Soriek
7mo ago
Agreed it is nonsense to consider Korea an exceptionally feminist society, at least for the developed world, and they genuinely do have a very large anti-feminist movement that played a big role in the last election. It should be said though the Ministry of Gender Equality wore a lot of people's patience thin for non-ideological reasons, like their attempts to ban videogames, or reduce prostitution by issuing checks to anyone who promised not to visit a prostitute.
Soriek
9mo ago
Their entire logic rests on the assumption that the higher spending is causing higher test scores.
If they're taking two neighborhoods and controlling for income, cost of living, demographics, population, pop density, and so on, and find that the difference in the better performing school is more funding per student, this is a reasonable argument to make. As far as I can tell you haven't made a counterargument here. If anyone has any actual objections with the adequacy model they're welcome to raise it, but the entire thing is besides the point because, again, the EPI paper isn't saying "funding is equal but they should be given more for the adequacy score," they're saying "poor districts are funded worse, period." It's also besides the point because my OP isn't some philosophical argument about who deserves what or what's the best way to fund schools; I'm asking a pretty specific question about how these two different think tanks found different conclusions from the same data.
I like this piece, but then and now feel like he's a little too dissmissive of the "cons" side of the calculation. Study #9, for instance, estimates that European-style price regulation could decrease innovation by as much as one third. I could reply with the Kaiser Family Foundation statistic that right now one third of people can't pick up their perscriptions at all because of the cost. If we reduce innovation by a third while expanding access to existing (and still increasing) innovation by a third, I'm not so sure we actually did that badly for ourselves.
I understand the study tries to account for the access side of things, but when they say that x reduced dollars leads to x less life years, I have to ask: aren't we basically already at about the peak of how long humans live? Are these extra life years at the very tail end of someone's life, low-quality, painful years that I probably wouldn't weight as highly as people who have their whole lives ahead of them gaining better medical care now? (As one commenter pointed out, if we really value all future life years equally, then the policy responsible for "worst thing in human history" would just be contraception). I could also add that this policy suggests Americans would get thousands more in savings, and that increases in income add life years in of themselves; likewise debt is a major driver of suicide - things I don't think the study accounts for in their life year ledger.
Also (unless I'm misreading) these studies seem to be addressing actual, old fashioned price controls, not pricing negotiations, which seem less drastic - it's what PBMs already do right now and no one seems to think they decrease innovation. I could be misunderstanding though.
This isn't to say that I don't take the argument seriously; we clearly gain from innovation and there should definitely be a big financial incentive to keep pharma companies churning out drugs. I'm just not sure if we're at the reasonable cutoff. When I tried googling, for instance, if we saw more pharma patents after Trump raised the patent period by four years, I couldn't find anthing. And as Scott points out, pharma companies wouldn't need to secure returns quite so crazy high if we didn’t make them go through a $billion+ ten-year approval process first.
Soriek
6mo ago
I have nothing super insightful to add, just thought this was a great post. Adaptations and repurposing cultural narratives are as told as time and as trad as Rome.
Soriek
6mo ago
I’m terribly sorry to hear everything you’ve been through and I hope very much your luck turns around.
Soriek
7mo ago
Both of these comments were fine, well above the standards of posting here. The second one I thought was just plain good, well written and makes a cogent argument that bigotry is natural rather than invented (by insert-your-political-enemies), and points out the hypocrisy of the most pro-assimilationist people here themselves being contrarians who vociferously resist assimilation.
Plenty of people would disagree strongly with his conclusions and maybe they'd be right. Good. This place should have actual differences in opinion, rather than different flavors of right wing arguing endlessly about the best way to fight wokeness. The fact that people think these are trolls are a sign of how unused to genuine disagreement and debate the userbase has grown.
Accusing him of dismissing the views of people he disagrees with is weak and holds him to a standard no one here is held to; dismissing and mocking progressive views is the single most consistent thing this sub does.
Soriek
7mo ago
Well, let's look at a [not even slightly] concrete example.
What's the point here? Why make an argument about someone based on a completely different user you for some reason suspect of being him, instead of just looking up him?
I don't like trawling through people's personal profiles but if you really want I guess I can look him up and find arguments I thought were interesting.
Soriek
7mo ago
So your principle is that, if someone threatens you after they suffer the consequences of bad decisions, then you'll give them what they want?
My principle is that if you can 100% count on people to mess up, prudence suggests preparing in advance. To not do so is poor governance.
This falls foul of the Lucas Critique: you're inferring saving behaviour under Policy Regime A from behaviour under Policy Regime B, when a switch from B to A would change the incentives for saving behaviour.
Well, that was why I tried to look into real world examples of what the system looked like in practice. Per the quote in the Brookings Report: “the system [in Chile, Mexico, Peru, El Salvador, Colombia, Argentina, and Bolivia] has done little to stimulate voluntary savings; few workers have channeled additional resources to their accounts.”
(Of course, someone might argue that European social democracy is preferable even given this relative stagnation, but that's a different argument.
I would be one of those people in favor for social democracy, partially because I’m pretty unconvinced taxation is really the root of their slower growth. Europe has had consistently high taxes than America for a long time but the divergence is only in the last 20 years, if anything a period marked more in Europe by slightly falling taxes. But as you say, that’s another argument.
My thesis is only that funding Social Security via increased taxation is one more step in that direction, and that that direction is not without costs.)
Sure, no disagreement there, my position is just that cutting SS by almost a quarter also has costs, and they seem larger to me than a small tax raise.
Soriek
7mo ago
From my OP:
- Raise Payroll Taxes - “even a modest change, such as a gradual increase of 0.3 percentage points each for employees and employers (or less than $3 per week for an average earner), could close about one-fifth of the gap.”
Soriek
7mo ago
No worries, I chopped a bunch of stuff to make it less long. The tax increase in general is def pretty obvious, I just thought it would be helpful to give some specific proposals and estimates.
Soriek
9mo ago
The core purpose of the NECM is to account for the fact, long established in the research literature, that the cost of providing a given level of education is not uniform across districts (Duncombe and Yinger 2007). Perhaps most importantly, districts that serve larger shares of high-need students (e.g., higher Census child poverty rates) will have higher costs. In addition, other factors, such as labor costs (e.g., districts in areas with higher costs of living will need to pay their employees more), size (economies of scale), and population density, all affect the “value of the education dollar.” The model, therefore, first estimates the relationships between district spending and these important factors, including testing outcomes. Importantly, the model accounts for the fact that school funding both affects and is affected by testing outcomes (For example, a district with higher test scores will tend to have higher property values than a district with lower scores. This high valuation allows the former district to collect more property tax revenues, which, in turn, boosts spending and positively affects testing outcomes. The NECM uses econometric methods to account for this endogeneity and tease out the causal relationship between spending and outcomes.)
This initial model yields a kind of “relationship inventory” of how each factor is related to spending. We then use the “inventory” to predict the cost (spending levels) of achieving a common outcome level (e.g., national average math and reading test scores) for each individual district, based on that district’s configuration of characteristics (in a sense, by comparing each district to other similar districts). These “required spending” estimates can then be compared with actual spending levels (total spending, direct to elementary and secondary education) in each district (this same basic process also yields our state-level estimates, which are aggregated district-level estimates). The difference between actual and required spending is a measure of adequacy relative to the common goal of national average scores.
Soriek
10mo ago
You do you but I'm generally pretty dubious. I think the quote you're thinking of from Scott is below:
Several come to my mind as comparatively liveable. Kenya. Tanzania. Botswana. South Africa. Namibia (is your list similar?) And one thing these places all have in common was being heavily, heavily colonized by the British.
Maybe he takes a closer look elsewhere but he doesn't actually compare wealth or gdp per capita or anything here, just kinda picks some good sounding ones. Most of these countries are spread across the continent's HDI and gdp per capita rankings except for South Africa (which was a self governing dominion) and Botswana (which was maybe the least heavily colonized country on the continent - the British basically left the existing monarchy in place and just demanded taxes). I could counter that other heavily British-colonized areas remain basket cases at the bottom of most relevant rankings: Sierra Leone, Malawi, the Gambia, Uganda, etc.
I did take a deeper look at India at least and found the British record pretty dismal. A while back I had ambitions of doing one of these for each of a bunch of the larger colonies, like Indonesia, Algeria, Malaya, Egypt, but got too duanted by the size of the project.
Now, when we’re talking about the 20th century, it’s a complicated discussion because in most of the nations you’re talking about, women could vote, and even in the ones where they couldn’t, they were certainly far more emancipated, and their preferences taken far more seriously, than in any previous time in history. That arguably had a massive effect on the political trajectory of the 20th century, even if the people actually tasked with implementing those political preferences were still overwhelmingly male.
Right wing movements came to power without any women voting at all in Portugal, Spain, Italy, Croatia, etc. The notable country that went from being a democracy with full women’s suffrage is Germany (and even there women mostly voted along with the male head of the household), and the NSDAP was the only party to not run female candidates because of their open stance that politics was the domain of men; women’s representation dropped from 37 MPs to 0 under them.
In which country did a fascist party come to power with majority support from women, or really any major attempt to cater to women’s preferences? Most mid-twentieth century right wing parties were pretty explicit about wanting to roll back women’s rights and restore traditional gender roles.
Soriek
3mo ago
I mean, he could have made immigration law take morality into account but didn't, suggesting it wasn't really that important to him as a matter of policy. Is the claim "not everybody in the world is equally awesome" really relevant to anyone but Bryan Caplan? Few people genuinely imagine the entire earth should move into their country.
Soriek
3mo ago
Pretty much just paraphrasing our founder:
“The bosom of America is open to receive not only the Opulent and respected Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions; whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges”
-George Washington
OG approved.
Soriek
7mo ago
Darwin was quite notable both for his prodigious and sustained output and his dedication to dishonesty and bad-faith interaction at every possible opportunity.
I disagree. He often made quality arguments and was willing to buck the status quo here from an underrepresented angle, something we should want more. He was no more inflammatory or bad faith than plenty of others here, but people reacted absolutely viscerally against him at a level disproportionate to his behavior.
The point stands. Darwin is still free to post here, as are any of the others who think BLM is a good idea. The fact that the history of their previous positions and the observed results places them squarely in the center of a rhetorical kill-zone is their own fault.
Imo that too easily absolves us as a community for failing to create the kind of debate space we set out to build. People get bitter and hostile in response to users who have actually tried to buck majority opinion here. I experienced this kind of thing enough from the times I tried to engage in actual culture war issues that I'm pretty unwilling to do it anymore, and I'm a very long time contributor.
Either way it doesn't matter much anymore, we are what we are here and my reply to gatt was meant to be light hearted, not a declaration of conflict or something.
Soriek
7mo ago
The dark old days when we still had users who actually had different opinions.
Because Anglos have tended to establish the world’s wealthier major states, mass immigration to them if open borders should exist is inevitable. These other peoples are unlikely to have a particularly great fondness for libertarianism, and so will slowly dismantle it as soon as they get the vote (just as happened, to some extent, in the US from the 19th century onwards).
One of Alex Nowrasteh's hobby horses is that we don't have a ton of evidence this is true, partially because it doesn't just matter how immigrants vote; it matters how the native population changes their own votes in response to immigration. America's government stayed unrecognizably small during our largest period of mass immigration in the 19th century. The period of 1921 to 1968 when America had its most restrictive immigration laws (and was 90%+ white and building a common national identity) also had the largest expansions of the government and the welfare state: the Great Society and the New Deal. After we reopened our borders government spending and union participation went back down, whether because xenophobic people don't like welfare going to foreigners, or language barriers make unionization harder, or maybe they're not related at all - point is more government doesn't necessarily follow from more immigrants.
Soriek
7mo ago
Do we want a larger share of power and capital in the hands of dumb people?
I'd like for them to be provided for in retirement! Certainly better than them being up-in-arms against their poverty, even if it's self inflicted. The problem is much larger than a cohort of dumb people at the bottom of the population as well, insofar as you trust self-reported surveys, various studies are always showing that even surprisingly numbers of well-off people report living paycheck-to-paycheck (25% of people making over $200k, 30% of people making over $250k). If these were middle income folks I would happily accept the counter that raising their payroll taxes would make this worse, but if even the Americans with the most disposable income don't save any of it, it's hard to imagine this would be better in a less-guaranteed retirement system.
Similarly, the "funding solutions" you consider all involve taxing labour more...As Western Europe has already experienced, social democracy via tax-and-spend plus regulation ends up in a trap of stagnation that is politically hard to escape:
These just aren't very high taxes on labor. 0.3% isn't going to bring us to anywhere near Europe. I'll note that even if we were, the Scandanavian countries are the pretty central example of high taxes on labor/consumption, low taxes on capital, and have done some of the best in terms of keeping pace with the US.
But we could even skip that and go with option 2 and only tax the top 5% of laborers. If you'd rather fund it by taxing capital I'm fine with that too. But even the conservative Tax Foundation agrees payroll taxes are more efficient than taxes on capital:
due to the inelasticity of the supply of labor, payroll taxes generate a comparatively small amount of deadweight loss compared to other forms of taxation. This means that payroll taxes lead to a relatively small amount of economic inefficiency, since the quantity of labor in the market does not dramatically decline as a result. Overall, payroll taxes do much less economic harm than taxes on capital. This is evidenced by our analysis of Senator Bernie Sanders’ tax proposals, whose payroll tax rate increase raised nearly four times as much revenue as his proposed increases on capital gains and dividends, but with a fourth less of the impact on GDP.
We've also been pretty committed to keeping entitlements funded via payroll tax partially because it's the least unpopular tax, since people see it more as an investment.
Soriek
9mo ago
This does not appear to be true. Those numbers are not about where the respondents were "from" but instead where they were last housed
Yeah, the relevance of the stat is that homeless people aren't traveling to California for warm weather / permissible legal regimes, they just become homeless in the areas where they already live. This also raises the relevance of California specific factors like housing costs since these people didn't become homeless under a different state government then switch states, confusing the stats. As @huadpe says, about a third born in other states is fairly representative for a normal Californian anyway.
The world is a big place, 45 days isn't slow.
The claim on the part of the skeptics is that the scientist made an abrupt 180 on their views in only a few days because of pressure from the NIH. Instead they had a month and half during which relevant research was published that overturned the main cited uncertainty.
OK, but any other theory was called a conspiracy theory (at best). So they put forth one possibility and suppressed anything else... You don't see a problem here?
This is what the scientists had to say about the lab leak theory vs the market:
As many early cases of COVID-19 were linked to the Huanan market in Wuhan, it is possible that an animal source was present at this location....
Although the evidence shows that SARS-CoV-2 is not a purposefully manipulated virus, it is currently impossible to prove or disprove the other theories of its origin described here. However, since we observed all notable SARS-CoV-2 features, including the optimized RBD and polybasic cleavage site, in related coronaviruses in nature, we do not believe that any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible. More scientific data could swing the balance of evidence to favor one hypothesis over another.
Pretty reasonable imo. Anyone is welcome to dispute their scientific claims. Again, the same government you're accusing of supressing the lab leak has also repeatedly endorsed the lab leak. Seems like a pretty sloppy coverup imo.
Soriek
2mo ago
I didn’t remove the end of the quote, that’s how I found it. Since you’re commenting on the tail end of a long conversation of me repeatedly arguing the addendum doesn’t change anything, either semantically or when we look at the actual immigration policy the quoted speaker pursued (or his other quotes on the issue), and you aren’t bothering to try to counter, do you have any point of substance to make? If not, let’s end this.
Soriek
2mo ago
because the claim that they don't change the meaning is not an objective, undisputed, fact, it's something you have to explicitly argue
Given that I have been explicitly arguing that, what exactly are you complaining about?
But to claim that Germans and Italians just wanted to be American is historically ignorant, because they maintained ethnic enclaves up until they were forced to stop, and didn’t use English as a first language until they were forced to.
At least from the surveys I've looked at it sounds like hispanic immigrants want to learn English, and they make their kids learn even when they themselves don't. This is from 2015 but:
Fully 89% of U.S.-born Latinos spoke English proficiently in 2013, up from 72% in 1980. This gain is due in part to the growing share of U.S.-born Latinos who live in households where only English is spoken. In 2013, 40% of U.S.-born Latinos, or 12 million people, lived in these households, up from 32% who did so in 1980...
for Hispanics overall, 95% say it is important that future generations of Hispanics living in the U.S. be able to speak Spanish (Taylor et al., 2012). Nearly as many, 87%, say that Hispanic immigrants need to learn English to succeed in the U.S.
I'm not sure how many other Europeans were really all that forced to integrate either. Even for Germans, while prejudice and discrimination against them was definitely very real in the WW1 era, iirc the laws against German language schools were struck down pretty quickly, and I'm not aware of similar rules on Italians, Poles, etc.
I'm referencing the second of the two options they describe:
More options
Context Copy link