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Comment by nabla9 | Hacker News Reader

This is just once piece of growing evidence that poverty damages health, cognition, and productivity.

* Being poor reduces raw cognitive capability including memory and decision making.

* Being poor increases stress, leads to bad decisions and short term thinking.

* Even relative poverty can have this effect. It may be because social status is so important factor in human well-being.

It used to be a joke that you can remove poverty by giving people money. It was common to think that patronizing is the only way because poor are lazy bums and lower beings who need to be managed. Same data with same correlations as before. It's just the direction of causality that may need to change.

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So much of conservative policy just seems very shortsighted to me. Cutting the pandemic team, cutting the cybersecurity team; homelessness, prisons and so on costing orders of magnitude more than it would cost to eliminate or reduce them. It's just that people can't stomach less well off people getting a hand, or prisoners being treated nicely. But now we're left with the largest pandemic in a century, one of the largest governmental hack ever and will end up paying trillions to fix it instead of the millions of prevent it.

I read a comment last week about how if fire departments didn't exist already, there is absolutely no chance that they would get introduced in this modern era of politics.

GOP actions have not been in line with conservative ideology for some time now. A conservative concept is, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." but as you pointed out, even something as basic as that has zero support in the current American political climate on the right.

I want to support ideas that deal with issues at their source, in targeted and specific ways that have exponential payoffs later, but I'm forced to support sweeping "just give them houses and they're not homeless" solutions because at least those folks are trying to help, and anything is better than nothing.

I think a large part of the problem with conservative policy positions (at least in the US) is that they're mostly unchanged from 30-40 years ago. Despite mountains of evidence on things like work requirements for government benefits, multiplier effects of stimulus spending vs tax cuts, benefits of expanding healthcare coverage, and many more, the conservative positions remain the same.

I would guess this is likely because these positions are more based on philosophy than they are on actual economics or other evidence-based fields. This was a reasonable position when there wasn't strong evidence to either prove or disprove these arguments, but at some point the evidence becomes overwhelming, and those positions should no longer be considered serious. We're long passed that point on a number of issues, but it sure doesn't seem like anything will change anytime soon.

Same with the central bank. Supply side stimulus forever, even though the supply side has been saturated with funding.

It's like dousing a farm field with fertilizers and herbicides to improve yields even though you couldn't sell half of last year's harvest. You end up selling your produce for less than last year even though the value of your company has gone up according to the stock market.

It doesn't take a genius to understand that things are doing better when supply and demand are balanced. You need a combination of multiple strategies.

Actually it's even worse. Too much fertilizer and herbicides will cause unintended consequences.

Isn't that exactly the meaning of conservative? They want to preserve the status quo of that time.

Sure, I guess in a dictionary sense of the word. But that obviously doesn't match their behavior in that case. They wouldn't be arguing for lower taxes or cuts to social security if they were only interested in preserving what existed in 1980. They wouldn't be attempting to overturn Roe v. Wade or gut the Civil Rights Act.

Think 200 years earlier, slavery and widespread poverty. The aim is bsckwards to good ol' times.

Yep, it sure matches if you actually pay attention to their actions.

It's not just conservative policy, although I admit that it has been a prominent source of backwards thinking. The problem is ... everyone. There is no party vs party war. There is a system of underlying issues that transcends party lines. It's just that some people are hit harder than others which forces a bigger response from them. There is too much emotional thinking instead of just looking at the problem and figuring out what solution is the most agreeable for everyone.

I think it’s worth pointing out that there is nothing “conservative” about cutting funding to a pandemic response team. “Republican”, perhaps. But not “conservative”.

Note that many countries with broadly left wing governments, such as those in Europe, were also not prepared for the pandemic, and will also pay a high cost.

“we're left with the largest pandemic in a century“

Sure, but not actually doing any worse than Western Europe.

Also, those same conservatives actually did invest billions in vaccine development and production capacity in the US.

Literally twice as much as the EU did, and the result is a vaccine rollout that at 5x the rate.

That wasn't my point. Obviously there is now way to know for certain, but there's a possibility that if Trump's administration hadn't cut the pandemic team, this whole thing may not even have happened in the first place. It may be a bold statement, but don't forget that said team's job was exactly to have people on the ground in China and other places, looking for new viruses and ringing the alarm early. Spending billions to come up with a vaccine is orders of magnitude more expensive than millions preventing the pandemic in the first place.

Similarly, one could argue that if Trump's administration hadn't gutted the cybersecurity team, we may or may not have caught the SolarWind hack much sooner. Again, there's no way to know for sure how well preventative measures work, all I know is that while those teams were in place, the hacks and the impact of viruses were much smaller.

> there's no way to know for sure how well preventative measures work

This is true. It’s not a valid counterfactual to compare against an imagined ideal.

It’s just as possible to consider that the pandemic response team had degenerated into ineffectiveness, and by disbanding them Trump made things better.

This is why imagined counterfactuals aren’t helpful compared vs comparing with an actual benchmark.

When you get both the worst pandemic and worst hack in a century right 1-2 year after killing the very teams whose job it is to prevent said catastrophes, at what point do you stop blaming things on bad luck?

Where has anyone blamed anything on bad luck? I think our institutions are terrible, and definitely a factor in things like the pandemic and the hack.

I just think it makes no sense to reduce that to blaming the republicans or even a specific act of the Trump administration, based on pure imagination of an alternative outcome.

If ‘American republicanism’ is to blame for how bad the pandemic is, how do you explain Europe’s performance?

> it makes no sense to reduce that to blaming the republicans

When they were the ones who cut off funding to the very agencies whose job it was to prevent, then it absolutely makes sense. If I cut off your house's alarm system, and the very next week there's a burglary, you would absolutely blame me for it.

> how do you explain Europe’s performance

Again, I'm not talking about the response to the pandemic, but specifically about prevention. And yes, China, Europe and other countries should've had their own agencies in charge of tracking and preventing worldwide outbreak, but this is whataboutism. What I care about is that the US cutoff it's alarm system and ended up getting attacks the next year.

This is just as true then:

People die in hospitals.

Demolishing them will make things better.

Do you claim no hospital should ever be demolished, regardless of whether it was built with toxic materials, or has been neglected to the point of being unsafe?

Basic income experiments show that you can remove poverty by giving people money.

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