Lorenzo Warby on Marxism and Wokeism; Razib Khan's book recommendations; Eric Schwitzgebel on wisdom and the academy; Two reviews of "The Myth of American Inequality"
Cochran notes the major problem with his numbers in the text, but then moves on.
A lot of what we give “the poor” is in kind services like medical care, education, housing subsidies, etc. it’s not clear how such subsidies should be valued, but a good case can be made that their value to the recipient is far below cost.
Meanwhile, means testing on these benefits means it’s effectively 100% tax on work.
Let’s imagine a family in a townhouse in Baltimore. They live in a neighborhood with 1/10th the crime and dysfunction. Marriage rates are 5x higher. They work in a factory and they can’t buy as much stuff but if they work an extra shift they keep the money. And anyway tvs we’re going to get cheaper over the last 50 years no matter what. If they have a smart kid he can go to college and afford tuition on a part time job with no debt.
Was that person worse off than someone that sits on a couch all day in front of a big flat screen, probably divorced, listening to gunshots at night, but qualifying for Medicaid to treat their self imposed diabetes?
I grew up in an 800 sqft house. I remember when we could afford an air conditioner. But it was a house in a great neighborhood with a good school and my dad had a good union job that looked out for him even when he got sick.
There's much that's true in what you say despite many factual errors. Thanks.
In case you are wondering:
1 While conditions such as "self-imposed" diabetes are more common today, part of the reason is that these people live far longer than 50 years ago. Treatment is WAY better.
2 While some neighborhoods have more gun violence, most don't. Violence is down from 50 years ago. Our homicide rate peaked about 40 years ago.
Marriage between men and women so as to raise kids in a married home is socially optimal and should be the goal of all who want to raise kids.
There is no just way to equalize singles raising kids with married couples raising kids. The use of Uncle Sugar as a semi-father provider of welfare is clearly sub-optimal based on crime & future lives of such kids.
Freedom allows folk to make many sub-optimal choices; sometimes the average optimal is not actually optimal for the individuals involved.
Absolutely, though one could argue any two adults (same sex, parent-grandparent, etc.) would be similarly better than most single parent situations.
Either way, two vs single adult households (kids or not) has a high correlation to income. I'm pretty sure it is Russ Roberts (Econtalk) who has said that all demographic groups are improving economically except this is countered by people moving from good performing two adult households to worse performing single adult households. I've not seen data to support that though maybe he had it in the references for an episode. Somewhere I've also heard that a kid from a two parent household in the bottom quintile has a less than 20% chance of being in the bottom quintile as an adult. I might have even seen data for that one.
I think diabetes rates like bmi are up even for constant age rates.
In any event my point is that fee medical care isn’t worth what it costs in terms of quality of life. The person might be better off with more cash and being on a diet then having free insulin.
I compare crime rates to 1960, so sixty years if you prefer.
I also adjust the murder rate for the increased effectiveness of trauma care after the Vietnam war (more attempted murder and less murder).
Finally, I’m mostly thinking about the marriage rate in bad neighborhoods.
As my previous first sentence says, there is much true in what you say. Please start with that.
Yes, it is debatable whether "free" medical care is worth what it costs. One could also argue it is worth far more than it costs. And while I'm very uncertain how a guaranteed income would work out, I'm not against trying it in place of some govt benefits but for better or worse, most proposals keep Medicaid.
Yes, an increasing percent of people get type 2 diabetes (bad) but they also live far longer (good).
Homicide rates are indeed up slightly from 60 years ago but one could argue that now you are cherry picking. Going back that far I have to wonder if official statistics included all homicides. Either way, the difference isn't all that big.
As for more attempts but less murders due to medical care, that seems equally positive and negative to me.
Only considering bad neighborhoods very much seems cherry picking to me.
More affluent Americans today spend truly prodigious amounts of wealth and effort on keeping bad stuff in bad neighborhoods, and themselves as isolated from those as they can. This effect is driven by such mundane considerations as not wanting to risk a trip to ER or being robbed, as well as giving your children a reasonably safe environment and a peer group that is socialized in a civilized manner, not in hood rat manner. Imagine how much extra could be spent on, say, caring for homeless (since you seem to care for this) if all this was not a concern. You could build whole cities with the surplus thus liberated.
Incidentally, one of the more salient criticisms of Piketty's famous work was that he lumped in home equity together with all other forms of capital. It was dumb because the appreciation of home equity basically represents payment for segregation, not any sort of industrial or other wealth-generating capital. And if memory serves, once one takes home equity appreciation out of his lump, his great discovery of r>g disappears into thin air.
I'm not sure I completely understand your first paragraph but I don't think what you say applies to much of the US and maybe that's why I don't see a lot of extra money becoming available (ignoring the further difficulty of somehow transferring that money to a pot for homeless or building a city). Econtalk just had a guest who mentioned how housing in most of the US is actually extremely affordable compared to other developed countries. It's basically CA, NYC and Boston metro, and few other spots that aren't affordable. TX, the south, small cities, rural america, etc. are mostly rather affordable relative to
historical prices as well as current incomes. In my community of a bit over 100k, the undesirable neighborhoods are rather small, maybe 10% but certainly not more than 20% of total so it doesn't take much effort to avoid them. Certainly not gobs of money as it's only an issue for those with very little money (lowest one or two quintiles).
I'm intrigue by your hypothesis about Piketty and home appreciation but I have no idea how big of a factor it is. I'll be looking for some data to back it up. If you can point me somewhere that would be appreciated.
1960 is before leftists took over. After the 1960s we essentially have a different society, and the sharp break in things like marriage, crime, fertility, etc are an indication of that.
These things impacted the bottom more than the top, and this is a thread on “inequality” so I think it’s worth discussing.
I think a society where you don’t get shot is better than a society where the trauma team at the ER can patch you up if you get shot. Something like 80% reductions in trauma mortality occurred, but that doesn’t make the world less violent.
People use murder rates because everything else can be systematically underreported. I had my car broken into about a dozen times in Baltimore, but I only reported it the first time.
It's an interesting idea that homicide rate tells us less about violence than it would seem. Certainly some truth in it.
It would be nice if things were as simple as your leftist idea. I'm doubtful they are. Unfortunately I have little or no hope we will ever know with reasonable confidence. Besides it being difficult to assess with anything close to a scientific method, the political left in control of most of academia and research has no interest in a hypothesis like that.
Lorenzo of Oz has long been making great comments on other blogs I've been reading, but haven't seen him much in many months. Very glad he's doing these essays with Helen.
It notes that social justice warriors want status for themselves, not better results for the poor they claim to care about. So any compromise with them feeds their egos and enlarges their demands.
Eric has a great note on why wisdom is so scarce among the academics:
"Narrow, stable lives will thus tend to generate less wisdom than chaotic lives with radical changes of circumstance." This stability leads to a lack of wisdom.
Bad times lead to hard men. Hard men lead to tough choices, and better times.
Good times lead to soft men, unused to making tough choices. Soft men lead to bad times.
Iterate.
Will Lorenzo note the relation with Eric's soft academics explicitly?
On inequality, the USA and all OECD countries continue to refuse to talk about the bottom 5-10% folk who, thru genetics and/or SES bad luck and/or bad lifestyle choices in the past are now not working in a job and are unlikely to get or keep a normal job. With mental or drug problems, cannot take care of themselves; don't want to be confined to an institution. Are usually not violent nor criminal.
What to do with such folk? UBI to feed their habits won't work - but like socialism, those who advocate it say "real UBI hasn't been tried".
The super wealthy top 1% or 0.1% (top 330,000 Americans) make huge amounts of money with huge wealth - but it is mostly the envious who want to destroy that wealth who are most hysterical about it. The important question is what to do about the bottom 33 million 10% who are failing to run their own lives?
We need both before tax and transfer measures of income distribution. The pre is especially important for political economy and more so geographically.
By way of background, I commissioned a short piece from Lorenzo arguing that problems with accurate evidence-gathering in the social sciences predated "Wokery". Wokism, we suspected, had simply made an existing problem even worse.
Lorenzo used one or two case studies in his original piece, and Lee Jussim challenged us on approaching the issue in that way, arguing that a generalised pattern of evidentiary carelessness across entire disciplines was needed in order to make out the claim.
I thought this was genuinely interesting & worth pursuing, and commissioned the essays, of which there are 26 in total. I'll edit and publish them weekly over the next six or so months, while Lorenzo is happy to make changes and respond to comments as they're published. This, of course, is made possible by the publication schedule.
I wholeheartedly agree that living conditions for most of the lowest quintile are way better. The primary exception would be the homeless. To the best of my knowledge, the homeless rate is higher (by a percentage similar to institutionalism being down, draw your own conclusion) and these people generally aren't doing better.
The quotes you provided remind me of recent work by some combination of Piketty, Zucman, and Saez. They claimed the bottom quintile paid a higher tax rate than the top quintile by excluding all kinds of govt benefits from their income and taxes, including tax credits, while they added things to the income of the top quintile such as unrealized cap gains. I don't know what assumptions Gramm used to get a low poverty rate but I can guess they are equally biased. For comparison, look at the official rate from the census bureau (over 10%) and especially the supplemental measure (over 5%).
That said, a rising boat for the lowest quintile does not mean it isn't rising faster for the top quintile. By most calculations it is. People have also calculated the percent of people near median income. It is down. We have more people way above median and more at least a bit below median. These measures say, for better or worse, income inequality is up.
Cochran notes the major problem with his numbers in the text, but then moves on.
A lot of what we give “the poor” is in kind services like medical care, education, housing subsidies, etc. it’s not clear how such subsidies should be valued, but a good case can be made that their value to the recipient is far below cost.
Meanwhile, means testing on these benefits means it’s effectively 100% tax on work.
Let’s imagine a family in a townhouse in Baltimore. They live in a neighborhood with 1/10th the crime and dysfunction. Marriage rates are 5x higher. They work in a factory and they can’t buy as much stuff but if they work an extra shift they keep the money. And anyway tvs we’re going to get cheaper over the last 50 years no matter what. If they have a smart kid he can go to college and afford tuition on a part time job with no debt.
Was that person worse off than someone that sits on a couch all day in front of a big flat screen, probably divorced, listening to gunshots at night, but qualifying for Medicaid to treat their self imposed diabetes?
I grew up in an 800 sqft house. I remember when we could afford an air conditioner. But it was a house in a great neighborhood with a good school and my dad had a good union job that looked out for him even when he got sick.
There's much that's true in what you say despite many factual errors. Thanks.
In case you are wondering:
1 While conditions such as "self-imposed" diabetes are more common today, part of the reason is that these people live far longer than 50 years ago. Treatment is WAY better.
2 While some neighborhoods have more gun violence, most don't. Violence is down from 50 years ago. Our homicide rate peaked about 40 years ago.
https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/htius.pdf
3 Marriage rates were not quite triple. More important though, percent of married households was not quite double.
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/567107-the-end-of-marriage-in-america/
Marriage between men and women so as to raise kids in a married home is socially optimal and should be the goal of all who want to raise kids.
There is no just way to equalize singles raising kids with married couples raising kids. The use of Uncle Sugar as a semi-father provider of welfare is clearly sub-optimal based on crime & future lives of such kids.
Freedom allows folk to make many sub-optimal choices; sometimes the average optimal is not actually optimal for the individuals involved.
Absolutely, though one could argue any two adults (same sex, parent-grandparent, etc.) would be similarly better than most single parent situations.
Either way, two vs single adult households (kids or not) has a high correlation to income. I'm pretty sure it is Russ Roberts (Econtalk) who has said that all demographic groups are improving economically except this is countered by people moving from good performing two adult households to worse performing single adult households. I've not seen data to support that though maybe he had it in the references for an episode. Somewhere I've also heard that a kid from a two parent household in the bottom quintile has a less than 20% chance of being in the bottom quintile as an adult. I might have even seen data for that one.
I think diabetes rates like bmi are up even for constant age rates.
In any event my point is that fee medical care isn’t worth what it costs in terms of quality of life. The person might be better off with more cash and being on a diet then having free insulin.
I compare crime rates to 1960, so sixty years if you prefer.
I also adjust the murder rate for the increased effectiveness of trauma care after the Vietnam war (more attempted murder and less murder).
Finally, I’m mostly thinking about the marriage rate in bad neighborhoods.
As my previous first sentence says, there is much true in what you say. Please start with that.
Yes, it is debatable whether "free" medical care is worth what it costs. One could also argue it is worth far more than it costs. And while I'm very uncertain how a guaranteed income would work out, I'm not against trying it in place of some govt benefits but for better or worse, most proposals keep Medicaid.
Yes, an increasing percent of people get type 2 diabetes (bad) but they also live far longer (good).
Homicide rates are indeed up slightly from 60 years ago but one could argue that now you are cherry picking. Going back that far I have to wonder if official statistics included all homicides. Either way, the difference isn't all that big.
As for more attempts but less murders due to medical care, that seems equally positive and negative to me.
Only considering bad neighborhoods very much seems cherry picking to me.
More affluent Americans today spend truly prodigious amounts of wealth and effort on keeping bad stuff in bad neighborhoods, and themselves as isolated from those as they can. This effect is driven by such mundane considerations as not wanting to risk a trip to ER or being robbed, as well as giving your children a reasonably safe environment and a peer group that is socialized in a civilized manner, not in hood rat manner. Imagine how much extra could be spent on, say, caring for homeless (since you seem to care for this) if all this was not a concern. You could build whole cities with the surplus thus liberated.
Incidentally, one of the more salient criticisms of Piketty's famous work was that he lumped in home equity together with all other forms of capital. It was dumb because the appreciation of home equity basically represents payment for segregation, not any sort of industrial or other wealth-generating capital. And if memory serves, once one takes home equity appreciation out of his lump, his great discovery of r>g disappears into thin air.
I'm not sure I completely understand your first paragraph but I don't think what you say applies to much of the US and maybe that's why I don't see a lot of extra money becoming available (ignoring the further difficulty of somehow transferring that money to a pot for homeless or building a city). Econtalk just had a guest who mentioned how housing in most of the US is actually extremely affordable compared to other developed countries. It's basically CA, NYC and Boston metro, and few other spots that aren't affordable. TX, the south, small cities, rural america, etc. are mostly rather affordable relative to
historical prices as well as current incomes. In my community of a bit over 100k, the undesirable neighborhoods are rather small, maybe 10% but certainly not more than 20% of total so it doesn't take much effort to avoid them. Certainly not gobs of money as it's only an issue for those with very little money (lowest one or two quintiles).
I'm intrigue by your hypothesis about Piketty and home appreciation but I have no idea how big of a factor it is. I'll be looking for some data to back it up. If you can point me somewhere that would be appreciated.
1960 is before leftists took over. After the 1960s we essentially have a different society, and the sharp break in things like marriage, crime, fertility, etc are an indication of that.
These things impacted the bottom more than the top, and this is a thread on “inequality” so I think it’s worth discussing.
I think a society where you don’t get shot is better than a society where the trauma team at the ER can patch you up if you get shot. Something like 80% reductions in trauma mortality occurred, but that doesn’t make the world less violent.
People use murder rates because everything else can be systematically underreported. I had my car broken into about a dozen times in Baltimore, but I only reported it the first time.
It's an interesting idea that homicide rate tells us less about violence than it would seem. Certainly some truth in it.
It would be nice if things were as simple as your leftist idea. I'm doubtful they are. Unfortunately I have little or no hope we will ever know with reasonable confidence. Besides it being difficult to assess with anything close to a scientific method, the political left in control of most of academia and research has no interest in a hypothesis like that.
Thank you very much for the recommendation.
Lorenzo of Oz has long been making great comments on other blogs I've been reading, but haven't seen him much in many months. Very glad he's doing these essays with Helen.
His essay is great: https://helendale.substack.com/p/social-justice-as-social-leverage
It notes that social justice warriors want status for themselves, not better results for the poor they claim to care about. So any compromise with them feeds their egos and enlarges their demands.
Eric has a great note on why wisdom is so scarce among the academics:
"Narrow, stable lives will thus tend to generate less wisdom than chaotic lives with radical changes of circumstance." This stability leads to a lack of wisdom.
Bad times lead to hard men. Hard men lead to tough choices, and better times.
Good times lead to soft men, unused to making tough choices. Soft men lead to bad times.
Iterate.
Will Lorenzo note the relation with Eric's soft academics explicitly?
On inequality, the USA and all OECD countries continue to refuse to talk about the bottom 5-10% folk who, thru genetics and/or SES bad luck and/or bad lifestyle choices in the past are now not working in a job and are unlikely to get or keep a normal job. With mental or drug problems, cannot take care of themselves; don't want to be confined to an institution. Are usually not violent nor criminal.
What to do with such folk? UBI to feed their habits won't work - but like socialism, those who advocate it say "real UBI hasn't been tried".
The super wealthy top 1% or 0.1% (top 330,000 Americans) make huge amounts of money with huge wealth - but it is mostly the envious who want to destroy that wealth who are most hysterical about it. The important question is what to do about the bottom 33 million 10% who are failing to run their own lives?
I presume your reference to Eric is to here:
http://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2020/04/wisdom-and-chaos.html
Now I have found it (thanks) I will certainly think upon it.
We need both before tax and transfer measures of income distribution. The pre is especially important for political economy and more so geographically.
Thanks for the promotion, Arnold!
By way of background, I commissioned a short piece from Lorenzo arguing that problems with accurate evidence-gathering in the social sciences predated "Wokery". Wokism, we suspected, had simply made an existing problem even worse.
Lorenzo used one or two case studies in his original piece, and Lee Jussim challenged us on approaching the issue in that way, arguing that a generalised pattern of evidentiary carelessness across entire disciplines was needed in order to make out the claim.
I thought this was genuinely interesting & worth pursuing, and commissioned the essays, of which there are 26 in total. I'll edit and publish them weekly over the next six or so months, while Lorenzo is happy to make changes and respond to comments as they're published. This, of course, is made possible by the publication schedule.
I wholeheartedly agree that living conditions for most of the lowest quintile are way better. The primary exception would be the homeless. To the best of my knowledge, the homeless rate is higher (by a percentage similar to institutionalism being down, draw your own conclusion) and these people generally aren't doing better.
The quotes you provided remind me of recent work by some combination of Piketty, Zucman, and Saez. They claimed the bottom quintile paid a higher tax rate than the top quintile by excluding all kinds of govt benefits from their income and taxes, including tax credits, while they added things to the income of the top quintile such as unrealized cap gains. I don't know what assumptions Gramm used to get a low poverty rate but I can guess they are equally biased. For comparison, look at the official rate from the census bureau (over 10%) and especially the supplemental measure (over 5%).
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/poverty-awareness-month.html#:~:text=Official%20Poverty%20Measure,and%20Table%20A%2D1).
That said, a rising boat for the lowest quintile does not mean it isn't rising faster for the top quintile. By most calculations it is. People have also calculated the percent of people near median income. It is down. We have more people way above median and more at least a bit below median. These measures say, for better or worse, income inequality is up.
Timothy Taylor had a post yesterday re: homelessness.
https://conversableeconomist.com/2022/12/29/homelessness-a-status-report/