The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America (2013)
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The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America (2013)
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Re: The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America (2013)
#2>Almost 200 years ago that discerning observer of social life, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote about the exceptional ability of Americans to form voluntary associations and, more generally, to cooperate in solving problems that required concerted collective action. This capacity for cooperation apparently lasted into the post-World War II era, but several indicators suggest that during the last 3-4 decades it has been unraveling.
>In these articles I argue that general well-being (and high levels of social cooperation) tends to move in the opposite direction from inequality. During the ‘disintegrative phases’ inequality is high while well-being and cooperation are low. During the ‘integrative phases’ inequality is low, while well-being and cooperation are high.
With economic inequality only getting worse [0, 1, 2] I can't help but wonder if there is also a decline in open source contributions? Or do our contributions increase because it provides visibility, and therefore increased economic opportunity, for those lower on the income scale?
[0]: http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/22/news/economy/us-inequality-w...
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/08/07/opinion/leonh...
[2]: https://twitter.com/lpolovets/status/890610260251033602
Re: The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America (2013)
#3While I found this quite interesting, and I'm as concerned about some of these trends as the next person, I was eerily reminded of some of John Robbins's stuff graphing meat consumption against incidence of diseases and his kind of casual thinking about causation. We have so many datasets available now that it's so easy to graph things against each other and notice things that may be coincidentally related, or even causally related, and then tell some kind of story about where the relationship came from. And I remember that there's even a funny web site that tries to underscore the difficulty in reasoning from these associations.
http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
In this case, the n-grams chart really exemplified this for me. There are so many influences on the frequency of a word, including lexical substitution of a word by its synonyms, changes in spelling, and increased or decreased interest in a topic regardless of whether that interest is positive or negative.
For example, check out the long-term decline in avarice in America! It's profound!
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=avarice&year_s...
Oh, wait, maybe we just stopped using the word "avarice" rather than the concept. :-)
Or, during this Second Gilded Age, our society actually started to become less atomized:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=atomized&year_...
... or maybe we just moved away from calling the phenomenon that.
Re: The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America (2013)
#4While I found this quite interesting, and I'm as concerned about some of these trends as the next person, I was eerily reminded of some of John Robbins's stuff graphing meat consumption against incidence of diseases and his kind of casual thinking about causation. We have so many datasets available now that it's so easy to graph things against each other and notice things that may be coincidentally related, or even c…
Why don't you hop into Sugihara's method and see for yourself?
My hunch is that the thing that most frequently trickles down in the trickle down economy is DEBT. I imagine distrust follows close behind.
Re: The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America (2013)
#5Nothing 'strange' about this at all; to a first-order approximation, it's the inevitable byproduct of the transformative shift in the society's governing ideology over the same timespan:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/aug/18/neoliberalism-t...
That said, the various participation rates he's siting may presumed to be somewhat skewed by immigration.
Re: The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America (2013)
#6While I found this quite interesting, and I'm as concerned about some of these trends as the next person, I was eerily reminded of some of John Robbins's stuff graphing meat consumption against incidence of diseases and his kind of casual thinking about causation. We have so many datasets available now that it's so easy to graph things against each other and notice things that may be coincidentally related, or even c…
We have so many datasets available now that it's so easy to graph things against each other and notice things that may be coincidentally related, or even causally related, and then tell some kind of story about where the relationship came from.
Yeah, it's a fun website -- but you could say that about just about any claimed correlation.
Meanwhile, for those who have been around long enough to have a sense for the 'barometric' changes he's talking about -- the shift in the basic, underlying "we're-all-in-this-together" ethos has been not just noticeable, but profound. Probably a lot more work needs to be done to find a solid statistical basis behind this observation (if this is at all possible).
But by and large (aside from the singe n-gram example, which I agree smells like cherry-picking), it's not like his arguments are simply frivolous.
Re: The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America (2013)
#7>Almost 200 years ago that discerning observer of social life, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote about the exceptional ability of Americans to form voluntary associations and, more generally, to cooperate in solving problems that required concerted collective action. This capacity for cooperation apparently lasted into the post-World War II era, but several indicators suggest that during the last 3-4 decades it has been u…
There is also Robert Putnam's work on the deleterious effects of "diversity" on civic life and engagement.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007....
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007.00176.x
Re: The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America (2013)
#8> polarization
What polarization is there in Washington? Or outside the beltway? What are the two poles? How people feel about transexuals? I don't see any polarization. The two parties are close together on almost everything. As the real differences fade, unimportant differences must be heightened. Trump is of that type - he makes a big show, but on what big issue in which he can get anywhere is he substantially far from the Democratic (or Republican) party? As real differences fade, the showmanship of there being a difference must increase, thus, Trump.
Even healthcare has no polarization. Both parties are agreed on what it should be. Any party acting as if it will do single player or scrap Obamacare is just showboating. Any changes that get through will be minor ones. It was a 60 Senator consensus vote of the middle-of-the-road consensus view of what healthcare would be. McCain's thumbs down to any major overhaul.
In the past two centuries the US went from a civil war to the intitial struggle of how to deal with the Great Depression. There hasn't been much polarization since that. Even the big squabble in the 1960s was over a non-issue - over a small, peasant country in Indochina. The cold war began cooling off in the early 1950s, and stayed cool, aside from occassional flare-ups in certain areas. By the 1970s, US conservatives were trying to figure out how to heat the cold war up again against the background of SALT and the Helsinki accords.
The political establishment is less polarized than ever nowadays. It's not like post-war France, where Joliot-Curie, Picasso, Sartre etc. were members of the largest political party in France - the PCF.
Re: The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America (2013)
#9Here's a question. Do you belong to any organization which chooses its leaders democratically? That is, you get to vote, there's more than one candidate, and the incumbents and their designated successors sometimes get kicked out?
Do you belong to any organization which has member meetings in which members can vote and make decisions binding on the organization?
Re: The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America (2013)
#10Here's a question. Do you belong to any organization which chooses its leaders democratically? That is, you get to vote, there's more than one candidate, and the incumbents and their designated successors sometimes get kicked out? Do you belong to any organization which has member meetings in which members can vote and make decisions binding on the organization?
Lots of clubs/community orgs are like this. The community soccer org for the city I grew up in had lots of turnover in the management due to voting.