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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   24623 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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What's this? A Culture War Christmas Truce?

It's a Decemberween mackerel!

I guess they called for a culture war, and no one showed up.

I was weighing whether to write a post on the lost psychosocial magic of traditional Christmas, at least

Frankly, happily, had far better things to do with my time.

Anybody Here? ...

Nobody? ...

Well, alright then:

A large study from all of Sweden has found that increasing people's incomes randomly (actually, increasing their wealth, but you can convert wealth to income via an interest rate very easily) does not reduce their criminality. The authors find that via a cross sectional model, people with higher incomes are less likely to commit crimes (this just compares rich people to poors and sees rich people are less criminal), while when they switch to a "shock" model where people who won what is effectively a lottery don't see reduced criminality in either themselves or their children. This is a pretty big blow for the "poor people are more criminal because they don't have money for their basic needs" theory.

Original study here: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31962/w31962.pdf

Marginal Revolution post discussing this here (also reproduced below, post has an additional graph at the end on the link): https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/12/why-do-wealthier-people-commit-less-crime.html

It’s well known that people with lower incomes commit more crime. Call this the cross-sectional result. But why? One set of explanations suggests that it’s precisely the lack of financial resources that causes crime. Crudely put, maybe poorer people commit crime to get money. Or, poorer people face greater strains–anger, frustration, resentment–which leads them to lash out or poorer people live in communities that are less integrated and well-policed or poorer people have access to worse medical care or education and so forth and that leads to more crime. These theories all imply that giving people money will reduce their crime rate.

A different set of theories suggests that the negative correlation between income and crime (more income, less crime) is not causal but is caused by a third variable correlated with both income and crime. For example, higher IQ or greater conscientiousness could increase income while also reducing crime. These theories imply that giving people money will not reduce their crime rate.

The two theories can be distinguished by an experiment that randomly allocates money. In a remarkable paper, Cesarini, Lindqvist, Ostling and Schroder report on the results of just such an experiment in Sweden.

Cesarini et al. look at Swedes who win the lottery and they compare their subsequent crime rates to similar non-winners. The basic result is that, if anything, there is a slight increase in crime from winning the lottery but more importantly the authors can statistically reject that the bulk of the cross-sectional result is causal. In other words, since randomly increasing a person’s income does not reduce their crime rate, the first set of theories are falsified.

A couple of notes. First, you might object that lottery players are not a random sample. A substantial part of Cesarini et al.’s lottery data, however, comes from prize linked savings accounts, savings accounts that pay big prizes in return for lower interest payments. Prize linked savings accounts are common in Sweden and about 50% of Swedes have a PLS account. Thus, lottery players in Sweden look quite representative of the population. Second, Cesarini et al. have data on some 280 thousand lottery winners and they have the universe of criminal convictions; that is any conviction of an individual aged 15 or higher from 1975-2017. Wow! Third, a few people might object that the correlation we observe is between convictions and income and perhaps convictions don’t reflect actual crime. I don’t think that is plausible for a variety of reasons but the authors also find no statistically significant evidence that wealth reduces the probability one is suspect in a crime investigation (god bless the Swedes for extreme data collection). Fourth, the analysis was preregistered and corrections are made for multiple hypothesis testing. I do worry somewhat that the lottery winnings, most of which are on the order of 20k or less are not large enough and I wish the authors had said more about their size relative to cross sectional differences. Overall, however, this looks to be a very credible paper.

In their most important result, shown below, Cesarini et al. convert lottery wins to equivalent permanent income shocks (using a 2% interest rate over 20 years) to causally estimate the effect of permanent income shocks on crime (solid squares below) and they compare with the cross-sectional results for lottery players in their sample (circle) or similar people in Sweden (triangle). The cross-sectional results are all negative and different from zero. The causal lottery results are mostly positive, but none reject zero. In other words, randomly increasing people’s income does not reduce their crime rate. Thus, the negative correlation between income and crime must be due to a third variable. As the authors summarize rather modestly:

Although our results should not be casually extrapolated to other countries or segments of the population, Sweden is not distinguished by particularly low crime rates relative to comparable countries, and the crime rate in our sample of lottery players is only slightly lower than in the Swedish population at large. Additionally, there is a strong, negative cross-sectional relationship between crime and income, both in our sample of Swedish lottery players and in our representative sample. Our results therefore challenge the view that the relationship between crime and economic status reflects a causal effect of financial resources on adult offending.

I don't think this result quite disproves "poverty => crime" except for a very naive version of that theory. Plausibly, growing up under poverty could impart habits and resentments that a late-life sudden injection of cash would not undo, any more than a 30something lifelong incel would become a well-adjusted normie with normie attitudes towards women if given plastic surgery and a flask of post-singularity AGI-designed pheromones to make him irresistible.

(The naive version would be something like "I have no money, so I calculate that going to steal some is the highest-EV action for me to take now". I doubt that real-life decisions to do crime are usually taken in this fashion; more likely that it's similar to those culturally evolved cassava processing rules, which would also linger for a while even if you supplied tribes with non-toxic GMO cassava. Presumably pro-crime poor communities outcompete anti-crime ones.)

Criminality causes poverty.

Left just likes reserving their sympathy for the worst people. They consider themselves superior for it, because any shmuck can have sympathy for a victim of violent crime, but only sophisticated people (or other criminals) would have it for the violent criminal.

Of course, it doesn't disprove anything. It just adds another wrinkle to the defense, but wrinkles accumulate until an idea starts to look old and haggard. Each wrinkle reduces the explanatory power of the hypothesis, since there are more and more exceptions, caveats, outliers, and improbabilities piling up around the thing meant to be explained. In the extreme, you reach a point where the argument is essentially that of Descartes' demon--P is true despite appearing for all intents and purposes to be false. That is, P has no functional role in explaining anything happens, but it is nonetheless asserted to be the true hidden cause of everything. That is, it ceases to be an explanatory hypothesis.

I would say this is approximately where feminists are with patriarchy, or where racism-mongers are with white supremacy, and so on. Unfortunately, the wrinkles don't seem to have much diminished their power and influence. The explanatory power of hypotheses seems to bear little relation to their political power, at least so long as societies are wealthy enough to offset their costs. In fact, it seems as though the political power of a hypothesis is actually diminished by too much explanatory power, since the latter makes it specific and inflexible and disallows easy picking and choosing of its application.

Sometimes I fear that successful rational criticism of popular political ideas can be counterproductive, since it often has the effect of merely reducing their explanatory power while actually increasing their political utility. It kind of refines and purifies them, alerting them to potential soft spots and weaknesses that need to be patched over. The end result is an idea that means less and has more to say, an idea that can account for everything and demand anything. In other words, and ideal ideology for political action. Science sure as shit doesn't keep this in check, but the economic costs and dead bodies do tend to pile up eventually.

I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this, but I think I may be accidentally arguing against the entire purpose of this forum.

but the economic costs and dead bodies do tend to pile up eventually

Yes and I think the 20th century showed us that the right sort of ideology can persist despite the megadeaths stacking up due to their mismanagement. I suppose the good news is 21st century Americans are more pampered and disobedient than mid-century Soviets and Chinese communists. So maybe we'd stop following ruinous policies sooner. One can hope.

So maybe we'd stop following ruinous policies sooner.

Surely if progressive policies were so ruinous we'd expect to see anti-progressive strongholds like the Deep South substantially outperforming progressive strongholds like New England.

The topic under discussion is policies so bad that the bodies are piling up. Neither Vermont nor South Carolina are currently suffering from some Great Leap Forward style policy disaster.

Whatever complaints I have about American progressives, they aren't racking up megadeaths like communists. But if somehow they or their conservative opponents did, I would hope Americans are less obedient than Soviet peasants and don't passively go along with ruinous policy.

Plausibly, growing up under poverty could impart habits and resentments that a late-life sudden injection of cash would not undo

Sure, but this is nearly indistinguishable (apart from some renaming) from the claim that the causes of poverty are endogenous.

  • A Poverty is caused by intrinsic factors or propensities of individuals
  • B No, it's that growing up under poverty imparted certain habits. Hence they are not intrinsic factors but rather factors related to upbringing
  • A Oh, so a large exogenous shock could reverse those?
  • B No, it's not reasonable to think that a sudden/large external shock could undo those habits and resentments
  • A Ah got it, so it's a propensity of an individual that is reasonably stable even under sudden/large shocks.
  • B Yes
  • A Could we just call those intrinsic propensities
  • B No, because they were imparted by growing up poor. Hence there were not intrinsic to the individual
  • A But they are now stable? Could we have a new word that means not-intrinsic-originally-but-set-and-no-longer-very-malleable?

Are you seriously trying to argue that nature and nurture are the same thing? Getting your legs cut off by a bear when you're 4 will also impart lifelong struggles, but you probably should not describe a mauled person's wheelchair as an intrinsic trait.

I am not making any claim about whether they are "the same thing" in some abstract sense.

I am saying that they share the property of being stable even under large external shock. They can be different things but be alike in that way.

Could we have a new word that means not-intrinsic-originally-but-set-and-no-longer-very-malleable?

Is neuroplasticity really a surprise new concept for you? Language acquisition in children vs adults is a popular culture-neutral example.

Certainly!

The difference remains that instrinsically poor people's children would still be high risk to have crime habits whereas non-instrinsic early exploure would not.

Presumably pro-crime poor communities outcompete anti-crime ones

Poor communities often have poor access to law enforcement (i.e. the police are often absent, abusive, or unhelpful) for social/political reasons, which allows criminal behavior to flourish, which increases antagonism from law enforcement, which increases distrust of law enforcement, which allows criminal behaviors to flourish...

This is often compounded by weak law enforcement also encouraging anti-social behaviors which may be adaptive in that environment but not in others. E.g. in a community with weak law enforcement, being willing to fight may be important to not being victimized (even if that norm also leads to stupid fights over petty disagreements). In a community with robust law enforcement, being willing to fight gets you arrested for assault.

Plausibly, growing up under poverty could impart habits and resentments that a late-life sudden injection of cash would not undo

An empirically correct (though not, as of the current year, large) example of a causal impact of child poverty on adult criminality is via lead exposure. Childhood lead exposure causes reduced IQ and conscientiousness in adults, which causes crime. Childhood lead exposure is strongly correlated with poverty, and giving money to poor parents will generally cause them to reduce their children's lead exposure (in the leaded petrol era, by moving to nicer places with less traffic pollution, in the modern era where most lead exposure is via peeling paint, by maintaining their homes better or moving to more expensive rentals with less shitty landlords).

The "people commit acquisitive crime because they have no other way of meeting basic needs" version of "poverty causes crime" is something of a weakman - I don't think I have seen it pushed in channels where everyone respects everyone else's intelligence. (I agree it is being pushed by expensively credentialled basic white chicks on social media). The most common sophisticated versions of the theory are the Spirit Level guys' theory (felt - i.e. relative - poverty stresses people out, making them more likely to commit crimes) and the adverse childhood experiences theory (chaotic upbringing affects children in a way which makes them more likely to commit crimes, and a lack of money can cause chaos in relevant ways).

Poverty causes bad parenting causes fucked-up kids causes crime is actually plausible - the evidence for near-zero shared environmental effects comes from twin and adoption studies, and most career criminals come from a family background that is sufficiently messed-up that it would get them excluded from twin and adoption studies.

‘Effed up parenting produces criminals’ is probably true, but I don’t think ‘poverty causes effed up parenting’ is, I think that the sorts of people who will seriously eff up being parents eff up everything else too, and are poor as a result.

'Effed up parenting is the wrong idea - the problem is providing a grossly inadequate environment for the child. Homelessness* does that for example, and poverty is causative of homelessness. (So, of course, is NIMBYism). In fact inadequate housing in all its many forms (lead is just the best studied example) is a fairly obvious case where poverty causes inadequate environments that wouldn't show up in twin and adoption studies, and could plausibly affect adult IQ.

Childhood malnutrition is another obvious example - this was a known issue 100 years ago (certainly in the UK a major driver of the early expansion of the welfare state was the number of army recruits who were medically unfit due to the effects of childhood malnutrition) but I don't know how significant it is in the contemporary US (it isn't a big issue in Western Europe). In third world countries there is pretty good evidence that you can reduce childhood malnutrition by giving people money.

"Are there practically significant ways in which giving poor parents money would improve childhood environments in a way which produces long-term benefits?" is a profoundly important and hard empirical question to which the answer is "Yes" in the third world, but which we can't answer in the first world because asking the question correctly involves crimethink-adjacent ideas like "A naive correlational analysis is genetically confounded enough to be worthless." If you think the answer is obviously "Yes" or obviously "No, with the partial exception of lead abatement" then you are suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect.

* Homelessness as in living in shelters, sleeping in cars, couchsurfing etc. Street homelessness has complex causes with drug addiction and untreated mental illness being major factors, but simple homelessness is either caused by a short-term emergency (like a messy breakup or a house fire) or by not being able to afford housing.

Thanks for the clarification.

In third world countries there is pretty good evidence that you can reduce childhood malnutrition by giving people money.

I believe that(a diet of 90% gruel is after all not very appetizing or nutritious and you'd fix it pretty quickly if you could afford something else), but I'm pretty sure that the dominant case of childhood malnutrition in the US is either shitty parenting(it's just easier to let them eat sweets instead of insisting on dinner) or poor cultural practices(blacks and underclass whites don't eat fruit and will only eat vegetables in highly specific forms that have much of the nutrition leached out, so picky kids miss out on important nutrients). It has the same causes as food deserts- people from certain backgrounds would eat steak if they could afford it but they can't so they eat cheap sausage, bread, and desserts with a soda, and it never occurs to them to eat veggies rice and chicken.

It's a dead horse. The idea that poverty in and of itself causes crime (rather than crime causing poverty, or people who suck being poor criminals) doesn't have much support at all, but it's one of the axioms of modern social democracy (gotta tax the rich to give more to the poor so the poor don't revolt, after all) and also progessivism, so it's unchallengeable in practice.

Now do you guys see why I want to add 100 million more poor third worlders to Europe? Progressive modernity can not be convinced it is wrong, it has to fail, and fail spectacularly. And what better way to make it fail than giving it the exact same things it wants and says are good and will lead to a better life for everyone, only to have their belief system crumble due to an unstoppable force of human social nature that they have spent decades trying to convince everyone (including themselves) does not exist.

  • -22

And what better way to make it fail than giving it the exact same things it wants and says are good and will lead to a better life for everyone, only to have their belief system crumble due to an unstoppable force of human social nature that they have spent decades trying to convince everyone (including themselves) does not exist.

Has anyone of any ideological stripe in history ever not doubled down while blaming everyone else when faced with this sort of thing? I think history, including much of recent history, shows that the human capacity for self delusion in ideology is effectively infinite and certainly well beyond what's needed to get people, en masse, to march all the way to oblivion if that's what is demanded of them.

Don't you worry it will cause a Dark Age? Civilizational collapse doesn't seem good for anyone, or do you not expect it will get that far?

Or is the satisfaction of saying, "I told you so," worth what you believe will be European civilization "fail[ing] spectacularly?"

Wouldn't you rather hope that social science develops and we create societies that facilitate the thriving of human nature?

Civilizational collapse doesn't seem good for anyone, or do you not expect it will get that far?

Oh I don't expect civilisational collapse, I expect things to become more like they are in the third world, which is to say, not that bad if you're near the top of society on one of a multitude of different axes (e.g. you have social elites, political elites, entrepreneurial elites, professional elites, academic elites, military elites, all you need to live a comfortable life is be one of these or close to being one of these or be the family of one of these), however it will be in such a state that the modern welfare state white elephant collapses under its own weight and has to be abolished, alongside all the other currently "fashionable" social theories which all Good Right-thinking People believe.

Indonesia seems like a good goal to me, and nobody would say it is undergoing civilizational collapse, Jakarta is a modern highly technologically advanced city, no reason humanity can't thrive in such a society.

(But yes, getting to go "I told you so" will be very nice too, extremely cathartic after all the shit and excessive taxation I've had to endure).

  • -11

all the shit and excessive taxation I've had to endure

oh you poor dear. I guess we should destroy our culture to make it up to your poor beleaguered brahmin head. Please sir accept my apologies for the excessive taxation.

That's all well and good, but it's not bringing my money back is it?

Who forced you to stay in the shitty tax-heavy West where you were losing money compared to your homeland?

Back home we don't have the sorts of high paying jobs like the one I do here. These jobs do exist in places like Hong Kong and Singapore and the US but I have family reasons for not wanting to move too far away from the UK, at least not right now. Money is not the only thing that matters.

  • -10
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South Africa is the society you describe and the ANC is full of idiotic and largely falsified progressive theories.

social science develops and we create societies that facilitate the thriving of human nature

I don't suppose anything resembling that is going to happen. Politicians and academics will propose societal changes, but I think it will be something along the lines of compact urbanism and some sort of Great Society style misguided welfare.

Don't you worry it will cause a Dark Age? Civilizational collapse doesn't seem good for anyone, or do you not expect it will get that far?

It's not in their interest to care, if you believe there's nothing in it for you as things stand. Would you continue to be part of a system if you thought things would never go your way again?

Or is the satisfaction of saying, "I told you so," worth what you believe will be European civilization "fail[ing] spectacularly?"

For some people that's enough. And if that's all they have, they might as well revel in it. "Better to reign in hell than serve in Heaven."

Wouldn't you rather hope that social science develops and we create societies that facilitate the thriving of human nature?

Everyone agrees with that thesis. Nobody agrees on the details. The things conservatives will point to for regarding Russia a success for instance, are the exact same things progressives will point to for regarding it a failure.

While I am not immune to schadenfreude, this is like an anti-nuke activist wishing for nuclear apocalypse to prove the MAD doctrine wrong. The point is to prevent the left from turning my country into a third world hellhole, not to say “I told you so” when they do.

One could try to stake out some sort of position where one wants X random Western country to turn into a shithole in order to prove a point to the rest.

One could also go full Nazi and intend on "fixing" the demographic problems after the point is proven with death camps.

I do not actually hold either of those positions, but they are logically coherent.

Only problem is that societies don't tend to reform-their-way-out of a self-reinforcing, negative feedback loop such as this. Things inevitably get worse before they get better, and that "getting worse" part brings them to dig their own grave.

Thanks, I'll let my daughter know that we had to accelerate the degradation of her homeland in order to prove a point.

This is a fair response, but taking the accelerationist argument seriously for a sec, the argument is generally that it will be better for your granddaughter, not your daughter.

Which, y'know, choosing between the two is one hell of a sophie's choice level decision, but I don't think it can be dismissed off hand that easily if what you value is the safety/comfort of your decedents. I feel like a better counterargument is that there's a decent chance we never get advanced civilization up and running again if the whole thing collapses.

I meant to imply your better counteragument, in a way - I don't think that what is currently being torn down can be rebuilt at all in any time-frame in which one can speak of a given family or country. Sure the world may yet see another place with qualities similar to the best of the Germanies of recent past, but I very strongly doubt that there'll be any continuity. And I opine that continuity is one's job as a maintainer of or contributor to civilization, and not burning it all down as a cautionary example.

Ahh, my apologies then, that did not come across in my reading of the comment. It came across as pretty standard concern for the welfare of your children. Which, fair, that's a pretty basic human emotion.

Either way. Happy new year. Hope your day is going well

You continually vacillate about your justification, though. Sometimes you actually come out and admit that you want Europe flooded by poor third world immigrants as a punishment, because you blame them (rightly or wrongly) for the plight of the third world, or because of more petty personal vendettas. (They expect you to drink at social functions and this makes you uncomfortable, don’t they know you’re better than them, etc.) I do wish you’d at least stick with that, instead of occasionally lapsing into pretending that this is somehow for our own good, or that somehow we’ll come out of this total societal collapse with a better and more sustainable set of moral principles.

One can have multiple reasons for wanting something, e.g. I might want to take a walk to the shopping centres because 1) I want to get groceries and 2) I want to get fresh air. I could do 1) on its own by just ordering online or 2) on its own by just going to the park, but there is a certain beauty in achieving multiple goals with as few actions as possible (not to mention efficiency). All the best mathematical theories are beautiful, and there is a reason why beauty and truth are so often put together.

I do think Europe needs punishment, and I also think the third worlders should have a better living standard than they do at the moment as they are just as human as you or I (doesn't mean they are equal though), and I also think we need to destroy progressive modernity and that its adherents have reached a level of delusion where it has to fail on its own terms. "Flood Europe with immigrants" is a 3 for 1 that achieves all of these goals in one fell swoop. It's beautiful in its simplicity, don't you think?

  • -12

and I also think the third worlders should have a better living standard than they do at the moment as they are just as human as you or I (doesn't mean they are equal though)

Given that progressive modernity has the high living standards, shouldn't your answer be the reverse? To help the global hegemon spread progressive modernity to the 3rd world? Why burn the golden goose rather rather than clone it, so to speak? Delusion or not it is demonstrably better at creating improved living standards.

You can do that and import some 3rd worlders to the West for the faster boost.

To help the global hegemon spread progressive modernity to the 3rd world?

To an extent I agree. Large parts of the world still have women treated really badly, including my homeland. I think you can get a lot of the economic conditions for growth without the need for progressive modernity (see Singapore) but even still you have to admit their social policies are directionally compared to highly traditional places like Afghanistan. We need a dose of progressive modernity to improve lots of things: I agree the gays shouldn't be persecuted as long as they keep it behind closed doors and don't force Pride on the rest of society (I am against gay pride for the same reason I am against accountant pride), divorce and abortion should be legal (though seen as socially suspect) and cheaply available, women shouldn't have to stay at home or be obliged to obey their husbands, minorities should have some organisation dedicated to make sure they aren't being taken advantage of, mental health should be seen of as just as important as physical health, women should be educated and play just as big a role in the direction of the country as men etc. etc.

Progressive modernity is a good servant but a bad master, the modern west has become enslaved to it and hence over there it needs to be destroyed, however in the third world I geuninely believe there is a lot of good it can do as long as its worst excesses are kept in check.

Sweden becoming 60% sub Saharan African does not necessarily imply that Sweden then adopts sub Saharan African morality- the progressives will come to and stay in power by offering the Africans free shit, and then attempt to impose progressive morality from above. No, they won’t turn some guy from the Congo into a gay rights activist overnight, but they’ll break immigrant families very effectively.

Dude's a troll calculating everything he says to get a rise out of us, I wish people stopped taking him seriously.

I do think he has sincere opinions and that they roughly approximate the basic worldview he espouses here. I also agree that he expresses those opinions in a way that is calculated to get a rise out of people such as myself. (And to some extent he succeeds at this goal!) Ultimately I still think it’s worth engaging with the underlying arguments and pointing out the ways in which he is being inconsistent and deceptive, both to make his trolling less effective in the future and to argue by proxy with those who hold similar views to his.

Ultimately I still think it’s worth engaging with the underlying arguments

I wish. Most of my issue with him that it would be interesting to engage with these arguments, but he's not really engaging in a conversation.

Even if he is a troll, there's no problem engaging him. Plenty of accelerationists sincerely believe the kind of things he espouses.

gotta tax the rich to give more to the poor so the poor don't revolt

Powerful hyperstition. If there were ever a step decrease in welfare, would that be taken as the signal to break shit?

Crime was low during the great depression, as evidence of this. https://lsupress.org/do-hard-times-cause-crime-the-lessons-of-history/

People only commit crimes due to poverty when they are truly desperate. A person who has no food may steal, even if they are a mentally sound and moral person.

People who commit crimes in welfare states are criminals either because of mental issues such as low Iq, low impulse control and psychopathy, or they want status. The young man who gets into a violent fit of rage and stabs someone when someone cut in front of a line at a night club isn't going to be less violent with more money. The factor that is commonly ignored is social status. A young man with no money, who lives in a ghetto, has poor academic results, has never travelled and doesn't have the looks for instagram is going to be the ultimate low status loser. Imagine using tinder as a cleaner, living with three friends in a dumpy apartment on the wrong side of town. In Sweden, members of this class often have the added disadvantage of being immigrants from countries with an average height well below the average height in Sweden and speaking subpar Swedish. If that guy becomes a gangster, he is a somebody. People will respect him, women will like him, and he will walk past the bouncers who used to reject him.

The welfare state can never give people status. They can give food and some basic entertainment, but it will never make people happy or satisfied. It reduces underclass men to being rescue dogs and ersatz children for middle class girls with sociology degrees. That might be enough for someone who was recently freezing to death on the streets, but it isn't going to satisfy a 24-year-old pizza delivery man.

The welfare state can never give people status, but it can reduce the status of low skill men who are more inclined to be providers and caregivers. Without the welfare state, lower class women have to make a trade-off between sexy bad boys and dependable good guys. With the welfare state, they don't.

The issue here is that the low status men aren't dependable, they are losers in every sense of the word, otherwise they wouldn't be low income. Getting a decent income (and keeping it) is piss easy and if you don't then there is something seriously wrong with you, and why would women want to date that? And even in this case you can easily get a mail-order bride, I know people who have. It's not hard and you don't need even a median income.

Moderately successful men on the spectrum with poor social skills that fail in the dating market is an entirely different issue.

There are low status and low income men who aren't especially criminally inclined and are relatively more stable and dependable. There may be relatively fewer of them than historically, but they still exist. Welfare makes them less desirable, and on the margin incentivizes more short-term mating preferences and competition from everyone.

Have you actually interacted with these men at all? They are not dependable. At some point people become a negative value proposition for anyone that isn't desperate and it isn't the welfare state thats making women not desperate, its being able to work.

Yes, frequently. I live embedded in a very poor region of the deep south. In fact, by the standards of most people here, I am a poor lower class blue collar guy.

If you're in a poor part of the US, it seems like a complication in the trend that American welfare laws effectively pay poor women not to get married.

What?

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Yes I have. Have you?

I could tell any young woman coming of age in high school what her dating prospects should be, as far as finding a decent young man go, with a single datum. Let me see the suitors report cards and I can tell you which one probably has the better future ahead of him. You think that kid has a lower or higher 'status' than the football star who'll end up beating her and who's been a serial cheater from day 1?

Now tell me which one has more real 'value' to society?

Yes, half my family is working class or lower middle class. Some have fallen down to be underclass adjacent. I have also lived in underclass areas and worked jobs with the underclass.

You think that kid has a lower or higher 'status' than the football star who'll end up beating her and who's been a serial cheater from day 1?

Compared to what? The intermittent pizza delivery or Uber driver? The guy that has issues holding down a job as a hospice care giver? The guy occasionally cleaning subway cars at night? The part time gas station attendant? Almost all of them drug users and video game addicts? This is the underclass, not the construction workers or guys employed in the manufacturing industry. Those guys don't end up single or criminal either by the way, they're doing fine.

The football star that beats her might very well be the better option. And what's to say the other guys dont beat their spouses as well?

Neither of the groups have any value at present but one at least did something at some point in his life. There is some capacity there that might transfer to a kid.

Well, yes. In a post-patriarchal welfare state, low-status, average midwit men are less likely to be dependable (i.e. eligible to become responsible husbands and fathers), because the incentives are meager. In a patriarchal society, they have every conceivable incentive to be so. Everything is interconnected, and incentives matter.

The issue here is that the low status men aren't dependable, they are losers in every sense of the word, otherwise they wouldn't be low income. Getting a decent income (and keeping it) is piss easy and if you don't then there is something seriously wrong with you, and why would women want to date that? And even in this case you can easily get a mail-order bride, I know people who have. It's not hard and you don't need even a median income.

This is ridiculous. The overwhelming majority of work that is done to maintain and perpetuate civilization, is done by men who are "low status," on the lower end of the middle class, marginalized and almost never get respected or acknowledged for the work they do. Unless you consider engineers, garbage men, clergy, abused IT workers, overworked nurses, underpaid professors, unpaid researchers (need I go on?) as not contributing to the upkeep of society, then this argument holds.

Moderately successful men on the spectrum with poor social skills that fail in the dating market is an entirely different issue.

I think you've confused low status with being a 'deadbeat', the latter of which earn men a higher status with women in virtue of them being an 'outlaw' and disregarding society's rules. Which is part of the problem.

Sorry, I meant low income (and low status) men.

It followed from talking about 'underclass men' and then 'dependable men'. I only used low status once and then talked about low income.

I agree that much of society depends on the labour of low status men, but that isn't poorly compensated and these people aren't underclass. The criminals don't come from the economic middle/lower middle class or working class, they come from the underclass.

Well, my apologies then if I misunderstood. If that's how I was meant to understand you, then I agree with you.

Sorry for being unclear.

The liberation of women from the age-old dilemma of "marry this guy and have six of his kids or become a prostitute" is one of the greatest triumphs of human history, on par with the elimination of smallpox and possibly the invention of agriculture. Thank you industrial revolution and twentieth century social democracy.

And most developed countries now are below replacement fertility, great success!

Unless you have a very wide definition of "welfare state", modern countries tend to be below that whether they are welfare states or not, and many of them first dipped below replacement in the interwar period already.

What countries wouldn't you consider as welfare states? For me, maybe China, I'm not 100% sure. US and European countries redistribute a fuckton of money for sure.

Singapore and Korea? They're not welfare states, are amongst the richest places on Earth, and have the lowest fertility in the world.

The problem is the middle road between patriarchy and equiality. Either don't give women access education and work, or equalize social expectations and have husbands to take an equal share of chores, housework, childcare, etc.

The middle ground puts too much stress on women, and pushes the most agentic out of the country.

What country has gotten its fertility above replacement again by equalizing social expectations? Israel, Saudi, and Argentina are the developed countries which have had above replacement tfr recently and neither is especially feminist by developed world standards.

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Everyone knows the answer to this question and is always cognizantly, tiptoeing around the solution. There is no straddling a middle ground between achieving the objectives of equality and keeping to more natalist, patriarchal norms. Short of imposing an Afghanistan style, Islamic theocracy on women (the part everyone is too afraid to mention in public), you're not likely to see a resolution to this issue.

Financial incentives and social support aren't likely to offer a path to a solution either. The poorest societies in the world have the highest rates of fertility and childbirth. Ed Dutton wrote an interesting piece on this.

In response to all the discussions below, I'd like to submit this Aporia piece on the Baby Boom:

The Baby Boom was the sudden rise in fertility, beginning in the late 1930s, of the wealthiest and most advanced countries in the world. It is often associated with the end of World War II, but actually began before then. These countries include the Anglosphere (Ireland, United Kingdom, United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia), the Nordics (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland), the wealthy continental European countries, occupied but victorious in World War II (France, Netherlands, Belgium), and the German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), which mostly lost World War II.

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Many theories of fertility decline claim that it is the inevitable result of various good things: technological advancement, wealth, education, science (through weakening religion), urbanization, individualism, and declines in childhood mortality. Since (almost) no one really wants to go back to being high mortality, low-tech, extremely poor, rural, and ignorant, the story goes, we simply need to live with it. There is good empirical evidence for all of these things mattering, but what the Baby Boom shows is that it is possible to have it all. You can have a rich, rapidly growing, technologically sophisticated, personally free and individualist, urban, long-lived and fertile society. There’s no need to choose between slow extinction and preindustrial poverty.

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There are several popular, but wrong, explanations for the Baby Boom. These come up in almost any discussion of the Baby Boom, so it is worth debunking them.

[1]. Generational income levels. In this model, popularized by Richard Easterlin, large cohorts lead to lower wages (relative to expectations) leading to low fertility leading to small cohorts leading to high wages leading to high fertility. This would be convenient, since it would suggest population would naturally reach an equilibrium and thus long-term population aging and decline is not a problem. It was plausible in 1978 when it was proposed, but has completely failed since then, with small, post-Boom cohorts across Europe having lower fertility than ever. It has also been refuted by showing that cohort effects (birth year) don’t particularly matter for the beginning of the Baby Boom, with it instead being explained by period effects (changes during the Baby Boom rather than changes in the years those who participated in the Boom were born).

[2]. Household appliances and antibiotics. In this model, recently popularized by Works in Progress, household appliances popularized after WWII reduce the costs of childbearing and antibiotics reduce the risk of various STDs as well as reducing maternal mortality. Since incentives matter, the story goes, easier and safer childbearing means more births. This would be very convenient (all we need is rapid economic growth, which we want anyways!) but has the twin problems that the size of the Boom was inversely correlated with appliance rollout and the beginning of the boom predates the fall in STDs. Also, this model predicts you should see Baby Booms in every country when appliances and antibiotics first spread, but that didn’t (doesn’t) happen. The vast majority of the world only had (or is having) a single demographic transition, rather than the double-transition pattern of the Boom countries.

[3]. Contraception failure. In this model, the Baby Boom is just a marriage boom combined with an inability to practice fertility control due to ineffective contraception. This would not be very convenient, since it suggests that the only way to revive the Boom is to imitate Ceaușescu’s Romania, which (almost) no one wants. The trouble with this hypothesis is that marital fertility actually declined in many Boom countries during this period, suggesting married couples got better, not worse, at controlling their fertility.

The Baby Boom is a Marriage Boom

The proximate cause of the Baby Boom is not a mystery. Almost all births during the Baby Boom were within wedlock, meaning that fertility was a function of (1) nuptiality and (2) marital fertility. In 15/22 countries (8/15 if excluding Southern/Eastern Europe, Ireland, and Japan), marital fertility actually decreased during the Baby Boom, meaning that the entire Boom is explained by more marriage. Only in the US, France, and Austria does marital fertility increase explain more than 15% of the Baby Boom, so when looking at it as a West-wide pattern, we can effectively reduce the Baby Boom to a marriage boom: more people getting and staying married at younger ages.

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So what caused this marriage boom? The answer appears to be a rise in young men’s status compared to young women’s7. The marriage boom can be explained almost entirely by a combination of female labor force participation (down), young male wages (up), and male unemployment (down).

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This model actually understates the case, because it uses total female labor force participation, rather than the relevant variable, which is labor force participation for young women. An overall decline in female labor force participation masks the fact that there was actually an increase in female labor force participation among older women (in part due to World War II; women who got jobs in factories while men fought often stayed after the war), which in turn drove down wages (and thus labor force participation) among younger women.

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Wages are not the only way to measure status. After briefly reaching parity at the zenith of first wave feminism, young men during the Baby Boom again greatly exceeded their female counterparts in educational attainment.

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Note that what matters here is relative gains, not absolute gains. Women did not make less money and were not less educated in 1960 as compared to 1930, merely less so in comparison to their male peers.

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What ended the Baby Boom?

In three words: second wave feminism. By this I mean the suite of changes referred to as the Sexual Revolution (no fault divorce, normalization of premarital sex, delegitimization of marriage as the normative form of the family), combined with a concerted political campaign to raise women’s relative economic and social status. Fertility in every Boom country, as well as in several countries that didn’t experience the Boom but had slightly above-replacement fertility (such as Italy and Japan), cratered within a few years around 1970 (the time of the social and legislative triumph of second wave feminism) to well below replacement, and never recovered. But what are the precise mechanisms?

The most common answer is the Pill, which made cheap, effective, convenient contraception widely available. But this is highly confounded with second wave feminism, because this movement pushed for its legalization. Where you see second wave feminism and not the Pill, as in Japan, you see the same decline around 1970, and no further drop once the Pill is legalized8.

I think the whole thing is worth a read for those debating here.

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Don't worry we will get the non-developed countries. Sub-Saharan Africa is the last holdout, but we're coming for them too.

Are you a misanthrope? An antinatalist?

No, but I don’t have “number (of humans) go up” as a terminal value. I think most people wouldn’t be thrilled about high or even replacement level fertility if all of those children being born were going to spend the their entire lives in conditions equivalent to a Soviet gulag or a Caribbean sugar plantation. That’s how I feel about high fertility in a context in which the children being born will spend their lives in societies like those which prevailed before the 20th century.

I don’t view falling fertility rates as good in and of themselves, simply as markers of things I DO view as good, such as female emancipation, wealth, literacy, the demolition of traditional clan-kinship structures, etc.

Declining population is bad for a society.

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Such a dilemma never existed. There's a reason that 'spinster' is a word used in English to describe a single woman. It's how they very often supported themselves. If we take England in 1377 as an example, a full third of adult women were single, and 10-20% never married at all. The idea that the only options were marriage or prostitution is a fantasy, formed (as far as I can tell) by people extrapolating the experience of the midcentury American housewife far off into the past and across the planet.

Reliable statistics from the medieval era are pretty non-existent but 10% actually seems to be about the rate at which women became prostitutes in the 19th century. It was quite common. Significantly higher than say, uptake on OnlyFans is today. You can also swap "prostitute" for "indigent." Nobody ever accused spinsters of living comfortably.

I've said it before and I'll say it again about this particular factoid - 10% of women or 10% of urban women? We are talking about societies which were 80-90% rural, and the brothels were in the towns - and mostly in the large towns and cities. So 5-10% of women in London per jeroboam (and presumably less in smaller towns) being prostitutes equals 1% or slightly less of all women being prostitutes.

10% of all women being prostitutes in the 19th century (where? it matters!) per To_Mandalay would mean that either 30% or more were prostitutes in the big cities, which I don't think anyone has suggested, or that there was a culture of prostitution even in village-sized communities.

30% or more were prostitutes in the big cities, which I don't think anyone has suggested

Some people did actually. I was thinking not of London but of 19th century New York. According to this book estimates of the percentage of young women in NY who were prostitutes over the 19th century ranged from 1% all the way to 40%. The author says that 5 - 10% seems likely because the police tended to lowball their figures and reformist societies to overstate them. He also suggests that during economic downturns the number may have gone above 10%. Obviously the numbers are extremely uncertain because moralists had a motive to exaggerate them, and at the same time a lot of prostitution was part-time and freelance, and so slipped under the radar. What seems clear is that women being driven to prostitution out of economic desperation was many times more common than it is today.

I have no idea what prostitution looked like in village communities or to what extent it existed. In the 19th century medium-to-large towns and cities in the USA and Western Europe are pretty much the only places with anything resembling reliable statistics.

In modern times we still see that prostitutes tend to concentrate in cities and that rural men will travel to cities to use their services. So the percentage of prostitutes among the rural populace was likely far lower than in the city.

Everyone in this discussion seems to ignore the social issues with prostitutes in small communities, where people are much more aware of the behavior of people in the community than in the city.

In 1300 AD, London had 18 brothels employing hundreds of prostitutes. These brothels were regulated, incredibly, by the Bishop of Winchester.

As the entire population of London was less 30,000 we can infer that perhaps 5-10% of the women in London at the time were prostitutes.

Prostitution was certainly a much more common career path during the Middle Ages. And life expectancy for prostitutes was very short. So I would say that, yes, many women were facing awful choices at the time. This shouldn't be surprising. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, Malthusian conditions applied more often than not. A large percentage of people, both men and women, did not get enough to eat.

London was a pretty huge outlier in a lot of ways though. You probably had what, 2-3 million people in England? And there were only a handful of cities with London being the biggest by far. Nowhere else would have even close to that concentration of people who had enough money to hire a prostitute.

More like 5-7 million.

You probably had what, 2-3 million people in England?

Actually almost 5 million! But it would crash to under 2 million by 1450 thanks to the Black Death and its many echoes. The ones who survived the plague enjoyed much higher quality of life as Malthusian constraints were lifted.

Nowhere else would have even close to that concentration of people who had enough money to hire a prostitute.

I think you're probably right. But what a revealing statement. Things were so bad that women who might have wanted to resort to prostitution couldn't because there weren't enough clients with means to pay!

Things were so bad that women who might have wanted to resort to prostitution couldn't because there weren't enough clients with means to pay!

Isn’t this an (odd) interpretation of virtually any supply and demand curve? The only thing stopping me from stripping naked on public TV is that nobody is willing to pay me a billion dollars to do it.

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But what a revealing statement. Things were so bad that women who might have wanted to resort to prostitution couldn't because there weren't enough clients with means to pay!

It just shows that rich men were concentrated in cities, and their extra wealth was greater than the higher cost of living of the city.

What do you find revealing about this? Is the idea that there were huge wealth disparities in the past a revelation to you?

Prostitution was certainly a much more common career path during the Middle Ages

...for the small minority of women who lived in London and/or other major cities. By far the most common occupation for both men and women would have been "small-scale subsistence farmer"

I agree it is one of the greatest triumphs of human history and we can thank the industrial revolution for that, but you don't need social democracy for it, even in modern day China women can freely not marry or become a prostitute but be extremely successful.

There's also a large amount of sex trafficking in places like Seattle and San Francisco, supposed bastions of liberal democracy.

I wonder which country has a higher percentage of women being forced into prostitution - China or the United States?

My guess would be the United States but low confidence.

Give it another century and I think the opposite will prove true. If social trends are any indication, the most liberated generation in history would tell me that OnlyFans and soft prostitution will always be their highest aspiration in life. Their words. Not mine.

The dichotomy you presented that's imposed on them by their biology, is just the unfortunate tragedy of being female. And it's even more unfortunate to accept that society can get along just fine without women's happiness or independence. It can't survive without mans participation. And those two things directly oppose each other on almost every point.

If so, we'd be seeing more crimes in the advanced welfare states than in other states, which we aren't seeing.

Except the comparison point would have to be (welfare state with X GDP and Y demographics) vs (no welfare state with X GDP and Y demographics). Is there even a similar set of states we can compare? Given the impact of demographics and wealth on the type of state that the public builds, is it even possible to have one?

Women always had the option of working to support themselves in lieu of getting married- and lower class women in most of history expected to both work(sometimes from home) and marry, social inequality and poverty are a hell of a drug. They just didn’t, pre-welfare state, have the option of becoming a single mom.

And I want to pause here- being a single mom is bad. It’s bad for the woman(although I suppose basing policy decisions on saving people from their own bad decisions isn’t great), it’s bad for the kid(s), it’s hard on the extended family and broader society. It actually is a major fault of the welfare state that the option of becoming a single mom becomes relatively more appealing.

To women, marriage itself is a sign of a high status woman. The welfare state only made it economically feasible to get by without a man, but the loss of cultural stigmatization was what legitimized single motherhood.

The revealed behavior by women seems to show that they prefer single motherhood over marrying below their station of at least, the station they believe they have.

People who commit crimes in welfare states are criminals either because of mental issues such as low Iq, low impulse control and psychopathy, or they want status

Or out of opportunity. lenient sentences creates an incentive to commit crime, too.

It's more complicated than that. Otherwise the solution would be to mandate the death penalty for every crime out there.

there is a middle ground between do nothing and the death penalty though

The expectation of not being caught is the key incentive, not the lenient sentence if you are caught (at least with sentencing policies within the Overton window). A night in the cells is enough to make shoplifting not worth it if you expect to get caught.

maybe for a 14-year-old who stole on an impulse. for a career criminals, i am sure a long sentence is way worse than a night in the cell.

Most career criminals have the mental capabilities of 14 year olds.

A large study from all of Sweden has found that increasing people's incomes randomly (actually, increasing their wealth, but you can convert wealth to income via an interest rate very easily) does not reduce their criminality. The authors find that via a cross sectional model, people with higher incomes are less likely to commit crimes (this just compares rich people to poors and sees rich people are less criminal), while when they switch to a "shock" model where people who won what is effectively a lottery don't see reduced criminality in either themselves or their children. This is a pretty big blow for the "poor people are more criminal because they don't have money for their basic needs" theory.

New but not surprising. People involved in retail theft prevention have known this forever. There is no reliable profile for a potential shoplifter. It can be anyone.

Surely you are not suggesting that it’s not possible to reason probabilistically about who is more or less likely to shoplift? I don’t think anyone believes that it is possible to definitively rule anybody out, but I would be shocked if it’s not possible to draw useful and reliable conclusions about whom to devote more resources to focusing on.

I’m not sure. As in the sense of using demographic data, it doesn’t appear so. That doesn’t mean you can’t build a psychological model, or notice dress or behavior that’s more common with shoplifters than the general public. I see a guy in a big bulky puffer jacket in June, I’d bet on him being a shoplifter.

As in the sense of using demographic data, it doesn’t appear so

Blacks are a lot more likely to shoplift and commit crimes in general.

I also assume that the viral photos you sometimes see of black hair products in anti-shopliftimg cases next to white hair products without any additional protections are done by retail chains based on their actual shrinkage data and not because they're racist.

I'm also curious if anyone has tried to collect data on which Walmarts have a checkout within the make-up section vs. those without and compare it to the demographics of the surrounding neighborhoods. My anecdotal experience is that checkouts within the make-up section are more common in more ghetto area Walmarts.

In the same way people rate disaster recovery based on whether the local waffle house is open or no, you could probably do similar based on how the local supermarket is structured.

I always do get a twisted sort of amusement seeing how the same store chain can have a radically different structure and layout based on the local socio-economics.

Everything except Aldi.

Alternatively, this may be more about who buys stolen goods than about who actually steals them, if shoplifters are fairly likely to be professional rather than stealing for personal use.

  • As in the sense of using demographic data, it doesn’t appear so

Are you lying on purpose or are you actually this ignorant? The demographic data is quite clear. Blacks shoplift at drastically higher rates than whites or Asians.

I think it's middle class or above teenage girls who are the most likely to shoplift. But if we assume that upper-SES teenage girls are only a small percentage of the US population, then screening for everyone is more prudent. Otherwise, you will miss a lot of potential shoplifters.

My guess is that demographic is over represented in frequency, but not dollar value. They tend to steal trifles for personal use, not to offload to a fence.

Some people have kleptomania. Winona Ryder was caught shoplifting, I don't think she would do armed robbery or carjacking.

Mm. Human beings are moral scavengers and opportunists far more then they are corrupted by some criminal pathology. The amount of well adjusted human beings in regular good conduct that come out of the woodworks when the wrong incentives align, are numerous beyond belief. However if the costs are high enough and the opportunities aren't there, you simply don't see it. The only human beings who have consistent principles are those you'd never want to live with or be governed by. Only at the extremes of human behavior do you see moral principles at work.

The only human beings who have consistent principles are those you'd never want to live with or be governed by.

This honestly has not been my experience at all. Those with the strongest principles have consistently been the only people in my life worth keeping around. If someone doesn't have any values that they'll maintain when it's painful, then you're basically dealing with a particularly cunning animal.

I never said that people who don't have principles don't have any values. I'm saying most people will quickly abandon whatever principles they imagine they have when every incentive for doing so happens to run the other way. The principles most people think others have is moral marketing people engage in.

Virtually every human being you meet has a self-concept of being a morally upstanding individual. When you walk down the street, people aren't out to murder you and steal your possessions. And yet, almost every single one of those people have no qualms about picking up a $100 bill you just dropped and treating themselves to a nice meal or a crack rock. If people had solid principles, legal contracts, law enforcement and virtually every body of government would have no need to exist; precisely because people would have stable principles that police their own behavior.

Principles are about more than tolerating difficult moral challenges to your life. It's also the characteristic of every stubborn and bull headed person out there that refuses to learn or have his mind changed. Adolf Hitler certainly had moral principles when it came to the strength and sincerity of his convictions. We all know how that wound up. My own moral calculus is don't trust people, trust incentives.

Isn't Japan famous for people consistently turning in wallets with all the money inside, and similar stories? The, people in small towns not locking their doors things also seems related. I imagine that high-trust societies exist, and modern western urban centers just happen to be lower-trust, currently. Especially in 'public' spaces. I would bet there are at least some high-trust enclaves within most major cities where the norms shift closer to Japan.

I don't know that much about Japan to say, but knowing quite a bit about Singapore, they're known quite well for the same thing. And I can assure you in a place that's literally called "a shopping mall with the death penalty," it isn't because they all have solid principles and a good heart. China (at least based on self-reported data) has some of the lowest rates of financial fraud, greatly outstripping the metrics credit card companies report on here in the US. It's also one of, If not the only country on Earth where you can be executed for economic crimes. Asian societies are some of the strictest most tightly controlled State's you'll find in the entire world. Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm guessing you haven't had much experience dealing with Asia.

As far as small, closely knit towns being safe, sure that's a thing. To me there's little that has to do with "principles" about that, and that example goes to my point more generally. That these cases exist in pockets and you have to go looking for them to make them stand out in the argument.

I don't want to be confused with being a moral relativist, I'm not. I'm challenging the common understanding about how people reason morally in practical everyday terms. People aren't as principled as they would have you believe.

I have been to Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, multiple times and lived and worked in Beijing China for over a year.

Chinese workers do not live or act as if they are under some sort of totalitarian state. They call in from work at the drop of a hat, or take two hour lunches to get in a few rounds of tennis (this was not just because they were rich or well connect, one of the regulars at the court was literally a beat cop). I would also say that the average Chinese is not very principled, less so than the average westerner in my experience. They are obsessed with 'face' and looking good but will lie and cheat at every opportunity. I would just assume their self reported fraud data is fraudulent.

Taiwan and Hong Kong seem mostly the same, honestly, maybe a bit more 'liberated' but the base Chinese cultural programing seems to go hard.

Japan feels VERY different culturally, and really seems like a high trust society. It is true that interacting with Japanese police can be onerous, especially for foreigners. Still, given the massive gulf in behavior between the Japanese and the Chinese it is hard for me to accept that it is down stream of how draconian their respective governments are. The simplest and most obvious form of this is queueing. Everyone, everywhere in Japan will queue properly into lines and wait their turn, and nobody, anywhere in China will do the same, but I could be unaware of the death penalty anti-cutting laws in Japan.

Honestly though I am not sure how much I disagree with you.

People aren't as principled as they would have you believe.

Seems, almost trivially true and correct to me.

The example of the money on the ground stood out to me, because I honestly think a significant number of Japanese people would actually take money they found to the police lost and found. While I don't think this behavior is driven by the strictness of their State, I am not confident in saying it is because the Japanese are more principled, in the abstract. I would rather say, that principles are easier to hold when everyone around you holds them. This would also be my explanation for the small town effect.

I imagine that after a critical mass of defection only a handful of people would continue to hold to principals while everyone around them constantly defected. There is a sense in which only those people ever really had principles at all. Still, I value fair-weather principles. I think Liberalism, is a sort of coordinated attempt to get everyone to agree to some core principles and follow them and this is valuable and good, and should be encouraged.

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And yet China is the least likely of these countries to return a wallet.

https://twitter.com/debarghya_das/status/1738571424095502504/photo/1

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almost every single one of those people have no qualms about picking up a $100 bill you just dropped

Speak for yourself and your own fucked up community. The people around me have gone a lot further for me than returning a $100, and I trust them deeply.

However, I understand your point, and the majority of the world's population is principle-less and incentive-driven. At the same time, I believe it is morally required to stand against incentives, and I think your way of thinking too often leads to a race-to-the-bottom mindset of "everyone else has no principles and follows incentives so I have to follow incentives too."

If you can resist that slide while maintaining your mindset, then frankly we're mostly in agreement.

And yet, I don't assume you're going around trusting people that easily with things that important to you. Or am I speaking too soon? What's your social security number? I didn't think so.

When it comes to matter, nobody actually believes the kind of thing you're suggesting. Count your blessings, because there are few people like that. That's my entire point. 300 million people don't readily obey law enforcement protocols out of recognition of their moral value. They're prudent moral calculators who fear imprisonment and retribution. Principles are a mile wide and an inch deep for most people. And unsurprisingly, the point at which they become porus and most flexible are when people see a gain in violating them.

You can stand against incentives if you want, but you'll find yourself at pains everywhere you go in trying to push back against them. You design 'with' incentives in mind, not against them.

Your example is pretty poor, you cannot tell someone "you don't trust everyone on the internet so no one can be trusted". Moreover, you ca. trust a random person and yet not trust a person arguing that "people just follow incentives"

I don't assume you're going around trusting people that easily with things that important to you. Or am I speaking too soon? What's your social security number? I didn't think so.

There are many people that I do in fact share sensitive information with. Those people are not you. I'm sorry if you have no one trustworthy in your life. I have many such people, who are trustworthy because of their commitment to principle.

I fully agree that most people are not principled. I do not expect them to be, but I do not think being principle-less is any more acceptable because the majority of people do it. I am happy to simply prune my own social circle of those I see lacking in principle. Even having done so, I am left with a much, much larger circle than the average person anyway.

The whole point of having principles is that by being unmoved by incentives, you open the possibility of changing the incentives themselves. If enough people hold that lying is evil, then you push the cost-benefit balance away from lying. To follow incentives, or design with them in mind, is to cede the power of incentive-setting to those who won't budge.

The only human beings who have consistent principles are those you'd never want to live with or be governed by.

I'll second SophisticatedHillbilly that this is the opposite of my experience. At least, out of all the people that I know somewhat well and would not want to live with or be governed by, every single one of them has demonstrated a lack of consistent principles - and, in fact, it's that lack of consistent principles that has largely translated to them being terrible to live with or to be governed by. On the other hand, the few people in my life who have demonstrated having somewhat consistent principles have tended to be more worth living with or being governed by compared to a random person. Often for reasons directly having to do with being principled.

In the same way almost all Internet trolls are male and you can reliably exclude half the population, having worked in asset protection in retail apparel ages ago, I can tell you they're almost all exclusively female, and you can eliminate half the population.

Professional shoplifting gangs are active in DC and Northern Virginia and some of those are male.

Also a major problem on the West coast. Also younger men.

While it'd be nice if throwing money at people decreased the crime rate, I think the strongest defense of welfare has always been that it improves the lives of the people receiving the money -- strong both in the sense that it's pretty self-evidently true, and in the (dark art's / practical) sense that the only real way to fight against the argument is to come out and say you don't care about poor people's wellbeing (which most people don't really want to do).

that the only real way to fight against the argument is to come out and say you don't care about poor people's wellbeing

Or that I care about the well-being of those being taken from as much or more than those being given to.

It is possible to care more about the people being taken from and still support redistributive programs if you believe the things being taken have marginal value such that the people receiving get a lot more utility than the people being taken from lose. I would not put much stock in happiness research either way, but I think the latest is that more money really does continue to make people more happy, though, so maybe the 'marginal value of the dollar' has been overstated.

You know what makes people really happy? Heroin. So while I'm sure giving drug addicts money so they can buy more heroin and make themselves REALLY happy (even if for a short time) will work, and reduce the happiness of the people whose money is taken less than it makes the addicts happy, I'm still against it.

I think one of the best conservative approaches to drug addiction is just offering addicts maximum legal free fent in safe, clean government spaces without any narcan available and hiring somebody to cart away the bodies.

But then how will we posture?

Presumably by standing on the resulting piles of skulls.

to be honest that would be a cool aesthetic.

More comments

Did I really need to include an exhaustive list of, 'things that make people happy but are bad for them so I would not want to subsidize those things'?

Alternatively, do you think it is literally impossible to have a 'positive-sum' redistributive program that does not boil down to buying people Heroin?

I do not think a positive-sum redistributive program is likely. While there are instances of redistribution which might be positive sum, I do not believe a program which can reliably find these among the rather larger universe of negative-sum redistribution is possible. As for not buying people heroin, if the people running the program were harsh, flinty-eyed believers in the necessity of their program to do good, they could likely keep that at a minimum. But since the program will actually be run mostly by either disinterested bureaucrats who care only that the metrics they are measured by go up, or worse by bleeding hearts who think providing free heroin is a good thing, there will be plenty of heroin bought.

it is literally impossible to have a 'positive-sum' redistributive program that does not boil down to buying people Heroin?

I'll bite the bullet and say I think that it is literally impossible to have a redistributive program that the poor-for-a-reason don't then use to finance terrible decisions, yes. They can be extremely inventive about turning foodstamps into income which they then spend on drugs, for example.

I am not a huge fan of education, and would argue that we as a species don't have a great idea of how to even do 'education' as it is often presented. I suspect that there is an education floor that is necessary and useful though and that our modern education system is more than sufficient to meet that floor, expenditures in excess of it are probably low value. However I believe that for the vast majority of it's existence the American public school system has been an effective redistributive program that produced more value than it cost us as a nation. I think it is increasingly difficult to do good welfare programs because a bunch of sociologists decided to make a bunch of shit up 40 years again and nobody has ever called them on it, but we could do better than we currently are pretty easily. I do not have a strong opinion if any given current program is positive sum, but I think some probably already are, and we could do better than we currently do.

I think you can have a positive-sum redistribution(of course, part of that is accepting that a lot of it is going to the lower middle class rather than the truly poor), just not one that doesn't get spent on drugs by the people who really need to make a wiser purchase with the money, unless you just follow @2rafa's suggestion and pass out free heroin adulterated with poisoned fentanyl.

It's an interesting tidbit, but at the same time it doesn't really tell us much more than pointing to the idea that many of our assumptions about crime and income may be incorrect in an area where the social safety net eliminates most cases of extreme material deprivation.


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