Under ranked-choice voting, the incentives push candidates to build broader coalitions. Since no candidate knows whether someone will garner enough votes to win in the first round, each candidate is incentivized to capture the votes of those who may not have picked them as their first choice. To do this, they must try to appeal to a wider array of voters than they would have otherwise. - How Ranked Choice Voting Can Increase Inclusivity and Voter Participation. Georgia Lyon/Campaign Legal Center May 21, 2021
Social scientists are people too, with their own intuitions about human nature, happiness, inequality and ideal societies. I'm talking economists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists (etc). I'm talking about the people who made up the theory of inequality-aversion.
The research social scientists conduct and the conclusions they reach are not independent of their intuitions about what is and ought to be. That's no reason to dismiss their work, only a plea to be alert to possible lapses of scientific rigor in what they do and say.
But we Californians are already living the consequences of overpromising and underfunding pension benefits. To illustrate….
The US currently spends about $4 trillion on healthcare (splitting the difference between 2019 and 2020). To get to Switzerland, we’d need to get that down to under $3 trillion a year. That’s a tall order.
Any way you look at it, the US spends way more on healthcare than other developed countries, both as a share of GDP and on a per capita basis. So why are these other countries’ health outcomes so much better than ours?
Since the US public debt is already rather high, I would stipulate that government funding to boost social mobility come entirely from additional tax revenue. US tax revenue - across all levels of government, from local to state to federal - is currently around 25.5% of GDP. I suggest raising that to 30% of GDP, or another 4.5%. This is close to the government’s take 20 years ago but still less than the average for developed countries, as per the following chart…
“Contrary to popular perceptions, populist voters are not uniformly deplorable, stupid and racist; they are deeply motivated by perceptions of a rigged, socially immobile economy. Whether a citizen has an unlucky start in life or is knocked down by an economic crisis, too many Americans cannot get ahead on their own merits. Given the Democrats’ recent drubbing in Virginia, the party would do well to pivot away from condescending culture wars and towards a fairer economy where opportunity is more equal and reward is allocated in line with contribution.” - Eric Protzer/Letter to the Economist December 4, 2021
Note the either/or thinking, what Daniel Dennett calls “rathering”, e.g., treatment rather than policing, as if increased access to treatment and more police on the street were incompatible policies. Why not do both? In fact, that is exactly what mayor Breed plans to do. Besides, there’s plenty of evidence that increasing foot-patrols in criminal hot spots does reduce criminal activity in those areas, mostly through deterrence (not increased arrests) and without displacing crime to near-by neighborhoods (Andresen & Lau, 2014; Piza, 2018).
Inspiration for this post:
Bobbin Singh, founder and executive director of the Oregon Justice Resource Center, said attempting to find a middle ground on policing…ignores the racism that’s baked into the justice system and the Police Bureau. “The question before us is not that complex. It’s binary. Either you support racial justice or you don’t,” Singh said. “You don’t find compromise with those structures; you dismantle those structures.” - Black councilman nudges Portland center on post-protest path. By Gillian Flaccus/AP News December 9, 2021
However, some risk factors are only causal in the presence of other risk factors. In many cases, no single factor is necessary or sufficient to cause an outcome. Causality lies in how the factors interact with each other. In other words, it’s all in the mix. Take illegal behavior….
Mmmm. What’s up with Germany and the Nordic countries? These historically protestant countries seem to have lost their work ethic - as opposed to China, the Philippines, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Russia and Ukraine. Let’s dig deeper…
10. Theme: Sweeping generalizations about how clueless people are.
Illustration: “Most people struggle to define the system that dominates our lives. But if you press them, they’re likely to mumble something about hard work and enterprise, buying and selling. This is how the beneficiaries of the system want it to be understood.”
Alternative: People who don’t believe as I do may still have valid points, or not.
I’m going to assume that reducing the Black-white homeownership gap is a worthy goal mainly because homeownership provides a way to build wealth and increase residential stability. For many, homeownership is also a great source of pride, pleasure, and purpose. That said, homeownership is not for everyone, especially those just a few paychecks away from being broke. Helping such individuals buy a home is doing them no favor if they later lose the home to foreclosure or are forced to sell at a loss.
The gap in Black-white homeownership rates recently reached 30.1% in the U,S., its highest level in 50 years and larger than when race-based discrimination against homebuyers was legal. Jung Hyun Choi of The Urban Institute has identified three factors that explain most of this gap. They are…
Do these two studies confirm that body cameras have “done nothing” to stop police violence? If so, are these two studies representative of most research on the effect of body cameras on police use of force? How would one know? My Google Scholar search for “body cameras police ‘use of force’ ” got me 21,000 hits. I didn’t check them all, but the first ten looked legit. Hmmm...perhaps the two studies are so convincing, one can simply ignore the other 20,998 (give or take)?
It’s not exactly surprising that unarmed police are less likely to kill than armed police. But that’s not what the authors are saying. They’re saying that police killings inevitably happen more in countries with armed police, simply because the police are armed. They do not acknowledge that police killings are also rare in several countries that do arm their police. For instance…
The authors of the above study define police violence as “police-related altercations leading to death or bodily harm”. Of the three non-governmental databases they use to estimate the true extent of police violence in the USA, Fatal Encounters (FE) is by far the biggest. Here is more on the FE data, provided by the authors in their Supplementary Material…
Create incentives and remove disincentives for affordable housing alternatives in the private rental and owner-occupied sectors. People will resist moving out of social housing without having a decent place to move to…Overcome the potential employment disincentives created by hard income limits for tenancy. Instead, allow tenants to remain in social housing as they climb the socioeconomic ladder, setting rents proportional to the household’s income at all levels while ensuring rent increases are always much less than any increase in income. As tenants’ rents increase, they will eventually approach market-rate levels, creating an incentive for the better-off tenants to transition out of social housing.
Social housing is rental housing provided at sub-market rates and allocated according to specific rules of eligibility for prospective tenants. Most social housing developments target vulnerable communities, such as refugees, the elderly, disabled persons, and low-income households (OECD, 2020). Social housing used to be called “public housing” in the US, but that term became associated with all sorts of bad things so it’s gotten a name change. No matter what you call it, new social housing is back on the policy to-do list in many countries, especially those with a dearth of affordable housing.
Not all low-income households having rent trouble are good candidates for social housing. Some are just going through a rough patch or are young adults living on the wild side. Some are students with excellent job prospects once they finish school. Others simply wouldn’t be interested or have decent options if things really get bleak, like move back in with the folks for a year or two. The individuals most likely to benefit from social housing are those with few options, who have serious barriers to decent-paying work, such as disability, or are single parents with limited earning capacity. But social housing isn’t the only solution for these individuals. There are plenty of other safety net programs that might be a better fit for them, from food stamps to tax credits to housing vouchers. (And if I had my way, an Adult Student Basic Income. But that's another story). Social housing is an expensive and risky investment that should only be considered as a last resort for the chronically cost-burdened.