Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study
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thesaint.scot
"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, varies."
The model assumes only two distinct and unchangeable identity groups, and assumes that these identity groups are solely based on a few specific unchangeable traits. And that's before you get into some of the wacky assumptions in their actual math model.
Also of note, they mention Charlottesville and the capitol riot as examples of political polarization, but make no mention of comparable events on the left like the BLM riots, the GOP baseball shooting, etc. Gives you a good idea of where the politics of the authors sit and suggests there may be motivated reasoning behind their arguments. "Solve political polarization by doing more of what the left has wanted to do for over a century!"
This is fundamentally a mathematical simulation, so it's bound to be simplified. Assuming fixed identities is not completely unreasonable, given that affective and ideological polarization in the US has been increasing over decades. Yes some people switch, but not as many as you may think.
But simple human behavior can often be modeled by a simplified mathematical model :)
My two favorite quotes on the subject are of course George Box:
> all models are wrong, but some are useful
And Avery Pennarun:
> almost everything produced by ML could have been produced, more cheaply, using a very dumb heuristic you coded up by hand, because mostly the ML is trained by feeding it examples of what humans did while following a very dumb heuristic.
Never mind all those serfs the church used to have…
(Actual communists used slave labor on a mass scale, that was the true purpose behind the gulags.)
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...
Have they factored in the act of wealth redistribution itself being polarizing? From a statistical/theoretical perspective it checks out, but I bet practically speaking if you actually tried "a high degree of [wealth] distribution", the middle and upper classes would start screaming and it would cause even more polarization. If the key thing needed to reduce polarization is "reducing inequality", it would probably be good to investigate alternative methods of reducing inequality as well.
If a redistributionist looks like they will become popular they will get smeared into the ground.
The serfs will always outnumber the lords. It's just a matter of keeping them pacified to sufficient levels so that revolting isn't a serious concern.
As you've suggested, other things to keep the masses pacified can come in many forms other than direct payments of cash. Stop reducing spending on public schools, public transport. Stop tearing down low rent housing in order to gentrify it with new housing that the original residents can no longer afford. Eliminate food deserts in populated areas.
Just a few off the top of head
This is very much a real dynamic.
[1] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2011/mar/10/michael-mo...
[2] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130395...
Everyone was always satisfied with the ruling party all the time. It was great joy.
Also, at least for East Germany - no idea how it was in Russia - when they showed the houses of the powerful (Wandlitz - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldsiedlung - You can google for some images of the houses and facilities) even back then in 1990 when I saw it on TV I thought it wasn't really much. Even a middle-middle class American or West German lived better.
The differences were not as big as with billionaires in the mix. It wasn't like in some African dictatorships where the top really had so much more. The GDR elite lived better, but far from extreme luxury as far as I could see after the reunification. I felt zero envy after I saw it even retroactively, I had already seen much better in average West German houses that I had visited by then.
This is how the last head of state of the GDR before the events of fall 1989, Erich Honecker, lived from 1960-1989: https://bmg-images.imgix.net/2021/12/04/58cb9e33-390f-4bf5-a... (the back of the house - the front is even more boring)
Also, again speaking for East Germany (I was 17 when the wall came down and participated in some of the events), I don't think the term "polarized" applies. I mean, we even had am entirely peaceful transition even though one party had all the weapons and the courts and the ability to use them. Still, they were not crazy and/or angry enough. and actually opened the wall instead without much fanfare.
Not sure what would happen with an actually polarized situation, like between some of the camps in the US, if one side had both the means and the legality (full control of police and courts to do as they wanted) in a situation where they would have to give all of that up.
In East Germany We didn't even have anyone drive a car into protesters or anything. That kind of hate between the people just wasn't there.
Was it in the USSR?
Well, yes. People in concord hated the regime.
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 that doesn’t mean giving this kind of “study” any credence is actually meaningful.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s huge amounts of evidence int the negative outcomes in environments of extreme inequality, but bullshit papers like this aren’t going to do anything except boost the authors H index rating.
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 model.
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
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-church...
Likewise, there are many ways to organize socialism, where the means of production are owned collectively. Some may more more desirable than others. There have been fewer experiments with socialism than capitalism, and those that have existed have some good features and some bad features.
There are some good features to capitalism, but it has long exhausted its progressive character. For example, its good at producing lots of consumer goods. Its weaknesses are an inexorable drive to imperialism, the subjugation of the working class, and a kind of environmental death drive where it can't stop itself.
The lower classes are too pre-occupied with survival, the elites have all the control, power, and are the ones pre-occupying them with modes for their survival (shitty jobs to pay exorbitant rents to get enough maybe for an iphone, and netflix subscription) so when you're done working 60 hours per week, you only have enough left over time to focus on distractions rather than a coup against the elites.
The answer is more unions, more worker co-ops, and providing REAL market alternatives to capitalism in the terms of democratic / DAO style companies that give all employees shares based on input, and maybe even shares for consumers who are loyal to their brand... (like a 5 shares per hour worked, 1 share per dollar spent - upto 10k dollars spent/yr) ... then say there's Walmart, and Walgreens, and MCDonalds competitors in the syndicate of co-ops... all the money they earn are pooled, and maybe everyone w/ at least 10k yearly shares gets free healthcare for the next year, and dividends from a pool of 30% of revenue...
These are still capitalist companies in the fact they're ran independently, and created by entrepreneurs they just have governing/managment aspects that give more power to the people who work there... it's a marriage if you will, and one that I think is the only way forward. It provides true dual power, but doesn't require a 'benevolent dictator' which is the evil of communism per se...
Communism always turns to Oligarchy, but apparently so does democracy, however co-op owned companies can run more ethically with more care for employees and the environment, and eventually lobby congress for their behalf which is for the employee's behalf.
It gets much more complex when we begin to incorporate other forms (and potentially sources), such as elite, partisan, party and legislative polarization. As umvi mentioned, each of those may be a source or consequence of affective polarization. Or both at the same time!
We really need some long-term field experiments (or natural experiments), but this paper definitely seems like a good contribution regarding the dynamics (models of which often have been way too simple).
Furthermore, inequality will always be with us. Pareto principle is an actual thing and is mathematically sound when it comes to economics. Generally, the top 20% will hold 80% of the wealth. Many phenomena exhibit this distribution.
Basically, there are at least four distinct types of polarization that are commonly studied:
* affective polarization (used in this study) measures hatred towards the outgroup. It is commonly measured with the feeling thermometer, alternatively with the gallup question "would you agree if your kid marries someone from X". This polarization has been increasing over time, and recently outparty antagonism in the US surpassed (for the first time) racial antagonism.
* ideological/partisan polarization measures diverging support for the two parties, i.e. voters drifting towards the edges of the political spectrum. Note that this does not require that parties also become more extreme.
* elite polarization occurs in politicians and can be identified from speeches etc., but also from co-sponsoring of bills
* perceived polarization is the perception of how polarized society is
Now, the interesting thing is that many of these phenomena have (at least) two distinct causes: Either sorting, i.e. people realizing which party they really want to vote for. This occurs when parties become more extreme and it therefore becomes easier to identify which party is ideologically closer. Alternatively, people themselves may (also) shift ideologically, creating a clearer gap between parties and their electorate.
Most research is done on the US due to its simple two-party system, but there is still some debate regarding the true scope and causes of polarization. For example, one paper could not find a clear causal relationship between internet penetration and different forms of polarization [1].
If you're interested, some good references are listed at the end.
[1] Boxell, L., Gentzkow, M., & Shapiro, J. (2017). Is the Internet Causing Political Polarization? Evidence from Demographics (No. w23258; p. w23258). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w23258
Abrams, S. J., & Fiorina, M. P. (2012). “The Big Sort” That Wasn’t: A Skeptical Reexamination. PS: Political Science & Politics, 45(2), 203–210. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096512000017
Fiorina, M., Abrams, S., & Pope, J. (2004). Culture War?: The Myth of a Polarized America. Undefined. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Culture-War%3A-The-Myt...
Fletcher, R., Cornia, A., & Nielsen, R. K. (2020). How Polarized Are Online and Offline News Audiences? A Comparative Analysis of Twelve Countries. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 25(2), 169–195. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940161219892768
Levy, R. (2021). Social Media, News Consumption, and Polarization: Evidence from a Field Experiment. American Economic Review, 111(3), 831–870. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20191777
Stroud, N. J. (2010). Polarization and Partisan Selective Exposure. Journal of Communication, 60(3), 556–576. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2010.01497.x
Tucker, J., Guess, A., Barbera, P., Vaccari, C., Siegel, A., Sanovich, S., Stukal, D., & Nyhan, B. (2018). Social Media, Political Polarization, and Political Disinformation: A Review of the Scientific Literature. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3144139
What happens with group A if you constantly prefer group B. Especially if there are no substantial differences, you should see animosity rise quickly.
> would you agree if your kid marries someone from X
Quite frankly I believe this is trailing society by at least 30+ years. In the US and other countries. Perhaps there is a divide between older and newer generations somewhere, but the topic certainly does not warrant state intervention.
That's empirically backed by research and stands in stark contrast to the technocratic myth of "we just have to make everyone wealthier" that's dominated for the last 30-ish years. It's not surprising at all that a population that is running on extreme levels of stress tends towards political polarization.
[1]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-economic-ineq...
edit: short video interview summarizing it because of the paywall: https://youtu.be/aNRPuBJ02MM
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, I'm sure envious people can tie themselves in knots over inequality, but I don't see this as a social problem. It's a personal psychological problem for those people. And I am skeptical that it is so common as to be my problem.
In short, anger leads to hate, hate leads to the dark side.
Even the Chinese Communist Party came to realize that people must be allowed to reap unequal rewards (based on their talent and labor) to escape desperate poverty. Their agricultural productivity tripled when they let people sell some of their produce rather than turning it all over to the state [1].
This is how Deng Xiaoping began his rise to power in a country gripped by the madness of Maoism. By accepting inequality even though the Communists have always demonized its socioeconomic manifestations.
For example, in games, it's always lag/bad teammates/etc. that keep them in "Elo hell" and they want to 1v1 you despite it being a team game and they ignore game winning objectives to score meaningless kills or whatever. Never mind everyone starts with exactly the same resources every time. Yes, yes, bad lag can have an effect on the margins, but some of the best players I knew were playing from another continent with terrible ping and bad lag doesn't have any effect on bad tactics.
I've been in, and climbed out of that Elo in plenty of games, and I know just how sharply the mindsets change as you climb.
In a game sure, but does this seem to reflect lived reality?
Edit: in fact, I don't know what game you're refering to, but imagine a game where your opponent was given an order of magnitude more HP or an hour to level up/prepare before you entered the game. Is this a game you would want to play?
And the ones I have in mind are such that people do start with the same resources every time.
Though if you want to discuss P2W games, those where actual skill is involved not infrequently have no-skill whales lose to skilled players. In those it depends on the scale of the P2W and how much skill plays into the actual contest, though.
Finally, to your edit, yes, many people play MMOs and even join ones where other players have already maxed everything before they created their first character. Not everyone feels the need to be #1 or even cares if someone has more than they do, because obsessing about that stuff is a sure way to hurt your own mental health.
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/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...
From the article:
> Apple’s iMessage plays a significant role in the lives of young smartphone users and their parents, according to data and interviews with a dozen of these people. Teens and college students said they dread the ostracism that comes with a green text. The social pressure is palpable, with some reporting being ostracized or singled out after switching away from iPhones.
I don't think it's a hard question.
I seriously think the better off we get the more "problems" people make up. It's ridiculous.
Yes, there are still some real issues in the world, but these types of "problems" seem almost like satire.
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 don't want to call the problem poverty, whatever, but it's definitely not inequality.
"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 the hierarchy. This constant reflexive update is not great for people in a highly unequal society because its a constant stress inducer and has direct physical and mental health implications that bleed over into things like the political sphere.
Both "pointy" hierarchies and flattened hierarchies are bad. Flattened hierarchies are when we are all equal, and thus society stagnates. Pointy hierarchies are the traditional kings at the top, serfs at the bottom. These inevitably collapse at some point for multitudes of reasons. There is probably a happy, more stable medium. Societies that are becoming unequal have a gradient trending toward the pointy hierarchy state.
Poverty is a specific threshold of material wealth, and is related, but ultimately orthogonal to the discussion.
I note that the San Francisco housing crisis has been ongoing for at least a few years if not longer according to the notes I have been taking.
It is in part an incentive problem.
If you institute a land value tax, we would reward the richest person around, because he makes the best investment, but he would also pay the greatest amount of taxes, because he bought the most productive or most desirable land.
If you can make the whole country polluted, food deserty and unsafe you made everyone more equal, but nobody will get healthier.
If a multi-billonaire buys a palace at the edge of a safe, clean neighbourhood that increases the inequality tremendously but won't make the people in the neighbourhood sicker.
Physician, heal thyself.
This particular study seems to be a case of extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary evidence. If true, the implications are enormous: medical justification for a wealth cap! Something which has never been attempted anywhere in the world in all of history.
Being angry all the time can harm your health. Maybe being envious all the time can too.
Do you know ultimatum game? There might be a good reason why envy exists.
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, because billionaires worry about them in the first place - the billionaires invented Amazon or Uber, which employ these drivers and are the primary cause of their working conditions.
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.
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.
(And FWIW, that isn't what "false dichotomy" means.)
Is it even possible that you are, as you say, open to being proven wrong? (I ask this in good faith, because I've been arguing on the internet for 25+ years, and whenever someone says this, I end up asking them what would persuade them and the answer is usually "nothing," which, ... okay ..., but I am an eternal optimist and I strive to take people at their written word.)
Good arguments are resources by Robert Sapolsky https://www.amazon.com/Stress-and-Your-Body-audiobook/dp/B00... or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C... or any of the books he has published (many have significantly overlapping content)
Skepticism is part of the scientific method; but just saying “hmm it doesn’t feel right to me” isn’t really useful.
Have you ever been a scientist? Scientists react this way to published research all the time, especially in fields like psychology where epistemic and empirical methods are weak.
Or, let’s completely disregard the studies themselves and look at the fruits of their labors. Is eg education noticeably better now than it was a generation ago? Is our mental health better now than then, etc etc.
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 ensure that the resources they fund serve them alone [1]. In the US, this is probably best exemplified by public education: schools are funded by property taxes, so rich districts have better schools, which in turn further increases home values (a process exacerbated by policies that prevent construction of cheaper, higher-density housing---policies supported by, naturally, the wealthy). Schools in poorer districts are therefore worse off than they would be if wealth weren't as concentrated.
Even if you take the perspective that, net, an equal amount of dollars is going toward education (or healthcare, etc.), it's fairly obvious the marginal benefits are different. A second violin teacher isn't as meaningful as adding a calculus class; elective cosmetic surgery isn't equivalent to treating diabetes.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir...
So before we go lecturing about how it "isn't that complex" let's make sure we understand what this thing is that's supposedly not that complex.
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.
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 effect that lottery winners often end up in poverty, having quit their jobs and spent all the money rather quickly.
If you do a Robin Hood tax, how do you distinguish between good/poor standing in life due to starting point vs work input? I’d argue someone who had an unlucky start to life has a different entitlement to support than someone who didn’t but can’t be asked. It’s ok if people don’t want to work harder and earn more, but why should I fund it? I feel very different about the opposite case, people who through bad luck can’t make way forward in life.
My personal answer, and seemingly not so popular, is education, at all stages. Poor people send their kids to poor schools that don’t give their kids enough skills to make it in life. Fund these schools, through taxes, so that every child gets a stab at a good education. Provide professional courses for adults, financial support to those who want to upskill. Maybe do state sponsored grants so that lower/middle class people can try becoming entrepreneurs: a high risk & high reward move otherwise.
Im not against redistribution per se, i just havent seen that as an actual equaliser, just an article of faith.
There are some very egalitarian countries (Nordics come to mind) where tax redistribution is part of the picture, but it seems to me it is just a part of a much bigger picture.
As a counterpoint, Poland is on a massive redistribution spending spree right now and it’s never been as polarised as it is now. Because, guess what, the redistribution is a hugely polarising matter (among other things).
Suck large amounts of money out of the housing market by taxing commercial loans used for residential real estate, doubling property taxes for non-owner-occupied residential real estate and vacant real estate, and putting caps on mortgage vs income though some means or another. 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. So much money and effort is sucked away from people into bank interest and "cost of capital" for people who already have lots of it. Maybe go to the extent of statutory redistribution of ownership of housing, 2% per year. If you rent a house for 50 years it's yours. This can't raise rents because rent pricing is based on maximizing what the market will pay.
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 years, college students, city residents who don’t plan on buying in the city but want to live there for some years while in the workforce, separated spouses need 2 places to live, the list goes on.
This snap judgment of “down with landlords, let’s destroy the rental market” doesn’t seem like a great idea.
I’m not saying they are some kind of godsend, rather that they are present precisely because renters wouldn’t buy the houses they live in, for whatever reason. If you take away the private landlords, you’d need to find that capital elsewhere, and it seems poor people don’t have it.
State-owned housing? Mutual housing? Promoting good transport so people can live further out? Lots of solutions I think, but not sure adding friction to the current set up will do anything.
I’m talking explicitly about lowering the cost of housing by reducing the amount of capital in the market from landlords.
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 costs.
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.
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 landlords"), i'd expect a similar ratio of housing rental vs ownership, even taking into account the depreciating nature of cars.
I disagree, rental housing is a thing that does need to go away, or at least be severly limited.
Because there's a strong trend towards corporations owning all housing and then everybody must rent from them.
(as a milenial my chances of owning the place I live in are small... specially in big cities; I looked into it, I would need to get a loan and then pay the loan amount twice over for the next 30 years to buy a shitty small appartment without a real kitchen).
You’re also creating artificial limitations. Nobody said you’re entitled to own the place your currently live, you’re creating that restriction. 200k gets you a whole lot of house in the south and Midwest. Choosing to live in a city and bitch about affordability is quite a millennial thing to do though, since you’ve already self-identified.
my parent's house? a friend's couch? My own appartment or house? (I suppose even millenials could inherit property).
I do not understand why you are saying that I'm contradicting myself. What I do see, is that you seem to be defending the custom of having to pay a recurrent fee to have a roof over your head, a custom which I stand against.
I don't think we need to model that... we have plenty of examples of what happens when cities don't build enough housing.
This might work for relatively small and single-nationality countries.
Reducing inequality would hopefully have the benefit of aligning political goals with the interests of the population, in which case politicians would be more motivated to score things such as universal health care, workplace safety, education, a safety net, and so forth.
If the government were to be burdened by too much money, they could give some of it back to the poor. ;-)
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.
A wealth tax is a terrible incentive for investment and growth of local businesses.
The 1% already manage their affairs to reduce the amount of tax they pay, why would adding yet another tax change that?
But that is very hard to implement.
Let’s take an example of San Francisco: public schools were closed all of 2021 and that really hurt low income families. Of course private schools were open.
And San Francisco is very left - so I don’t know.
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's Two Sigma which roughly says that a student at the 50th percentile for their class is tutored, they will perform like students in the 95th percentile (the most recent literature I read pegged the effect slightly weaker than this, but not that much).
These results on inequality tell us several things: Increased inequality reduces the quality of home life for children by making parents stressed and unhappy. Increased inequality plus the fundamental economics of public education mean that smart and capable people are less likely to become teachers, and those who do will be more stressed Increased inequality means that richer people can afford to hire the services of tutors for their children, drastically improving outcomes.
As someone who sold my educational services to rich people, and gave it away to poorer students when I could afford to, I can personally testify to the massive difference this kind of resourcing makes. I don't think there's any way to get away from that aside from actually reducing 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 addressing those home issues are try to ignore them and throw good money after bad. (this also complicates cross-country comparisons because many of our social programs for kids are funded through the education budget where other countries put them in a health or social well-being budget).
2. When it was easier to achieve a higher quality of life on a single above average income you get higher quality teachers. A pattern you see amongst the best teachers who are now in their 50s or 60s is that their significant other had a good job and the teacher sacrificed a higher paying career for better hours for raising kids and the ability to easily move to almost any location with their spouse without their own career disruptions (since everyone needs teachers). This is no longer a good option unless your partner is earning a lot of money.
3. Funding numbers often fail to capture various types of donations in cash, materials, and/or labor. I grew up in a fairly rich neighborhood and my public school received thousands of hours of unpaid labor per year from parents, construction projects built cheap at high quality by parents who owned massive contracting businesses, an art program taught by rich moms who took minimum wage to just fill their day (to be clear, they were good teachers), and a whole host of other benefits. These benefits can be worth thousands of dollars per child per year.
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?
Performance/success in high school might help get into college, but even with that advantage, it's not an indicator of relative success later in life.
If attention and stability at home are the issue, then that problem needs to be fixed, but its not an economic one. Plenty of poor parents make the time for their kids, and plenty of wealthy parents ignore them.
Parents spending time with kids is tied more to family makeup, with financial security just being a symptom. Having a two-parent home is still the success factor that is in a league of its own, and is an obvious solution to literally doubling parental supply. Presuming a significant number of these poorer students are from single parent/ broken homes, that's the direct solution to "needs parental help at home", not money.
Success in schooling is much more than just providing a good building, teachers and resources(computer/books/etc.). It is also a function of what the child has to go through in his/her day to day life. Those early years cement what kind of person the child becomes so you can provide all the Adult education you want, it is too late. Is the family around to provide support outside of school hours? Is the neighborhood stable enough so that you are in an environment to not fall into the edge cases of our society (ex: Are there groups that discourage breaking out of a specific mold?)
Hell this happens even with minorities in suburbs that provide them with all the resources needed for success. As a muslim living in a upper class right wing leaning suburban town I ingrained a self defeating mindset after 9/11 that I cannot achieve specific things and fulfill my wildest dreams. Despite this I ended up relatively successful thanks to the environment I was in giving me multiple chances after I failed time and time again.
Others don't have as many chances. The school is not the only problem. It is the system around the school that resulted in the school being in such a poor state to begin with. Some of this is being brought up(and subsequently banned) in topics such as Critical Race Theory (CRT). These talking points that you have expressed are sometimes brought up in Libertarian and right wing circles. It will not lead to this issue being solved in my opinion.
I have seen it with my own eyes in others as well. One of my many failures led me to being put on probation at my University: A school that prides itself on helping the largest # of minorities achieve STEM degrees in the country. I ended up at community college where I saw first hand how they ran many dozens of entry level math, physics, history and english sections that end up being empty by the end of the semester because there are huge swaths of the population that just cannot get past the first courses in a college level program. So they re-run these sections in all possible schedule combinations to maximize the chances of success. Still a majority students don't make it and give up. Keep in mind many of these people also get enough of a grant to likely be getting their tuition covered. The system failed these people years ago and just free education does not make up for it. They needed a stable environment from childhood in all aspects to maximize the chances of success.
Mentioned polarity in Poland, comes not from lack of college education, but from extremely poor understanding of economics, lack of basic personal budgeting skills, lack of critical thinking, vulnerability to cheap propaganda and manipulation techniques.
High school material at best.
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.
Also IIRC the US improved it's gini coefficient for the one year 2009? 2008?; a lot of rich people suddenly got less rich until they got bailed out.
That’s a very American attitude - that money will solve everything. The school itself with great teachers (assuming money buys great teachers) cannot be enough. There needs to be parental involvement and a culture of advancement to push these kids to their actual capabilities. That’s in addition to everything else in their environment. If parents are stressed or there’s food insecurity, no one is attempting to get to grad school. If gangs are all around and violence is everywhere, few will make it to college.
Culture is the most powerful force, and that has to come as a collective set of ideals. It also doesn’t have to cost anything.
Too hungry to study? Fund school meals. Are free school meals stigmatising? Fund them for all students.
Teachers not good enough? Pay more for better ones.
Gang violence competes for mindshare? Fund proper, attractive activities for kids in the age group so they can do something better.
You can’t solve problems by burning money but you can spend money to solve problems.
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.
Otherwise I agree. Education is the best remedy. Since logistics of knowledge is very cheap today, it is also a manageable problem. At least in higher education. But you have to look at the whole economy and there might not be opportunities for everyone.
Racial or sex quotas should not be used because they would be more unfair than the former solution to treat people equally, even if the unscientific accusation of bias were true. Governments in Europe are obsessed with it though. There would be an end goal and it is only toxic people that decide what is allegedly fair. A Robin Hood tax would show the same faults.
I believe the Nordics use a progressive tax with individual taxed subjects. I would not call that redistribution. Within the EU we actually have a redistribution towards allegedly poorer countries and it is an extremely toxic and unfair system. The most profitable behavior for a subject is to spend money as quickly as possible and put the externalities of bad behavior on the state.
Plus, the inequality in nordic countries is very high, so they also do not have a solution against that. They have a solution for the people that have nothing and that is a strong welfare state (which is accused to foster inequality, but that is not based on sane arguments).
So my question to anyone who acts like there's a very simple causal link from violence/crime/illness to inequality is, "why isn't your strategy working then?"
I think this kind of stuff is generally a lot more complicated than pointing to a single cause; I don't think that inequality is the single cause of every social problem. But if I am going to point to a single cause, it's probably not going to be based on the strategy that we aggressively targeted for multiple decades that didn't yield the results people are now promising. I get a little bit annoyed by people who keep saying, "no you don't understand, if we're even tougher on crime, then we'll see the results. We just haven't been tough enough yet."
At some point, it starts to feel more like "tough on crime" is a philosophy rather than a data-driven, falsifiable theory.
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 criminals from getting an education
6. Crime is a zero-sum, adversarial economic system. Cooperation in a free market is far, far more productive to those who participate in it
A person committing crimes will impoverish himself, his family, and his community.
P.P.S. An awful lot of people look at the obvious correlation between poverty and crime, and assume that therefore poverty causes crime. I strongly suspect it's the other way around - crime produces poverty.
P.P.P.S. No, I am not an advocate of being "tough on crime". I think most prison sentences are excessive. But decriminalizing and ignoring crime is the wrong answer. NYC's classifying armed robbery as not a violent crime is the wrong answer. (I've been robbed at gunpoint. Putting a gun in someone's face and threatening to blow their head off is a violent crime. Period.)
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.
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?
> 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.
Crime is not the only variable affecting the economy. I gave you another variable - paying people to not work.
> It's an interesting theory
It's a question for you. Which would you choose?
As for trends, there's been a decades long increasing trend of people leaving their jobs for one reason or another and getting on disability. Disability pays less than their jobs did, but it's a workable life. Their standard of living went down, but it wasn't because of rich people. It was because they found a friendly doctor who could get them on disability, and they wouldn't have to work anymore.
https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/statcomps/di_asr/2016/sect01...
Do you think that a 5 fold increase in the number of workers on disability in the last 70 years might have contributed to inequality?
It sounds like you're saying here that crime doesn't have a strong enough effect on inequality to really practically matter when compared to other factors. Is that what you're saying? That other factors are so much stronger that they're able to actually reverse the trend we would otherwise expect to see?
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If you're trying to find the actual reasons why inequality has gone up, we can overlay a lot of charts on top of inequality levels that will show correlations, from welfare participation to market deregulation to housing prices to even mobile phone usage.
People can debate which of those theories are correct. But all of them are more plausible than the idea that crime rates are strongly correlated with rising inequality. I have some issues with the "welfare queen" narratives that people bring out, but blaming welfare is at least pointing to two numbers that are going in the same direction.
So, sure, I will happily grant that it is more plausible that welfare levels influence inequality than it is to say that crime rates are driving inequality. I will take some minor quibbles with the fact that spikes in welfare/inequality don't seem to be correlated in convincing ways (again, we saw economic trends around 2019/2020 that didn't line up with when people were given financial aide during the pandemic, which should probably strike you as at least a little bit odd). But yes, at the very least you're now pointing at graphs that both have a positive slope.
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> It's a question for you. Which would you choose?
I would genuinely, honestly choose to work, I am interested in maximizing my earning potential for multiple reasons. I also have side/entrepreneurial stuff I do anyway for profit, so it's really not feasible for me to even consider taking welfare that would be conditional on me not having a job or earning any additional income. And the numbers you're talking about are too low for me to live comfortably, and only the working option gives me a clear path forward to changing that number.
I don't think that answer matters to you, and I don't understand why you care about it. Obviously you don't think the answer I give above about my own work preferences is representative of the average American person, so why did you ask the question if the answer didn't matter to your argument?
> so it's really not feasible for me to even consider taking welfare that would be conditional on me not having a job or earning any additional income
You can still be setting yourself up in business. It takes a while before a business generates income. You could also use the time to upgrade your job skills so you could re-enter the job market at a higher pay level.
But I do admire your honesty there. I expect a not insignificant number of people would take the check, and have another source of income off the books.
Like I said:
> People can debate which of those theories are correct. But all of them are more plausible than the idea that crime rates are strongly correlated with rising inequality.
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> and have another source of income off the books.
:shrug: This seems like a lot of trouble to me personally; I don't like the idea of either not putting income into the bank or not reporting it on taxes. Audits are nasty :). Maybe I'm over-cautious on that front, I guess people do sometimes choose not to report income -- but since I'd like to make significantly more than those numbers, I suspect that's a solution that wouldn't really work for me long-term unless all of my side projects/ventures stayed very small. At most I'd need to only do it short term.
Again though, I don't think my own preferences or choices matter that much here, I think looking at overall data trends is better than looking at personal anecdotes. I don't think it's really relevant to the conversation what I would or wouldn't do.
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 to armor their stores, hire security guards, and cover the losses. Many just close up shop and flee. This will increase poverty and inequality.
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 -- cities that didn't alter their policing strategy also saw increases in crime.
The other thing that's worth bringing up once again is that people don't just claim that decreasing crime... decreases crime. They claim it decreases inequality, they claim it's responsible for decreasing other ills. But the only stats that they're ever interested in are crime stats, at which point they just kind of jump to the conclusion that "of course businesses will have to spend more money to armor stores."
There's not good data to support this -- the most convincing example is San Francisco, which when you dig into, also doesn't really hold up. Store closings in San Francisco aren't that much higher than the rest of the country.
> This will increase poverty and inequality.
And again... opposed to before?
What's frustrating about this is that we have a strategy we're trying -- tough on crime -- that is not reducing inequality. And whenever anyone suggests alternative strategies, the response is, "that will make inequality worse." But the existing approach is not working right now. It's all based on fear of what's about to happen. It's not based on looking back at historical data and saying, "we implemented stop and frisk and then people got better jobs." Because that didn't happen.
It's always based around this idea that society is about to fall apart, not tangible data that crime rates are causal for the other harms.
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.
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.
I noticed you didn't answer any of them :-)
I also never said that 100% of inequality was caused by crime. I said that crime is a cause of inequality. Just like smoking is a cause of death.
It's pretty obvious that crime causes a reduction in the standard of living of the criminal, his family, and his community. I understand that obviousness is not proof, but you seem to thing it doesn't. Why do you think that?
Well, short answer to all of them, I'm not 100% certain, but apparently not for any reasons that show up predictably in national trends. :)
You want me to treat this like it's a personal question, but whatever answer I give you doesn't matter if it doesn't reflect what other people are doing.
If I tell you that I would choose to open a business in the high-crime area, are you going to be shocked and concede the argument? Of course not. You know on some level that asking someone's opinion on a web forum is not the same thing as examining national economic trends.
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> I also never said that 100% of inequality was caused by crime. I said that crime is a cause of inequality.
If you're just saying that crime is a contributing factor, sure I buy that, absolutely. But that's a very different thing then complaining that people have the causation backwards. We might as well say that both crime and inequality contribute to each other in subtle ways, crime/poverty being a cyclical problem is just as obvious of a conclusion, so I'm not sure what your objection is if that's the case.
More to the point though, saying "it's a factor" isn't necessarily the same thing as saying it should be the primary factor we focus on. We have a lot of data now saying that pulling the lever on crime is not influential enough to seriously impact inequality. At best, that's the conclusion we can draw from that data.
Saying that crime is a weak cause of inequality that doesn't show up in national trends is effectively the same thing as saying we can kind of ignore it when talking about inequality. Because it obviously doesn't matter enough to be visible.
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> It's pretty obvious that crime causes a reduction in the standard of living of the criminal, his family, and his community. I understand that obviousness is not proof, but you seem to thing it doesn't. Why do you think that?
I think it's complicated -- I think that the correlation between poverty and crime rates is much higher than the correlation between inequality and crime rates, and there might be a couple of reasons for that. Crime rates contain a lot of crimes against communities, and inequality is not always focused within communities, so maybe there's a contributing factor there? Maybe it's that there are thresholds of inequality of outcomes that need to be present before they start influencing people's behavior? Or maybe because crimes are influenced by existing poverty, crimes do more to keep communities at existing levels rather than lower their outcomes further? Heck, maybe it's just that only certain crimes impact or are influenced by inequality and the data is not granular enough to pick out meaningful trends. I certainly buy that white-collar crimes like wage theft could reasonably have an impact on national economic outcomes. But I think my biggest conclusion is that anyone who claims to have a perfect explanation for any of that stuff is either selling something or deluding themselves.
I do know what the data says, which is that decreasing crime levels have not lead to decreasing inequality. I do know what the data says about policing, which is that police budgets and policies at least in the short term don't really seem to be affecting the economic health of cities in any predictable way. I do know what the data says about crime rates themselves, which is that there doesn't seem to be any really strong trend I can find that's predictive of how much of an increase in crime a given city will have seen over 2020-2022.
The actual data about the recent crime increases gets really confusing the closer you look at it. Homicides and violent crimes are up, property crimes are not rising by the same amount -- by some metrics they're going down. This is really weird, it doesn't fit with a lot of narratives. It doesn't fit with narratives about lawlessness and degradation of society, but it also doesn't fit super-well with narratives about times being tough during the pandemic, because on the surface we would expect thefts to rise more than homicides in that case. People have offered explanations that maybe people traveling less makes it harder to steal things? Which... maybe that's true. It's a plausible theory, but there's not really data to back it up.
Regardless, I don't think that the right way to approach any of these questions is to say, "I have a theory that seems obvious to me, it doesn't match with the data, but I'm not sure what the better theory is so I'm just going to keep confidently asserting it." I think at some point it's better to take a step back and say, "I notice I am confused." I don't really need to offer you an alternative explanation as to why inequality is going up in order to disprove that crime is a major reason. I can just point at the numbers and say that if crime was a major reason, the numbers would be different. You don't need to replace a theory to prove it wrong.
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Now, could crime be a contributing factor to inequality? I guess. Maybe crime causes inequality trends and inequality trends cause crime. Both seem obvious from some explanations, and there's about the same amount of data for both conclusions -- which is to say, not much. But clearly these metrics are not strongly correlated, so if we're interested in tackling inequality, this might not be the best place for us to focus our efforts.
This is why naive explanations of inequality that blame the poor or the envious are false.
And struggling to pay bills is a different problem from inequality per se.
As another example of justified skepticism, I wonder what their research departments have to say about student debt forgiveness programs? I am sure they will find such programs fantastic. There is no conflict of interest involved there.
We are the richest and most prosperous humans to ever walk the earth. Scapegoating still exists.
Nope. Inequality is increasing locally in the west. There are a lot of poor people everywhere you look.
> Needs will just increase to meet the threshold for scapegoating.
That goes against the submission but okay. I suppose you are also against minimal wage increases.