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.
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.
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?
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.