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).
Thing is, subjective and objective are not mutually exclusive. If they were, humans would not exist. Fear is a useful emotion. Without it, humans would not exist. What we perceive and feel sheds light on what is happening in the world. That doesn’t mean people don’t overreact or imagine things, only that it’s rarely “all in the head”. So what in the real world might perceptions of safety be tracking? I would guess local criminal activity, including property crimes.
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
California farmers have a water crisis. Not enough of the stuff and the supply keeps shrinking. The coastal urban dwellers aren’t all that sympathetic. A common sentiment: they shouldn’t be growing crops that need so much water, not in such a drought-prone state. Tear up those almond orchards!
The earth’s biosphere is in the middle of a mass extinction event, thanks mostly to the loss of wild habitat to agriculture. We need to shrink the amount of land used for agriculture to expand wild habitat and protect endangered species. Since livestock farming destroys more habitat than other types of agriculture and cattle are the most destructive of livestock animals, it would make sense to go after cattle ranchers and their enablers, aka those who eat beef.
The growing demand for beef is coming mostly from Asia and Africa and no matter how impassioned the pleas from environmentalists and vegans, the people in those regions aren’t going to change their food preferences any time soon - not when memories and stories of widespread hunger still linger in their collective minds.
But demand is only half the equation….
Ingroup favoritism—the tendency to favor members of one’s own group over those in other groups - has been well-documented in social groups across time and place. However, real-world studies are often descriptive, making it difficult to infer underlying process or generalize from specific groups delineated by nationality, race, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, etc. to other intergroup contexts. The “minimal group paradigm” overcomes the limitations of descriptive studies by using an experimental research design in which participants are given artificial group identities.
Unanticipated events, insufficient time, lack of requisite skills and a multitude of other factors may prevent one from acting as intended. Actual control over a behavior depends on the ability to overcome barriers of this kind, as well as the presence of facilitating factors.
These days I often come across the idea that the brain is some kind of machine, e.g., prediction machine, simulation machine, meaning-making machine, decision-making machine, computation machine. And there’s still a lot of push-back against the idea of being a machine.
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….
The studies and density advocates are assuming that driving and residential energy use will continue to rely on energy sources that emit greenhouse gases. But what about remote work, online shopping, electric vehicles, renewables, smart nuclear, and carbon-capture? Aren’t these (and other) technological developments going to change the equation in the not-so-distant future? As within a decade or so?
Actually, a good number of Americans still want to live in cities. But that doesn’t mean they want to live in high-density urban areas. After all, most American cities have car-friendly residential neighborhoods, which aren’t all that different from suburbs.
Ok, electric vehicles clearly emit less over their lifecycle than conventional gas-only cars, at least in Europe and except for Germany. What’s wrong with Germany, anyway? In a word: coal.
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…