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Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

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Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#171

Post by danShumway »

WalterBright wrote: post #141
danShumway wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mor…

1. Crime causes stress in high crime neighborhoods. 2. Crime impoverishes neighborhoods by causing people to spend money to protect themselves, hiring security guards, armoring their businesses, and simply driving businesses away. 3. Crime impoverishes families when members get jailed. 4. Crime impoverishes criminals because a criminal record greatly restricts opportunities for productive employment 5. Crime prevents…

Okay, that's an interesting theory. Violent crime rates have decreased dramatically across America over the past several decades. Has inequality gone up or down?

Because if it's gone up, then decreasing crime rates didn't do what your theory says they should do. The theory doesn't really matter that much if we can point at two arrows going in opposite directions and say, "look, making one of the arrows go down didn't make the other one go down."

I'm kind of picking on you here, but to be clear, we can ask the same question in the opposite direction -- inequality has gone up by many metrics even though crime has gone down by many metrics, so clearly inequality doesn't have as much of a direct effect on crime rates as people say it does, or else crime rates wouldn't have gone down.

But no matter what way you're looking at it, these really simplistic models just don't hold up to even surface-level scrutiny like, "are they playing out in the real world?" There has to be more complicated stuff going on or else the numbers would be different. And so it's just frustrating to hear people say, "the correct answer is to keep doing the exact same things we've been doing, and to hope that the results are different."

There has been ample opportunity for policies focused on crime to prove that they solve these social issues, and they haven't solved them.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#172

Post by civilized »

js8 wrote: post #166
civilized wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feel free to try and negotiate better whatever for yourself. But if stress about someone else having more is your driver, I think you're suffering needlessly.

My point was, what is envy, then, other than the motivational force behind trying to negotiate better for yourself? Most people have some form of it. The claim that "people should just learn not to be envious" is a classist BS, because without some form of envy, nobody would be motivated to ask for better remuneration. Drivers can negotiate too, through collective action. Of course they worry about billionaires, beca…

If envy is just some motivating force then why should I care about it? The conversation was originally about unhealthy stress and damage to health due to others having more than you.

Being motivated by the success of others or wanting to negotiate your comp is fine. But when people feel bad merely because others have more, they should not expect anyone else to feel bad for them or solve that for them. It's their own problem.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#174

Post by dragonsky »

rich_sasha wrote: post #44
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…

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…

I thought the point was that it was not level of poverty that was the problem but the level of inequality... These are of course related, but I would assume that the causality runs from inequality causing poverty rather than the other way around.

Giving people with no or little power a bit more money is not going to allow them to magically take control of their situation. If somebody is flat broke and struggling to pay the bills, giving them a little bit more money may improve their economic situation in the short term, but over the long term with more people having some disposable income, supply and demand will increase prices and good old inflation will balance things out.

If you ensure that people have more equal opportunities by improving access to education, improving access to services independent of location and remove barriers based on sex, race religion health care etc (look I don't have the answers to this) then at least a persons has a similar chance to everybody else to achieve their goals in life.

Trying to solve social problems by just moving money around is a very simplistic solution and can only ever work for simple problems. Inequality is a very complex problem with origins based in history and human nature. If you want everybody to have the same chance to achieve their personal goals then you have to give them the same baseline to start from, and only a small part of that is how much money they have in their pocket.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#175

Post by dnautics »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #162
dnautics wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Spending numbers are not super informative, I'll ramble off a few things I find are non-obvious to people outside of education that relate to inequality. 1. Parents farther down the social totem pole are more unhappy and stressed as a cohort. The negative effects of a bad home life on kids is enormous and education is often impossible without dealing with some of these issues. You either spend your resources addressi…

Completely agreed on all fronts: my point is that the "problem" is so complex that I think expecting a bureaucracy (which is guided by a political class that campaigns on basically one metric "how much did you spend on education") is unlikely to make much headway at all. If you want a reductionist soundbyte, as a political system we have goodhearted education spending and neglected truly important things which you have bulleted (and more important things in addition).

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#176

Post by kansface »

analog31 wrote: post #149
kansface wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You start a business, and against the odds it’s successful! You hire employees as it grows to scale operations, only now it’s now worth 11 million dollars. Now what? Do you have to pay 100k in taxes to cover a totally illiquid asset? Who is doing the buying here that isn’t subject to the same tax? Do you give away shares to family? Do you sell off ownership and lose control? What’s the point of taking any business pa…

You take 100k out of the kitty and pay the tax. Your investors knew up front that this could happen. The point of taking a business past that threshold is that it can make enough money to cover the tax while also growing itself. What does a homeowner do when they don't have the cash to pay their property tax?

In this scenario, I can only assume that corporations are not subject to the same tax, less you would destroy every medium to large business that competes internationally? This would be all domestic manufacturing for instance.

If so, I don’t imagine that funneling even larger amounts of capital into corporations is what you have in mind.

The point isn’t that the tax couldn’t be paid for, it that it’s an extremely perverse incentive against growing your business. Why bother trying when you will be forced to divest, or take on millions in personal loans on bad terms (illiquid asset), inevitably losing control? This policy would be a disaster.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#177

Post by dragonsky »

analog31 wrote: post #74
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…

I'd simply start a progressive wealth tax at a high enough threshold so that a person could provide themselves with a reasonable nest egg. Pulling numbers out of the air, maybe 1%/year for the first $10 million, up to 10%/year for $100 million. (Note that if you live in a house, you're already paying some wealth tax). This would leave most people with both good and poor standing with enough to live comfortably, and t…

The only people who benefit from yet another tax is the accountants who get paid to help the wealthy avoid those taxes.

The 1% already manage their affairs to reduce the amount of tax they pay, why would adding yet another tax change that?

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#178

Post by retrac »

zajio1am wrote: post #167
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.

I do not know about USSR, but AFAIK at least in Czechoslovakia the communist leaders do not really have big personal property. They have enormous political power and also access to property through their functions (assigned appartments and official cars), but not in form of direct ownership.

That is fair. But by similar logic, some medieval lords technically also owned nothing. They merely were administrators for the king's land. And yet that position enabled social and political connections that translated into fabulous wealth. The ability to control the disposition of nationalized property as the Communist leaders had, was a form of wealth, in my opinion.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#179

Post by js8 »

civilized wrote: post #172
js8 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was, what is envy, then, other than the motivational force behind trying to negotiate better for yourself? Most people have some form of it. The claim that "people should just learn not to be envious" is a classist BS, because without some form of envy, nobody would be motivated to ask for better remuneration. Drivers can negotiate too, through collective action. Of course they worry about billionaires, beca…

If envy is just some motivating force then why should I care about it? The conversation was originally about unhealthy stress and damage to health due to others having more than you. Being motivated by the success of others or wanting to negotiate your comp is fine. But when people feel bad merely because others have more, they should not expect anyone else to feel bad for them or solve that for them. It's their own…

Stress that you won't be able to pay bills or debts is NOT envy. You can have it even in a society where everybody is poor. That's why, in rich societies, envy is not the cause of it, but rather how society distributes its wealth is. And so it becomes a collective, not an individual, problem.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#180

Post by analog31 »

kansface wrote: post #176
analog31 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You take 100k out of the kitty and pay the tax. Your investors knew up front that this could happen. The point of taking a business past that threshold is that it can make enough money to cover the tax while also growing itself. What does a homeowner do when they don't have the cash to pay their property tax?

In this scenario, I can only assume that corporations are not subject to the same tax, less you would destroy every medium to large business that competes internationally? This would be all domestic manufacturing for instance. If so, I don’t imagine that funneling even larger amounts of capital into corporations is what you have in mind. The point isn’t that the tax couldn’t be paid for, it that it’s an extremely per…

The tax could be imposed on the owners of corporations. It boggles my mind that a 1% tax is a cap on the size of a business. The other way to raise the money is that the business could sell something, such as a product.
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