But turds also float?

See? Science.

Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things. And no good thing ever dies.

JonB wrote:

The authors suggest that whatever envy, status anxiety, or relative deprivation people may feel in poor, unequal countries is swamped by hope.

Holy fuck! Never thought it would be that awful. What's for dinner mum? Er... hope. Yay.

JRPC wrote:

Most damagingly, the sociologists Jonathan Kelley and Mariah Evans have snipped the causal link joining inequality to happiness in a study of two hundred thousand people in sixty-eight societies over three decades. Kelley and Evans held constant the major factors that are known to affect happiness, including GDP per capita, age, sex, education, marital status, and religious attendance, and found that the theory that inequality causes unhappiness “comes to shipwreck on the rock of the facts.” In developing countries, inequality is not dispiriting but heartening: people in the more unequal societies are happier. The authors suggest that whatever envy, status anxiety, or relative deprivation people may feel in poor, unequal countries is swamped by hope. Inequality is seen as a harbinger of opportunity, a sign that education and other routes to upward mobility might pay off for them and their children.

Ain't it weird that Pinker is relying on sources like "Polish Sociological Review", rather than, say LSE?

I can't even find this supposed claim that "people in the more unequal societies are happier" in the source provided, and certainly none of that nonsense about "they're happier cos they're full of hope and aspirations!":  https://www.jstor.org/stable/41275132?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Hell, the abstract even explictly states:

Taken together, the quantitative implication of these patterns is that economic growth enhances well-being, especially for poor people, and more so in poor nations than in rich nations.

djchump wrote:

JonB wrote:

The authors suggest that whatever envy, status anxiety, or relative deprivation people may feel in poor, unequal countries is swamped by hope.

Holy fuck! Never thought it would be that awful. What's for dinner mum? Er... hope. Yay.

JRPC wrote:

Most damagingly, the sociologists Jonathan Kelley and Mariah Evans have snipped the causal link joining inequality to happiness in a study of two hundred thousand people in sixty-eight societies over three decades. Kelley and Evans held constant the major factors that are known to affect happiness, including GDP per capita, age, sex, education, marital status, and religious attendance, and found that the theory that inequality causes unhappiness “comes to shipwreck on the rock of the facts.” In developing countries, inequality is not dispiriting but heartening: people in the more unequal societies are happier. The authors suggest that whatever envy, status anxiety, or relative deprivation people may feel in poor, unequal countries is swamped by hope. Inequality is seen as a harbinger of opportunity, a sign that education and other routes to upward mobility might pay off for them and their children.

Ain't it weird that Pinker is relying on sources like "Polish Sociological Review", rather than, say LSE?

I can't even find this supposed claim that "people in the more unequal societies are happier" in the source provided, and certainly none of that nonsense about "they're happier cos they're full of hope and aspirations!":  .

[/quote]

That's cos none of that is in there, it's just Pinker's gloss.


Pinker has misunderstood and misapplied that study. It doesn't pretend that the definition of a poor person's happiness scales or tracks with a person in a rich society's definition of happiness. In other words, it forces a consistent measure of happiness by different people in different societies. You need only look at the hypotheses tested by the authors to see that Pinker's conclusion is a misapplication. In other words, in an unequal society, the ones with the goods are so happy that they bump up the stats for that society. In a more equal society, the returns are lower. It's all about the survey method.

But none of this measures "inequality" in the piketty sense, which is what we are all truly talking about.it doesn't try to.

“None of those count” (with a hand wave) and “I don’t understand” seem to be common refrains.

Oh dear.

Posted in the ills thread, because thats what it's about, but I find his case against splitting neoliberalism into smaller parts really good as a way of pointing out the problem with Harris style singular focus.

The books he mentions are apparently persuasive because of broad scope. Seems right to me for anything that's complex.

Facewon wrote:

Posted in the ills thread, because thats what it's about, but I find his case against splitting neoliberalism into smaller parts really good as a way of pointing out the problem with Harris style singular focus.

The books he mentions are apparently persuasive because of broad scope. Seems right to me for anything that's complex.

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/neoliberalism-forum-mike-konczal

I didn't post the link.

https://youtu.be/4LqZdkkBDas

Contra points. Oh my. Amazing. Was it Tempy who mentioned it earlier?

Jordan peterson rip through, but covers off ip and a bunch of stuff in an entertaining way.

http://www.somethingawful.com/news/jordan-peterson-interview/

GurtTractor wrote:

I'm trying to get to a more foundational starting point. Is inequality intrinsically harmful? If so, how? I don't think any of what Stoph has posted really speaks to that, and not to disparage, but most there strike me as pure tautology. Actually reading through those, the only one that actually does seem to follow directly is the one about access to certain medical treatments. But again, I don't see any necessary intrinsic problem with that. Is there one?

Inequality creates poverty you numpty. Poverty creates suffering. 42 people hold same wealth as 3.7bn poorest If you can't see, just from the headline, why inequality might cause problems, then you're a lost cause.

No, it doesn't. Why would it?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-44152429

A giddying "abyss" of inequality of access to pain relief has grown between rich and poor countries, concludes a recent study in the medical journal, the Lancet. The report finds that of the almost 300 metric tonnes of morphine-equivalent opioids distributed in the world each year, a paltry 0.1 metric tonne reaches low-income countries. "That access to such an inexpensive, essential, and effective intervention is denied to most patients in low and middle income countries," the study concludes, "is a medical, public health and moral failing and a travesty of justice."

BUT AT LEAST THEY'VE GOT ALL THAT FUCKING HOPE AND ASPIRATION RIGHT??

 

This confusion keeps happening and some variation of this has been posted several times now. Again, what’s described in that Lancet article is not an issue of inequality but issue of poverty. 

Many people in low income countries don’t have access to simple medicines like painkillers. This is a  “medical, public health and moral failing and a travesty of justice” . Sure, absolutely.  But by framing this as an issue of inequality what’s implicit is that the reason these resources are in such short supply to so many is because elsewhere rich people have loads of them. That if only the top 5% stopped hogging all the wealth and medicine it would soon find its way into the hands of the most needy. 

This is nonsense. 

What would be the result if our access to these painkillers dropped by half in the west? Well firstly the degree of inequality would be decreased substantially. If you hold to the idea that inequality is a “tangible evil irrespective of what it means for economic poverty” then this would be a good thing. 

But of course it wouldn’t be a good thing. If you decrease the amount of painkillers available to the western world (therefore reducing inequality) then all that happens is that less people have access to painkillers. Nobody in India is going to benefit from our loss and wellbeing overall is decreased . 

Again, there’s nothing morally objectionable about inequality as this example illustrates. What’s objectionable is poverty. 


The concluding paragraph from the Guardian article you posted to Gurt: 

Mark Littlewood, director general at the Institute of Economic Affairs, said: 

“Oxfam is promoting a race to the bottom. Richer people are already highly taxed people – reducing their wealth beyond a certain point won’t lead to redistribution, it will destroy it to the benefit of no one. Higher minimum wages would also likely lead to disappearing jobs, harming the very people Oxfam intend to help.”

tin_robot wrote:

I've generally avoided this thread, but thought I'd have a quick skim through - and opted to post mainly to say that Stoph's post a few pages back about why inequality is a tangible evil irrespective of what it means for economic poverty is superb. For those interested in the economic argument alone, then there's this useful review published by LSE and Oxfam which looks at the relationship between income inequality and poverty in the UK from 1961 to 2016.  It shows for every 1 point increase in inequality (measured via the Gini coefficient) there's an increase of relative poverty of 0.6 points.  Obviously correlation doesn't necessarily equal causation, but the correlation is particularly close.   The paper then goes on to discuss some of the ways in which inequality drives poverty - many of which Stoph touched on already (political & legal influence, skewing of voting electorate etc).  There's also some interesting stuff about how the average man on the street massively underestimates the gaping chasm of inequality that we now have, and why that perhaps allows the situation to persist, and indeed worsen.

So I read the Oxfam summary text. I think the three mechanisms they suggest may link poverty and inequality sound very plausible to me and I can easily imagine them contributing to a failure of optimal redistribution. But they leap to the wrong conclusion when they say that a reduction in relative poverty must go hand-in-hand with a reduction in inequality (like that above quote points out). 


For one thing, it’s not like if the rich controlled 2% of the total wealth instead of 8% that the problem of buying political influence would suddenly go away. What’s needed is sensible legislation that targets those specific issues - electoral reform/political influence/removing barriers to economic mobility etc.


Here’s a fairly amazing fact from Pinker’s book and I think the only one I’ve memorised; today and every day for the last 25 years 137,000 people in the world have been taken out of extreme poverty. We’re on course for the first time in human history to eradicate extreme poverty from the face of the earth by 2030. This is thanks to the fact that wealth is not a finite resource that gets divided up in the zero-sum fashion. Wealth is generated. Globally inequality is actually going down and yes this is absolutely a good thing. But it’s a good thing because it's the kind of inequality reduction that we should actually care about - it's a reduction in poverty.

Yo if everyone just got the Finish living stipend and could live better than 99% of people throughout history we'd all be happy. Then, if Dave invented fidget spinners, patented the fucker, made some dollar, thereby creating the first income inequality in our utopia then everyone except Dave lives in poverty.

Burn Dave.

In jrpc's bubble, Brexit/Cambridge Analytics/Aggregate IQ never happened...
His definition of poverty and inequality are also rather lacking indicating he's never had to experience either.

God bless him.

The year 2091, all human disease has been eradicated... even... death. Everyone lives in a Roddenberrian society, everyone has enough, replicators make any food you desire. Yoss has just been given his newly grown body, 30 yr old spec. But he is unhappy. He wants a conservatory on his cube house. Nobody else has one, his neighbour, Brooks, tells him he should be happy without one. Yoss says fuck that, pimps himself out to a local builder, One Brick man, who builds for fun, because why wouldn't you? Gets a conservatory and breaks in his new body. Two days later the futuristic net curtains of his neighbour JRPC 2.0 twitch.