bias avalanche. It'll be in and out, just like how eggs and wine and chocolate are good for you on Tuesday and bad for you again by Thursday. EDIT: Yes…

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.

Just the opposite - consider the replication crisis. Our a priori belief should be that any published paper in the social sciences is junk without extremely compelling evidence to the contrary. This is an evidenced based position!

Or, let’s completely disregard the studies themselves and look at the fruits of their labors. Is eg education noticeably better now than it was a generation ago? Is our mental health better now than then, etc etc.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#126

Post by colechristensen »

rich_sasha wrote: post #119
colechristensen wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Landlords compete with aspiring homeowners, raising prices. Raising prices benefit landlords as what they get to charge for their “cost of capital” gains a higher proportion vs their cost of actually maintaining the property.

I’m talking explicitly about lowering the cost of housing by reducing the amount of capital in the market from landlords.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#127

Post by kiba »

meowkit wrote: post #97
civilized wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You may still be unable to afford to own a house in a clean, safe area with access to a decent school. That’s inequality, not poverty. But this sentence contains no reference to how X having more than Y caused Y to suffer. It contains a description of how Y could be better off if Y had more. If inequality was eliminated by making it so no one had access to safe schools, it would not solve the problem at all. If you…

I assume you don't know who Robert Sapolsky is in the parent comment. "how X having more than Y caused Y to suffer" is the observation of someone who is above you in the hierarchy of A (A is whatever measure you want, usually its financial wealth or social status). This involuntary comparison allows you to derive your relative position, and this is a biologically stressful activity when you are toward the bottom of t…

OK, but I don't care about the billionaires or the rich guy down the road having a big giant yacht.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#128

Post by dzikimarian »

kansface wrote: post #108
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…

There is no or next to no empirical correlation between school funding and outcome in the US. I’d go so far as to suggest this proposal has cause and effect reversed. The push to send everyone to college at literally any cost has been a generational disaster. The value of a college degree has steadily declined while the cost has increased faster than any other sector of our economy. It’s very hard for me to imagine m…

Increase in quality of education is something different than push for college degree just for sake of it.

Mentioned polarity in Poland, comes not from lack of college education, but from extremely poor understanding of economics, lack of basic personal budgeting skills, lack of critical thinking, vulnerability to cheap propaganda and manipulation techniques.

High school material at best.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#129

Post by WalterBright »

HideousKojima wrote: post #12

The study sounds like a crock of horseshit: "In this model, we assume that a large population of individuals comprises two distinct identity groups. These identities are assumed fixed, and thus correspond to a fixed feature of identity such as race, religious heritage, or socioeconomic background. Although such identities are fixed in the model, the salience of the identity, and therefore its impact on behavior, vari…

The left does indeed solve inequality, by making everyone poor. Such is the sorry history of communism.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#130

Post by kiba »

chongli wrote: post #67
kiba wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has to do with extremely poor land use policies combined together with bad incentive in the housing market, hence "robust" housing market as if it's something to be celebrated. I note that the San Francisco housing crisis has been ongoing for at least a few years if not longer according to the notes I have been taking.

Those land use policies come from nimbyism and a desire to “pull the ladder up behind you” that we see so often in our society. I think, and it sounds like the research supports, that inequality drives people to act more selfishly and this is the result we see.

No, the price of real estate must rise to enrich you. Can't having rising real estate price if you don't restrict housing.

It is in part an incentive problem.

If you institute a land value tax, we would reward the richest person around, because he makes the best investment, but he would also pay the greatest amount of taxes, because he bought the most productive or most desirable land.

Post reply on HN