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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

#181

Post by kansface »

ashtonkem wrote: post #123
dnautics wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post war America was a truly unique time and place. Literally the entire industrial world was destroyed apart from the US. I’m not so quick to blame bad policy. The world was going to catch up eventually and start competing, right?

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#182

Post by civilized »

js8 wrote: post #179
civilized wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem in this discourse is that certain people like to call everything "inequality" whether they're talking about "some people can't pay bills" or "some people make more money than others".

We might want to tolerate the latter but reduce the former. But if we call them all the same thing, we can't think clearly or formulate such nuanced policy, as Orwell noted.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#183

Post by WalterBright »

danShumway wrote: post #171
WalterBright wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Would you start a business in a high crime neighborhood, or in a low crime one?

If your dad was put in prison while you were growing up, would your standard of living go up or down?

Other things drive inequality. For example, if you would be paid $12,000 for a job, and $10,000 for not working, which would you select? Would your standard of living be higher or lower?

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#184

Post by colechristensen »

rich_sasha wrote: post #165
colechristensen wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right, and where do the renters live? Someone needs to own the houses. Not every renter is on the cusp of buying. If you make houses more expensive for landlords and don’t introduce some other source of housing, at best it’ll be a wash: lower prices for houses but extra taxes meaning landlords charge more or less the same rent. Or maybe prices won’t move much but landlords will charge more rent to cover their higher…

We are not at risk of an abundance of empty housing with nobody to live in it.

You lower prices by reducing competition from landlords, then more people who rent will buy. There's a long way to go before you get to the point of people who don't want to buy a house feeling forced to do so because they can't find a rental.

I don't know the name of the logical fallacy, but the argument you're making is imaging a far away extreme situation being undesirable and using that to justify not making moderate changes.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#185

Post by WalterBright »

danShumway wrote: post #170
WalterBright wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it starts to feel more like "tough on crime" is a philosophy rather than a data-driven, falsifiable theory. Just recently it was reported that after the cops were not allowed to chase car thiefs, car thefts went up 50%. https://mynorthwest.com/3327635/dramatic-rise-in-car-thefts-... The recent decriminalization of looting has also resulted in a surge of stealing and crime in cities. Businesses have to spend a lot t…

Eh, and this is always the response. The problem is that we saw crime increases before police protests and defunding movements, including in cities that aren't in California, so it really doesn't make sense to blame the recent "defund the police" movement for all of that increase. When you actually sit down and do the math, there is no strong correlation between police defunding/reforms and the recent crime wave -- c…

> There's not good data to support this

Look at pictures of storefronts in, say, Brazil, after hours. They have steel shutters completely covering the storefront.

https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-1053267656-sao-paulo...

Why would the shop owners do that?

There was a small shopowner in Seattle interviewed recently. His shop windows were smashed and then the store looted, again and again and again.

What do you think he's going to do about it? He can't continue with replacing the windows and merchandise.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#186

Post by danShumway »

WalterBright wrote: post #185
danShumway wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, and this is always the response. The problem is that we saw crime increases before police protests and defunding movements, including in cities that aren't in California, so it really doesn't make sense to blame the recent "defund the police" movement for all of that increase. When you actually sit down and do the math, there is no strong correlation between police defunding/reforms and the recent crime wave -- c…

> There's not good data to support this Look at pictures of storefronts in, say, Brazil, after hours. They have steel shutters completely covering the storefront. https://www.shutterstock.com/video/clip-1053267656-sao-paulo... Why would the shop owners do that? There was a small shopowner in Seattle interviewed recently. His shop windows were smashed and then the store looted, again and again and again. What do you t…

Good questions. But the data doesn't back up your conclusion.

You can point at other countries, you can bring up anecdotes, but the overall trends in the US do not match what you're saying. We're still in a scenario where crime rates seem to be decoupled from protest/decriminalization rates, and where store closure rates across the country don't line up neatly with areas that have decreased policing/prosecution strategies.

It doesn't matter how logical your theory seems when written down if it doesn't hold true in the real world. You can bring up any argument or example you like, but I'm still going to keep asking you about that broader trend. Either there is a component to this that you are missing that overrides the effect you would expect to see -- or the causal effect isn't there. But unless you're going to claim that the data is wrong, one of those things has to be the case or else we would see a strong correlation between economic health of cities and whether or not they changed police/prosecution strategies, and we don't. As best as we can see, stuff like homicides are rising in every city, and every city is struggling with store closures regardless of what they've done recently with their police forces.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#187

Post by danShumway »

WalterBright wrote: post #183
danShumway wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Would you start a business in a high crime neighborhood, or in a low crime one? If your dad was put in prison while you were growing up, would your standard of living go up or down? Other things drive inequality. For example, if you would be paid $12,000 for a job, and $10,000 for not working, which would you select? Would your standard of living be higher or lower?

If decreasing crime decreases inequality, why did inequality rise while crime fell? Hypotheticals aside, something is clearly going on here that you are not accounting for.

> For example, if you would be paid $12,000 for a job, and $10,000 for not working, which would you select? Would your standard of living be higher or lower?

It's an interesting theory, but the problem with this explanation is that pandemic checks are too recent. Inequality trends were visible before 2019.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#189

Post by beerandt »

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…

People build houses all the time. It's not just rent or buy.

Re: Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

#190

Post by beerandt »

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…

I don't follow how (1) is an indicator(?) of inequality.

Aren't all the students capable of learning more with tutoring?

Measuring by percentile seems like a problem if everybody improves.

It's a good thing to try and make sure everyone performs to some minimum standard for their age, but are you suggesting equal outcome as a goal?

If kids are learning at home, are you suggesting they should receive fewer school resources?

I'm lost on what the goals are here and what you'd consider success to be?

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