This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Granted, but your previous argument was not "preparing for people to mess up" but that one should cater to irresponsible people, if they will be "up in arms" about having outcomes that disatisfy them.
My point is that "living from paycheck-to-paycheck" doesn't mean that these people won't save more for their retirement under a different system. Whether they save enough depends on how smart and self-disciplined they are.
Additionally, the evidence cited in the quote doesn't do much to support the quote's conclusion: you'd need to look at the overall savings rate (ceteris paribus) to make such a causal inference, not just one category of savings (the retirement accounts).
The divergence in growth rates is recent. The divergence in levels is much older for most Western European economies:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=19QJO
Note how Germany actually caught up with the US by 1975, but then fell behind again. Also, events in social science are rarely monocausal, so it's not so much "Western European taxation causes slower growth than the US" but "Western European taxation and regulation are part of a set of factors that tend to leave them indefinitely stuck behind the US." Of course, there are exceptions like Norway, but planning on the basis of a massive natural resource boon isn't a development policy; it's closer to a prayer to God.
It's doesn't have to be either/or. An equal increase in the solvency of the system through tax rises and spending cuts (later payment age, slower uprating with inflation etc.) could be a reasonable compromise.
It feels like a distinction without a difference to me tbh, it's just a different way of wording the same policy need that we'll always have to deal with.
Them living paycheck to paycheck is less a particular reflection on SS and more on their spending habits with the money they do have control over; this seems like as good a starting place to make assumptions about how smart and disciplined the best of us are going to be with more cash in hand.
But really, this is part of why I wrote this post in the first place. We don't know fully what people will do under an alternative system, so it makes sense to look at examples of how that system looks in practice. If we note their savings accounts are worse, that certainly shouldn't upgrade our priors to thinking private retirement accounts will help us either.
For the purpose of this discussion it seems most relevant to me whether or not they made use of the retirement savings, but fair enough. The best I can find for personal savings rates is for Latin America overall:
Here's a little closer to the present and after all of these countries went through their SS reforms that seems to say the same thing about overall national savings (which correlates with private savings):
Note that you can look at the specific countries that reformed their SS (Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Mexico, Peru, El Salvador, Argentina) on pages 12-15, though unfortunately they're not modeled on a chart for easy comparisons with other countries.
Sure, in the inverse, the multifactoral nature of growth is what makes me so suspicious of the original claim that we should be confident European higher government size is the main, or even primary factor here. I don't often see much attempt to isolate those affects, or to account for the fact that many of the countries that have maintained the highest tax levels, like the Scandanavians, have also maintained the highest growth rates (the graph I linked above was supposed to include all of the OECD growth rates, not just Sweden's - sorry about that). Heck, America's own government as a percent of gdp has been moving steadily up forever and we seem to have mostly just gotten richer.
Everywhere faltered around the mid 70s, but when we talk about Germany catching up to America before then it's worth noting this was under a period of famously active state intervention, tight regulations, high union participation, and an expanding welfare state - this is true not just of the Miracle on the Rhine, but of Les Trente Glorieuses, and the Belgium, Italian, Greek economic miracles, etc.
I am no particular advocate for dirigisme (and indeed many of these countries also had pro market reforms that I think contributed to growth as well) but I do need more of an argument for Europe's mild-by-historical standards government size is definitely responsible for its (relative) stagnation now, but its tightly regulated, highly interventionist and welfare expansionist state in the mid twentieth century definitely isn't responsible for its success then.
Agreed! A fair middle ground position.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link