I think you are correct. I suspect the only way this goes the other direction is if we say "Ok, if government programs that are part of the welfare state are mostly staffed by women, and welfare state programs mostly benefit women, shouldn't we include all government subsidized industries and transfers?" In that case the military, prisons, police forces, oil industry, forestry industry, etc. that are more male might count up. However, I don't think it is a legitimate logical move to extend "welfare state" to "everything the state does".
I think if we limit it to just what people think of as "welfare" type programs, then yes, it is overwhelmingly benefitting women as the direct recipients. That was always rather the point, however, as only a very few programs allowed for men historically (mostly veterans benefits and Social Security). Most were by design targeted at widows, particularly of soldiers, as a house wife who lost her husband was pretty much the epitome of "deserving poor" in the old days. That didn't really change as women entered the workforce as equals to men.
Prisons lock up men and the military gets men to shoot each other. I could maybe buy that a few well connected men in the police/military benefit from this but men in the broad sense certainly don't, not in the broad sense of men generally benefiting the way women generally benefit from the welfare state.
Yea, I don't think it would be a good argument, just the best that could be made :D I mean, women on welfare don't get married, raise kids themselves, and are generally trapped into a cycle of poverty and misery. It is only those who run the programs and are employed by the state that benefit long term, which is remarkably like those who benefit from the prison system.
(The military is a more complicated issue, as many members benefit over all, far more than actually get killed or otherwise damaged through the experience. I don't want to even try to balance out the net benefits of that overall.)
Maybe welfare single moms would be better off marrying similar men because they need the income, but this relies on the idea that they are suffering from mass false consciousness. Even if true doesn't really change the politics.
I don't think one needs to rely on false consciousness to argue that the massive increase in out of wedlock motherhood in the wake of the expansion of the welfare state, specifically those parts that require a husband not be present, has been negative for women over all. Trading family stability for cash turns out to be a really bad idea for most people. I wouldn't chalk that up to false consciousness but rather a different sense of time preference matched with poor cultural values. (See Thomas Sowell's work on "Black Rednecks" on the cultural issue, and how it teaches poor preferences.)
With the educational attainment of women outpacing that of men (and the gap seems to be growing), is it possible that in 20 years or so the net flow of resources will reverse and be from women to men? I wonder what the social implications of that might be. On the other hand, the wealth generating capacities of high achieving men like Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg might just outweigh any male-female gaps for average people and ensure the result is always a net transfer to women.
Educated women aren't going into the most lucrative professions though. Your average office drone is less economically valuable than your average plumber. Further, even within professions men choose more lucrative tracks, work more overtime, take fewer breaks from work, etc.
It's kind of a natural law that men need to earn more than women to get women so they will do what it takes.
The only scenario where I could see this not working is one where the government takes over most of the economy directly or indirectly and women are better able to get government jobs. That is what it is like in black urban machine politics, the women have city jobs and then men are unemployed. But that begs the question, is a state employee not just on welfare of a different sort.
I stopped reading about happiness studies. Here's why: I'm happy. I wasn't always happy. I can see how I got here. It was mainly by getting out of my comfort zone. It was from doing things that everybody claimed would make you happy, but which I hated doing. Being as unhappy as I was, I thought (not in so many words) that I'd make a habit of going against my grain, in big and small things. That meant getting out of my chair when I didn't want to, talking to people I didn't know, introducing myself to strangers, getting up earlier than I needed to, doing household chores before I needed to - I undertook all this thinking, "What do I have to lose? I'm already unhappy. Going against my grain can't make me too much unhappier than I already am." And like everyone else who has overcome challenges, I learned that once you get over that first hump, it gets easier and easier - and then it becomes a pleasure. Today, I look forward to my exercise sessions, and I get a little shot of exhilaration when I introduce myself to a stranger. My natural introversion is permanent and inviolable, and there will always be tension between my inner and outer selves. But that tension tells me that I'm alive and out there fighting the good fight. So I would say, that if you are unhappy, you shouldn't discount the strong popular consensus that exercise and social effort -- in short, going against your grain - can help overcome the entropy of steady state gloom (I speak not of clinical depression or bipolarity).
"Happiness research makes me very unhappy" Me too. Or does it make you 'depressed'? Endless media-balls about depression 'depresses' me as well. In our modern therapeutic age, plain old unhappiness has been abolished and anyone who exhibits the least sign of it is immediately diagnosed as 'depressed'. Unhappiness used to be part of life's rich tapestry; not any more.
Freddie deBoer's piece is a fantastic tour through the psychology of our therapeutic culture. But bizarrely he doesn't seem to have a clue about what 'conservative' means. He seems to think it's another word for unkind.
I am always a bit surprised that when people talk recent inflation they mention the stimulus packages but never the massive imposed negative supply shocks from the lockdowns. People were kept from producing for weeks or months, goods were backed up sitting in container ships (still are last I heard) many businesses closed completely. We should have expected to see inflation if there had been no increase in the money supply at all just due to the competition to get the smaller pile of goods. Tie in a huge stimulus, and we had two terribly policy choices.
About happiness interventions. I think Nature might be a proxy for slowing down, getting away from crowds and enjoying quietness. My personal experience is that I'm happier in rural places or small towns, and I'm clearly less happy when in big cities.
Most of the social and personal rules that should apply to children should also apply to adults, but we currently have shit rules for children and so we end up with shit rules for adults as well.
Contentment should be the goal; an overall state of emotional well being knowing who you are and getting that there will be ups and downs in life. Happiness is an emotional state just like sadness and both will vary from time to time, but if contentment is achieved then all will be well.
I don't see how DeBoer can so blithely wave away the leftist impulse, possibly its founding impulse, to raise high, that which is low. Whatever is lowest - however tragic - is inevitably going to be the most exalted. There is no nuance on this point.
Whatever he wants - dignified work, that is in the same ballpark remuneration-wise with the work done by the talented/bright/lucky; universal healthcare paid by the government; lots of regulations around labor - I don't know what his interim proposals are as steps on the way to communism - is so dwarfed by the radicalism of his peers, who always and forever just want to throw the game board and all the pieces in the air ... It's maybe absurd to call an avowed Marxist - admittedly vague and content to suggest the dream is never coming - insufficiently radical but there it is.
If happiness research makes you unhappy, then you’ll be really depressed to know there’s actually a master’s program in Happiness Studies. (www.centenaryuniversity.edu/academics/graduate/master-of-arts-in-happiness-studies). All this self-centered nonsense is rooted in exactly that: self-centeredness. The idea of living outwardly rather than inwardly is largely absent in our modern society.
He states that, "As a leftist, my core political assumption is that we are all responsible for each other’s material well-being ..." But he hates the way so much not feeling perfect is now defined as a disorder ("bad mental health") and that so many people feel society has an obligation to fix all bad mental health. He goes so far as to say, "society has no business attempting to regulate the emotional lives of its individual members or to protect them from unhappiness", a surpassingly libertarian sentiment from this avowed man of the left.
There is a major tension here. Mental well-being and material well-being are intertwined. If you believe, as so many leftists do, that "society" is responsible for people's well-being, it must address both aspects. It must do more than just give people money and things.
I am reminded of Coase's "The Market for Goods and Market for Ideas"--coming up on its 50th anniversary! Coase said that the intellectual bifurcation of a market for goods, which needed severe government regulation, and the market for ideas, which required no regulation (free speech!) was incoherent. Ideas could hurt as much as goods, it was as hard for people to judge ideas as to judge goods, etc. Coase, as a fairly libertarian person, wanted less regulation of goods. Much of modern progressivism wants more regulation of ideas.
I think all published economists are wrong about "inflation" - which should be the price level of everything bought. Since stocks & financial assets are bought, their increasing in price should be part of "inflation" (in quotes because it's not, in practice, defined that way).
The US stock market usually has over $5 billion/day of shares being bought (and sold!). In 200 days, that's over $1 trillion. Imagine a gov't program to stimulate share prices: everybody who bought shares in the last year gets an amount from a US stimulus program of $1 trillion, about $5 billion/day until it's all used up.
Share prices go up, maybe way way up - but most other prices don't. Most of the buyers of shares don't really want to buy other stuff, they want some high value financial assets. Financial Asset inflation, not Consumer Prices, is where most of the inflation from US gov't debt is going. Most of going to the rich, and the investment funds / older investors.
Neither John, with his MV=PY (I learned it as PQ, quantity) nor Blinder with no anchor, nor Arnold with an anchor with a long anchor-boat distance are addressing the weakness in the definition of inflation. The fact that the rich are getting richer much much faster than the middle class workers is a big indication that the inflation measure that the Fed focuses on is not the right measure.
But John is more correct to focus on fiscal policy.
I hope Freddie is right. Society needs more self-reliance and mental toughness. I highly recommend reading his essay if you have not already.
"if you care for people you try to walk them towards self-reliance, dignity, and toughness. Not from a lack of compassion, but precisely out of compassion."
A certain level of public disorder is unavoidable and has to be tolerated, but it does not necessarily include roadside defecation, open-air drug markets and needles in public playgrounds. Keeping public order by purely non-coercive means is impossible, and that means forcible institutionalization - in a county jail, if nothing else - or corporeal punishment.
"Does the welfare state transfer wealth from men to women?"
Isn't this super obvious.
Women pay less taxes and get more benefits.
Female employment is much more highly concentrated in both government and government subsidized work (education, healthcare, HR, literal DMV ladies).
Further, the entire reason the Democratic Party exists is because of unmarried women, who are the biggest recipients of government.
Men need women to give birth to them, although that may change over the next few years.
I think you are correct. I suspect the only way this goes the other direction is if we say "Ok, if government programs that are part of the welfare state are mostly staffed by women, and welfare state programs mostly benefit women, shouldn't we include all government subsidized industries and transfers?" In that case the military, prisons, police forces, oil industry, forestry industry, etc. that are more male might count up. However, I don't think it is a legitimate logical move to extend "welfare state" to "everything the state does".
I think if we limit it to just what people think of as "welfare" type programs, then yes, it is overwhelmingly benefitting women as the direct recipients. That was always rather the point, however, as only a very few programs allowed for men historically (mostly veterans benefits and Social Security). Most were by design targeted at widows, particularly of soldiers, as a house wife who lost her husband was pretty much the epitome of "deserving poor" in the old days. That didn't really change as women entered the workforce as equals to men.
Prisons lock up men and the military gets men to shoot each other. I could maybe buy that a few well connected men in the police/military benefit from this but men in the broad sense certainly don't, not in the broad sense of men generally benefiting the way women generally benefit from the welfare state.
Yea, I don't think it would be a good argument, just the best that could be made :D I mean, women on welfare don't get married, raise kids themselves, and are generally trapped into a cycle of poverty and misery. It is only those who run the programs and are employed by the state that benefit long term, which is remarkably like those who benefit from the prison system.
(The military is a more complicated issue, as many members benefit over all, far more than actually get killed or otherwise damaged through the experience. I don't want to even try to balance out the net benefits of that overall.)
Maybe welfare single moms would be better off marrying similar men because they need the income, but this relies on the idea that they are suffering from mass false consciousness. Even if true doesn't really change the politics.
I don't think one needs to rely on false consciousness to argue that the massive increase in out of wedlock motherhood in the wake of the expansion of the welfare state, specifically those parts that require a husband not be present, has been negative for women over all. Trading family stability for cash turns out to be a really bad idea for most people. I wouldn't chalk that up to false consciousness but rather a different sense of time preference matched with poor cultural values. (See Thomas Sowell's work on "Black Rednecks" on the cultural issue, and how it teaches poor preferences.)
With the educational attainment of women outpacing that of men (and the gap seems to be growing), is it possible that in 20 years or so the net flow of resources will reverse and be from women to men? I wonder what the social implications of that might be. On the other hand, the wealth generating capacities of high achieving men like Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg might just outweigh any male-female gaps for average people and ensure the result is always a net transfer to women.
Educated women aren't going into the most lucrative professions though. Your average office drone is less economically valuable than your average plumber. Further, even within professions men choose more lucrative tracks, work more overtime, take fewer breaks from work, etc.
It's kind of a natural law that men need to earn more than women to get women so they will do what it takes.
The only scenario where I could see this not working is one where the government takes over most of the economy directly or indirectly and women are better able to get government jobs. That is what it is like in black urban machine politics, the women have city jobs and then men are unemployed. But that begs the question, is a state employee not just on welfare of a different sort.
I stopped reading about happiness studies. Here's why: I'm happy. I wasn't always happy. I can see how I got here. It was mainly by getting out of my comfort zone. It was from doing things that everybody claimed would make you happy, but which I hated doing. Being as unhappy as I was, I thought (not in so many words) that I'd make a habit of going against my grain, in big and small things. That meant getting out of my chair when I didn't want to, talking to people I didn't know, introducing myself to strangers, getting up earlier than I needed to, doing household chores before I needed to - I undertook all this thinking, "What do I have to lose? I'm already unhappy. Going against my grain can't make me too much unhappier than I already am." And like everyone else who has overcome challenges, I learned that once you get over that first hump, it gets easier and easier - and then it becomes a pleasure. Today, I look forward to my exercise sessions, and I get a little shot of exhilaration when I introduce myself to a stranger. My natural introversion is permanent and inviolable, and there will always be tension between my inner and outer selves. But that tension tells me that I'm alive and out there fighting the good fight. So I would say, that if you are unhappy, you shouldn't discount the strong popular consensus that exercise and social effort -- in short, going against your grain - can help overcome the entropy of steady state gloom (I speak not of clinical depression or bipolarity).
"Happiness research makes me very unhappy" Me too. Or does it make you 'depressed'? Endless media-balls about depression 'depresses' me as well. In our modern therapeutic age, plain old unhappiness has been abolished and anyone who exhibits the least sign of it is immediately diagnosed as 'depressed'. Unhappiness used to be part of life's rich tapestry; not any more.
Freddie deBoer's piece is a fantastic tour through the psychology of our therapeutic culture. But bizarrely he doesn't seem to have a clue about what 'conservative' means. He seems to think it's another word for unkind.
I stopped reading his writing because I couldn't get past the intensity of it. But I enjoy seeing selected quotes..
I am always a bit surprised that when people talk recent inflation they mention the stimulus packages but never the massive imposed negative supply shocks from the lockdowns. People were kept from producing for weeks or months, goods were backed up sitting in container ships (still are last I heard) many businesses closed completely. We should have expected to see inflation if there had been no increase in the money supply at all just due to the competition to get the smaller pile of goods. Tie in a huge stimulus, and we had two terribly policy choices.
About happiness interventions. I think Nature might be a proxy for slowing down, getting away from crowds and enjoying quietness. My personal experience is that I'm happier in rural places or small towns, and I'm clearly less happy when in big cities.
Most of the social and personal rules that should apply to children should also apply to adults, but we currently have shit rules for children and so we end up with shit rules for adults as well.
Contentment should be the goal; an overall state of emotional well being knowing who you are and getting that there will be ups and downs in life. Happiness is an emotional state just like sadness and both will vary from time to time, but if contentment is achieved then all will be well.
I don't see how DeBoer can so blithely wave away the leftist impulse, possibly its founding impulse, to raise high, that which is low. Whatever is lowest - however tragic - is inevitably going to be the most exalted. There is no nuance on this point.
Whatever he wants - dignified work, that is in the same ballpark remuneration-wise with the work done by the talented/bright/lucky; universal healthcare paid by the government; lots of regulations around labor - I don't know what his interim proposals are as steps on the way to communism - is so dwarfed by the radicalism of his peers, who always and forever just want to throw the game board and all the pieces in the air ... It's maybe absurd to call an avowed Marxist - admittedly vague and content to suggest the dream is never coming - insufficiently radical but there it is.
If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands
If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands
If you're happy and you know it,
and you really want to show it,
Clap your hands
If happiness research makes you unhappy, then you’ll be really depressed to know there’s actually a master’s program in Happiness Studies. (www.centenaryuniversity.edu/academics/graduate/master-of-arts-in-happiness-studies). All this self-centered nonsense is rooted in exactly that: self-centeredness. The idea of living outwardly rather than inwardly is largely absent in our modern society.
In some ways, I love Freddie deBoer but ...
He states that, "As a leftist, my core political assumption is that we are all responsible for each other’s material well-being ..." But he hates the way so much not feeling perfect is now defined as a disorder ("bad mental health") and that so many people feel society has an obligation to fix all bad mental health. He goes so far as to say, "society has no business attempting to regulate the emotional lives of its individual members or to protect them from unhappiness", a surpassingly libertarian sentiment from this avowed man of the left.
There is a major tension here. Mental well-being and material well-being are intertwined. If you believe, as so many leftists do, that "society" is responsible for people's well-being, it must address both aspects. It must do more than just give people money and things.
I am reminded of Coase's "The Market for Goods and Market for Ideas"--coming up on its 50th anniversary! Coase said that the intellectual bifurcation of a market for goods, which needed severe government regulation, and the market for ideas, which required no regulation (free speech!) was incoherent. Ideas could hurt as much as goods, it was as hard for people to judge ideas as to judge goods, etc. Coase, as a fairly libertarian person, wanted less regulation of goods. Much of modern progressivism wants more regulation of ideas.
I think all published economists are wrong about "inflation" - which should be the price level of everything bought. Since stocks & financial assets are bought, their increasing in price should be part of "inflation" (in quotes because it's not, in practice, defined that way).
The US stock market usually has over $5 billion/day of shares being bought (and sold!). In 200 days, that's over $1 trillion. Imagine a gov't program to stimulate share prices: everybody who bought shares in the last year gets an amount from a US stimulus program of $1 trillion, about $5 billion/day until it's all used up.
Share prices go up, maybe way way up - but most other prices don't. Most of the buyers of shares don't really want to buy other stuff, they want some high value financial assets. Financial Asset inflation, not Consumer Prices, is where most of the inflation from US gov't debt is going. Most of going to the rich, and the investment funds / older investors.
Neither John, with his MV=PY (I learned it as PQ, quantity) nor Blinder with no anchor, nor Arnold with an anchor with a long anchor-boat distance are addressing the weakness in the definition of inflation. The fact that the rich are getting richer much much faster than the middle class workers is a big indication that the inflation measure that the Fed focuses on is not the right measure.
But John is more correct to focus on fiscal policy.
I hope Freddie is right. Society needs more self-reliance and mental toughness. I highly recommend reading his essay if you have not already.
"if you care for people you try to walk them towards self-reliance, dignity, and toughness. Not from a lack of compassion, but precisely out of compassion."
I'm all for self reliance, dignity, and toughness. But doesn't he also want more people forcibly institutionalized?
A certain level of public disorder is unavoidable and has to be tolerated, but it does not necessarily include roadside defecation, open-air drug markets and needles in public playgrounds. Keeping public order by purely non-coercive means is impossible, and that means forcible institutionalization - in a county jail, if nothing else - or corporeal punishment.