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Politics and Economics
Based on the above considerations, I’m going to guess that about half of self-described Black Americans would qualify for reparations - roughly 22,500, 000 individuals currently alive, plus 250,000 Black children born to eligible parents within the first 18 years of program implementation, after which the reparations program would no longer accept new applicants. A tax on households in the top 20% income bracket would pay for the reparations program…Here’s a possible budget…
I used to be an active member of a debate club that met monthly before the pandemic. We switched to online debates, but none have been scheduled for several months. Basically, the spirit has died, killed off by the venom of partisan hatred. A taste from last week’s group email thread: …
In other words, the Implicit Association Test (IAT) does a poor job of predicting behavior and is no better at predicting behavior than self-report measures. Nor does the IAT appear to provide a window to unconscious bias, given that research participants have been highly accurate in predicting their own IAT scores (Hahn eta l, 2014). Nor does the IAT capture stable, context-free racial attitudes that are resistant to change (James, 2018; Gawronski & Hahn, 2019). Rather, implicit bias is less (not more) stable over time than self-reported bias (Gawronski, 2019).
Inflation hit 8.5% in March - the fastest annual rise since 1981. Unfortunately, between the war in Ukraine, labor shortages, and an overheated economy, the steep rise in prices will likely continue for at least another year. And so we have yet another reason to work at home as much as possible: to save money. Check it out:…
“What's Putin's problem with NATO? For Russia's leader the West's 30-member defensive military alliance has one aim - to split society in Russia and ultimately destroy it…Ahead of the war, he demanded that NATO turn the clock back to 1997 and reverse its eastward expansion, removing its forces and military infrastructure from member states that joined the alliance from 1997 and not deploying ‘strike weapons near Russia's borders’. That means Central Europe, Eastern Europe and the Baltics.” Why has Russia invaded Ukraine and what does Putin want? By Paul Kirby/BBC News April 14, 2022
“At an April 1st summit between China and the European Union, China demanded that the EU and members stop supporting multinational, coordinated statements about Chinese rights abuses in such global forums as the UN Human Rights Council.” - The war makes China uncomfortable. European leaders don’t care/The Economist April 2, 2022
According to John Zaller and Stanley Feldman in A Simple Theory of the Survey Response: Answering Questions versus Revealing Preferences, people normally don’t have a “single, fixed, and firm attitude on issues but instead have many, potentially opposing considerations”. That is, most people have mixed feelings about policies and political issues - not counting ideologues and political activists, who tend to view ambivalence as a weakness easily exploited by one’s adversaries.
Why would so many Democrats, women, young adults, and Blacks be unwilling to stay and fight the Russians in case of an invasion? Here are a few possibilities: the U.S. doesn’t deserve to be saved; one doesn’t truly belong to this country (feeling like an outsider); family safety more important; anti-war or anti-nationalist sentiments; feeling no special affinity for America or enthusiasm for the American project; lack of fellow-feeling or common purpose with other Americans; nihilism or relativism to the point that no country or system of government is worth dying for.
…the ideal of ending poverty, facilitating economic mobility, and making sure everyone has access to the basics – healthcare, education, and family services – doesn’t have to pit Most of Us against a Despised Other (or at least an Undeserving Other). In Denmark, it’s more We’re All in This Together for the Long Haul.
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…