The Fall of the American Worker
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Sources:
[1] http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/4100
[2] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/story/2010/03/25/mb-p...
Everyone qualifies, forever.
[1] http://www.crikey.com.au/2013/01/16/dole-around-the-world-ho...
The most significant difference is that in the US unemployment benefits are generally limited to a maximum of 26 weeks, while in Australia you can collect benefits for decades.
The "greater benefits" available in some states (e.g., Massachusetts) are only available to people who have been recently working in a high-income job. Your unemployment benefit in MA = 50% of the bi-weekly pay rate you had when you were working, up to a certain maximum. And, again, you can only draw unemployment for a maximum of 26 weeks.
I don't know how the Australian laws have changed, but you can't just collect unemployment benefits forever without doing anything, but it is pretty close. I'd guess that the amount of crap the Australian system puts you through in a lifetime is probably about with the US puts you through in a year.
I know a lot of people who just wouldn't work if they could draw benefits like that. Hell, I might retire myself.
I know of houses full of 20 somethings who intentionally fill out applications left handed with spelling mistakes so they never get a job and can surf all day.
The amount of money is enough to live on, but you won't be really doing any leisure activities, so it gets old pretty fast for anyone that's motivated. For the unmotivated, it keeps them fed, clothed and sheltered, and stops them resorting to crime, so I think it's a good thing.
The training is a covered cost, so its not out-of-pocket for the unemployed. I think it is a good method of helping reduce structural unemployment, as most of the cyclical unemployed are likely to find work before the training requirement kicks in anyway.
It would also help government budgets - for example, BART trains could be cleaned by some unemployed individual making $10k/year rather than some unionized worker making $75k + benefits (or whatever the exact numbers are).
With a guaranteed income, $11k would likely be insufficient - why work for $11k when you can enjoy a life of leisure for $10k?
Otherwise you end up with 100% marginal tax rates, like in traditional benefit regimes.
This is the same category of lunacy as the "the homeless are just too lazy to work" argument. Anyone who has even seen the reality on the ground for people in these situations would know not to make them.
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2011.pdf
(Note: I'm defining a "life of leisure" as one in which you choose not to work, and instead enjoy leisure time. This describes most of the poor in the US. Of course, if you define "life of leisure" as having a butler and a solid gold toilet, you get different results.)
No one is enjoying life in this country at $10K/year. The life of someone at that level is a constant barrage of worries, of harassment, of choosing between having one basic necessity of life over another.
No one chooses to be there, and certainly no one would stay if they had the opportunity to exceed it.
> "but available data on people below the official US poverty line certainly agrees with this general picture."
You're going to have to cite specifics from that document, because all I see are labor force participation rates and income levels - there is nothing in there about people choosing not to work in favor of "enjoying leisure time".
> "This describes most of the poor in the US."
Really? You think the day laborer standing outside Lowe's hoping for a job has chosen to be below the poverty line, and instead has chosen a life of leisure?
I'm going to state this in the most civil way I know how: you are sorely lacking in perspective - and this is after reading all of your posts in this thread so far - and for your own sake, and the sake of people you share this society with, go volunteer at a poverty or homelessness-related organization for a month. You have beliefs that are in no way grounded in reality, and the numbers you continue to cite to make your argument are between nonsensical and specious. Please find some way to experience the issues from within.
You think the day laborer standing outside Lowe's hoping for a job has chosen to be below the poverty line, and instead has chosen a life of leisure?
No, I think the 80% of the poor who chose not to participate in the labor force are the ones who have chosen a life of leisure. The day laborer you mention is one of the 20% or so who made a different choice.
Not working for someone else is not the same thing as enjoying leisure, at all - you've built a castle of logic on a deeply flawed assumption.
Look, if you only have $10k a year you can not buy a lot of stuff. That's just about enough to supply yourself with an adequate amount of food, clothing, and similar basic necessities if you are in some low-rent area - in short, for a single person to keep body and soul together. It's not enough to go out to restaurants or purchase more than necessities unless you enjoy some sort of additional subsidy from parents, spouse or wherever. You'll be cooking your own meals, carting your groceries around on foot, doing the same with your laundry (or washing it in the bathtub) because you can't afford a washing machine, and so on and so forth. You won't starve, but you'll have to work at things that other people pay to have done for them. This is, believe it or not, time-consuming, and effort-consuming too. It's not too bad for a single individual who's educated enough to have a meaningful inner life, but for a lot of people it means both boredom and a significant exclusion from social activity, and for an awful lot of other people (the sort you think chose to have vaginal sex instead of giving you a blowjob), it can mean dealing with children, which is extremely time-consuming.
I think you mean well Chris, but you seem almost comically ignorant about the difficulties faced by other people who didn't have the good fortune to be you.
ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/ce/standard/2009/income.txt
As for cooking, carrying groceries and doing laundry, I do all those thing sfor myself.
Incidentally, your mental picture of the poor is a bit off.
As for owning things like washing machines, the gap is far smaller than you think. 65% of poor households have one, compared to 80% of the US (see table 2-4, pg 52).
http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf
I think terminology is confusing you. You hear words like "poverty" and assume a certain lifestyle. But the word "poverty" doesn't correspond very well to the lifestyle you are visualizing.
[1] It's been pointed out to me that at least some people in poverty are business owners who took a loss. I don't know to what extent this is the case, but it messes up all the numbers if it's a big factor.
I invite you to try the SNAP challenge (http://site.foodshare.org/site/PageServer?pagename=programs_...) and see how long you can go on a $4/day allowance. I was lucky to get sufficient education about nutrition and cooking in school to be able to eat healthily on a budget like this when I've had to, sometimes for a few months at a time. But if you screw up and spoil a meal or some of the food goes bad, then tough luck, you don't get to eat anything.
Not to mention, why should people have to do worthless government-assigned work to get that money? Yes, of course, there will naturally be some people that would take the 10k and live on it - as best as can be managed - but I think it would free up a great many other people to pursue work they're actually interested in, especially in the arts.
In past times, the majority of human work was growing food. Today, less than 2% of the population can feed everyone else. As a result a great many people had to find other work; and they did. But now it seems that software and automation will reduce the number of people needed to do all other kinds of required work to a minimum, as happened to agriculture.
Coincidentally, artistic work by and large pays less than ever today due to the ease of piracy (you can trace the profits of RIAA over the last 3 decades for a good example of this) even as more people than ever are able to do artistic work (better tools) and reach an audience at no cost (better communications). Art and entertainment will be the last bastions of human "work" when current trends start to max out.
So - why not have a society where people are free to pursue the work they're interested in, whether it pays or not; where art and entertainment are possible to freely create or consume, unconstrained by the bounds of the market; and where the necessary work for human survival is compressed to a minimum of needed people that are interested in those matters and/or the money that comes with them?
That's the thing. If $10,000 is the new $0, then it will be worth $0.
The benefit of a basic income is that any paid work would simply add to your take-home cash. At the moment, means-tested benefits can cause people entering into the workforce to have benefits removed - so that their implicit marginal tax rate can exceed 100% (i.e. they are worse off working). Even if this perverse situation isn't directly manifested, the very poor suffer some of the highest implicit tax rates due to benefits being removed. Which is a crazy situation.
I have taken to saying "Everybody should have the right to a job as 'Verwaltungsfachangestellter'" (something like an office clerk). But I tend to say that in jest...
This isn't actually that wild an idea - this is what FDR did with the NRA during the great depression.
Another thing I have realized: proponents of government spending are always right. Of course there is an optimal way to spend money, and in theory government could just decree that money should be spent in that way and things would run in an optimal fashion. The problem is that advocates of government spending tend to skimp over the aspect on how to actually determine optimal spending.
This sounds like a great way to create and maintain an underclass of laborers who make less than minimum wage.
No person should be forced to work just to eat or have shelter.
The $10,000 would increase demand by $10,000. What mechanism would then increase supply? How much would that mechanism increase supply?
I fail to see any such supply-increasing mechanism. If I'm right about that, then that $10,000 would be eaten by inflation literally instantly.
Money is a store of productivity. It cannot be a universal policy of an economy to give out money for no productivity exchange without consequences.
Robotics. In my lifetime, most basic productivity will be fully automated. Robotic factories will make self-driving tractors that cultivate fields of genetically engineered crops.
Labor is already obsolete. The majority of Americans of traditional working age (13+) already live on handouts. This trend will accelerate in the next 20 years. It is a huge question of how to handle the below average people who are both unnecessary and not well suited to the life of ibtellectual pursuits.
In Peter F. Hamilton's sci-fi novels, he posits that each person will receive an EMA, an energy-mass allocation to use or trade as they see fit. With the boundless resources of the universe brought to your doorstep, we need a better method of resource allocation than the minimum wage.
indeed
I don't think we can dismiss that out of hand. It seems like a pretty bog-standard social welfare program.
Say there's 250m people in the US over 21, give each of them $10k and you're talking $2.5 trillion/year. Say, the economy as a whole is about $15 trillion/year (it's a bit higher, but I'm approximating), so at most you'd be looking at inflation of 16.6%. You're assuming that the first $10,000 of goods and services would be inflated by 100%, but this isn't true, nor is the first $10k of goods and services the same for everyone.
Obviously I'm giving you a very abridged answer, but I encourage you to look into Milton Friedman's writings on the concept of Basic Income - not a person you could accuse of economic illiteracy, even if you didn't agree with all or many of his views.
Critics of the welfare state, like Murray, prefer to talk about choice rather than hardship. Their general argument can be summed up as, "They made poor choices, and are now facing the consequences of those choices." The problem with this perspective isn't the profound lack of empathy, but rather a presumption that there exists a system of perfect information that everyone is tapped into.
Choices have consequences. But we rarely see the many possibilities a choice can yield, let alone the probable weightings of each one. Even granted the great presumption that everyone should be perfectly rational, it still depends on perfect information. "She shouldn't have had a child with the wrong guy," says Murray, and Maharidge seems to just accept this. The proper response would have been to dig deeper. Should she have made sure that she couldn't have children first before having sex? Should she have not had sex? How could she verify that that guy was the right guy?
And this still presumes that she had a choice in having sex with him in the first place. But perhaps more to the point, how would she have known each of those things? How would she have discovered that birth control exists? How would she have been afforded sex education and family planning strategies? This isn't a feminism/sexism issue, though I'm veering a little too close to that.
We know things because we learn them. We hear about them through rumor and this is filtered through whatever heuristics and analytical brain software we happen to have available. And yet these pathways for comprehending information and sifting truth are built on trial and error. We learn something; we believe it; we find that a certain part wasn't true after all; we adjust; we move on.
This process happens. We make mistakes. That's how we learn what consequences exist to the choices we make. Yes, we make bad choices, but this is frequently, virtually always, because we could not see with perfect clarity what consequences there would be. That's what experimentation is. Because at the end of the day, we don't really have a choice. We can't change the laws of physics so that a ball we throw into the air doesn't come back down. I might choose to throw the ball up, but I can't choose whether or not it comes back down. The limit of choice is reality, and we do not have a perfect understanding of reality.
By placing the burden of consequences on those who did not know them before making the choice, you ask them to supercede reality. That's something of a stretch in to call a reasonable expectation.
When you talk to hardworking poor people about their lives, you'll find that a common question is, "What could I have done differently? How could I have done better?" And I ask you this: if choice is the final word, why are these questions being asked?
Are you asserting that knowledge of birth control is somehow unavailable, as is knowledge that vaginal sex leads to pregnancy?
The original quote about her having the child of the wrong guy may as well say she 'got raped by the wrong guy'. We are rarely masters of our own fate, although I can see why you as a very wealthy individual like to delude yourself into thinking that, it's more comforting.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/unmarry.htm
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr56/nvsr56_15.pdf
The "perfect use" (i.e., use a condom every time) failure rate of condoms is about 2%.
So at least 60% of unmarried women who give birth and 80% of unmarried women who get pregnant did so as a result of choosing to have sex without a condom.
> "So at least 60% of unmarried women who give birth and 80% of unmarried women who get pregnant did so as a result of choosing to have sex without a condom."
You're seriously reaching here. This files under the same logic as "20% of animals in the zoo are elephants, therefore the other 80% are alligators".
You're jumping from "perfect use (with a gross misunderstanding of the definition of perfect use) failure rate of condoms is 2%" to "therefore it follows that everyone who doesn't fall into bucket A falls into bucket B".
This files under the same logic as "20% of animals in the zoo are elephants, therefore the other 80% are alligators".
No, this files under the same logic as "20% of animals in the zoo are elephants, therefore the other 80% are not elephants". You either choose to use birth control and follow the rules of the method (assuming you also choose to have vaginal sex), or you don't.
We can compute the pregnancy rate that would result if everyone practiced safe sex or abstinence - any excess must be the result of unsafe sex.
Was the fact that most of her kids dropped out of college entirely their choice or did finances force the matter?
Do the savings of moving to a rural area exceed the drop in job availability that would follow?
Murray's opinions reek of fundamental attribution error and self-serving victim blaming, as seems to be the case with a great many critics of the "welfare state."
"This process happens. We make mistakes. That's how we learn what consequences exist to the choices we make. Yes, we make bad choices, but this is frequently, virtually always, because we could not see with perfect clarity what consequences there would be."
And I believe what you are asking for is a more forgiving society?
But, that is hard to come by in a morally oppressed society. Why forgive when it is more economically efficient to not? Forgiveness can sometimes be one hell of an expenditure you know.
Personally, I think those people should get some portion of their money back. I'd also like to see a lower minimum and have people who only paid in for ten years not not draw so much. It's not fair to people who paid in for 45+ years.
I'm not sure if it is economically efficient to have a whole bunch of kids being raised in low-income, single-parent households, since they are much more likely to turn to crime.
What most people don't understand is that, one way or another, society is paying for the choices people make. So the entire "welfare vs. no welfare" debate is essentially a negotiation about what form this payment should take (e.g. higher crime vs. higher taxes).
I had a kid (unplanned) at barely 19 years old. I could blame the initial situation on lack of information but looking back 18 years later, it's hard to ascribe my life now to anything but how I reacted to that situation.
Life can be a terrible lab for experimentation.
If you have wealthy/powerful/connected friends and relatives, they can and will shield you from the consequences of your actions. Rich people make bad choices all the time. Drunk driving for example--how many times have you heard in the news about politicians and business leaders getting DUIs? But they hire expensive lawyers and get off scot free.
If you're poor and have poor friends or no friends, you're going to bear the full brunt of the consequences for every single bad decision you make. When you get in legal trouble, you can't hire a lawyer to protect your rights and interests. You don't have powerful parents who can pay the right person to "make it go away."
On the one hand, I firmly believe in what PG said about, if there are two explanations and one of them gives you an excuse to be lazy, it's probably the other one.
But, the whole choice / consequences meme rings hollow, it's a way for the wealthy to justify whatever awful things they may have done in order to get rich (or that they may have simply been born into it), while talking down to the poor and blaming them for the structural causes of poverty.
It's not just that the poor don't know the consequences of their actions, it's also that they don't have connections with people who can help them deflect the consequences of their actions.
There's nothing here about someone getting screwed.
But everybody that became wealthy took advantage of systematic injustices to do so (and to keep his wealth).
Except if he won the lottery.
That seems a bit of an overstatement, unless you're going to argue from extremes, eg 'X chose to work at building a business rather than establishing a level economic playing field for everyone before starting that business.' I've met lots of privileged people, but I've also met a lot of people that succeeded through a mixture of luck, talent and diligence and I don't consider them to be taking advantage of systematic injustice.
Can you explain what you mean?
I think what the grandparent means is that the fundamental imbalance of the present system (for example, some are born in to greater education and more supportive environments, with greater access to resources) is self-perpetuating. Ignoring the real impact of the system as a whole is morally questionable.
Coming from a luckier background and accruing wealth without making efforts to alter the system is essentially tantamount to supporting systematized inequity and is therefore morally questionable.
Likewise, being poor in a wealthy country but consuming vast quantities of resources, whining about how the 1% is the problem whilst personally producing serious negative effects on the shared environment is also morally questionable.
Many philosophies (eg. Buddhism) eventually get to the point, deducing from there, where it is realized that we are all inherently destructive creatures. Our mere existence is the destruction of others' rights and resources in our vast yet finite environment. Furthermore, each of us possesses limited time and our capacity for constituting positive change is merely to correctly take charge of our own actions (including thoughts, speech, etc.) in the present.
I'm not sure about the monotheistic religious traditions, but in a philosophical sense Buddha's response to this moral quandry was, IMHO, pretty well argued and pretty damn timeless! It's called The Noble Eightfold Path. If interested there's a good deal more on that from a famous American monk (born in New York) at http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bodhi/waytoend.ht... and from a Burmese monk at http://www.bps.lk/olib/wh/wh245-p.html
Now, this means you get resources from others, those that are playing life in "hard mode". People don't start from equal positions -- and the winners like to think it was their "hard work" and "determination" that got them there. As if a coal miner doesn't work hard, or a single mother of four working at some shitty job to make ends meet is not "determined".
And the higher you go, the easier it gets for you, and the more "cheat codes" you unlock.
Those give you all sorts of powers. Like, firing people. People that own a business fire people that were perfectly good at their job and needed the money, if the company economic conditions require it (whereas, they rarely share their loot when the company makes a killing).
Or take collecting rent. Another injustice. Beginning from an empty land (actually a land inhabited by indians, that were driven out the lands, but I digress), somehow one person now has 4 apartments, and another person has to pay rent to him.
Now, that's a high level view - imbalances and injustice is all around. Even holding on to money, with people starving, is injustice enough in my worldview.
FYI, the source of this quote is John Scalzi: http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-th...
Not commenting on it; just felt like it ought to be grounded in a citation rather than floating around as a meme.
Like a trillion dollar bailout.
It's always easy to knock someone down when type haven't walked a mile in their shoes. It's not a rich/poor thing either. Working folks in the projects HATE people on welfare, even though they receive food and housing benefits.
I think the real problem is just that it's trivial to see that it's empirically false. If you look at the statistics, the U.S. is roughly twice as ghettoized as it was only ten years ago, so it's not even plausible that societal patterns of wealth and poverty could be determined by the choices of individuals. E.g.:
"High-poverty schools, in which more than 75 percent of the students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch (FRPL) [...] comprised 21 percent of all public schools in 2010–11, compared with 12 percent in 1999–2000."
"In 2010–11, some 24 percent of public school students attended a low-poverty school, compared with 45 percent in 1999–2000."
In other words, the percentage of students attending high-poverty schools has roughly doubled, and the percentage of students attending low-poverty schools has also roughly doubled.
Source: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2013/2013037.pdf, p. 78
I agree with the rest of your post, but I have mixed feelings about the above.
Within my relatively small circle of friends, two unmarried couples recently announced that they were expecting babies. Neither couple has announced plans for a wedding.
I just don't get it. I mean, my mind bends, but cannot fully wrap around the concept of willingly having kids out of wedlock. I definitely hope things turn out well for the aforementioned couples and their children, but statistically speaking the odds are not in their favor.
One, considering the national divorce rate, wedlock doesn't mean quite as much as it used to: had both of your couples married, statistically, we'd expect one pair to divorce anyways. Two, they may have opted for a private wedding sans name change you weren't invited to. Not likely.. but possible. Three, sometimes the other person dies. They might enlist; they might get gunned down in a drive-by; they might develop cancer; etc. Is it the "wrong guy" if you have kids with someone who happened to be working in the WTC on 9/11?
Single parenthood just isn't hard to come by, especially in our hyper-individualized age where the notion of children being raised by a village is regarded as a hippie thing. In the grand scheme, wedlock is a relatively flimsy shelter against the storm of reality... but I agree that it's definitely a shelter.
http://m.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=...
I suspect one reason is, many atheists and agnostics associate weddings with religion.
Since they are quite happy to live without a religion, they would also get by without the need for religious ceremonies like weddings.
Meanwhile, my wife's parents had to drop out of college when they got accidentally pregnant with her, because their parents didn't have the resources to support them.
I don't like it when people overemphasize the impact of "choices." Choices don't have the same meaning for all of us. Life is a different kind of easy when fucking up doesn't mean derailing all of your plans.
I'm okay with that. What would be the point of being wealthy if it didn't make your life easier?
But we can do things to steer people toward good decisions or bad decisions. Your argument is a little too deterministic/fatalistic, as though things just kind of happen.
Directly applying empathy to policy sometimes steers people toward bad decisions. That's just the unfortunate reality of incentives; in some cases worse than others.
One way of steering people toward good decisions is to expose them to some of the consequences of their bad choices. That has some major advantages: (1) it's easy to implement and fairly natural; (2) it doesn't require central planning; (3) it preserves a lot of freedom to make a wide variety of choices, not all of which have to be perfect. Unfortunately, it also has the disadvantage that mistakes and misfortunes cause major problems -- not just for the individuals, but also for the rest of society.
I believe the best trade-offs are when social assistance is provided by the most local organization that can provide it, starting with the immediate family and going up to about the size of a U.S. state at most. In a family or community, social assistance comes after years of listening to advice and with many social strings attached (usually by the more successful community members). The advice helps avoid the need for assistance; the social strings are a deterrent from bad choices and help people get back to making good decisions.
For example, reproductive choices vary widely between cultures, and I believe that's a caused by things like taboos and shame. Of course, taboos and shame have their own problems because they are applied imprecisely and are sometimes outdated. Sometimes, that results in even worse decisions, like staying in an abusive relationship or not entering a good one. I didn't claim to have all the answers.
But how is this actually done? In any of the cases noted in the article, how would you have exposed people to those consequences without simply subjecting them to those consequences and leaving them to rot? Can you say to a single parent, "Well, now you know what kind of person not to have a child with"? The child is born. It has its own rights and needs. You're presented with a whole new set of choices to make, with their own consequences, that you still can't foresee with perfect clarity.
You say that not all of the choices have to be perfect... but that doesn't seem any different from what Murray, at least as portrayed by the article, is arguing.
And moreover, can you really say that you're presenting them with a choice? Here's an anti-Christian argument about free will: many Christians say that going to Hell is your own choice. Their job is to simply to inform you of that choice, so that you can freely accept Christ before you die. But the choice is between eternal bliss and eternal torment. Is that really a choice? The real choice isn't really between eternal bliss and eternal torment: it's between accepting coercion or refusing it.
Expose them to a fraction of the consequences, rather than all of them.
My point was not that one approach is good and another not. It's a trade-off (between adequate assistance and incentives to make good choices) and the trades are implicit in every act of assistance, whether at the family or government level.
The best approach is to make good trades that provide the most assistance without steering people too much towards bad decisions.
It's easier to do that in a localized (or better yet, personalized) way than using central planning on a 300M-person scale. The reason is that there are many more options to get people back on track when dealing with a problem at the local level. A government of 300M people can't do much more than throw money at the problem, which is not nearly as good of a trade-off.
The "Capabilities approach" is not built on a human rights framework, and does not really engage with the question of freedom and choice. Instead, it asks on an individual basis, "Is this individual capable of these particular things?" Justice, in this sense, is for everyone to have a minimum amount of capability.
I have so far found philosophically sturdier than anything else I've seen. Here is a ton of links.
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_approach
* http://people.wku.edu/jan.garrett/ethics/nussbaum.htm
* http://crookedtimber.org/2011/08/29/martha-nussbaums-creatin...
* http://www.amazon.com/Creating-Capabilities-Human-Developmen...
And since we don't, it's all about managing outcomes by using data to intelligently adjust variables.
The New Yorker is based in New York City where I live. Both renting apartments and purchasing housing has increased in cost significantly because of an artificially induced housing shortage through zoning laws meant to favor wealthy landlords over those who rent or want to purchase an apartment/coop. (this is called by economists, economic rent)
There are many, many laws like the zoning laws in NYC that cause economic rent that favor certain groups over others. Another example in New York City are Taxi Medallions which limit the number of taxis and making them less affordable for passengers.
Instead of focusing on wage increases which might be limited by globalization, we should look for all of the economic rents and removing them through legislation thus allowing markets to do their job.
>They [the two families] have to navigate this HEARTLESS economy by themselves.
The social critics may be right. However, they point to individuals as morally incompetent, etc.
But it takes an entire society to define an economy.
So I am wondering if these social critics are right but they are blaming the moral collapse only on those currently most negatively affected by it i.e. those impoverished, out-of-work,etc.
However, the Germans under the Nazis were morally incompetent but had raving economic success.
So, all in all I don't know. I was just thinking that you cannot say that just because an American is either well-off or filthy rich that they are more morally competent than the rest of the society.
What the fuck?
The country I grew up in didn't tell people what to do. People were encouraged to figure out what needed doing. Then they went and did it.
I think we do a great disservice to the poor to focus on jobs as some ends to themselves. They are not. Jobs are the result of innovation and entrepreneurship. Not everybody has to be an entrepreneur, but you need enough of them to keep things mixed up constantly for everybody else. There is no "play by the rules". That's bullshit. You either live your own dream or somebody else's. There is no middle ground. You don't just "create jobs" for people who "follow the rules". This is not a maternal society. This is organized chaos, where the chaos is creatively destroying things that don't work and replacing them with new things as humanity moves along.
God, I hate this navel-gazing pulp.
The incremental discovery of "things that don't work", and adjustment to these discoveries, is good and necessary because no one has, or will ever have, a complete understanding of the perfect society for human flourishing.
Given the limits on knowledge, I find the mind of an individualist far less scary than the mind of someone who presumes to know how others should live, and is willing to use force to ensure that they comply with that vision.
Into the second half though, the overtones began to paint a very Upton Sinclair-like story of crushing, inescapable poverty, and ultimately the piece ends with the same message The Jungle ends with: it's unfair that some people make a lot more money than other people do.
And I'm left with the same question I always have for these arguments: Mr. Article Writer, how much of your income would YOU like to give to the heroes of these stories?
Everybody always wants to say, "Oh it's so sad that these people are suffering," and then generously volunteer that someone else pay for it: "Hey! Why don't we make THAT guy give that OTHER guy his money!" Nobody ever offers his own money, though.
Wonder why that is...
There is a 2000 year old book that basically says "There will always be the poor" --not sure exactly what that means, but it kinda makes sense. For me, I've tried both large scale and small scale ways of helping "the poor" and I've developed the model of:
1. help people when you can & however you are able...It probably won't help them long-term though but maybe thats ok.
2. A few of those folks really are motivated to change their life for the better, so when you help them, it may pay off for the greater good.
Either way, studies show that helping others and "giving to a good cause" typically pays off higher "happiness dividends" than selfishly spending money on yourself (unless its for a new smartphone or laptop of course :))
regal's point, on the other hand, is not only completely speculative, as it's completely irrelevant, because the argument isn't invalidated even if stated by an hypocrite.
Funny you're complaining about that comment: This whole piece is one big emotion appeal for class warfare and unionism
"If only Little Johnny's parent's union jobs didn't disappear, then he wouldn't have lived in a broken home, and would have buckled down and gone to college!"
"Why does this group of people, who I know little about as individuals, have it so well?!"
Typical bleeding-heart bull, which is, of course, what this movie is about (and how this author barkers for his friend's movie). "Come one, and all, see how unfair life is in America!"
It's too bad these families both work so hard and barely get by. Maybe they did get screwed over by circumstance. Maybe they shouldn't had assume union jobs were forever. Maybe the lure of a paying job today to help the family kept those kids out of college. Or maybe those kids were fuck ups and didn't take school seriously. I guess I should pay for a ticket to find out if I should feel superior to the family or to the CEOs.
Complaining about how life is unfair will get folks into the art movie theater, but it's not going to provide opportunities for these families to better their lot.
Interestingly, many folks asking other people to get paid less or contribute more have no problem consuming other people's hard work for free -- specifically folks that have no problem with software piracy, for instance. Under some theories, the CEO is getting rich "off the work of others," yet hypocritically, people seem to have no problem pirating music and software -- which is effectively getting "rich" off of someone else's work.
I won't go too far in to the other points, just to say that yes, there are quite a few people who would benefit greatly from getting to keep an extra 1500 dollars per year of the value they create.
$5m/year doesn't sound so awful. Are you saying that the $15m CEO is definitely 3 times better? How are you quantifying that? How do you explain the fact that some CEOs see pay rises even though their firm's revenue or share price declines over the same period?
But, these folks that make a fairly middle income suggesting that someone else give more are exactly the problem. No one wants to give more when it reduces their quality of life. There are plenty of people waiting for kidney transplants, yet when was the last time a New Yorker writer went to volunteer to give up a kidney for someone he's never met?
America should ask why manufacturing has left the US. Rising costs. Yet what has caused costs to rise? It isn't like greed is a new invention. Something has changed though .. Burdensome regulation and unfettered litigation for one. Have you ever tried to open a factory in California? Good luck. It can take years and sometimes a decade due to NIMBY politics. In China, you can have a factory opened in just over a year -- construction and government approvals included. I won't suggest we turn into China but the extreme on the other end is what we're facing. The increasing numbers of poor are the result of an economic environment that is primarily caused by limousine left wingers that think they've been anointed guardians of everyone else's destiny. They'd rather stop a factory from being built and have the potential workers in poverty from which they can eventually be saved by government intervention. The cite boogey men such as "CO2" yet, poverty causes for death than CO2 ever has.
The rich CEOs aren't stealing from the people, they're players within the system just like everyone else. They don't make the laws. As far as rich, there are plenty of $120,000 per year developers on HN that wouldn't think of working for $60k. To a poor person, 60k is a fortune. I think some religious figure once said something about casting the first stone.. There was another dude from India that mentioned something about all life being suffering. There will always be poor people because life has winners and losers. To suggest any different is to revisit the 'prosperity' of the Soviet Union in the 1950s.
This is a bit of a non sequitur. The budget doesn't only go on the poor.
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that the poor don't pay taxes, and that individuals and companies producing the goods they consume don't pay taxes.
The top 1% of people in the US have about 20% of the income. The US's GNI is about $14T, so that's about $3T for the top 1%. (So an average of about $1M per person; of course that's the mean; the median will be lower, and the threshold for the top 1% lower again.)
The official poverty line in the US is about $23k for a family of four; let's say $6k per person. The number of officially-poor people in the US is about 40M. If we suppose all those people are earning precisely nothing at present, taking them up to the poverty line would therefore cost about $240B, less than 10% of the income of the top 1%.
So ... it seems like giving 92% of the income of the rich to help the poor would help them rather a lot, actually.
Actually, they do write the laws. They fund special interest groups and give money to politicians to get elected. Big money often writes the law - with those same special interest groups attaching themselves to Congressional staffers and then providing the actual language that goes to the floor. I don't know what world you think you're living in when you can't see how money shapes our politics and laws.
It's the oft-cried tripe of the modern middle-income West. See somebody having a harder time than you? It's okay! Just tell them how it's so wrong that they're suffering and rich people ought to just... give them stuff! There - feel like a good person now, don't you? Good deed for the day = done.
The fact is, there's somebody out there somewhere in the world who could be living a significantly enhanced life if our good writer were to put his money where his mouth is and donate a portion of his income to him/her - perhaps an impoverished individual in South America, or Africa, or Asia, who gets by on a meager $300 a year. Could our writer donate $3,000 to one of these individuals every year, and change her life? Perhaps another $3,000 to another individual still? Think of all the good he'd be doing... according to his very own argument.
But he's not doing that, is he? What's he doing instead?
The same thing every middle class Western person does: he talks. About how horrible it is that poor people are poor, and how evil it is that rich people are rich.
It's class preservation 101: put the spotlight on the bigger target, and keep it off of you. Nobody raises taxes on the middle class if everybody's upset at the upper class.
Many of us have been extraordinarily lucky—and we did not earn it. Many good people have been extraordinarily unlucky—and they did not deserve it. And yet I get the distinct sense that if I asked some of my readers why they weren’t born with club feet, or orphaned before the age of five, they would not hesitate to take credit for these accomplishments. There is a stunning lack of insight into the unfolding of human events that passes for moral and economic wisdom in some circles. And it is pernicious. Followers of Rand, in particular, believe that only a blind reliance on market forces and the narrowest conception of self interest can steer us collectively toward the best civilization possible and that any attempt to impose wisdom or compassion from the top—no matter who is at the top and no matter what the need—is necessarily corrupting of the whole enterprise. This conviction is, at the very least, unproven. And there are many reasons to believe that it is dangerously wrong."
http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/how-to-lose-readers-witho...
A: My views on charity are very simple. I do not consider it a major virtue and, above all, I do not consider it a moral duty. There is nothing wrong in helping other people, if and when they are worthy of the help and you can afford to help them. I regard charity as a marginal issue. What I am fighting is the idea that charity is a moral duty and a primary virtue.
[From “Playboy’s 1964 interview with Ayn Rand”]
> Followers of Rand, in particular, believe that only a blind reliance on market forces and the narrowest conception of self interest can steer us collectively toward the best civilization possible and that any attempt to impose wisdom or compassion from the top—no matter who is at the top and no matter what the need—is necessarily corrupting of the whole enterprise.
Most critics of Rand that I encounter base their opinion on an incorrect caricature that is reinforced by other critics repeating the same incorrect untruths. I consider myself to be generally in agreement with most of Rand's philosophy, but am nothing like your description of her followers. Granted, a lot of her advocates are purely self-interested idiots, but it wasn't Rand's teachings that brought them to that state.
He was clearly talking about her followers. And you avoided his main point, that none of us are truly selfmade. We've all been very lucky if we are successful. That shakes the foundation of Rand's philosophy b
Does not follow... The fact that a lot of Christians are raving fundamentalists who reject science and logic, is not a reflection on Christ... likewise, that a lot of self-described Randians may be "purely self-interested idiots" is no reflection on Rand. Rand can't control what the people who come after her and claim association with her name do, any more than Jesus can. Substitute any other famous/influential character from history for Rand or Jesus in the above, and the point remains the same.
I don't want to assign the faults of Randians to Rand, but I think it's fair to say tat she disapproved of altruism and reified individualism as the acme of human achievement. I can sort of understand this given the circumstances of her birth and so on, but Rand (or at least the average Randian) seems suspicious of voluntary and specific collectivism as well as mandatory or universal collectivism. I'm a bit of a hermit, but when I am being social I like working on a team and I find the relentless insistence on individualism as the only valid kind of self-actualization rather pathetic.
I would say people have a strong interest in themselves and their personal welfare. This should be expected or we would probably not exist as a species. However the interesting thing about humans and some other intelligent animals is that they are also interested in the welfare of others, including non-relations, and even other species (some argue that this is part of a broader form of self-interest like the golden rule). However none of this should deny that people are motivated by self-interest most of the time.
While libertarians talk about self-interest more than most I don't think there is any good evidence that their actions are any more selfish than non-libertarians. I would suggest they are simply making an observation about human nature that explains a huge fraction of human behavior.
"However none of this should deny that people are motivated by self-interest most of the time."
Sure, but that doesn't mean we should build a philosophy and our institutions around the idea that it's good! This is very different than "simply making an observation about human nature".
And the biggest flaw in libertarianism is the idea that humans make logical decisions, which is one of the most egregious denials of human nature I've ever seen.
Some have paths chosen for them by genetics or simply by misfortune. And amongst those that have chosen the wrong path, is it reasonable in such a rich society that they should have to be selling blood plasma to keep food on the table?
I don't think it's unfair that some make more than others do. I think it's unfair that many are scratching around for money for the bills and enough to eat, when we have a society of riches and excess beyond anything seen before in history.
So I offer my own money in the form of taxes. We know from history that when welfare is entirely down to charity we get a shortfall, a growing underclass, mass criminality, workhouses, inescapable poverty etc etc.
1) http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2009/08/social-mobi...
[1] http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21571417-how-prevent-v...
Your comment is indicative of a lot of our problems with political discourse. You must be smart enough to understand that your experience as an individual isn't necessarily representative of everyone as a whole, or everyone who grew up in your situation.
So why did you even make the comment? Because accepting the data might lead you to a place politically that you aren't ready to go? Accepting it might conflict with some portion of your worldview? You believe nothing that is widely reported is true? Just genuinely contrariness?
The only reason I now own my own home, have good insurance, and don't worry about money is because when I was 19, a hiring manager 600 miles away who knew me from web forums took a chance. I had just enough cash for a plane ticket. I walked into an office in Santa Clara one Spring morning and got handed the keys to the kingdom.
Fifteen months later the company imploded and I had two offers from four interviews, all arranged by further connections I'd made on the job.
Logically, that never should have happened. I had no formal qualifications, not even a diploma, and no documented experience. I don't think they even bothered with the standard background check, and I know they never checked my references (which were real but borderline worthless).
I made the right connection at the right time. I got lucky. If I hadn't, I'm not entirely sure I'd actually be alive right now, but I would definitely at least be several years behind where I am now.
Everyone has different experiences. You can't assume yours is ordinary, nor that what worked for you would have worked for anyone else.
Hell, even look at myself, very few of my choices were a result of just my own thinking, convictions, and/or discipline, and those that I do consider my own can partially be explained by my genetic makeup. But I don't want to reduce this argument too far.
My point is that the path we go down is mostly followed 'by default' and not a result of our own individual actions and choices. And I find that those who've had the most fortuitous defaults tend to ascribe them to their 'selves' more than others do. I think this is incorrect, and even if it's not, the more ethical position is to assume it is incorrect.
This is not supported by history, in fact you can correlate mass criminality in the US to the start of the mass welfare state of the great society. Crime was much lower during the great depression when there really was a large underclass, and there were far fewer safety nets. There are dozens of poor third world countries that can't afford welfare programs that are far safer than the US.
Nobody needs to offer his own money, though. You give a moral answer to a social conflict. You miss the point.
A lot of people offer their money. Most countries have social security systems, which were voted in by people who stand to lose money over them. If I give a homeless guy $10,000, that won't stop all the other homeless guys from causing me all the problems that they cause (like not buying enough stuff to provide me with a better job, or clogging up the local emergency ward because they got pneumonia). But if I conspire (with a few fellow voters) to give $10,000 to all the homeless guys, then the problem is partially solved.
And it's not like all these countries with social security nets are forcing rich people to pay for it. It's no secret that the truly rich often don't pay taxes.
This is very true. America leans more heavily on the rich to pay for government than the rest of the OECD. Only Australia even comes close.
http://taxfoundation.org/blog/no-country-leans-upper-income-...
In the US the rich pay taxes for schools they end up with better schools in their neighborhood. And they get better parks, and better libraries and better everything in rich neighborhoods. Very little of that money ends up improving poorer neighborhoods, so in the US rich people pay those taxes mostly to themselves. The taxes aren't very re-distributive, which defeats the point of progressive taxation.
Tax deductions in the US also go disproportionately to rich people, whereas in Europe there are many big tax breaks for poor and middle class families.
So it's absolutely not the case that the US has the most progressive tax system among industrialized nations (as claimed in the linked article). Only when you creatively slice and dice the data can you arrive at such a conclusion.
And Americans wonder why their school system sucks? Why they have more people in prison than China?
About 25%. I'm OK with a tax level of between 35-40% on a moderate (>$50k) income, and I'd like about 75% of that to be spent on helping other people especially through education and healthcare) and the other 25% to be spent on things like defense, NASA, cops and so on, that's meant to benefit everyone. I'm willing to negotiate these various percentages, within reason. When I can, I pay a bit more tax than I absolutely have to because it makes me feel good, although some years I don't earn that much and I just pay what I have to. I'm not demanding that you must pay much more tax, but I am happy to pay a moderate amount and then a bit extra if I can afford it.
Does that answer your question?
Wow. You don't sound racist at all.
EDIT: On second thought, I see I am somewhat in error. Let me amend my statement to say "Central and South American peasants".
But yes, with ALL the values that we hold in America: capitalism, a sense of morality, etc. It is inevitably that we will only grow towards becoming more merged with the world around us. Simply because: their is more economic benefit for companies looking more at everything they do in an ever growing international sense. However, worker Joe does not study game theory and has zip way of learning about working with Chinese manufacturers.
I get the feeling that we are seeing the inevitable. The 'third worldliness' that persisted throughout much of the world is melding with the old 'American isolationist.'
However, we as capitalists now have a taste for the economic fruits of thinking internationally and we won't give it up. But, still it makes me wonder because The British Empire had international success and it only made Brits that much more wealthier (BUT they also had a strong sense of 'frontierism' e.g. colonialism) ... And I think that is the one thing we seriously lack today. If jobs go to China, then in Imperial days that would equate to colonies being formed in this 'new land of China' (e.g. Brits moving to the American/Australian Colonies for new opportunities, etc.)
That is NOT our situation today. If jobs move ANYWHERE, there are already cooperating entities there that do NOT need more people.
That is because cooperation for monetary reasons is much easier to do in today's age. Currency exchanges, the digital age, etc. make that much more efficient instead of old times where everything was purely about 'trade or be conquered.' ... Just some thoughts.
But from some poor countries there are claims that when outside forces result in poor people having more money, right away they slow down on having children -- the rate of births falls.
So, for one related point, using some version of socialism to raise poor people from poverty should reduce the burden on society of children of poor people and not increase that burden. Or, in this case, poverty does not cause people to exercise more discipline and be more responsible but on both points, less. So, society might calculate an expected return on investment: Invest some money in raising poor people out of poverty and see how much society saves later in expenditures on the social problems of children with poor parents with poor parenting.
But, wait, there's more! Finland beat back the Swedes, Russians, and Germans, but now they are losing! How? They are having only about 1.5 children per woman. Extrapolate that out for 100 years and see a smaller Finland; for 300 years and see nearly no Finland. And that figure of 1.5 is close to what holds in several countries in Europe. Why? So far in the more advanced countries with the higher standards of living, they have decided they don't want to be parents.
Joke: Come back in 500 years and find nearly everyone super fired up about being good parents. Why? Because all the other branches of the tree died out!
Darwin wins again! Of course, there is likely a grain of truth in this joke, and if so then we stand to be in one of the periods of relatively fast genetic change, assuming that the desire to be good parents is significantly a genetic thing.
But, wait, there's more! So, some of the people lost their jobs because in effect their jobs were shipped overseas. So, we go to a retail store, buy an item made overseas, pay for it, and then also pay taxes to pay to help the person who lost their job as we bought this item from overseas. Are we actually helping the US in this way?
I know; I know; all those textile workers in the Carolinas were supposed to get much better jobs at Microsoft as Microsoft sold software to the overseas textile industry. Who believed this?
Yes, apparently in the US we can import items with low or no import tariffs; I've heard that this policy on imports is rare in the world, that most other countries protect their domestic workers.
There are claims that such protectionism is, net, bad for the US economy, but this argument seems to write off the training, experience, and capital associated with the person who lost their job with this expensive write off ignored.
For more, the economy is important. Then destroying the financial system is a disaster. How to do that? We saw how in the 1920s: Use high leverage to blow an asset bubble. In response we put in a lot of controls in finance to keep that from happening again. Then starting in 2000 or so, we did it to ourselves again, although this time with real estate. Plenty of people, e.g., the COB of Wells Fargo who said clearly that we would not like the results, saw the problem coming. Yet, we let the bubble inflate. If we want to say that actions have consequences, then we should be willing to say that bubble blowing has consequences and with discipline, we had plenty of information, we wouldn't do such a thing.
For more, one of the problems in the US is social problems from poor people, but actually we wanted poor people and have worked, more than once, to import a distinctive lower class we could have as poor people and cheap labor. We've deliberately created an underclass, and we are seeing some of the consequences.
From all I can see, except for new technology in the last 60 years, the US standard of living was higher in the 1950s. Then we exported a lot but imported very little. But how did the exporting help the US? Or, workers at Caterpillar built an earth moving machine and sent it to a third world country or one of the countries so damaged in WWII that they couldn't make such a machine again yet. So, the US got paid in foreign currency that we swapped for gold or some such -- nearly useless. Net, the US was able to do better being nearly self sufficient. Sure, we might import rubber and tin, but mostly we were self sufficient. Sounds like maybe we should be self sufficient again.
Poverty isn't self-correction or "market discipline". It's a cascading failure that corrupts the whole society, then as well as now.
"poor choices...empathy...choices have consequences...we make mistakes...morality of altruism", "The country I grew up in....Jobs are the result of innovation and entrepreneurship", "morally competent", "how much of your income would YOU like to give to the heroes"
Not much rational analysis. Just a sermon, or morality tale, or an abbreviated Ayn Rand screed against altruism, which might as well be a religious sermon.
Poverty is an essential cornerstone of the current economic system.
There have been many economic systems over the millenia - hunter-gather societies, then slave societies, then feudal societies, then capitalist societies. From the philosopher Hegel to Francis Fukuyama we've had intellectuals say our current economic system is the last one. From the 19th century on, some have said other economic systems might become predominant in the future, particularly socialist ones.
Capitalism is the only economic system where poverty is necessary. When a company's revenues exceeds its capital expenses, the money has only two places to go - profit or wages. If there was full employment, strong unions, no laws banning secondary strikes like Taft-Hartley etc., workers would get more and more in wages until profits disappeared. When companies have the lever to send workers into poverty, they become happy "just to have a job". This allows for companies to make workers work longer hours for less money, or to put in a more strenuous effort during the time worked.
Everything can be discussed rationaly, but when discussing how poverty exists in capitalism in a manner it did not in feudalism, or prior economic systems (or possible future ones), words like "morality" are brought out. People can rationally discuss VCs and valuations and options. But rationality has to go out the window when discussing how poverty exists in the current economic system, we have to get a sermon, rational discussions of the topic are not allowed.
Also a look at history is not allowed. That our economic system is just one in a chain of systems, and that "socialism" is still a bugaboo of the people moving the levers of our economic system is a sign of this. Capitalism is new historically as a dominating system, and has very shaky elements, so you want to make people forget that...in Europe countries are still under feudal trappings. That in the the 1930s, the capitalist west had its factories lying dormant while the USSR couldn't build factories fast enough. And so forth. You want to forget that the property in the US was stolen from Indians, or even the property in Poland or Ireland stole from the Polish and Irish. You want to forget Africans were dragged to the US in chains and set to work in stolen Indian property. That even the property accumulated from the profit made off these people after is similary ill-gained. And that this all happened historically recent, relatively. History has to be forgotten to, even fairly recent history. It's a topic which can't bare rational analysis or a look at recent history. Some type of moral sermon is all that's called for. Not just the "heartless conservatives" but the "bleeding-heart liberals". Mawkish calls for the poor to be fed for moral reasons is just as silly as moralistic claims that the poor are lazy.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-fourth-of-july-sermon-f...