Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study • Hacker News Board

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#151

Post by ahoho » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 9:17 PM UTC

civilized wrote: post #140

ahoho wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, I think you're letting your view of academia distort your own thinking here. The mechanism isn't that complex. Anywhere resources are limited can lead to outcomes where an unequal society is worse off than an equal one. If I have a finite supply of doctors, for example, then the wealthy will be the ones who receive care while the poor go without. The wealthy also tend to set up systematic barriers to ensu…

This is just your speculation. A bunch of other people in this comment tree say it's not about outcomes in an unequal society being worse than outcomes in a (hypothetical, possibly unachievable) equal society with the same resources. Instead it's about a hardwired biological stress response that people lower in the social hierarchy have when they observe people higher up. So before we go lecturing about how it "isn't…

Where's the speculation? I shared a concrete example. Places without that method of funding have more equitable education systems.

I'm not really concerned what others are saying. You made the claim that "There's no reason for my health to be harmed just because someone has more than me." I just gave an intuitive explanation of how this could happen. And you can see this happening on a global scale: wealthy countries attract more higher-skilled workers, like doctors. These are educated, capable people not contributing those skills to their home countries (to be clear, I wholeheartedly support open immigration policies, but that doesn't mean "brain drain" isn't real).

EDIT: ah, I was not reading carefully, and realize you are saying "I see no reason for my health to be harmed by the sole fact of being poorer than someone else." I am not familiar with Sapolsky's research and can't speculate. In principle, I do see why you'd think it's hard to disentangle the material impacts of inequality from the psychological.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#152

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 9:17 PM UTC

brewdad wrote: post #40

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…

One obvious example is housing. Those that have more than you can afford to live in safer neighborhoods. Those less well off but still able to afford to own a home will be forced to live in neighborhoods with higher crime, higher levels of pollution, "food deserts", or any other number of negative factors. Sure, you can opt to drive til you qualify and avoid some of those problems but now you spend an hour or more ea…

[deleted]

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#153

Post by civilized » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 9:18 PM UTC

js8 wrote: post #150

civilized wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it proves envy false as a cause. It just means envy is of a piece with status anxiety more broadly. I doubt that anyone of any historical period would be shocked by this.

The stress of falling from the current social position (for example, in the US, the risk of inability to pay medical bills or student debt) also affects people who are not envious and comfortable with their current salary and social standing. So it's not just envious people causing psychological harm to themselves, it's the unequal system that harms mostly everybody.

I think you haven't understood what I said. I know that envy is not the only form of harmful status anxiety, and that the wealthy can suffer from non-envy status anxiety. I just think that, envy or not, it's a personal problem that those people can and should get over. They're not victims. They do it to themselves.

And struggling to pay bills is a different problem from inequality per se.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#154

Post by _skzr » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 9:21 PM UTC

daenz wrote: post #48

retrac wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In practice the USSR was an extremely unequal society in terms of wealth distribution. Growing awareness of the enormous gulf in the standard of living and political power between the nomenklatura and the quasi-enslaved contributed substantially to its collapse.

Sounds like it "wasn't real socialism/communism."

This is literally the “AckChyually IT WAsnT ReAL CommUniSM” meme

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#155

Post by notahacker » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 9:23 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #85

olliej wrote: post #51

This study is not a study - they created a mathematical model that has a bunch of behavioural assumptions, given those assumptions reducing inequality improves it. It seems completely plausible that a different set of assumptions could create the opposite. A study would mean looking at actual people, and say directly reducing the inequality. Obviously such a study would be infeasible (time, money, ethics, etc), but t…

> A study would mean looking at actual people, and say directly reducing the inequality. Obviously such a study would be infeasible Hence models. Your complaint boils down to "This is a model of reality, and not reality therefore it's meaningless." This is a very shallow criticism. Yes, all models come with assumptions. If you have a criticism, it should be about specific assumptions, and not the fact that this is a…

Some models incorporate real world data. Some models draw analytical conclusions from [slight modifications] to relationships widely agreed to be true.

And some are pretty purely abstract. With this one you can largely guess the conclusion from the stated assumptions despite the complexity of the algebra but... there isn't much reason to believe the stated assumptions approximate reality. Yes, if you model political polarization as economic interactions in which people gain more from riskier trades with people from a different race or political party, pick their political party according to these economic aspirations, and are risk averse in proportion to their income, then the logic of those assumptions is that inequality will make people more likely to sort themselves into parties which match their races and consider those important to their decisions. But I'm not sure that's really how US racial politics works, or that the complexity of the model's dynamics make it more rather than less plausible.

There are better reasons to believe reducing inequality can reduce political polarisation than this model, as well as better reasons to believe it won't make much difference

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#156

Post by thegrimmest » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 9:27 PM UTC

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…

I don't think there's any escaping the stressors of deep hierarchies. Social status is a scarce commodity, and will continue to be scarce regardless of wealth. I think the better solution is to proscribe severe punishment/suffering for violating the peace a la Japan. Classical conditioning works on people too.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#157

Post by thegrimmest » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 9:28 PM UTC

Valgrim wrote: post #121

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…

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 landlo…

There are loads of people leasing cars, which is basically a fixed term rental.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#158

Post by thegrimmest » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 9:29 PM UTC

umvi wrote: post #35

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…

> There's no reason for my health to be harmed just because someone has more than me. You would think so, but I've read several articles that suggest this isn't the case. One example that comes to mind is that in some communities kids experience social stress/bullying if their SMS bubbles aren't blue (because it implies you are too poor to afford an iPhone and can only afford a "lesser" Android): https://www.wsj.com/…

Why can't the solution here be individual coping strategies?

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#159

Post by sd8f9iu » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 9:30 PM UTC

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…

Peacefully protesting (and yes, the vast majority of BLM protests were peaceful [1]) the extrajudicial killing of black men is not remotely on the same level of extreme political activity as the outgoing president orchestrating a coup attempt to try and stay in power.

There is no equivalency between far-right and far-left violence in the US. There is a much, much greater rise in far-right violence [2].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/16/this-summ...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/20...

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#160

Post by slavik81 » Sun, Jan 30, 2022, 9:34 PM UTC

fortran77 wrote: post #84

umvi wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's no reason for my health to be harmed just because someone has more than me. You would think so, but I've read several articles that suggest this isn't the case. One example that comes to mind is that in some communities kids experience social stress/bullying if their SMS bubbles aren't blue (because it implies you are too poor to afford an iPhone and can only afford a "lesser" Android): https://www.wsj.com/…

Are you suggesting the Government buy an iPhone 13 for everyone?

The more practical suggestion would be to allow other companies to make iMessage clients.