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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   30962 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 15, 2023

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A bit different angle of culture (and maybe culture war?)

The new Bill Gates' house.

This guy has all the money. He could have built pretty much any house people can build. He chose to build that. Do you think it's beautiful? Would you dream, if you became wealthy beyond your wildest dreams, one day live in a house like that? If you don't think it's beautiful (I must admit I don't) - is this example for all of us that material possessions are not that important and you can spend a wild amount of money, get an ugly house and still be happy with it?

I don't like how it goes all the way to the edges of the lot. I don't like how it looks like an inexpensive hotel: uniform and beige and easy to power wash.

The only way I can explain why someone like Gates would have a house like that is that it's not his primary or even secondary residence. His house in Washington looks rather nice. His former property, Irma Lake Lodge in Wyoming, looks spectacular. I don't know why he needed a place in San Diego. Maybe one of his grandkids is a surfer. Maybe he was advised by his doctor to spend more time breathing warm ocean air.

It's consistent with the tastes of a rich man who would risk his marriage and reputation on an affair with Mila Antonova.

This isn't a piece of modern architecture that intentionally disrupts mainstream understandings of aesthetics or w/e. It's a functional building. The couches, tables, and shades aren't nice and wooden, but they're good for outdoor conversation. The solar panels are probably there for green reasons, but even purely on economics they're a reasonable choice. And the roof isn't an ugly metal slope or anything, just normal tiles.

I don't think anyone finds it beautiful, but it seems fine. Even if you want marble columns in your $5M mansion, that's still secondary to the material function of the house - spending your day there, having people over, etc.

I doubt that BG is worried about his energy bill being too high given that he's spending tens of millions on having another house.

IMO the “functional over form” position is predicated on a misconception of human needs. Humans actually need beauty and order to thrive. We need these things as much as we need a roof. Beauty and order in a building boosts your mood and aids your mind. Preferring function over form is like preferring an ugly, easy girl over a beautiful but somewhat expensive girl, because she is “functional”. Or it’s traveling to an ugly beach instead of a beautiful beach because they both have sand. Or it’s like playing a guitar with really shitty strings made out of shitty wood because you can hear the same notes even though the tone is bad. The ubiquity of beautification in human history proves without question the importance of form for the functioning of the human being.

Preferring function over form is like preferring an ugly, easy girl over a beautiful but somewhat expensive girl, because she is “functional”.

I believe this is also known as 'not being shallow,' and would be accompanied by less pejorative framings.

The drawbacks of superficial attractiveness are legendary. Like, literally some of the oldest works in the literary canon.

Even so, would you prefer a woman who speaks like ChatGPT (functional) or with a sonorous voice/heart (form)? When we talk about our loved one’s personalities do we say they are convenient and quite functional and does the job, or do we express what matters — the beauty of the inner person?

In terms of personality I care that they're pleasant, funny, like me back etc. A bipolar angsty girl into astrology and chakras might have a more "beautiful" personality, but all desire it inspires is to look now and then from a distance and not touch.

It's not that function is beauty. It's that beauty is function.

Again, I repeat: 'would be accompanied by less pejorative framings.'

Looks good. A cursory look around on google maps says that it fits with the surrounding esthetics. What would you build if you had the money of Bill Gates? I've never understood people that like neoclassical buildings in the US, to me they all look phoney, poseur, out of place, lacking in originality.

Not all beautiful buildings need be neoclassical.

Sure. The point I was trying to make is that it has to fit with its surrounding.

I hate it, it's hideous. It's kind of degrading to look at because he has so much fuck you money that he doesn't even bother to give the rest of us something pretty to look at. I'm guessing the location was exactly what he wanted or something and he has so many things already that he doesn't care about aesthetics. It also pattern matches to the irritating impulse many rich leftist Americans have where they feel so guilty about their money that they think to flaunt it would enrage the proles when in reality, not flaunting it is even worse (a la Marie Antoinette's peasant dresses, many of the people of France in the late 18th century weren't mad that she was a queen flaunting her wealth, they were angry that she dressed like a peasant in her spare time)

It's kind of ugly from above, but most people live in houses, they don't hover forty feet above them. If you're in it, it probably looks pretty nice.

His main home in Medina, Washington is surrounded by trees to the point that it's hard to see the buildings. He likes privacy and doesn't feel the need to build anything that screams "look at my house".

I suspect the bland exterior was a deliberate choice. It probably makes him feel safer.

The pool is covered in those photos. There are pics of the interior under a former owner here: https://www.latimes.com/business/real-estate/story/2020-04-24/report-bill-and-melinda-gates-buy-43million-del-mar-home

BG himself probably put 6 milliseconds of thought into the house. Knowing some ultra wealthy people, they are too busy to think about what underwear they wear, forget about the "aesthetics" of their nth house and what some nobodies in the internet with 1/100..000 of their wealth would think.

This guy has all the money. He could have built pretty much any house people can build. He chose to build that. Do you think it's beautiful?

His fellow billionaires think it is beautiful, and BG wants to impress them, not you.

He cares about your approval about as much as you care whether insects find your house nice and good looking.

He cares about your approval about as much as you care whether insects find your house nice and good looking.

I care a lot about that, only with the valence reversed. Perhaps this is the same sort of situation.

His fellow billionaires think it is beautiful

And how do you know this?

His fellow billionaires think it is beautiful

How do you know? I mean, I don't know a lot of billionaires, to be honest, but I met some rich people, and their tastes in general aren't that different from the rest of the population. They are not aliens. It's not about my approval of course, it's about my understanding of why he did it. I am curious. I do not seek the power to approve Gates' decisions, I seek the understanding.

I don't think it's beautiful on the outside but I'm sure it's prettty luxurious on the inside. I think it's a pretty big jump to go from "One specific billionaire is not particularly concerned with the outer beauty of his dwelling" to "material possessions aren't important"

If I had all the money to spend I'd have a nice enough house that fit in the neighborhood with a big and well equipped shop out back within walking distance of my favorite bar.

Merchant class aesthetics updated for the modern era. Ostentation is for the extinct warrior aristocracy or noveau riche clods with no taste. Pursuit of beauty is for the priestly class. Merchants are supposed to be frugal, modest, and vaguely sterile.

Alternatively: function over form. As others have noted, people don't spend a lot of time looking at their own house. If Gates finds the design serves his needs better, he probably doesn't care that it looks drab.

Alternatively mk 2: countersignalling. Gates is one of the richest and most successful people on the planet. He doesn't need to impress anyone.

Alternatively mk 2: countersignalling. Gates is one of the richest and most successful people on the planet. He doesn't need to impress anyone.

So is Trump, but he is often mocked for eating steaks well done and pizza with a fork.

But those signal that Trump is not trying to impress anyone! Doing eccentric, "tasteless" things is one way to signal that you're not trying to impress people with "good taste". Eating well done steak or going to McDonalds is a way of shouting, "I am not trying to impress WASP elites."

Even Trump's gaudiness e.g. in his mansions could be a way of signalling that he's a Common Man, because they are the ways that a Common Man would spend millions if they had it. The message that Trump wants to give to his supporters and potential supporters is "I'm just like you, only richer, so I can still understand you and I share your desires."

Even for those of his supporters who regard this signal as insincere, the fact that Trump sends this signal is a way that they can identify that he is trying to cynically appeal to them, rather than other groups, which is relevant information for determining his priorities.

Sure, but the industry dedicated to hating on bill gates is much smaller.

Has Trump given any indication of caring?

He doesn't need to impress anyone.

I never felt a particular reason to impress anyone either (well, maybe outside the period where I was on the dating market, but that was decades ago...) but I still like nice things. If I had so much money that it wasn't a question of price, I'd certainly buy a house that looks nice (to me) - not to impress anyone but because it is pleasant to live in a nice house.

It could be so much worse. There's nothing nice about it but it looks like a fine place to use as a base camp for enjoying the san diego weather and beach.

Looks like it will make a dandy Best Western when he gets done with it.

I don't suppose he had put much more thought into it than I do into my order in some fast food joint. I just pick based on how much I'm willing to spend, trusting that the default option won't be terrible because the reviews are okay; he most likely outsourced the design to professionals, and let his secretary handle the details.

One of the marks of highly successful people that unites them with normies is being content with defaults. Sure, were I rich, I'd be able to afford a custom laptop for travels that ticks my every nerd fetish box – trackpoint, 3:2 touchscreen, 100Wh battery, mechanical keyboard, magnesium chassis, no thinness fetish… But I'd most likely just tell my secretary to get the newest lightweight Mac, and paying much attention to what you own would be as absurd to my eyes as tinkering with rooted Android firmware.

One of the marks of highly successful people that unites them with normies is being content with defaults. Sure, were I rich, I'd be able to afford a custom laptop for travels that ticks my every nerd fetish box – trackpoint, 3:2 touchscreen, 100Wh battery, mechanical keyboard, magnesium chassis, no thinness fetish… But I'd most likely just tell my secretary to get the newest lightweight Mac, and paying much attention to what you own would be as absurd to my eyes as tinkering with rooted Android firmware.

I mean this is something that occurred to me one day during COVID. All-hands meeting at the company I was working for, pretty big spectrum of income/wealth/countries of residence... and yet prettymuch everybody on the 100+-person call was essentially at a very similar table, with a very similar background, on a very similar device on this Zoom meeting. Testament to how increasingly flattened the curve is on lifestyle.

But I'd most likely just tell my secretary to get the newest lightweight Mac

Tangentially related, but when Khodorkovsky was released from prison, his secretary got him the newest lightweight Mac, the newest iPhone and the newest iPad and his mind was blown. He remembered what 2003 cutting-edge tech was like and spent a few months being extremely online.

Isn't he still very online?

Not as much as Elon Musk.

One of the marks of highly successful people that unites them with normies is being content with defaults.

Yes, and this is sign that highly succesful people are just normies with big pile of money. Billionaire supermen exist in Ayn Rand's novels, not in reality.

Sure, were I rich, I'd be able to afford a custom laptop for travels that ticks my every nerd fetish box – trackpoint, 3:2 touchscreen, 100Wh battery, mechanical keyboard, magnesium chassis, no thinness fetish… But I'd most likely just tell my secretary to get the newest lightweight Mac, and paying much attention to what you own would be as absurd to my eyes as tinkering with rooted Android firmware.

When someone ends at this level, time, not money is the bottleneck. You could, when you make your billions, hire as consultants professional engineer and design teams from Apple or Samsung, explain to them what exactly you want and tell them to build this dream machine just for you regardless of cost. But you would have something better to do with your time.

Houses and computers are not so important, more important is that even the most succesful people outsource their information, even billionaires get their knowledge about the world from mainstream media and popular literature (plus some rumors and inside info heard from their peers and other VIP's, which can pay very well).

With honorable exception of Elon Musk, who lately turned to /pol/ memes as his source of news, more accurate source than NYT, CNN or FOX.

But, billionaires should do better if they wanted to. Ordinary billionaire could afford to hire his own OSINT/financial/technological/investigative team to look behing the facade, to seek from open sources what is really going on in the world.

Well, if they did, they would not tell us, but we would see billionaires predicting (and profiting from) important world events more frequently than random chance allows.

You had similar idea long ago, when, as the first thing when you get mega rich, you planned to dig deep, follow through the rabbit holes and learn who and what is behind the infamous satanic ritual celebrating opening of Gotthard Base Tunnel.

Yes, and this is sign that highly succesful people are just normies with big pile of money. Billionaire supermen exist in Ayn Rand's novels, not in reality.

Normie taste does not imply Normie aptitude. And saying otherwise is coping.

I like the courtyard, but would prefer a useable roof in that style house.

I think Gates might go nondescript on purpose. His home on Lake Washington isn’t even visible from the lake. When you’re boating and tell friends where Bill Gates lives, you’re gesturing at a clump of trees on the shore.

Eh, looks fine to me, I don't see the exterior of my house that often, and especially not from a drone's point of view, if building it that way made the interior more suited to my needs by a small margin, the tradeoff would've been worth it.

architecture nerd here, looks essentially modern, no fusion. southwest accents. could be better, modern southwest has many beautiful works.

could be much worse. a lot of purely modern houses are dissonant, inhuman shit. that house doesn't do anything interesting, it also doesn't do anything terrible. inoffensive.

i imagine gates will spend very little time there. isn't that the thing with those 8 figure fantasy mansions? all that time and effort to get it and no time to enjoy it. gotta keep grinding. except maybe notch.

I'd imagine that California's building codes made it very difficult to make any kind of structural changes to the house. He probably did what he could on the outside, and made huge changes to the inside.

I saw pretty interesting houses, say, in Carmel. So California is not at fault here I think.

but were they right on the beach? When were they built? I don't know about del mar, but you always hear horror stories about trying to do anything in Malibu. here's an example from a google search:

State law mandates cities to review and approve ADUs within 60 days. But it took the planning commission 11 months to let the Riddicks know their request for a permit was denied.

To say this was a bureaucratic nightmare would be an understatement. The lengths the city has been willing to go to in impeding development seemed almost too ridiculous to believe, especially with a major housing shortage under way.

Yes, many right on the beach or very close. I recommend Scenic Rd in particular, it's always nice to walk there. I have no idea where were they built (last time I was there, which was a couple years ago by now, some were still building, though I have no idea how they came out) - I could probably find out, but never bothered. Maybe it's a very expensive and arduous process to get anything approved there (most likely it is), but those people somehow (probably - lots of money and connections?) managed to get through it.

The house fits the man. What can I say ...

That's such an incredibly meh design. Not outright ugly, but I'd cry if I paid $48 mil for it and had that to show for it.

But at any rate, I doubt that house is the defining contributor to his sense of self-worth or happiness.

I think we have to consider other things about the house. The exterior visible design is pretty pedestrian I suppose. But it looks like a freakin' huge house, (six bedrooms, 3.5 baths, 5,800 square feet) and it's reportedly on a large beachfront property in Del Mar, San Diego. I expect real estate there is pretty pricey, especially with that large of a Pacific ocean beach. And we have no idea what he did to the inside. I would think with all those other factors, $48 mil doesn't go that far in the make it look super impressive from the outside department. I don't get the impression that Bill Gates is the kind of guy who wants to impress everyone else with how awesome and rich he is. Here's another article I found about how awesome this house supposedly is.

Yeah it's pretty nice on the inside but why build a beach house in San Diego (assuming you're super rich)?. San Diego is beautiful, but California makes it illegal to own the beach itself. If I had unlimited money I'd want to put my beachfront property in places where I can keep the riffraff off my sand. How am I supposed to enjoy the beach and the surf if the paparazzi (or just randos) can legally come onto my beach.

It's not his only place. Presumably he wants at least one big place in a swanky but accessible location to throw billionaire parties at. IDK if there's any paparazzi around, presumably nobody wants pics of pasty old dudes? Or maybe he has so much freakin' money he can destroy any publication that annoys him, like Thiel did?

Here's another article I found about how awesome this house supposedly is.

That looks like a very nice house, but apparently Gates tore it down to build the current house.

$48 million probably for the location , not the design ...

That's such an incredibly meh design. Not outright ugly, but I'd cry if I paid $48 mil for it and had that to show for it.

My feelings exactly. But why? I mean, it'd probably be the same price and effort to have a non-ugly house instead. Does he think it's beautiful? Does he just not care because he's way beyond it? I mean, I probably won't care if I went to McDonalds and got an ugly burger - it's a cheap burger, I eat it and forget it, who cares. Is that what's going on here?

But why

Because you hear $48M and think of that as a capstone sort of representation of the culmination of your life. A $48M house on the beach in San Diego is a way of showing both to yourself and to your neighbors that you are somebody who can afford a $48M house.

It's something you'd want to be really proud of, since you probably imagine only buying a $48M once, probably near the end of your life.

Bill Gates is worth $100 BILLION dollars. For math, let's assume your net worth is $1M. A $1,000,000 net worth is not something to be ashamed of.

This would be like spending $500 on a house. Let's say even $10,000,000 - a level at which most people would consider you rich. That's $5000 on a house. My net worth is somewhere between those two numbers, and I have many $5000 "goofy" sorts of toys that I mistreat and don't really care about aside from the once or twice a year they get used.

Even at $100,000,000 net worth, this is still a $50,000 expenditure (proportionally).

Why is it ugly? Because why the hell would he even consider the aesthetics of this house? At that level of wealth, this is functionally no different than staying in a hotel. He might not even know that he owns it.

If I were to spend $500 on something, and I had a choice between an ugly thing and a beautiful thing - I'd definitely choose the latter. When I buy $500 things I definitely care for how they look. Thinking about what I could by for around $500, for me, that would be either an electronic gadget or some smaller piece of furniture, I guess, definitely aesthetics would matter.

I wouldn't. When I was a kid and my parents took me to buy school accessories, I always went out of my way to find the least colorful and most boring-looking stuff on the shelf to avoid attention from my classmates.

Still today, my smartphone case is transparent-gray, and my keyboard RGB is off at all times.

But isn't that either depression or anxiety induced behaviour? What would you get if you specifically wanted to demonstrate your good taste?

Fair enough, and I'm in that same order of magnitude for wealth, and I still make fun of watches that look like shit for $5K. Yeah, you can just spend that and it's not a big deal, but why choose something shitty when you could choose something that looks nice? I don't think, "I don't even care lol" is compelling in any setting at all, to be honest.

If I had to wild-ass guess, he just doesn't particularly care, has multiple better houses he prefers and just wanted a minimum viable product, or is just so inured to luxury it doesn't bother him.

Richard Hanania reports (it seems someone leaked to him) that the Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer at Uber has been placed on leave of absence following a DEI session called "Moving Forward: Don't Call Me Karen".

Unless I'm missing something, it's not clear that this is explicitly related to the recent and ongoing Citi Bike Karen.

That Karen is an anti-white slur only directed against white women seems pretty obvious. I never understood why so many on the right embraced the term. I am also not surprised that most of the people in the chatlogs are other women, since the term was mostly used by women or gay men.

One interesting point is that the most anti-white group at uber are blacks whereas Asians were most sympathetic. Latinos were sort of in-between but a bit closer to the Asian position. This makes me a bit more hopeful about America's future as traditionally the two most hostile anti-white groups were either blacks or Jews and both are losing relative demographic importance since the bulk of non-white growth is Asian and Latino.

The black population is estimated to remain stable at 11 to 13% of the US population out to 2100 last time I checked. I haven't heard about Jews but I imagine they're not declining precipitously.

So the US is moving from whites to more Hispanics, which aren't as pro-SJW as blacks are but certainly are sympathetic in many ways.

I haven't heard about Jews but I imagine they're not declining precipitously.

The Reform and irreligious ones are. TFR of 3.3 for Orthodox, but 1.8 for Conservative, and only 1.4 for Reform, 1.1 for "No particular branch", 1.0 for "No religion".

Basically the same pattern is found between different religions (except that Buddhist TFR is even a little lower than Nonreligious?) and within other religions (e.g. TFR correlates with Biblical literalism, and with rates of church attendance), but the effect size for Jewish people seems exceptionally large.

I think Scott Aaronson (Jewish "No religion" category, but IIRC 2 kids anyway, good for him) once described modern religious demographic trends most memorably, as "a contest between the Darwinian theorists and the Darwinian practitioners".

These kinds of leaks just reinforce my postion that woke corporations aren't just acting woke to 'respond to the market' or to cover their own asses from regulation (i.e. that corporations are only acting woke for sound, economically rational reasons), but that corporations have been subjected to entryism much the same as any other insitution and that market forces and competition aren't some impenetrable bulwark against woke entryism.

the chatlogs showed make it hard to believe these people are functioning adults at a big company.

"matt walsh said karen is a racial slur, do you agree with him???

"you deserve a pay raise and/or time off for all of this emotional unpaid labor"

and my favorite

"it was more of a lecture - I felt like I was being scolded for the entirety of that meeting"

"matt walsh said karen is a racial slur, do you agree with him???

I wonder if there's a niche for a loathsome conservative to get paid to chime in every once in a while supporting a rival leftist's cause, just to irradiate the whole thing.

I wonder if there's a niche for a loathsome conservative to get paid to chime in every once in a while supporting a rival leftist's cause, just to irradiate the whole thing.

I was kind of under the impression that this was Hanania's whole thing.

How so? Can you give examples? I'm curious because I just discovered Hanania and have been reading his archive with relish. He's a great writer, IMO.

"it was more of a lecture - I felt like I was being scolded for the entirety of that meeting"

I mean, that person isn't wrong. That's kind of the entire DEI modus operandi.

I think I just had a weird zoom-out moment. It strikes me that none of the things in this post need to exist. DEI officers, DEI sessions, black worker specific groups, all of this is completely needless people fighting over completely needless things. Why is anyone wasting any money on any of this stuff in the first place?

It all just seems so silly. It's like the corporate priest led a sermon from a different faith and the churchgoers got angry about it. This is basically the reaction I'd expect if my local vicar held a reading from the Quran at the Church of St Mary.

Why is anyone wasting any money on any of this stuff in the first place?

Why do people set up the people's commissariats to have a man of the people in every room of the soviet union where an actual decision is being taken?

Because we are besieged by imperialist traitors that are everywhere trying to sabotage our great socialist project and condemn humanity to the bondage of capital, that is why.

Only a simple man or a traitor would ask such questions. Which are you comrade?

I often wonder about the alternate reality where Scientology wasn't horribly mismanaged and took over most institutions. Companies would have mandatory auditing sessions and tech conferences would start and end with a Dianetics lecture. People objecting would still be called bigots.

deleted

Why is anyone wasting any money on any of this stuff in the first place?

It's insurance against employee lawsuits for mistreatment. If Employee X complains about harassment of a sexual/racial/whatever nature from Employee Y, the company can say "well Employee Y went through mandatory sensitivity training for all these things. Obviously this is not a part of our corporate culture. We have no legal or moral responsibility for what happened."

There are true believers involved at various levels presumably, but it's a lot easier to be a true believer if your economic incentives align with it as well.

The crazy thing is that the actual case law on hostile work environments is extremely employer friendly. It's just that cowardly general counsels and ideologically compromised HR departments are able to convince their bosses It's in their interests to settle and grovel. Any company that told these sorts of people to go fuck themselves would almost certainly prevail in court, but the people in charge are either true believers or have been lied to by true believers into having an irrational fear of liability that doesnt really exist.

I've seen it analyzed as due to legislation on workplace discrimination, and all of this makes it harder for the businesses to be sued, and so have some value to them in that respect. That, in combination with it looking really bad if you try to get rid of them.

Why is anyone wasting any money on any of this stuff in the first place?

“Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation.”

― George Carlin

DEI is the tool that is used to scare you into obidience of due to its arbitrariness. DEI is based on something that rebukes objective reality and stacks arbitrary relativistic moral values which you can't predict logically.

Certainly. And if one was interested in making Uber profitable, a great way to start would be firing and/or eliminating the position of everyone in those tweets, including the DEI officer.

While probably true, is Uber's goal profitability? They've never to my knowledge posted a profit and seem to live off of various money sources enabled by easy credit- and access to those is probably significantly enabled by their robust DEI department, and also probably much easier than turning a profit.

There's the first important issue: California property tax laws are insane.

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13

Under Proposition 13, the annual real estate tax on a parcel of property is limited to 1% of its assessed value. This "assessed value" may be increased only by a maximum of 2% per year until, and unless, the property has a change of ownership.[15] At the time of the change in ownership the low assessed value may be reassessed to complete current market value that will produce a new base year value for the property, but future assessments are likewise restricted to the 2% annual maximum increase of the new base year value.

So your property taxes can only increase by 2% a year from your date of purchase. As a result anyone who has owned a home for 10+ years is locked into property taxes far below what they'd pay if they'd move.

So there's a strong incentive to never sell. A retiree might think about selling their house and downsizing, but while they'd get a lump of cash their property taxes will be significantly higher for the rest of their lives. That affects calculations.

Other issues benefitting SF...

The weather is quite pleasant and unique. Many people are heat bugs and dislike it. But it rarely rains in the summer. The weather never gets muggy. It never really gets cold. Sort of year round light jacket weather. There's a big market for that, and there are only a handful of cities like that in the world.

Demographically it's 78.8% asian & non-hispanic white. That's extremely high for a rich costal city in the US.

Really the biggest downside to SF is the incompetent management of the drug addicted & mentally ill homeless population.

It's never going to be a party town, but it's going to be a desirable place for the wealthy and bookish to live for the foreseeable future.

Other issues benefitting SF...

And it actually has nice streets, mentally unstable hobos notwithstanding. That's where all that missing middle housing in the US has gone to. Drop a pin anywhere west of the mountain or in Pacific Heights and it will look like a real city: streets with houses instead of setbacks and/or parking lots. It just needs some more trees.

Good summary. There are simply too many structural factors favouring SF in a way that e.g. Detroit never had. Moreover, it helps that firms like OpenAI are vocally supporting of the city even while they criticise the leadership.

One final point. Even many people who move don't move far. There was one VC who made a big splash on Twitter a few months ago about how he's moving out of SF due to spiralling crime. Where did he move? To Palo Alto. SF mostly rose as a cheaper alternative but the wider Bay Area isn't losing its luster as much as people think. Moreover, even alternatives like Seattle are seeing a rise in similar problems, but with substantially worse weather.

San Francisco is actually experiencing mini renaissance within a broader decline, namely in AI. Think the neighborhood dubbed Cerebral Valley.

Maybe that has something to do with it. Those are the people buying those homes.

There is a simple and relatively general reason why we expect housing costs to have increased relative to pre-pandemic levels. Remote working increases demand for housing everywhere because people who work from home require more square feet of living space for an equivalent quality of life. And the impact of increase in price on demand is greatest where supply is constrained - i.e. in blue-state NIMBY cities.

So we have three effects:

  1. A general increase in house prices due to the demand effect of WFH. Positive everywhere, and relatively more positive for the Bay Area than elsewhere.

  2. The relative attractiveness of different places changes due to WFH. There is a general flattening effect (within a metro area for people who sometimes need to network in person, globally for people who can be 100% remote) on the value of neighbourhoods, and there is also a shift in value away from places with a convenient commute to good jobs, and towards fun places. This is a small net negative for the Bay Area as a whole, but within the Bay Area it is a big positive for SF at the expense of Silicon Valley.

  3. The specific problems with social decay in SF.

It doesn't surprise me that these are net-positive for SF house prices.

Why would you expect WFH creates a demand increase everywhere? Seems to me that if you need not commute, you will get some x% if the population moving to generic cheap jurisdiction which may decrease the demand in very expensive neighborhoods.

So much has been said about housing prices. Scott even jumped into the fray recently. But I think there's something missing from every analysis. Here's my take, which I offer with low confidence, but at least it's not the same regurgitated shit:

Housing Prices are a Meme

Something changed around the year 2000. It wasn't an economic change. It was a mental change in how much people are willing to pay for a house. Before, people might have balked at paying 50% of their income on a house. Now they do it. And why not? With few exceptions, housing always goes up. Once you digest that, then there's almost no amount that's too much to pay.

Prices in San Francisco are not high. Compare San Francisco to Vancouver. Compare it to Hong Kong.

San Francisco is the richest city in the world. Yet, prices in San Francisco are not really too much different from much poorer cities like London, Vancouver, or Hong Kong. In San Francisco, a software engineer might spend 50% of his income on a house. In China, he would spend MORE THAN 100%, relying on the accumulated wealth of parents and grandparents.

Housing prices are a meme. Fortunately, this meme is less strong in the United States than it is in Europe, Canada, or China. But it's getting worse here. To break high housing prices, we need to break the meme. We need people to learn that housing prices go down. To do that, we need to create government programs that make housing a shitty investment, which is the opposite of what happens now.

If you want to see what happens when the meme finally gets broken, look at Japan. Housing has been a shitty investment in Japan for a long time now. People don't hoard houses hoping for appreciation like they do in other places. As a result, it's affordable. People have been trying to figure out what makes Japan different. This is it. This is the reason.

If we want lower prices, we need to break the meme. Everything else is just nibbling at the edges.

Housing in Japan isn't affordable. Houses are small, probably roughly half of the sqft you'd get in most of the U.S. for the same dollars (my "huge" house in the countryside that shocked my co-workers was just over 1400sqft and it had 4BR, lol). The construction quality is shit, very poor insulation, crappy building materials that degrade significantly in the first 10-20 years. And all this for the low prices of 30,000,000 to 45,000,000 JPY if you want something new, or 25,000,000 to 35,000,000 if you want something used. And get ready to live in a 1000sqft "house" with maybe 1-2 meters of "land" surrounding your house, if that. (Yes, even in the countryside -- they build houses 1 meter apart even in the midst of massive open spaces.) AND! You get to pay for it with your Japanese salary, which PPP-adjusted is worth about half of an American salary.

As for why this is, the most plausible reasons seem to be that

  1. Brain drain to the cities is extreme and WFH hasn't taken off nearly as much -- most people are still trying to cram themselves into Tokyo

  2. Home construction is a racket -- There are a handful of massive national level builders that sit on top of a truly insane byzantine network of contractors, sub contractors, and sub sub sub contractors so that building even with shitty materials becomes horribly expensive due to the sheer number of parties taking their cut. This also makes QC'ing your house nearly impossible because there's no single "contractor" to hold accountable, it's buck-passing all the way down

  3. Penalties for sitting on land are very low -- the attitude towards owning property here seems to be "sit on it and hope you win the lottery." I personally know people who own land in the countryside and who have zero plans for it -- it's just there, it's costing almost nothing, and maybe someday someone will want to buy it, who knows? And of course there's the famous inheritance/ownership problem, where a piece of land gets passed down to half a dozen grandchildren, only some of them cannot be located (and might even be purposely avoiding being located in order to dodge taxes) so nothing can ever be legally done with the land and it just sits in limbo forever.

Interesting! Maybe it's time to take the "Japanese housing is cheap" idea out to the river and drown it.

What do you think of the previous discussion where we talked about a (shitty but functional) rental in Osaka going for $150/month?

I haven't seen that discussion, but it sounds possible. Places like that are usually exactly what you'd expect, some combination of:

  • Extremely small

  • Filthy and/or damaged

  • Old

  • Structurally dangerous (predating latest earthquake safety laws)

  • In a natural disaster high risk zone (flood/tsunami/landslide)

  • Terrible location (far from public transit, or next to factories/noisy train station/graveyard/sewage plant etc)

  • Tainted by association (usually a suicide or high profile crime)

  • Shitty neighbors (almost by definition)

$150/month might still seem outrageously low given the above, but I again have to emphasize that these are usually basically pod "apartments" that would probably violate building codes in the U.S. for being so small.

150/month for 'old pod in natural disaster zone' is still amazing tbh (provided you get a day or two's warning for the disasters, and just move to other pods).

that would probably violate building codes in the U.S. for being so small.

Are there any good reasons such building codes should exist? There'd be a bunch of new requirements for the specific constraints such small apartments ofc, building codes in general are useful, but as far as I can tell generally prohibiting them is pure deadweight loss

In China, he would spend MORE THAN 100%, relying on the accumulated wealth of parents and grandparents.

Somebody explain to me how it can make sense. I mean ok, he spends his parent's wealth on paying for the house. Then he has kids. What his kids would be paying for the house with? Is the assumption his income at some point would jump so high that he would be able to accumulate wealth too? Is the plan is for the house price to appreciate so fast that he'd retire, sell it, move to Chinese equivalent of Sticks, IA and use the money to support the kids? Is the plan to never have kids and never retire? I thought Chinese model was supposed to be kids supporting parents? Not sure I understand how it works there.

Presumably it works because of the one child policy.

4 grandparents -> 2 parents -> 1 child.

The Asian model is that parents support their kids financially well into adulthood in exchange for obedience.

Traditionally, the whole extended family would live in the same house, with all working-age members contributing to a shared pool of income and the elders making the financial decisions. Once enough wealth has been accumulated, the whole clan will move to a new house that would be better than one any individual member could afford on their own. As long as you have enough children and grandchildren bringing in money, your lot will improve over time.

This system is of course breaking down, as declining birthrates reduce the working-age population of any given family and as western individualism slowly dissolves the old social structures. The ultimate result will be as you imagine, with future generations unable to afford the homes they would like because the family accounts have been overdrawn and split up.

Probably inheritance from when his parents die(after all, their house has also been appreciating) and multi-generational households combine through the power of ultra-low fertility rates.

I think especially now that WFH is a major thing, that any high prices are about meme cities, not just meme prices. Being a resident of certain cities is pretty high status. California is high status, New York around NYC is high status. Nashville isn’t a meme city, though it’s a pretty nice place, St. Louis isn’t a meme city, nor are most midsize cities in the south. You can get a pretty nice house in North Carolina for what you’d pay for a small home in San Francisco. But NC isn’t cool.

Isn’t it a bad investment in Japan because declining north rates mean there is less demand?

What started the decline was a very high base rate, IMO. Prices at the peak around 1990 were unsustainable. There was a popular saying at the time that the theoretical land value of the Imperial Palace in Tokyo was greater than the land value of the entire state of California.

Now that's it's been a bad investment for 30 years, people don't speculate the same way they do here.

The real population decline in Japan hasn't even gotten started yet! Japan has about the same population today as it did in 1990. The current population of 123.5 million is only down slightly from the peak of 128 million reached in 2009, but the pace will accelerate from here.

It's a bad investment in Japan because their zoning system makes it very easy to build new houses. Indeed building new houses is a cultural norm, and houses are considered temporary occupiers of land rather than permanent features. Buy an old house? Chances are you'll knock it down and replace it.

4. Many home owners analysis the social collapse as a scam. The way that the scam is theorized to work is this: First engineer social decline. This reduces the price of office blocks. Second, buy a $300million office block for $60million. Third, reverse course on social decline. Fourth, patience, it takes a while for your "$60million" office block to be worth $300million again. Fifth, sell, and walk away with $240million profit.

The home owners don't want to be victims of this scam. They don't want to sell cheap at the bottom of the market, only to see prices recover as part of some-one else's plan. Perhaps too many people are in on the scam and they are propping up the housing market. Perhaps they are not in on the scam, they have merely noticed the avarice and evil of American political economy and feel confident in guessing what is going on. Perhaps it isn't even a scam, it is just that with American political economy being so avaricious and evil, people assume that its a scam. The realization, that social dynamics are playing out with no-one in charge and exercising agency, has yet to dawn.

People need homes, they don't need office space. Some businesses moving online or to cheaper areas does not eliminate demand for housing. These are related but not that well correlated. Although VC is down in SF, it is not out:

https://sfstandard.com/research-data/san-francisco-top-vc-venture-capital-deals-investors-firms-2022/

Demand for housing is much more stable compared to supply and demand for commercial real estate. Layoffs can create huge, sudden vacancies.

I'm only loosely familar with commercial real estate lending (I did residential lending) but a major difference is that commercial lenders typically require market LTV maintenance whis means ~ margin calls. If your property tanks by 50% in current market value, your bank is going to call you & demand cash.

Now, they won't intentionally drive a performing loan account into bankruptcy. Banks are worse at liquidating siezed collateral than the original owner, and in any case really just want the loan payments. But if you have a generally solvent business, or you have lots of personal assets & gave personal guarantees (and most small businesses have to) they will absolutely make you shoulder the volatility risk and take your savings to pay down the loan to a % they are comfortable with. You can take the equity back out if & when the proprty appreciates again.

This story is a great example of no one ever updating, or even questioning the narrative.

In recent years, drug cartels have flooded US cities with fentanyl to meet demand for opioids created by rampant overprescription.

Ah, yes, the blame for the drug problem doesn't lie with the users; it's split between the cartels and "overprescription" (doctors and drug companies). Leave aside that if you dig down, you find opiate abusers may start with prescription drugs but it's usually not their prescription, we get this later:

As he spoke, he watched out his window as a homeless person clutching a glass pipe rifled through his trash cans.

Glass pipes are used to smoke crack or crystal meth. Who is overprescribing those? Are we going to blame stimulant abuse on ADHD overprescription? (probably yes, but it'll still be nonsense)

Adisa says Urban Alchemy has reversed 1,300 opioid overdoses in the two years he has worked there.

No consideration that reversing such overdoses may be part of the problem, much like being a medic in a gang war. The story of course only mentions examples where this is unambiguously a good thing -- a baby and a dog accidentally getting a dose -- but somehow I feel certain that a lot of those 1,300 were not in that category.

“Five years ago, a black guy with a pipe got arrested; now the police walk past a white guy with a needle in his arm,” he says.

Ah, yes, this is all about race.

Adisa calls it a “sanctuary city”, using positively a term American conservatives deploy as an insult. “Flower power kids came here in the ’70s to rebel against their parents,” Merlin says. “Now, kids come here to do fentanyl.”

...and that's a good thing, apparently???

Inequality is not a product of the internet era either.

Right, because the problem is "inequality". Not the absolute level of the homeless drug addicts, just that some people have a LOT more than them.

“From [Nob Hill], looking down upon the business wards of the city, we can decry a building with a little belfry, and that is the stock exchange, the heart of San Francisco; a great pump we might call it, continually pumping up the savings of the lower quarters into the pockets of the millionaires upon the hill.”

Technically this statement is referring to the past, but it betrays the author's belief as well -- that the rich in SF are rich because the poor are poor. This was probably false in Robert Louis Stevenson's day; it's certainly false now.

As long as the problems are maldiagnosed, solutions will not be forthcoming.

This worldview treats the oppressed as lacking in agency and an oppressed person is someone who has it worse than others.

It therefore makes sense to talk about drug problems as a result of someone other than the users because the users lack agency.

Residential in San Francisco has constraints that don't apply to commercial.

Due to Prop 13, most San Francisco homeowners aren't techbros, they are elderly immigrants that bought thirty or forty years ago. If they sell, they lose their preferential tax treatment and have to move out of the ethnic enclave. Little Russian and Chinese grandmas in the Sunset aren't going anywhere, and that constrains supply.

Building residential also comes with significant political issues. Since housing is so tight, landlords and developers are seen as the enemy. The moment a developer proposes a residential unit, every single non-profit with a veto starts making demands for affordable units, protesting against gentrification, etc. Commercial doesn't have the same impact, which is why it's easier to build the Salesforce Tower than a four-plex.

It could also be that some people are locked into the market. Interest rates are high so people aren’t selling. They can’t afford to buy a new home even at a lower principal amount.

I’m curious whether there is an easy way to check the volume of home sales in San Fran. If the volume is very low, it might indicate the lock in effect.

California Ass'n of Realtors publishes price and volume stats monthly.

https://www.car.org/en/marketdata/data/countysalesactivity

April volumes are down about 35 to 40% in all regions and statewide.

I hope this isn't too shallow for a top-level comment, but I wanted to share a personal observation about shifts in political views. Specifically, in the last couple of years, I've become a LOT more authoritarian on crime. Part of this is probably me getting older (damn kids, stop cycling on the sidewalk!), but I'd single out two main factors.

(1) A big part of it has been related to noticing shifting views on the issue among city-dwelling liberals (that's my in-group, whether I like it or not). I regularly visit a bunch of US cities for work, and I subscribe to their relevant subreddits, and there's been an incredible shift from "defund-the-police is a solid principle albeit the details need to be worked out" to "lock up the bums now". And similarly, several real life liberal friends who were traditionally pretty anti-police have become much more authoritarian of late, complaining about how e.g. the NYC subway used to be incredibly safe but has now become a creepy unpleasant space to inhabit, and something needs to be done.

(2) I've also had a lot more professional dealings with academic criminologists lately, and damn, it's been a wake-up call. It seems to be one of the most activist domains of academia I've ever encountered (and I deal with sociologists and social psychologists on a regular basis!). Over a few different conferences and dinners, I've chatted with criminologists who were pretty explicit about how they saw their role, namely speaking up for oppressed criminals; empirics or the rights of the wider populace barely came into the conversation. On top of this, there have been some spectacular scandals in academic criminology that have helped confirm my impression of the field. Suddenly, all those papers I happily cited about how prison doesn't work etc. seemed incredibly fragile.

I'm going to add two quick personal longstanding reasons why I'm inclined to be quite authoritarian on crime -

(i) Despite my fallouts with The Left, I'm still broadly a social democrat; I think that an effective state is one that provides good free services to all its citizens, including things like high quality education, healthcare, and public transit. But in order to be democratically sustainable, this requires a certain amount of imposed authority: if public schools become known as a magnet for drugs and gang violence, then middle-class parents will pull their kids out and send them to private schools, and won't give their votes or (more importantly) their organising energy to maintaining school quality. If subways become excessively creepy and weird and violent, the middle classes will get Ubers, and vote for candidates who defund public transit. In short, if the middle classes (who have options) decide not to make use of public options, then public options will die their democratic death. Speaking as someone who likes public options, I think it's essential that fairly strong state authority is exerted in public utilities to ensure that they are seen as viable by the middle class.

(ii) I have a weird sympathy towards Retributivism as a theory of justice and crime. More specifically, I have a lot of negative animus towards what I see as excessively utilitarian approaches to criminal justice, that regard criminals as just another type of citizen to be managed. As soon as we stop regarding criminals as people, but just factors of (dis)production, then I think we do them and our society a disservice; it's treating them as cattle. Instead, I'm sympathetic towards a more contractualist approach that mandates we treat all citizens as autonomous individuals who enter into an implicit social contract by virtue of enjoying the benefits of society, such that we would be doing them a disservice of sorts if we didn't punish them for their crimes. Let me try to put that in a maxim: you're an adult, you're a citizen; you fucked up, now you pay the price. If we didn't make you pay the price, we'd be treating you like a child or an animal.

Obviously lots more to be said here, but I'll save my follow-ups for the comments. Curious what others think.

These trends come in waves. Liberals in the 1960s and 1970s also lost control and then turned sharply towards the center during the 1980s and 1990s. Biden used to brag about passing the most draconian anti-crime bills in the 1990s until the optics changed and it became a liability. Perhaps he will now remind voters yet again in 2024?

I think the turnaround on crime is simply an outgrowth of "everyone has a plan until they get hit in the face" theory that was proposed by Mike Tyson and which I subscribe to. The plan was defund the police and getting hit in the face part is what followed. Will liberals learn? History shouldn't make us optimistic given that we've seen these patterns before.

A major rule I have to the 'bad upbringing' of criminal actors is the more immediate a person experiences antisocial behavior, the less the opponents story matters. It's easy to read about horrible crimes and violence committed against a perceived person and go 'the decision to incapacitate someone in xyz manner was wrong and should be punished' and give the underdog a sympathetic story. However, it's funny when these people are immediately put on the spot their politics change abruptly. However, when an aggressive drug addict or homeless individual gets in your face the most important thing is to get away safely, not think "oh, the person had a poor upbringing, it isn't their fault," Now that police enforcement (which was successfully keeping away aggressive behaviors) is kneecapped, suddenly people are changing their tune because they're directly experiencing the negative behaviors police were experiencing and successfully repressing every day. It's easy to be sympathetic to someone or something that happens to you far away. It's much harder when it's on your doorstep.

To quote the old saying, "hard men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create bad times, bad times create hard men'

hard men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create bad times, bad times create hard men

I think this phrase is mostly BS, but here it seems appropriate, at least insofar as "hard men" = "tough on crime" and vice versa. This issue seems alarmingly cyclical.

I’ve often been at least somewhat a fan of the idea of restorative justice. The idea being that you have to pay back or otherwise make whole those people you’ve victimized. I don’t think this is incompatible with some retribution and certainly not against jail time. But I think having the person earn money in jail to pay back the damages done by theft, or to fund the drug rehabilitation programs that are needed because they’re dealing drugs. I think it helps to educate a person on the consequences of their actions.

The only way out is to stop producing so many dysfunctional people. We have so far failed to figure out how.

Seems to me that a good first step would be to stop subsidizing their production.

Reducing welfare, implementing social sanction of single mothers and encouraging traditional marriage and the nuclear family unit, free birth control and abortions on demand (within reason, eg first trimester), encouraging parental surrender to the state for the incapable (more 'no questions asked' infant drop off boxes at fire stations and hospitals).

well, then you get the current problem.

Police officers I've talked to have mentioned this, and what I think is getting left out of the abovementioned trend(although probably not intentionally; it's just not mentioned) is how often it's the same adolescents getting picked up over and over again by the police for crimes and not being charged by the DA until they commit murder because they're just kids. The common thread seems to be that they're fatherless and of certain ethnic backgrounds(usually centraco, sometimes black, occasionally a venezuelan), but the police know exactly which teenagers are going to commit horrific crimes and wind up with decades long prison sentences(of which they'll serve less than ten years) long before they do so, and they're not the ones that show up to community outreach for at risk youth.

I recall a specific story told to me by an officer. He arrested one of his frequent fliers for orchestrating a kidnapping in which the victim died, and this time the DA filed charges, the charges stuck, and at 16 he got a sentence for 25 years. The officer confidently predicted he'd be out on parole by 21, would violate his parole almost immediately and disappear, and would go on to kill someone else.

centraco

What does centraco mean? Central American? I just tried googling it and couldn't find anything, was it a typo?

Yes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Triangle_of_Central_America

Literally is refers to a Central American person. In practice it refers to someone from Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador, especially one with greater degrees of indigenous blood.

And the frustration more than likely leads to cops being more likely to use force. If you keep seeing the same people escalating their criminal behavior, you’re not likely to want to be the person they decide to murder.

I don't know for sure whether this is true, but it seems plausible and I'm not really shedding a tear for the plight of the poor juvenile delinquents.

I know that this sounds barbaric, but perhaps we could use something like flogging for these kids. Yes, it would have an unfortunate resemblance to slavery. Yes, it might leave marks, but figuring out how to beat someone or cause them pain without scarring them isn’t a terribly hard thing to do.

It also sounds like it might be a good idea to do this to adults for a first-time misdemeanor offense, maybe some minor felonies. Maybe expunge the whole thing from the record after a few years of good conduct.

I think farm labor would be perfect. Take the unruley city kid and have them manually transplant Vidalia onions for 3 months. If they try to start something I doubt the visa-farm laborers would take a second to beat them to the ground. could even pay them $15/hr subsidized by the government to be paid upon completion of sentence. Any tantrum or loss of crops from the individual can be taken out of their pay.

The problem is that bored young antisocial men have no outlets for constructive behavior in the ghetto. Get them working and put them in a situation where they're isolated from what allows them to misbehave.

That could work - it's basically a short term at hard labor. This being said, there are perverse incentives galore: this shit's profitable. Now you've got not only budding thugs and gangsters but also some poor sap that got busted for shoplifting caught up in this dragnet. As long as they're not working them too hard, giving them enough food and water...as long as it's not some kind of troubled-teen hellhole like Holes with less water and more beatings, it sounds like a good idea. Ideally, the government (and the farmers) would barely break even on the scheme.

I wonder what happened to the petty criminals of our grandfathers' time, who were given the choice between jail and the Army...provided they didn't see combat, were they better off?

My only observation is that it is too heavily populated by prisoners, but I didn't know of this till now.

It seems that almost all rehabilitation attempts fail extravagantly. How do you deal with a population which doesn't respond healthily either incentives or punishment?

you cull it.

I mean sure, that's a thing that seems worth trying, but it'll never happen. Instead politicians will continue pretending the thirteen year old assaulter will get a stern lecture from his parents like it's 1955 until he kills someone, and cops will continue getting frustrated until sombra negra comes to the US, and that'll be significantly worse to the progressive mindset than a few floggings but it's too late to change anything.

I mean. In 1955, in a lot of cities? A White cop could basically get away with murdering that Black 13-year-old. A dropped gun, a statement that the kid had pulled it, and nobody really asks any questions. I'll grant that some of this might have been cops covering up a tragic, honest mistake, of the "I confused a wallet for a pistol" variety, but a hell of a lot was just shooting fleeing people in the back or shooting them for contempt of cop.

Nice, liberal people want their violence hidden; if it just so happens that 13-year-old juvenile delinquents are sometimes never seen or heard from again, and there is a strong suspicion that it is the local police department doing it...people can unfortunately look the other way. And that's a damn shame: frustrated cops as judge, jury, and executioner.

Like. Someone is going to want to do something about this problem. The prison-industrial complex is expensive; unlike slavery, a prisoner can't make enough off of making license plates (or whatever it is they have them doing) to pay for what it costs to keep him locked up. Bullets are unfortunately cheap.

Someone mentioned farm labor, and that seems like it wouldn't be a bad idea either. Certainly not if they're with migrant farm workers (instead of other juvenile delinquents). Three months picking strawberries because you carjacked some dude at 13 might get you to straighten up.

EDIT: To be clear, I do not think that extrajudicial killings of criminals are at all a good idea. Nice, liberal people don't like violence, but if it must happen they want it well-hidden; they'd be very much against said extrajudicial killings but could look the other way most of the time, I think. Most of us would've been good Germans. I'll stand by what I think cops could've gotten away with in 1955.

sombra negra

I would have hoped I was in the timeline were we get Batman or The Shadow as our vigilantes.

If El Salvordoran death squads are all thats available it's likely another example of Central Americans taking the jobs of American vigilantes.

Specifically, in the last couple of years, I've become a LOT more authoritarian on crime.

I don't think supporting a crackdown on crime is authoritarian. Rather, I see my libertarianism and support for incarcerating criminals as two sides of the same coin. I think government should be in the business of protecting people's right to life, liberty, and property. I oppose government trying to take these away, and I oppose criminals trying to take them away.

I think government should be in the business of protecting people's right to life, liberty, and property. I oppose government trying to take these away, and I oppose criminals trying to take them away.

The trouble with this is that when the government stops criminals doing it (in modern times, anyways) there's usually scope creep in terms of what's considered a 'criminal'.

The solution that could work looks more like reverse anarcho-tyranny -- don't put the government in charge of punishing subway screamers, because they will inevitably end up going after people selling loose smokes (or vapes, probably), but punish the Pennys of the world lightly if at all.

If acting nuts on the subway is likely to end with you getting beaten or dead, the nuts on the subway will be less likely to act it out.

I've been all up and down the thread saying yea charge penny for manslaughter because extrajudicial killing is a slippery as fuck slope, but I also don't give a shit about neely at all.

Obviously dude should have gotten help; not his fault his brain blew a fuse. The solution to him not getting help because there are no resources or because he doesn't want it isn't to throw up our hands or start lynching people; it's to provide resources and enforce their use.

But then we're back at your dude getting institutionalized for smokes somehow instead of for having an episode.

So I am one of those weirdos that thinks that under certain circumstances a society with just the anarcho- and no tyranny could work in a way that's superior to what we have now -- but if we are going to have anarcho-tyranny, wouldn't it be better for the anarcho-privilege to apply to the vast majority of folks who aren't out there starting shit and making everyone else's life worse, rather than the tiny minority that are a pain in the ass to the world at large?

I think Penny should be penalized -- you are correct IMO that manslaughter is appropriate under current law, based on what we've seen so far. Reduce the penalty a bit for justifiable violence, and you pretty well have what I'm suggesting. I'd personally reduce the penalty a lot for anything that looks like consentual violence, and "yelling at people and throwing trash at them on the train" would count as consent. If Neely hadn't died, in my world him and Penny would both be up on some sort of disturbing the peace misdemeanor -- and if the jury lets Penny walk for New York reasons, so be it.

Since he did in fact die, manslaughter is what it is -- this is a risk in any street fight. So maybe Penny is both a hero and guilty of manslaughter? Killing a bum doesn't make you a hero, but showing the other bums that people are willing to shut them down whatever the consequences maybe does. Pour encourager les autres and all that.

but showing the other bums that people are willing to shut them down whatever the consequences maybe does

This is the big if for me.

If leading one mentally ill guy onto the chakmool and choking him to death appeases Tlaloc and cures all ills, then it was obviously worth it. We already live in omelas; making it more obvious is just owning up to it.

I just don't thing the type of people ready to throw down on the subway because the voices were too loud that day are going to be convinced by incentives; IMO they need to be cured or segragated.

But, oh fuck oh shit, there's that fucking tyranny problem you brought up AGAIN and we are institutionalizing randos like it's 1950 AGAIN.

It's that fucking lockian hobbsian all the way back to whoever was in charge of the first farming village problem AGAIN.

The Templo Mayor was a government based solution -- I am suggesting a social one.

Humans are really good at responding to social pressure, even when they are fuckin crazy.

If they aren't, they are still animals -- and the way to train animals through negative reinforcement is to make sure that the reinforcement is swift and sure -- not necessarily severe.

This is not possible for a government to do without a very resource intensive police state -- but citizens can provide it very very well, if you leave interpersonal violence on the table.

Indeed, I wanted to make a similar point but forgot. Punishing violations of and defections from the non-aggression principle is entirely consistent with libertarianism—if not one of its defining aspects—and a function a limited government can still provide.

Five more years and you'll be talking like our resident belle juive.

If you want to live in the first world, you either get Singapore or America. Humans are a variable species, and some will have lower intelligence, time preference, and inhibition. The stupid will always be with us. They can be controlled, for their benefit and for ours, by authoritarianism (both cultural and legal), like they are in East Asia. The schools are safe, the streets are clean, and there's no innovation.

Or we can have America. The uninhibited and unintelligent are allowed to express their nature, to the detriment of themselves and those around them. In return, there is no ceiling on the most productive among us.

If I lived in a city-state, Singapore would be the only tenable solution. I don't, however, I live in the suburbs, which seems to be a great arbitrage opportunity. I get all the benefits of the incredible creativity of America while living in peace and safety, and in return, blue tribers get mugged and have their stuff stolen.

Sounds great to me.

Yeah I've definitely moved further into the let's sacrifice innovation camp. If the most productive or ambitious or idiosyncratic feel kneecapped, so be it, for the sake of public order and a general ethos that supports regular people's dispositions.

It seems to me that many places outside of East Asia, mostly but not exclusively in the Anglosphere and Northern Europe, had within living memory (and in quite a lot of them still have, as a matter of fact) safe schools, clean streets, and as much innovation as there ever has been. The greatest advances in science and technology took place in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a time with a much more restrictive social order than we have today, and I remain unconvinced that the removal of these restrictions through successive waves of progressivism and liberalization over the past century has done anything to make us more innovative in engineering, literature, etc. One would be better off making arguments for those changes on deontological grounds than by any utilitarian calculation of scientific or artistic output.

I too am thoroughly unconvinced that progressive shibboleth tolerance, etc drives innovation and economic development.

I’ll go one better. Removal of those norms and expectations has stymied progress as people must put more and more effort into stop-gap work arounds for things that just worked in previous decades. It also creates a situation where kids don’t get to learn to be independent as they need to be under the watchful eyes of adults because bad things can happen if you just let a kid wander around.

I don't see how it follows that allowing drug addicts people to harass strangers and push them in front of subway trains allows for greater innovation. If anything, it would seem to be the opposite. What's the mechanism here? Is the thought that someone like Kanye West would be jailed in Taiwan? I'm not sure that's true. I'm also not sure that there is no innovation in East Asia.

One thing I'm fairly certain of is that innovation in the United States now is lower than it was pre-1970 when crime and decay was much lower than today.

My hypothesis would be that the same degeneration which causes drug addiction and crime also lowers our creative capacity.

Well the libertarian ethos that has defended wealthy weirdos and their right to innovate and Do Their Own Thing is certainly wedded to the uncomfortable subway person in spirit.

And America's love of rags to riches stories also suggests that the uncomfortable subway person may one day be a startup founder!

In libertarian utopia, drug shops would be on every corner, and so would be gun shops.

In libertarian utopia, everyone would be packing, and when drug addicts start making problems, sober citizens will not need "cops" or "marines" to save them, sober citizens will draw faster, fire more accurately and solve their problems themselves once and for all.

(at least, this is what the theory says)

In short, this subway situation would be impossible in libertarian world, and no way could be blamed on "libertarian ethos".

I see. You're doing the No True Scotsman redefining of libertarianism to the stricter anarcho-capitalism only

Correct, to get the subway situation you need anarcho-tyranny. The state claims a monopoly on force, then fails to enforce it against crazy homeless drug addicts, but comes down like a ton of bricks on anyone who tries to handle said crazy homeless drug addicts themselves.

Yeah, that sounds about right. Kind of like the alcoholic's belief that their heavy drinking is somehow making them more interesting. Possible in some cases I suppose, but mostly it's just bad storytelling and cope from people who want to believe that there must be some reason that bad things happen.

I live in the suburbs, which seems to be a great arbitrage opportunity. I get all the benefits of the incredible creativity of America while living in peace and safety, and in return, blue tribers get mugged and have their stuff stolen.

Sure… but while you’re basking in schadenfreude, many of the blue tribers you mock are hard at work advocating for low-income housing to be brought to your neighborhoods and diversity to your children’s schools, which would likely be downers upon your suburban bliss. So I wouldn’t get too comfortable resting on my laurels.

The solution to that would be something like modern day Texas, Georgia, or Florida, wouldn't it- blue tribers still control the major cities but don't have influence over the rest of the state.

I’ve had the same shift and it’s coincided with me becoming, in chronological order, someone with a hard but well-paid job, a homeowner, a husband, and a father. None of that is easy, and it takes takes basically all of my time and mental energy to keep the whole thing standing up. Of course it is very satisfying and rewarding too.

In little breaks I have in my otherwise full schedule of carefully tending my garden, I notice that most people around me are just like me, showing up, working hard, earnestly trying to do their best. They’re all types, from the banker to the software engineer to the plumber to the Mexican immigrant lining up outside Home Depot looking for work while his wife works in the nail salon. Life is hard but most people show up and do their best, and end up doing okay.

And then you see the few people who at best just don’t give a fuck and can’t be bothered, or at worst actively make things worse for everybody else. In any sane society, these are the Bad Guys and would be treated like the Bad Guys. We’d be taking these people off the streets, we’d be keeping them away from our communities, and we’d be screaming at them for their absurd anti-social behavior.

But instead, especially in coastal big blue cities like where I live, society and government is entirely, 100% engaged in excusing and enabling them, while me and the banker and the plumber and the immigrant day laborer pay for it and told to smile while we do it. The only time we can get law enforcement to do anything is when their anti-social behavior is bad enough that it could hypothetically harm them (they don’t have any property, so property crime isn’t punishable).

Everybody else is out there busting their ass and it feels like the government always takes the other guy’s side. It’s so frustrating and absurd.

I teach at a big university. Class compositions are always like: 15% of students are awesome and are thrilled to be there and go above and beyond. 70% are good and do the work. 15% don’t give a shit. It’s hard to strike a balance between giving the best students more challenging and enriching material and keeping the worst students on track with the basics. In particular, you’re worried about leaving behind an earnest try-hard who just happens to kind of suck or be behind for reasons beyond his control.

My senior colleagues gave me the following advice which I’ve realized is absolutely right: conduct the class 100% for the benefit of the best students. They want to be in the class. They’ll benefit the most. And guess what, there are basically zero earnest try-hards who land in the bottom 15%.

I don’t know why we can run society in the same way. Run society for the benefit of the people who choose to participate productively in society. I know there’s this mythical class of people who would love to participate in productive society but their circumstances have done them wrong; if only they got the right social worker they could turn things around. But more and more I become convinced that almost all people who are out there shitting on other people’s lawns are just going to be lawn shitters no matter what we do and we need to get them as far away from our lawns, and my family, as possible.

I know there’s this mythical class of people who would love to participate in productive society but their circumstances have done them wrong; if only they got the right social worker they could turn things around.

I blame Hollywood for that, people are too stupid to avoid being influenced by movies (Good Will Hunting et al). For another example we have the case of silencers in guns.

I don’t know why we can['t] run society in the same way. Run society for the benefit of the people who choose to participate productively in society.

"Social Justice" is why. If you run society for the benefit of the productive people, there will be some people who don't or can't contribute. To put it as mildly as possible, advocates for those who don't or can't contribute would strongly object to removing those people from society. Take a look at graphs showing lifetime net consumption of government benefits. Any government policy has to account for the fact that the bottom 15% of the population is functionally incapable of participating in civil society.

all people who are out there shitting on other people’s lawns are just going to be lawn shitters no matter what we do and we need to get them as far away from our lawns, and my family, as possible.

Yes.

What subject do you teach to get that level of participation post-Covid?

You might be interested in this CS Lewis article where he expresses similar views on crime and punishment. http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/ResJud/1954/30.pdf

I'm hopping in off this due to the shoplifting comment, where one of the points is to put up kiosks where the - hmm, can't call them perpetrators or criminals, I suppose "unfortunate victims of systemic racism"? - can be connected with social services.

Guy with a knife is threatening "open the till or I'll cut your throat" - send in the social workers! They (or more likely, "she" as one will be sent on their own) will talk him down! He will regret his life choices and become compliant once a sympathetic shoulder to cry on is presented!

Yeah, sure. Even the most bleeding-heart social worker is going to want police backup in the scenario of "armed criminal/crazy guy being violent". Is it any surprise that when faced with the concrete results of policies, people switch to "maybe we do need the cops after all"?

I'm not against compassionate policies and there are people who need help due to bad life circumstances or mental illness. But not when it comes to gangs of professional thieves who are career criminals doing this as a job, and not when it's down to comfortably middle-class DAs and prosecutors more interested in virtue signalling and being part of the network of the NGOs who are making careers out of this than in actually helping anyone. 'Revolving door arrests' those guys, safe in the knowledge that you will never have to encounter them face-to-face in your daily life.

And this is why I do agree that criminals should lose the right to vote: they've demonstrated that they do not want to participate in civic life or be bound by the laws on all citizens, and that they have no perception of others as fellow-citizens or respect for their rights. When you put yourself outside the common life, you lose the rights of that common life. Come back in, demonstrate genuine reform, and then ask for your rights to be restored.

Suddenly, all those papers I happily cited about how prison doesn't work etc. seemed incredibly fragile.

Prison doesn't work if all that happens is you scoop someone up, dump them in there, do nothing about reform, then let them back out to resume their interrupted career once the sentence is served. There has to be real effort put into diverting young offenders off the path of crime and helping out guys who do want to reform but have few to no options if left on their own to go back where they came from.

But this is expensive and needs a lot of work, so it's easier to build prisons, fill them to bursting, then - when the inevitable failure occurs - turn on a dime and start releasing or not even arresting criminals in the first place. If you can't make people adhere to the terms of their bail, or their parole, or the programme for drugs they were sent on instead of serving jail time, then such things are toothless and do no good at all.

Apart from that, I have unhappily come to the conclusion that there are some people who will never change, no matter if you intervene when they're sixteen or if they're twenty or thirty. They don't care, they are only in it for themselves, they're just smart enough to be able to invoke the "pity poor little me, I had a hard life, it's not my fault" but they have no intention of changing. They want social services and the rights of unemployment assistance, social housing, etc. because they want anything and everything they can get for nothing, but they don't contribute, don't want to contribute, and think that ordinary people are suckers to be exploited. They want cheap drugs, easy sex, free money, no necessity to work or do anything, and no consequences. Knock that bitch up? Not my responsibility. Steal from my own family to get a fix? Not my responsibility. Slack off on training programme to get a job? Not my responsibility. Get fired from job after job because I show up late, don't work, and steal on the job? Not my responsibility.

Those are the hardcore who are the minority but do need to be treated differently, and yeah that is going to mean some form of "lock them up" or restrict them or harsher treatment. Because they will never change, and soft treatment just confirms their belief that "you are all suckers and sheep to be fleeced".

Prison doesn't work if all that happens is you scoop someone up, dump them in there, do nothing about reform, then let them back out to resume their interrupted career once the sentence is served.

This is not so. Men achieve peak of their criminal career between 16 and 30, after that they naturally become more placid. If you keep the worst offenders in prison during that time, you physically prevent majority of the crime they’d ever commit, even if you do absolutely nothing to rehabilitate them. In short, they do not exactly resume their career.

Not exactly the same career, but -- won't someone who spent most of their youth learning no skills that are not crime-related, socializing with nobody except other criminals, and is actively discouraged from finding non-criminal jobs and forming non-criminal social connections even after leaving prison, be rather unlikely to become a highly productive member of society, even if they strongly wish to?

I do not, in fact, care about them being highly productive members of society. I am not going for some sort of grand society improvement project. I just want them to stop committing crime.

Highly productive might be a stretch, but "noncriminal and employed" is probably doable.

I’m willing to try other ideas. For example, I’d be interested in adopting public beatings a la Singapore for first time non deadly (or non child related) felony crime.

But after that, I think jail serves the purpose of incapacitating the criminal. If you still commit crime after a public flogging, then you deserve to be removed from society.

Agree with the public beatings. Have medical professionals see if the individual in question is able to endure it: it would suck to have a criminal with brittle bones or something.

There has to be real effort put into diverting young offenders off the path of crime and helping out guys who do want to reform but have few to no options if left on their own to go back where they came from.

Either (A) we have no idea how to do that or (B) there aren't actually all that many people falling only in that category. So we should do what we can -- put more criminals in prison, building more if necessary. Perhaps if (A) is true we should work on how to do it, but not unless we're willing to reject ideas that don't work. Personally I suspect it is possible in theory, but possibly not in practice -- it would involve catching minor criminals far more often and punishing them swiftly with unpleasant but short stays in jail. But that's only a theory and even if implementable may not actually work.

Either (A) we have no idea how to do that or (B) there aren't actually all that many people falling only in that category.

There's the old idea of "bad company" or "going astray". There are young people who are weak-willed (and maybe weak-minded) who get into 'the wrong crowd' who happily use them as catspaws - I can think of two examples off the bat from the school where I worked.

One was a teenage guy who was the only child of elderly parents. He had 'educational problems' (meaning intellectual disabilities) but he was bigger and stronger than his parents who had no means of keeping him under control; there was no way the dad could lock him in his room or threaten him because the kid would just be violent in return. He came to notice because he had spending money without having a job. Strong suspicion that he was being used for petty crime because, to be blunt, he was big and dumb and easily influenced. If he got caught, no problem - he didn't know enough and wasn't smart enough to turn in the guys in the gang and he'd be the one ending up doing time while they found another patsy.

Second was a girl from a broken home, again easily led and not that smart (no diagnosis of learning disabilities). Again got into "bad company", ended up habitually truant, eventually dropping out of school and ending up on that early school leavers' programme I mentioned. Hard to track down because she kept moving around couch-surfing with 'friends', said friends introduced her to weed and other 'harmless' fun substances. Eventually she ends up on heroin, a single mother, and doing time in jail for stabbing another girl in the stomach at a house party. I'd followed her 'career progression' from the time she was in school with poor attendance, but basically okay, to reading the reports on her file about where she ended up (prison) due to the various jobs I'd worked in, and it was depressing.

These two weren't naturally criminal, they were weak and got led down the wrong path. If there were a robust system of intervention (i.e. if you could do anything other than 'now Johnny, that's naughty' and have to let them go under the guidance of an over-worked social worker who can't handle the workload they already have and will probably be switched out for somebody new and the whole process repeat itself) then there is a good chance of keeping them off the path of crime and jail. They maybe won't be the most productive members of society but you can divert them off the track that leads to a baby, a heroin habit, and jail.

But that requires going back to the bad old days of discipline and industrial schools and the rest of the things that nice, middle-class, university graduates protest about and work to do away with. The activists that, as they get older, move seamlessly from student socialist protests while in college to professional careers, nice middle-class well-off neighbourhoods, and the concerns of that set.

EDIT: Actually, there's a third example comes to mind. Another kid on the early school leavers' programme whose career I had followed from school onwards; he had anger management problems and suffered from being spoiled by his single-parent mother whose reaction to every disciplinary action by the school was to turn up and scream about "why are you picking on my son?" Mommy gets pregnant again, drops everything (including son) to dote on the new baby, kid is left adrift since Mommy no longer cares a damn about him and ends up on the programme, where another kid who definitely was on the path to prison (and deserved to end up there because he was one of the habitual losers who don't want to reform) used him again as a tool. Jailbait doesn't want to sit through a full class trying to teach him something he might use to get a job? He winds up Angry Kid who can reliably be set off like a hand grenade, who starts throwing chairs etc. and the rest of the morning goes on calming down Angry Kid and dealing with the aftermath of the meltdown. Jailbait sits there smirking and going "I didn't do anything, I only said X" (where X is on the surface innocent but will push Angry Kid's buttons).

Jailbait deserves to end up doing time, I don't know if he did because I moved to different job and lost track of him. Angry Kid again needs intervention (including taking him away from Mommy who did nothing to help him because she was using him as an extension of herself) but is likely to end up involved in petty crime. That's the difference.

I really like the additional block about Angry Kid and his interaction with jailbait because it illustrates a pernicious part of the problem that is both underappreciated and extremely hard to remedy...

A very small percentage of true sociopaths / anti-social personalities can destroy entire communities, especially if those communities are already fragile, and this can be done without the sociopath's overt attempt (i.e. "all I said was x").

Raphael Mangual talks about this in his book Criminal Injustice and, if memory serves, Roland Fryer had a paper that analyzed the disastrous effects of even a single murder on a neighborhood in (again, going off memory here) St. Louis.

I think the short, mid, and long term solution is more cops. A HELL of a lot more cops. First, this would be to simply dissuade crime. Yes, the sociopaths don't care, but the young "hoppers" who are just getting acquainted with crime will still avoid a purse snatch, or a hand-to-hand deal, etc. if there's a police cruiser within line of sight. Second, more seasoned cops can be freed up to perform Community Policing (don't worry, TollBooth hasn't go Prog on y'all) .... what I mean is acting as intelligence agents ... without calling it that ... because something something constitution.

You want the veteran cops creating detailed reports of the network of crime in a given area, with special attention paid to those sociopaths. That attention could be quite obvious - meaning that the "target" ought to know the Cops are watching him or her closely. Optimistically, this would hopefully have the same impact as incarceration. That is, creating a "dead zone" for the sociopath's criminal capabilities. At the very least, the second the target commits a violent crime, the arrest could be swift.

I sort of think that America has an over-incarceration problem, but not because we're just chucking all the kids with joints into prison. Again, reading Criminal Injustice, your average prison (not jail) inmate has over a dozen arrests and more than a handful of felony charges. We give our Junior Varsity criminals a lot of time to practice and then get serious with them after they do some Big League crime. The solution, IMHO, is to over-emphasize the front of the funnel; more arrests more frequently, more visible police presence always.

It sounds like one very effective way to protect people like A, B, and C in your story would be to more rapidly and permanently incarcerate the genuine bad eggs around them, as well as making opiate drugs less widely available. The state can’t ensure that feckless weak-willed people are exposed to healthy friendship circles or overcome their natural deficits in decision-making. However, it can intervene to ensure that there are fewer bad actors around to exploit them.

Indeed, particularly in the case of B- has there ever been any society which has had success in keeping stupid but not actually literally mentally disabled teenaged girls from broken homes from getting taken advantage of until they wind up in a bad spot in a way that can't be fixed, like ever in the history of the world- some of these people will never have good outcomes, but you can probably make their outcomes less bad just by removing the worst aspects from society.

Girls knew that if they got pregnant out of marriage, terrible things (and I mean, really terrible things) would happen, so they did not get pregnant. This was barbaric in some ways, but it shows that teen girls, even when dumb, respond to incentives.

Did they do everything but have sex, the Mormon way, or were they actually chaste?

Did they do everything but have sex, the Mormon way, or were they actually chaste?

Oral sex was practiced by those in the know, perhaps less than 5%, but the complete lack of sex education meant that most people learned about the mechanics of sex from farmers' kids. Farmers understand a lot about breeding but are focussed almost entirely on cattle in Ireland, and the insights do not transfer quite as easily as you might think.

I would guess that most girls did not understand the basic physics of sex when they graduated high school. I have witnessed people explaining to young grooms what was expected on their wedding night. It is possible that boys were even less adroit, but they at least knew about erections.

The girls were chaste for the most part out of fear. The guys were chaste out of a complete lack of options and strangely, religious reasons. John B. Keane has a play, the Chastitute, written in 1981, that captured the zeitgeist well:

'A Chastitute is a person without holy orders who has never lain down with a woman . . . rustic celibate by force of circumstance.' John Bosco, who 'hasn't the makings of a dacent sin in him', is a chastitute, a bachelor farmer and all he is searching for is a plain decent woman to share his life. He nearly got there a thousand times but nearly never bulled a cow'. This play tells of his many endeavours to find a mate and the end result.

There’s also option C- we have a very good idea of how to do it such that any retired cop in a diner could tell you how, but for some reason that probably has to do with civil rights or non discrimination society has decided it’s against the rules.

What, exactly, are you alluding to?

The Constitution, and hundreds of years of precedent after it (so, precedent relative to today), prevents arrest without clearing what is the highest barrier for evidence and evidence collection in the Western World.

The "retired cop in a diner" would say something like "Every Cop knows that Bad Leroy Brown is running the drug market on the South Side. But he's never actually in the room with drugs, or on phones, and no one will testify against him, so we can't indict."

This is actually a major recurring theme in The Wire. Where the kingpins generally are so far removed from the street that indicting them is a long term game of cat and mouse. Meanwhile ,the chaos that results from their empires destroys a city and then only "high visibility" solution is to "rip and run" - i.e. engage in low level arrests of minor players in an effort to clean up the streets.

The civil liberties slippery slope is real. We can't, as a society, just start making exceptions because "everybody says Leroy Brown is the big man around the way."

Interesting. Do you know how, say, an English or Australian policeman would handle Bad Leroy Brown, the local drug kingpin?

I can't say with a lot of specific certainty as I don't know those policing systems much at all.

I know that the concept of civil liberties and privacy are fundamentally weaker. For instance, I know that there has been at least an official police visit to folks who have posted offensive language on twitter. Not an arrest, per se, but an official sanctioned visit to the domicile. The threshold for what would take a warrant in the USA is much lower. I believe the language is "vital to an ongoing investigation" at the discretion of the police themselves - no judge needed.

So, assuming I'm not wildly off base with my statements above (which are, admittedly, fuzzy at best) ... A constable in the UK would hear that Leroy Brown is a bad dude from the local toughs and then, presumably, launch and official investigation. This would allow Constable Fish-N-Chips to surveil Mr. Brown and search his domicile (again, I think) with near impunity. No such thing as off-limits or 'non-pertinent' information. It's a 24/7 (or as much time as the cops feel like) surveillance and waiting game until Mr. Brown somehow commits a crime with prosecuting.

I'm not alluding to anything in particular, just pointing out that it's entirely possible in the society we have that the solution is both known and politically impossible because it has bad optics or a disproportionate impact or something.

Yeah. I would suspect that "catch and flog/beat petty criminals" might be it, or at least part of it.

Can you explain what you mean by "quite authoritarian on crime"? The only concrete example you give is your friends "complaining about how e.g. the NYC subway used to be incredibly safe but has now become a creepy unpleasant space to inhabit,* and something needs to be done," which is not what I would describe as "authoritarian," let alone "quite authoritarian."

I have a weird sympathy towards Retributivism as a theory of justice and crime. . . . I'm sympathetic towards a more contractualist approach that mandates we treat all citizens as autonomous individuals who enter into an implicit social contract by virtue of enjoying the benefits of society, such that we would be doing them a disservice of sorts if we didn't punish them for their crimes.

I don't understand this. You can be believe that "wrongdoers deserve to be punished, in proportion to their crimes, as a matter of justice or right" (the definition in your link) while simultaneously supporting rehabilitation, addressing social conditions which are conducive to crime, etc. If you are saying that you think that punishment should solely be a function of the crime, rather than partly a function of the criminal (eg, potential mitigating or aggravating circumstances such as age, prior record, etc), then isn't that tantamount to treating them as cattle, rather than as individuals?

*As I have mentioned here before, I am very skeptical of this sort of claim, because I ride the NYC subway every day, and have friends who do so, and have never heard such complaints.

Despite my fallouts with The Left, I'm still broadly a social democrat

I don't think your views on crime, though I personally wouldn't subscribe to all of them, are at all in tension with social democracy, indeed if one considers policing to be a public service which it surely is, then ample police funding is surely the 'more' social democratic perspective. Hence why in Britain, where policing has not been caught up in culture wars as it has in the US, even Corbyn attacked the Tories for cutting police funding.

Those views fall outside of Sociel Democracy as practiced as a social scene, wherein all cops are bastards etcetera.

That's not really social democracy, as commonly understood, anywhere.

Or that there's a perception police in th UK spend more time policing people saying mean things to or about alphabet people on the internet than investigating and disrupting asian grooming gangs raping kids.

This is just not the case. Every now and again such a case (like the recent gollywogs one) will come around and the usual suspects will have a (sometimes justified) moan, but when Starmer or whoever talks about crime they always focus on the impact of austerity on serious crimes.

Isn't that the only positive narrative available?

If he talked about austerity impacting officers assigned to police alphabet internet mean words or not having sufficient officers to raid a pub to remove offensive dolls, that's not really a narrative that is going to perform well.

5 police seized 15 dolls from the pub in Essex. That doesn't sound like an under-resourced force. If that was the best use of officers on that day I would think there is no serious crime in Essex.

The big upending of the British legal system over the past few years has been dedicated to sending police to harass otherwise law-abiding citizens for activities such as organising a judo class for children and having a coffee while walking with a friend. It's not merely a funding thing. There are obvious incentives for police to harass the harmless rather than confront the difficult and dangerous, and the UK is already long down the road of anarcho-tyranny.

propensity to violent criminality is almost entirely genetic

That's a tough one. You do get families where they are criminals for generations. But you also get families where there is one "bad apple" even though the rest of the family are living in the same circumstances, and trying to cope with that 'bad seed'.

The problem with the genetic propensity theory is that in practice it becomes imposed on the poor. Rich family has a fuck-up kid? They can afford high-class lawyers, rely on contacts, and pay off to have the kid put in rehab.

Look at that case of the rich family in South Carolina, where digging into the original murders brought forth all kinds of dirty laundry. The son was one such fuck-up kid who had killed someone in a boating accident and got it all covered up by the parents. I guess you could indeed say this proves the genetic propensity case because dear old dad later went on the family murder spree and apparently had been involved in theft and embezzlement for years preceding, but had it not been for that, the son of the rich family would have gone on with his life and presumably, in time, got the career and money that went with it, while the son of a poor family in similar case would be in jail and marked out for life.

Unless and until we can ensure justice in how the genetic propensity is punished, it's better not to make policies on that theory, because it will only result in "you can get away with literal murder if you have money, and go on to keep committing crimes and getting away with them". If someone is an habitual criminal, we want them put away, not allowed to go on committing crimes.

That's a tough one. You do get families where they are criminals for generations. But you also get families where there is one "bad apple" even though the rest of the family are living in the same circumstances, and trying to cope with that 'bad seed'.

I think almost entirely genetic is overstated even for something like IQ. And - 'genetic' doesn't just mean 'inherited', it means 'anything from genes', including idiosyncratic non-additive genetic effects, and random effects from crossover during meiosis (random half of your mother and father's dna).

Also think that violent crime is much less genetic than IQ. I'm, like, 99% sure that, if you took existing black children with really bad genes, modified the genes for physical features to make them 'look white', and swapped them with white babies, the resulting children and adults wouldn't commit crime at anywhere the rate blacks do. Sure, lower-iq on average, maybe (but haven't seen any convincing arguments here) have different temperament, but 'black crime' is clearly propagated by cultural practices and institutions.

The problem with the genetic propensity theory is that in practice it becomes imposed on the poor.

That's not a problem for the theory. The theory's truth value is not affected by its consequences.

Rich family has a fuck-up kid? They can afford high-class lawyers, rely on contacts, and pay off to have the kid put in rehab.

As long as the fuck-up is kept away from the rest of us, that they're in a place more comfy than a prison seems a minor issue.

Unless and until we can ensure justice in how the genetic propensity is punished, it's better not to make policies on that theory, because it will only result in "you can get away with literal murder if you have money, and go on to keep committing crimes and getting away with them".

If you make policies based on falsehoods and fail to make policies based on accurate theories, your policies are going to fail. It is true that it is definitionally hard to impose consequences on the powerful (under any policy), but that's no reason to reject any particular theory.

If it's only the poor get punished and the rich get away with it, then the whole idea of "punishment for crime, because we want to prevent crime" becomes warped into "punishment for being poor" and then activism gets its rationale for coming into being, and we end up with the whole "don't punish Johnny for his life circumstances" stuff which leads us to where we are today.

If both Johnny and Jonathan get punished, and there is no option for Jonathan to end up in cushy private rehab while Johnny goes to jail - if both go to jail and it doesn't matter a flying damn if Daddy knows the Governor - then we get an equal society and people will back "tough on crime" policies, because they can see it really is tough on crime and not 'tough on not being able to pay off the judge'.

If it's only the poor get punished and the rich get away with it, then the whole idea of "punishment for crime, because we want to prevent crime" becomes warped into "punishment for being poor"

No, it becomes "punishment for being poor and criminal". Which is indeed bad, but solving the problem by letting the poor off for being criminal doesn't help. That just leads to the poor not being punished because they're poor, the sufficiently rich not being punished because they are powerful, and the bulk of the productive people of society being both over-policed and preyed on by criminals.

If both Johnny and Jonathan get punished, and there is no option for Jonathan to end up in cushy private rehab while Johnny goes to jail - if both go to jail and it doesn't matter a flying damn if Daddy knows the Governor

We're never going to get that. The Hunter Bidens of this world will always be able to get away with things unless their parents happen to be extremely unusually morally upstanding. But that we can't get justice against Hunter doesn't mean we need to allow the Jordan Neelys of this world free reign.

Pure speculation, but I wonder if the bad seed is the result of paternity fraud. Perhaps there are four kids and three are great and a like and then you have the one “bad boy.” Maybe mom Stepped out with a bad boy one night?

No, those kinds of families are respectable and at their wit's end trying to deal with the kid causing trouble. Where Mommy is likely to be stepping out with bad boys, there is no Daddy and the other three kids all have different bad-boy dads and the environment is different such that it's no surprise at least one kid is known to the law.

Sometimes you roll the genetic dice and the result comes up losing throw.

Do most failsons cause trouble? I'm under the impression that the median failson doesn't really do anything- he mooches, maybe becomes an alcoholic or permastoned or something, and never winds up doing much of anything at all.

Certainly even working class failsons(which I am more familiar with) mostly are not serious criminals, they're charity cases who spend "help" on substances of various kinds while never holding down a job, and may have been in the mental health system at some point but probably aren't anymore because either they don't like it or they're just bad at using the resources available to them to get help. Since crime is pretty correlated with class, I would assume that upper middle class failsons are even more likely to just smoke pot in their parents' basement and fail classes at the local community college.

Although I’m always open to a “these hoes ain’t loyal” hypothesis, Razib has discussed before how the false paternity rate is likely “only” about 2 to 3%. I say “only” because 2-3% is still horrifying; imagine if hospitals switched babies around 2-3% of the time. Women certainly wouldn’t tolerate it.

I would venture that false paternity rates covary with SES, and that the rate is much lower among families successful enough where the concept of a failson is a thing.

If you have a bunch of trees each with a bunch of apples, chances are an apple will eventually fall and roll far from its tree.

That’s probably right.

There's lots of obviously-genetically-related (e.g. by appearance) failsons. Even if we assume everything's genetic, nobody's genes are all aces, and sometime some zygote will roll a bad combination.

Agreed not one for one. But I wouldn’t be shocked if paternity fraud plays a role.

Black family formation was higher pre-civil rights too.

While there's certainly some cultural component. The eschewing of academic success, standard English grammar or glorification of criminal behavior seems to lead to poor outcomes. There do not appear to be interventions that reliably counter these 'cultural' disadvantages in the wider black community. Especially now that so many useful traits or features for success are labeled as white or white supremacist.

Members of black communities in Europe and international black students at US universities are more likely to have been recently selected for admission to. These selections are likely to pull disproportionately from cohorts already performing in the top quintiles for many measures. Lingering selection effects for American black populations whose constituents were not selected from top quintiles likely also play a role.

Following the civil rights era and the sexual revolutions many types of social pressure were abandoned or lessened. Stigmas against divorce, illegitimate children, pre-marital sex, sloth, malingering, criminality, etc. Absent the overt and covert pressure against many of the antisocial behaviors by their in-group, wider society, police, combined with the glorification of many has lead to increasingly poor outcomes for these communities.

White, Asian and other successful communities have maintained more of these pressures via their in-group. This leads to improved outcomes.

This is a polite way of saying that black people in America are significantly more predisposed to violence

Is this a joke? I am legitimately unsure if you are just doing a bit or if this is what you actually believe.

I was going to write a more serious response to this but I don't want to put the effort in if it turns out that was just me missing some obvious sarcasm.

This is a polite way of saying that black people in America are significantly more predisposed to violence

This is a reframing of the original point in an uncharitable, unflattering way that makes thinking less clear and reduces understanding of the topic. Every single one of your objections was created by your poor understanding and misinterpretation of the point being made.

that doesn't explain why black communities pre-Civil rights were less violent

And it doesn't have to - when you remember that the actual statement is "propensity for criminal violence is heritable", then this problem disappears. At some point between then and now, something in the population and culture shifted in such a way as to reproductively reward genes which give a propensity for criminal violence.

why certain countries in Africa (e.g., Ghana) are significantly less violent

Africa has a huge variety of differing tribes, clans, people and ethnicities. Different populations and groups have differing selections of traits, and the genes which contribute to that violent criminal propensity are not evenly distributed between them. The Igbo people, for instance, are outliers on a number of traits as well - and this only becomes a problem with your uncharitable phrasing, not the original idea.

why "low-IQ countries" like Bosnia and Herzegovina have low homicide rates

This has nothing to do with the statement in question. The most straightforward response is that those countries simply do not have as many of those criminality-propensity-increasing genes - a low IQ is associated with criminality, but that's not what we're discussing here (and I think those two countries specifically have some interesting recent history which could definitely impact levels of violent tendencies in the remaining male population).

why US whites were more violent a hundred years ago

Genes which promoted a propensity for criminal violence were selected against among US white populations and so the level of expression of that gene was lowered as a result. Explained perfectly by the original claim, but not your rephrasing.

Black communities in Europe also have lower violent crime rates.

Black communities in Europe were selected in very different ways and from different populations (the Igbo are relevant again here) - the original statement provides explanatory value, your rephrasing obscures meaning and makes understanding harder.

I think there's a significant cultural component here.

Of course. That doesn't mean the genetic component doesn't exist.

  • white collar crime / ‘non violent crime’ can almost always be punished with alternatives to prison like asset seizure, wage garnishing, industry bans and so on.

If you define this are most offenders, sure. If you define it as most white collar crime in amount of money or amount of people affected then no. These people are very good at hiding assets and using patsies. Some people are just committed to building their life around being anti-social, whether that is through violence or white collar stuff,and punishments don't deter them but locking them away can prevent them from hurting others and society at large.

That is the point, they keep posing a threat. Industry bans, wage garnishing and asset siezures most often don't do anything to stop reoffenders.

What’s the incentive for this “smart person” to generate excess returns if they must surrender the vast majority to the state? Will they be jailed if their earnings fall below X?

Also what company would hire someone who publicly defrauded people? I wouldn’t want to keep my money with a firm that an alive Bernie Madoff is employed at. Would you?

Yep. And this is enough to stop them from harming society any further, even if you aren't able to recover all the money they stole.

Holmes is a aberration and not worth focusing a ton of energy on, I don't care what's being done with her, it doesn't matter.

I'm talking about organised white collar crime. People who build their careers embezzling money from corporations and states and (illegally) hide money for the rich. These people don't just work as accountants man whose licence you can take away and they stop.

Perhaps you think of these people as just organised crime but most of them literally only engage in white collar crime or indirectly as enablers for the literal mob to engage in white collar crime (which is far more lucrative than the drug trade). The policies you prescribe are well studied and understood as ineffective for those who reoffend.

Those kinds of white collar criminals should be treated similarly to, like, organized retail theft rings. If you rob a dozen stores without a gun, you still go to jail Both significantly disrupt the economic functioning of society for personal monetary gain, and that's the main thing prison is supposed to deter!

More specifically, I have a lot of negative animus towards what I see as excessively utilitarian approaches to criminal justice, that regard criminals as just another type of citizen to be managed. As soon as we stop regarding criminals as people, but just factors of (dis)production, then I think we do them and our society a disservice; it's treating them as cattle.

I guess "stop regarding X as people" is sufficiently poorly defined that you can argue this (you can also claim "being against gay marriage is not regarding gay people as people", "not letting transwomen compete in female sports is not regarding transwomen as people", etc.) but it seems to require some incredible contortion to argue that Utilitarianism, which wants to treat criminals the exact same as everyone else is not treating criminals as people.

It seems to me that you're necessarily making the claim that Utilitarian doesn't treat anyone "as a person". Which, sure, poorly defined words let you say basically whatever you want (see: lots of philosophy). But then "Utilitarians stop regarding criminals as people" is a pretty misleading sentence when what you actually believe is that Utilitarians don't regard anyone as a person.

The plain version of your claim is

Punishing Alice because she wronged Bob is respectful to Alice

This makes it clear that "respectful" is being used in an extremely unusual way. And this wouldn't be too bad, except you clearly mean for "X is respectful" to imply "X is good" (or, at least, "X should be pursued via public policy").

I wish I had a name for this rhetorical trick -- where you convert a controversial word into a less controversial word, with the goal of claiming the original point. It's kind of a very specific form of Motte and Bailey.

Another example is that it's very controversial whether (e.g.) bats are conscious, so instead philosophers argue over whether bats have "qualia". To which I say: either "X is conscious iff X experiences qualia", in which case it's really unclear what value the concept of "qualia" is bringing to the discussion, or they're not equivalent, in which case claiming bats don't have qualia (and letting the shared valence finish the argument for you -- "bats aren't conscious") is bad (though effective) argumentation.

A third example is when politicians claim that "X deserves Y, and then letting "deserve" mutate into "good" in people's minds, so that people hear "giving Y to X is good policy".

Punishing Alice because she wronged Bob is respectful to Alice

This makes it clear that "respectful" is being used in an extremely unusual way.

Punishing someone who commits a wrong shows that you are treating Alice with agency which I agree is some measure of respect. Not punishing Alice ever when she wrongs someone implies the authority figure doesn't believe Alice is capable of making another decision.

We don't punish or show disappointment in an infant who poops their pants because they don't have any ability to control that action. Never punishing someone is the same thing morally.

There's a measure of respect inherent with punishment that the punished has the capacity to not do wrong.

There's a measure of respect inherent with punishment that the punished has the capacity to not do wrong.

That's still a motte and bailey because the original phrasing was "doing them a disservice". Normally, punishing someone is doing them a disservice.

Interesting, from my background punishment was something done out of love or at least concern for the punished person's future, I suppose that's limited to punishments short of death penalties. Not a pleasant or enjoyable experience but a necessary one like learning to eat healthy foods or exercise.

"Has a minor element of X" is not the same as "is for X".

Even if it's not the death penalty, part of the reason for the punishment is disabling the criminal (he can't rob you if he's locked up) and deterring other criminals. These can't reasonably be described as being done out of love, except in the Spanish Inquisition sense of "we kill you out of love".

As Margaret Thatcher once said - The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.

This could also be said for modern liberal - the problem is that you eventually run out of other people's safety. All the policies people support with no consideration - usually someone else pays the price. Southern border collapsing - problem for Texas and Arizona. Defund the police, lenient DAs, ignore homelessness and theft - in the start the chaos is in the working class places, but eventually chickens come home to roost and problems start showing up in the good and gentrified places.

So for the first time they have what is called skin in the game.

Physical safety in society is paramount. People value it highly. To fix this - you must make punishments for rational people inevitable (not necessarily that high) and to lock the irrational away from the society.

To fix this - you must make punishments for rational people inevitable (not necessarily that high) and to lock the irrational away from the society.

You also need the punishments to be significant enough that it isn't rational for anyone to defect. As it is, it frequently is rational to do so even if you're caught. And you need to accept that there is going to be collateral damage.

(ii) I have a weird sympathy towards Retributivism as a theory of justice and crime. More specifically, I have a lot of negative animus towards what I see as excessively utilitarian approaches to criminal justice, that regard criminals as just another type of citizen to be managed. As soon as we stop regarding criminals as people, but just factors of (dis)production, then I think we do them and our society a disservice; it's treating them as cattle. Instead, I'm sympathetic towards a more contractualist approach that mandates we treat all citizens as autonomous individuals who enter into an implicit social contract by virtue of enjoying the benefits of society, such that we would be doing them a disservice of sorts if we didn't punish them for their crimes. Let me try to put that in a maxim: you're an adult, you're a citizen; you fucked up, now you pay the price. If we didn't make you pay the price, we'd be treating you like a child or an animal.

Yes, the reductio ad absurdums of the alternative theories of punishment are very persuasive to me. If you go down the deterrence road, you end up with something like Gary Becker's approach: punish harshly but monitor laxly, since this is more cost-efficient as a way of deterring crime.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Becker#Crime_and_punishment

If you go down the rehabiliation road, then it's hard to explain what's wrong with a Clockwork Orange view of crime: neuter the capacity of the criminal to commit crimes, even if they want to do so. If you say, "They need to appreciate why their crime was wrong," then this goes beyond rehabilitationism, and introduces an abstract concept of justice that is more appropriate in a view like retributivism.

Finally, there is expressivism (punishment is an expression of society's disapproval of the criminal act) but that doesn't explain why we should punish criminals, rather than any group that society tends to dislike, e.g. Satanists or Morris dancers.

If you go down the deterrence road, you end up with something like Gary Becker's approach: punish harshly but monitor laxly, since this is more cost-efficient as a way of deterring crime.

I think that's not true, because it fails to consider the high time preference of the habitual criminal. So rather than deterring crime, that leads to anarcho-tyranny. Ordinary people are constantly on edge fearful they'll commit (or be falsely convicted of) some crime (like walking on the grass in that ST:TNG episode) and suffer a harsh punishment. Habitual criminals will just do what they want enjoying the lack of monitoring, and rarely will suffer the harsh punishment. It may be cheap but it's not effective.

How is that a time preference issue?

If a habitual criminal distinguishes between prob1(capture)*utility(punishment_1) = r and prob2(capture)*utility(punishment_2) = r, then they are irrational, since their expected utilities are the same in either case. By contrast, there is nothing intrinsically irrational about high time preference.

With more monitoring, a criminal will be caught sooner; the punishment is thus less far in the future and less discounted.

Ah, makes sense. I would definitely like to look more into this topic when I have time.

What’s wrong with cost-effective punishment? I think it’s clear we spend too much resources monitoring and judging crime, and not enough actually punishing (eg, people with a ludicrous amount of convictions still plying their trade in public). That sounds like something tough-on-crime politicians say constantly. The standard response would be that the certainty of punishment is more important than the amount of punishment. I think reality has disproven that notion.

Probably because most street criminals are bad out calculating expected values, and calibrate based on the simplistic heuristic “am I likely to be caught?”.

This assumes that they have just enough time preference and rationality to understand the difference between likely and less likely punishment, but not enough to grasp the difference in severity. Somehow they’ve mastered probabilities, but the concrete difference between 1 year suspended and 5 years in prison eludes them.

At some point “bad at” equals “incapable”. If they are incapable of controlling themselves at all (and some undoubtedly aren’t) , it’s a waste of resources.

This assumes that they have just enough time preference and rationality to understand the difference between likely and less likely punishment, but not enough to grasp the difference in severity.

Yes, that's what high time preference means.

On a high enough time preference, the value of the future drops to zero. Today’s crime spree fun will always be more valuable than tomorrow’s freedom.

Yes, at a high enough time preference punishment doesn't matter at all. If someone has a time preference that's higher than your average puppy, deterrence simply won't work and incapacitation is all there is. I think even most habitual criminals aren't that bad, though perhaps the raving homeless drug addicts are.

They possess a high score on what we might call ‘Pikeman’s z’ that makes them behave irrationnally and criminally, and a component of that factor is their high time preference T. But the z factor has other components, like an inability to accurately estimate the likelihood of something happening L (like getting caught). The plan is to give them a purely L test in the hope that they’d do well on that at least, but sadly T and L are largely correlated and they are way below average in L too.

Well the law is complex. There are approx a million gradients for simple crimes.

What’s wrong with cost-effective punishment?

From a deterrent perspective, nothing, but a lot of people think it's unjust to deliberately have fewer convictions and harsher sentences. One more fundamental reason to think that's undesirable is that it increases the element of luck in the legal system, whereas it seems like having a legal system that is less based on luck is more just.

It's an iterative game. Law of large numbers, they'll get their due.

The cost of lower surveillance is exactly that it is less likely that criminals will get their due, even in iterative games. After all, if a criminal is caught for one crime in a long criminal career, it doesn't follow that they will be punished proportionately for their past crimes.

I think it’s clear we spend too much resources monitoring and judging crime, and not enough actually punishing

In addition to what @HaroldWilson said, which is a correct summary of the literature, this seems to be factually incorrect; we apparently spend relatively a lot on punishing, and relatively little on policing:

It stands to reason that a society with ~1 homicide / 100,000 needs to spend proportionnally less on prisons than the one with 6/100,000.

Note that, because the United States is more violent than the EU, you might expect that the US would have a higher level of spending — but it wouldn’t obviously suggest there should be a different mix between police and prison.

I beg to differ. You need police for traffic violations and murder, but you can’t send people to prison for parking tickets.

But surely that doesn't explain much of the discrepancy. While murder carries relativity long sentences, few people are in jail for homicide.

And, my point is NOT that current spending is unreasonable. Rather, I am making an empirical claim. Note also that the US apparently has a pretty low number of police per capita, compared to most Western European countries outside Scandinavia. So, I don’t see much evidence that the US spends too much on policing and not enough on punishment.

Re that block quote, is it from the linked article?

Realize that “Homicide” and “parking tickets “ are representative of heavier and lighter forms of criminal behaviour respectively.

The data is all over the place on this police/prison ratio. If you go by homicide rate, the US is not spending nearly enough on prison.

One thing missing in this discussion is the cost of judging them, which are major costs the ‘catch a few and pound’ strategy is supposed to alleviate. Seems pointless to go through the trouble of making sure they’re guilty if they’re not going to be punished/incapacitated anyway. ‘if it weren’t for the lawyers, old boy, we wouldn’t need lawyers’.

Re that block quote, is it from the linked article?

Don't you have ways of figuring that out? The answer is Yes.

The data is all over the place on this police/prison ratio.

What data are you referring to?

If you go by homicide rate, the US is not spending nearly enough on prison.

I am really not sure what you are trying to say. What, precisely, are you saying the US should spend more money on, and why?

One thing missing in this discussion is the cost of judging them, which are major costs the ‘catch a few and pound’ strategy is supposed to alleviate.

But isn't "catch a few and pound" precisely what you are advocating when you say, "it’s clear we spend too much resources monitoring and judging crime, and not enough actually punishing"? And I am skeptical that, in a system in which something like 98% of convictions are via plea bargains, the cost of judicial proceedings is all that high.

More murders (higher homicide rate) should equal more time spent in prison (therefore higher prison costs, in a rich society squeamish about the death penalty). Accordingly, all else equal the US should spend 6 times more of its gdp on incarceration than western europe (instead of 0.5% : 0.2%, 2.5 : 1). Policing is a separate issue. I am arguing for longer sentences, which does not require more police. As Gary Becker says: “maximize the fine and minimize surveillance. “

More comments

Because most of the literature points in the direction that a high chance of being caught and effective is by far the most important factor in determining deterrence rather than severity of punishment. Criminals are not paragons of rationality, breaking out their calculator to work out the expected returns before committing the offence. Quick and reliable punishment creates a much stronger link between offence and punishment in the mind than the occasional criminal being caught and spending years in the slammer. Which it to say that you cannot simply assume that in practice deterrence is sentence length x chance of conviction.

Even if those studies weren't suspect, it's not just about deterrence, is it? Incapacitation and retribution are impaired by these almost nominal punishments.

The original comment here though was saying that it would be a better use of resources to catch fewer criminals but give them harsher sentences, which hardly seems like it would be a good thing for incapacitation. The point is where is the marginal dollar or pound currently best spent, and I think the evidence indicates policing rather than prisons at the moment.

The original comment here though was saying that it would be a better use of resources to catch fewer criminals but give them harsher sentences, which hardly seems like it would be a good thing for incapacitation.

Yes it would be. I'm saying the length of the sentences matters more than getting caught. If I have 100 hardened criminals, and I give half of them a 10 years sentence, that's 500 years' worth of incapacitation. Catch and release them all after 1 year provides only 100 years of incapacitation (for greater monitoring and judging costs).

If subways become excessively creepy and weird and violent, the middle classes will get Ubers, and vote for candidates who defund public transit. In short, if the middle classes (who have options) decide not to make use of public options, then public options will die their democratic death.

To put this in perspective, I live in an extremely densely populated city (Hong Kong) that would be unlivable as a car city. However, if the buses or metro became dangerous, then the middle classes could switch to the taxis, which aren't that much more expensive due to ultra-cheap labour.

The metro is uncomfortable and noisy - most carriages have TVs playing news and advertising - but crime on the trains is inconceivable. The only "offence" that I have seen is someone taking a surreptitious drink of water on a hot day, since eating and drinking anything is banned on the metro or in the paid areas of metro stations.

If I were a criminologist, I would spent my career studying how HK has eliminated most forms of crime, without usually feeling like a "police state". To what extent is it cultural? Institutional? Economic? Selection (so much of this city of made up of immigrants like myself, who were indirectly selected for conscientiousness)?

The only "offence" that I have seen is someone taking a surreptitious drink of water on a hot day, since eating and drinking anything is banned on the metro or in the paid areas of metro stations.

The worst “offence” that I’ve witnessed on the MTR (back when I was still in Hong Kong) were obvious mainlanders taking a leak in a carriage, though it was pretty rare, and I think incidents of that sort have dropped off a fair bit with mainland Chinese visitors developing more of a modern city culture. I haven’t been back since before covid, though.

Yes, I've only smelt piss once on the MTR, and given that it was on an extremely crowded day, I think that it was just a child or an old person being incontinent.

If I were a criminologist, I would spent my career studying how HK has eliminated most forms of crime, without usually feeling like a "police state"

The problem is they already know and hate the answer to this: to make a city with Kong Kong levels of crime in the US, all you need to do is get 99.2% of the non-Asians (and 100% of the blacks) to move out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Hong_Kong

~100%, though the overwhelming majority of black people in Hong Kong are African or Caribbean rather than from the US, and selected for conscientiousness and IQ e.g. students and skilled workers. There are some asylum seekers, but not enough to cause problems - the troublesome minorities, in my experience, are Middle Eastern and South Asians, who beg (generally illegal) and sell drugs (extremely illegal, the government even has a public health campaign right now about the dangers of even moderate drinking for cancer etc.).

It’s possible that would require Hong Kong demographics, but I think most people would be satisfied if things returned to the way they where in 2005-2010, which is obviously achievable in the us when there are better incentives.

Perhaps. But then study Guiliani era NYC, not Hong Kong.

I think that an effective state is one that provides good free services to all its citizens, including things like high quality education, healthcare, and public transit. But in order to be democratically sustainable, this requires a certain amount of imposed authority

Do many people disagree with the goal of free high quality education, healthcare and public transport? Well, I suppose there's the issue of 'free' in that someone eventually has to pay for it. But in principle, these things genuinely are supposed to be investments. Not investments in the 'doubling down for the tenth time on this shitcoin that's constantly reaching new bottoms like ICP or California High Speed Rail' sense, actual investments that deliver returns. Public transport is supposed to be economical, it's energetically efficient at least. If construction costs are low it makes a lot of sense. Good infrastructure is important for industry too. Education is supposed to improve the quality of the workforce in economic terms, produce sensible, virtuous citizens. Same with healthcare.

Everyone wants those things, they just have a bunch of other goals as well. For instance, it's impossible to have a high-quality public transport system if it's full of drug addicts, or if you bog everything down in so many environmental reviews that nobody can build anything efficiently.

In Australia, about 11% of 5-7 year old boys (and 5% of 5-7 year old girls) are now on the NDIS disability scheme (for things like 'developmental delay' or autism). My source is paywalled. Costs are out of control, 14% annual growth, 35 Billion AUD this year. I fully expect we're causing considerable damage to perfectly normal boys by medicalizing what could easily be ignored. But people (especially the newish Labor government) don't want to look like they're stripping 'care' from people, they don't want some parent of disabled children sobbing on national media. So their response is to chair an independent report that'll come back in October, aiming to reduce cost growth to a mere 8% per year. If I'm reading the article correctly, the minister involved also wants to spend another $730 million AUD on 'capacity building' to reduce costs in the long run. I have very low expectations.

More specifically, I have a lot of negative animus towards what I see as excessively utilitarian approaches to criminal justice, that regard criminals as just another type of citizen to be managed

The issue here is that they're not making use of all the options to achieve utilitarian goals. For instance, a utilitarian might very well come to the conclusion that they should just shoot a certain subset of criminals. Drug Dealer Adam might enjoy dealing drugs, doing drugs, robbing stores, driving stolen cars in street races, exploiting Drug Addict Bella and Catherine for sex and molesting their children, fighting turf wars, doing drive by shootings... But all those things are bad for everyone else. Given that there's no 'turn him into a normal person' gun, a utilitarian might say 'shoot him dead', especially if prison is expensive. But what you see as an excessive utilitarian would always ask for more rehabilitation, more programs, more education, or avoid the subject by talking about 'root causes' and then frame them in utilitarian logic. Unless they have a time machine, addressing root causes won't change fully-formed parasitic criminals.

As it intrudes more on them personally, people get less tolerant of crime (consider the San Fran women who are warming to my preferred cut-them-down approach). I think we'd be better off if decisionmakers had more skin in the game. If there was anything in Stalin's Russia like California High Speed Rail, the NKVD would be shooting and torturing wreckers for weeks. While massive purges have various negative externalities, is there no way to punish people for collectively squandering tens of billions of dollars? Prison, a fine? And what about some rewards if things go well? We could even tack a prediction market on here, make politicians buy bonds that pay off if their policy succeeds to show their sincerity.

I conclude with three beliefs:

  1. If you pay for something, you get more of it.

  2. Defeating enemies is a useful alternative to deterring them, especially if they're weak.

  3. Decision-makers and overseers must have an incentive to get things done efficiently and correctly

Do many people disagree with the goal of free high quality education, healthcare and public transport?

Yes. For the second two, most of the right plus libertarians. For the first, mostly only libertarians at least until you get to post-secondary, which I suppose doesn't count as "many".

Drug Dealer Adam might enjoy dealing drugs, doing drugs, robbing stores, driving stolen cars in street races, exploiting Drug Addict Bella and Catherine for sex and molesting their children, fighting turf wars, doing drive by shootings... But all those things are bad for everyone else.

Drug Dealer Adam is a utility monster, so it's okay.

Do many people disagree with the goal of free high quality education, healthcare and public transport?

They should, because the first doesn't exist, and the latter two are always expensive.

Education was better and significantly cheaper some 70 years ago, before the educationalists and administrators started multiplying. Have you seen that CATO graph of how spending per pupil rose 250% in the US since about 1970, inflation adjusted? Outcomes did not change at all. It's clearly possible to do much better, for much less. I can't find the CATO graph but this is just as good: https://housingtoday.org/animated-chart-of-the-day-public-school-enrollment-staff-and-inflation-adjusted-cost-per-pupil-1970-to-2018/

Japan does healthcare and public transport pretty well. I know their demographics are very different to US demographics. But it is possible in principle to have an efficient, effective health and transport system. It just depends on what other priorities policymakers are prepared to sacrifice.

One of the main drivers of the increased cost and reduction in efficiency in education is progressive sentiments of expanding education access. Most of the students progressives care the most about should be dumped into the workforce at 13. Not being willing to do that drives cost and other stupid trends in education like grade inflation and the reduced value of a HS diploma.

Significantly reducing the school leaving age specifically for the lowest IQ and least functional students seems like it has easily foreseeable and terrible social engineering effects. The thing about kids who are not future engineers because they aren't college material which everyone seems to forget, including politically incorrect HBD enthusiasts, is that they're people who aren't future engineers because they aren't college material. 80 IQ teens with bad values having less supervision and more freedom is in fact a bad thing, and sure that's a little bit unfair to 120 IQ teens who could easily be done with secondary school at 15 or 16 but have to drag out highschool by another two years, but warehousing bright teens unnecessarily causes a lot less damage than having unsocialized dumb adolescents entering their peak criminality years with nothing to do.

If we lived in a world where even poor people mostly had intact families teaching good values in a culture that supported that kind of thing it might be different, but we don't and no one seems to know how to get there on a societal level. 80 IQ single moms are by and large not going to suddenly become fundamentalist Christians raising their kids with the beliefs that hard work is a sacred value from God, honesty and rule following bring rewards, sexual promiscuity is immoral and low status, drugs are evil, etc. And fundamentalist Christianity is more or less the only subculture in America today that has any success with low IQ people, so it's not as if I picked an absurd example.

So, on one hand you are admitting its basically just a prison of sorts, but on the other you want to concentrate the lil inmates there and also subject their brighter peers to forced interaction with them.

You are assuming that a 15 year old who's pushed out of school necessarily gets a job and a career, and I'm not so sure that's true. We live in a broken society and it seems like lots of these kids would just do drugs and hang around gangs.

Yes there's lots of not-terribly-bright but not actually bad kids around, and lots of them would benefit immensely from expanded school to work programs or Germany-style tracking into apprenticeships. But you'll notice those are well supervised situations where they don't have unlimited freedom to make their own decisions, because making their own decisions and handling freedom is not something teenagers tend to be good at.

that a 15 year old who's pushed out of school necessarily gets a job and a career

This was a widespread course of action 60 years ago. We decided that it was more cost-effective to farm out the job that cohort did to other countries while warehousing them for a few more years- missing that developmental milestone has consequences, but ones that have been successfully privatized (it costs society nothing to have them sit in their parents' basements and lie relatively flat instead).

is not something teenagers tend to be good at

>gives [demographic] zero chances to develop a trait to the point they're actively discouraged from doing so

>complains that [demographic] don't exhibit that trait

>claims it's immutable biological fact of [demographic]'s inherent inferiority even though history of every time period outside of the last 40 years conclusively proves otherwise

>confused_nick_young.jpg

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Despite my fallouts with The Left, I'm still broadly a social democrat; I think that an effective state is one that provides good free services to all its citizens, including things like high quality education, healthcare, and public transit.

And this is the problem. You won't update; nobody ever does. No matter how many times it turns out the obvious problems those on the right claimed would occur actually did occur, no one who has bought into the leftist view will reject the premises which said they wouldn't. It's a trapdoor epistemology.

Hardly. YIMBYism is gaining steam and as doglatine points out, it sure seems like the pendulum is swinging back towards law and order among the left. Perhaps there's a lack of self-awareness in failing to say 'wait a minute, wasn't there a group of people telling us 20 years ago that restricting housing supply/being lax on crime was a bad idea?'

But the question in my mind is, what does updating look like to you? There are no more leftists as we come to Jesus and everyone updates to your narrow slice of the overton window? Do we just set up a new political spectrum shifted far to the right? Or do we update by discarding failed policies while keeping the gestalt intact?

Do we just set up a new political spectrum shifted far to the right? Or do we update by discarding failed policies while keeping the gestalt intact?

Shifting to the right would be an update. Setting aside failed policies while continuing to rely on the gestalt which implied they would work is not. Especially when those failed policies will come back as soon as people forget enough about the last time.

That conservatives frequently fill the role of Cassandra doesn't cause anyone to update because of their filter bubble, not because they're incapable of updating.

It's not just their filter bubble. They see the conservatives predict bad things, they see the bad things happen, and they lament that the bad things make it appear that the conservatives have a point. They have all the information and demonstrate their awareness of it but reject the conclusions.

"Conservatives Pounce"

Why would you update on any non-crime/policing issue on the basis of policing issue question?

Logic. If premise X implies things about policy A, policy A is implemented and those things are shown false, then premise X is also false. Now when premise X is used to claim things about policy B, one should not believe premise X actually provides evidence for those things.

Except eventually one would have to reject ideas like "all people are equal" in order to update, and that's a fundamental problem as it is the anchor of the overton window in western societies.

"all people are equal"

Not to beat a dead horse again but for that and just that belief alone (sufficient, not necessary), western society deserves to be replaced.

Equality does not square well with the human condition, no different to how communism does not square well with it.

The more people that reject such ideas and update, the more the Overton window shifts.

Hence the forever War on Noticing things like racial IQ gaps or crime statistics—spaces like Reddit banning wrong-think, chatbots getting hate facts reinforcement learning’d out of them, the UK policing supposed online hate crime, the FBI focusing on racial or involuntary celibate extremist terms like “based,” “red pilled,” “Chad,” “Stacy,” or “looksmaxxing”.

Only the overton window of elite discourse and opinion matters with regard to changing policies. Voters just don't matter and pretending, or even giving lip service or respect to the absurb and empty pretence that they do, requires mastering such cognitive dissonance that I just can't do it anymore. Sorry.

Nobody except a few extreme ivory-tower types acts like they believe "all people are equal". The idea is absurd and should be rejected. (note rejecting it doesn't require HBD; you can believe that all people are born exactly equal -- also absurd -- and still not believe "all people are equal")

Some do believe it, and for the others it may be a signal, a, not the, pilot light to enable distributed identification of friend/foe and spontaneous cooperation.

In a similar way to how noone really believes in speed limits. If it says 50, I know my car car physically exceed that and even a few mph over it won't necessarily result in a fine or stop, even if directly measured. It does, however, act as signal to enable spontaneous cooperation of a certain type and in a certain direction, in tbis analogies case to not go too much faster than 50 mph (perhaps even a 10% tolerance for measurement error, depending on country and jurisdiction).

Professing all.people to be equal is, I think, similar to this. Both a havels greengrocer flag in the window, and an anchor of the overton window, and it's ideological internal counterpart, to enable apontnaous cooperation of a certain type, to drive actions in a certain direction likely to give results with, use methods accepted or liked by, etc to those who might profess the, known false, belief in equality.

You are also correct about equality not necessarily requiring HBD or invalidating. One could can add "epicycles" galore and still have a self consistent model, contact with reality notwithstanding.

Policing is entangled with other issues. If you favor more policing in situations like this, you need to give up disparate impact, for instance, and that's used by the left in a lot of contexts outside policing.

I'm curious what you think "disparate impact" means in this context.

That policing is bad, because the criminals caught are disproportionately black.

I meant re the nonpolicing issues you mentioned.

That other things are bad because they disproportionately include or exclude black people. Surely you're aware of the idea as applied to schools, jobs, or even national parks.

That's where your argument breaks down. I know many people who are left of center who are skeptical of hiring processes that disproportionately affect black people for, arguably, no good reason (eg: jobs that require a college degree for no apparent reason) or spending on state parks in the wilderness instead of local parks, etc, but who have little problem with enforcing criminal law, because there is good reason. (And of course there is a distinction between enforcing criminal law and particular practices of the criminal justice, some of which might have disparate impact [possible example: the crack versus powder cocaine sentencing disparity]).

So, yes, it is perfectly possible to update re criminal enforcement without updating re schools, jobs, parks, etc.

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The world had social democrats before anyone had dreamt up disparate impact, and it will have social democrats once people forget about such a concept too.

You won't update; nobody ever does.

I don't know, I think my political views have changed somewhat in recent years. Less than a decade ago (I am relatively young) I would describe myself not dissimilar to OP, as a social democrat, albeit I never was 'woke'.

However, I find myself nowdays identifying far more with Catholic social teaching and political theory (e.g. Chesterton and distributionism, at least as ideals). I guess means I have become more conservative, though it's a very specific kind of conservative that's heterodox in modern political discourse.

Nybbler is, as often the case, correct. Understanding the crime problem requires understanding and accepting that the progressive project failed, and cannot be redeemed. As is prominently mentioned in the OP, he still believes the state can provide, "high quality education, healthcare, and public transit" to all its citizens. These thoughts are at odds with the goal of fixing crime, or reality, or both.

  1. High quality education is just middling education given to talented students. Students make the school, teachers barely do anything.

  2. High quality healthcare is state of the art healthcare, this is always expensive, being state of the art. Thus it cannot be free. Nor does it matter much. Reliable plumbing is 10x+ as important for life expectancy. Most of current health problems are either lifestyle or the result of EXTREME age.

  3. Public transit cannot be for all and be good. This is the progressive crime problem remade. Everything good in society must exclude the bad people forcefully. Over and over.

Most of current health problems are either lifestyle or the result of EXTREME age.

Increasingly this is the issue of the modern healthcare system, though. Massive expenditure to keep somebody going for an extra 3-4 years with minimal Quality of Life, without which the whole system would be eminently more practical.

stupidpol/anti-idpol is a thing. Freddie deBoer's huge readership consists of a lot of disaffected liberals and leftists who reject the identity politics of the far-left, while still supporting social safety nets and so on consistent with the social democrat position

Communism didn't have a great track record before idpol either. As bad as they are I would rather leave the DEI brigade in charge than give Freddie the chance to try Real Socialism.

in fairness I think a lot of these people are not actual communist and just want to turn the dial back to the 90s or so. Social democrats are not the same as democratic socialists. but communism/socialism has a bad track record overall but there are some exceptions such as China's hybridized system.

Freddie deBoer calls himself a Marxist and the stupidpol subreddit has "A Marxist Critique of Essentialism" as it's header. I guess there could be liberals against DEI but the thought leaders of the movement are old school communists.

The group of people who want to turn the dial back to the 90s are called Republicans.

What would you call someone like Andrew Sullivan who is obviously not a republican but opposes the woke? Also consider the fact that almost reddit communities that used to be far right-wing are almost all gone, so this has led to many on the moderate or even far right adapting by appropriating more left-wing themes not because they necessarily want Marxism but to prevent being banned.

If the threat of being banned is enough to adopt themes incompatible with their principles, good riddance to them then.

There are plenty of real-world countries that successfully implement the kind of social system I’m endorsing, from Singapore to Denmark to Germany to Japan. What these countries have in common is either (a) a high degree of social conformity, and/or (b), a state willing to get authoritarian on people who don’t toe the line (plus wealth etc., but that's something the US has in spades). Where I’m shifting my priors, especially in relation to the US, is on the critical importance of (b).

And in a lot of those places nonconformism is either inconceivable or banned even for people who aren’t making anything worse.

I think health care is very fraught when subject to comparison. For example, the US regime is highly influenced and controlled by the government (be it for the actual regulations on medical practices, indirectly by prioritizing expensive insurance via the tax code, directly by imposing a lot of rules under Medicare). It is also true that other countries manage a “public” system like Singapore but those countries have a lot of actually free market like principles. Then it is all confounding that you have different populations.

Long story short, it might be difficult to tease out what is a good system.

I had a longer post I was going to write, but I don't have the energy or the morale.

I'm just going to say you're wrong in several respects. People do update, but turning into a rightist is not the only practical reaction to failures of liberal policy. Rightism has some pretty serious failure modes as well.

If the failures are in their face enough, they may oppose that particular policy temporarily. But they will draw no other conclusions about other policies based on the same premise. And, as soon as those failures are not in their face any more, they'll go right back to supporting the failed policies until they fail blatantly and obviously again.

The catchphrase to remember: "The worst thing about this incident is it makes it seem like the right has a point". Because the idea the right might actually have a point is anathema.

This is just a mirror of how rightists think - in exactly the same way.

You're not wrong, you're just not describing anything more than unreflective tribalism. Leftists do it, rightists do it.

Of course I understand the point you are trying to make is "Yeah, but we're right. If we abandoned leftist policies and embraced rightist policies, things would be better."

Okay. Years of watching both fail does not convince me.

The right wing hasn't been failing on crime for years. We had left wing, soft on crime policies in the 70s and 80s, epitomized by Willie Horton, and crime was high. In the 90s we moved towards right wing policies like 3 Strikes laws and crime rates improved rapidly. Now left wing cities are going soft on crime by electing activist DAs and they are becoming unlivable and stores are closing. Right wing, harsh on crime policies demonstrably work in the United States and they do so consistently.

Both sides think they're right but both sides don't have the same track record.

Sure, my own views on crime are pretty "right wing." (And to be honest, they've only moved a little bit lately; I've never been a good liberal, really.)

I'm not a right-winger because I disagree with their views on many other things (economic, social, moral). I know the common right-wing rejoinder is "Well, it all goes hand in hand, if you don't buy into trad morality and right-wing economics, you must inevitably accept leftist social policy in all things." It's just a hair removed from Christians who claim that no moral government is possible without believing in Jesus.

This is just a mirror of how rightists think - in exactly the same way.

It's a mirror of how some rightists thing. But it's modal thought on the other side. Many people, noting their local (R) government isn't solving the problems it said it would and they're actually getting worse, will vote (D) next time (e.g. Jacksonville, FL). But the other side will never do that, short of crime as high as it was in the late 1980s and early 1990s -- and even then they'll go back.

It's a mirror of how some rightists thing. But it's modal thought on the other side.

"Most of us are rational voters who will update our priors as necessary, but most of them are low-information NPCs."

Yes, I have been hearing this, from both sides, since I was old enough to vote.

If it were true, electoral politics would play out differently. In reality, we have solid red and blue areas which are never changing their (collective) votes, at least not in a timespan of less than a generation, and a lot of shades of purple. If Democrats were never motivated by the perceived failures of Democratic leadership to vote Republican, Trump would not have won.

If it were true, electoral politics would play out differently. In reality, we have solid red and blue areas which are never changing their (collective) votes

We have very large solid blue areas with not one Republican vote. We have no such large solid red areas. It might be very comforting to insist on symmetry, but it just isn't true. The Democrats are winning, and they're doing it largely because most of their base believes one Simply Does Not Vote Republican, so the former pattern of becoming more conservative as one ages (or at least staying still as the Democrats move left) no longer holds. Trump did manage to switch a bloc of Democrats (not as individuals, but as a group), but it appears that was the last one.

We have very large solid blue areas with not one Republican vote. We have no such large solid red areas.

Really? You think there is not a single Republican voter in Portland or San Francisco?

When polls indicate the population at large is pretty evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, it's impossible for Democrats to simultaneously have all blue areas locked down while no red areas are.

The Democrats are winning, and they're doing it largely because most of their base believes one Simply Does Not Vote Republican, so the former pattern of becoming more conservative as one ages (or at least staying still as the Democrats move left) no longer holds. Trump did manage to switch a bloc of Democrats (not as individuals, but as a group), but it appears that was the last one.

So I know that one of your ongoing themes is that the game is rigged, leftists have already won, and they're going to stomp on your face forever.

If Trump wins again (an event I consider unlikely but not impossible at this point), will that update your priors?

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There hasn't been a rightist government in Anglo countries in living memory as far as I am aware, so seeing right wing policies implimented and failing is a surprise. Can you outline where and when? - roughly, no need to detail specific if low on morale and energy, just gesture in the vague direction if posisble please :-)

I suspect this will devolve into "No true rightist..." ("True conservativism has never been tried?"). But Reagan and Thatcher, off the top of my head (and arguably both Bush administrations).

I know no true rightist blah blah, but those seem in hindsight to be incredibly liberal governments. As a rule of thumb I'd say moderate, center right, socially conservative positions would include E.g., reintroducing criminal penalties including imprisonment terms for buggery and related offences - said here not to spark debate about that issue, but to highlight just how far outside the realm of actual serious policy positions moderate right wing view is from "right wing" governments.

Economically sortof laissez faire, sometimes, does not make a right wing government and that's the core of my contention here.

Surely you know that no actual right-winger thinks that Reagan, Thatcher, and Bush were genuinely right-wing, right? Reagan, the guy who signed one of the largest illegal immigration amnesties in U.S. history? Bush, the guy who championed No Child Left Behind? These are your “failed right-wing governments*?

Surely you know that no actual right-winger thinks that Reagan, Thatcher, and Bush were genuinely right-wing, right?

Yes, I do know that. Hence my comment about "No true rightist." I know rightists also believe that Clinton and Obama were left-wing, despite many, many policies they executed which were not remotely leftist.

If you tell me no government to the left of Mussolini or Pinochet is actually right-wing, then of course you won't be able to find many "right-wing governments" in the Anglo-sphere in living memory.

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The worst thing about this incident is it makes it seem like the right has a point

Yes, but the actual worst thing is the prejudice that the incident causes:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=cMyKGNy3CI4


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