Okay. I'm reading this: "Diamond also found that as cities increased their share of college graduates between 1980 and 2000, they also increased their bars, restaurants, dry cleaners, museums and art galleries per capita. And they experienced larger decreases in pollution and property crime, suggesting that cities that attract college grads benefit from both the kind of amenities that consumers pay for and those that are more intangible."
And my reaction is: yes, there is inequality, but what we're seeing here is that college graduates are improving their cities. Awesome!
And I really dislike this 30,000-foot view of humanity:
"""
"When you have more college grads, all of these amenities seem to improve in your city," Diamond says. "But that may be at the expense of kicking out lower skilled workers to other cities."
It also comes at the expense of other cities that may lose their college grads. What happens to Toledo and Baton Rouge without them?
"""
I'm not subservient to helping cities-- I'm going to cities because of my own interests, and I absolutely reject any guilt to bringing down those cities. I dislike this attitude that sees people as pawns that we should move around for political goals rather than as people who are just living their lives.
I don't think Diamond is asking you to make choices that improve society. He's attempting to analyze systemic changes in society accurately. And from that perspective, it is not only appropriate but absolutely required that you look at overall shifts, not just one city in isolation. The extent to which a particular city's improvement is "internal" vs. just zero-sum shifting at the expense of other cities, is pretty relevant to that. If college graduates vs. non-graduates are self-segregating and this explains a large part of the wealth changes in both directions (the places that get more graduates get richer, the places with fewer get poorer), then I think it is not really accurate to say that "college graduates are improving their cities", or at least it is not the whole story. It would be more accurate to analyze it as a migration, something like: college graduates are concentrating in some areas and not others, and wealth flows accordingly. Assuming, again, that systemic flows of educated people are the main causal factor in wealth changes, as Diamond claims.
We can probably replace many instances of (s)he or he/she with a singular they. As the Wikipedia article says[1], this is not a recent phenomenon. If using he in a gender-neutral way or in gender ambiguous situations is somehow not politically correct, we should use the word they to replace all instances of he/she or (s)he or he or she where the gender is not important. This is probably the case in over half of our usage of he/she or (s)he or he or she.
Instead of: Barack Obama is the current president of the United States. He was born in 1961.
Say: Barack Obama is the current president of the United States. They were born in 1961.
Fight the madness of people getting mad over gender of pronouns with a greater degree of madness. It is the only way.
I feel like you're making a good argument but have chosen a singularly poor example. Use of "they" is most justified when the gender is unknown. Barack Obama is a very known male.
At some point, we may use "they" for everyone, even if known. But at present, it's not accepted even for cases when gender is unknown.
It's likely better to argue for its usage in unknown cases first before making a case for its usage even when gender is known. The latter is a far more radical proposition.
Consider that like Chelsea Manning, at some point in the future Barack Obama may announce she has always been a woman. Also like Chelsea Manning, at that point you would be obligated to alter all past and present references to Barack Obama as "she," or else be guilty of a hateful and cruel misgendering slur. So as a matter of practicality it's probably easier just to use the singular-they in every case so you are being respectful. On the other hand, it still wouldn't be considerate to leave it at "they" if Barack Obama had clearly stated her preferred pronouns, so you might have to change it anyway so now I am not actually sure what advice to give.
Fine, I'll say it plainly. Using singular-they in all cases is in my mind a reasonable accommodation if you live in a world where there are two or more genders and you are obligated to use someone's gender-identification rather than their society-assigned gender. But during the Chelsea Manning trial, a group of serious people very "concerned about trans issues" demanded unreasonable accommodation, that all references to Manning as "he," even ones made in the past and which referred to her when the world identified her as male, had to be altered. My point is that using singular-they in every case, even if you think it could be a reasonable accommodation, is already not good enough for a significant number of people, both people that will still demand that you retroactively erase all reference to prior gender, and people for whom "they" is offensive and demand you memorize and use everyone's personal pronouns.
I was not intending to mock trans people, I was mocking extremists in that group. It's really fucking annoying when you were for gender-neutral pronouns your whole life, took shit for that because nobody wanted to use "clumsy grammar," then you get shit from some trans people who claim that you're erasing their identity:
<quote>Look, if you take gender neutral pronouns and start using them for people that aren’t gender neutral, you are appropriating my and other non-binary people’s pronouns, whatever way you cut it. You’re also erasing and devaluing both binary and non-binary trans* people, who have to fight every single day to be recognised and treated as their gender. This smacks of that whole ridiculous ’gender is irrelevant’ shit. That sentiment ‘gender is irrelevant’? Yeah, it’s trans* erasure.</quote>
I am not the pedant. These people are the pedants. But these are the people you are going to be dealing with when you talk about what pronouns you should use in writing, so you better be aware of it.
I'm a trans woman and I do agree that anyone who was demanding that all previous written instances of using "he" for Manning be altered is going too far.
On the other hand, once she informed people about her true gender and pronoun preferences then there ought to be no use of "he" in media to refer to Manning. At most, I'd support using "nee" and a reference to her old name for the sake of continuity.
Make no mistake about it, pronoun issues may seem trivial to those not affected, but it's often a deeply distressing and systemic problem for many trans people.
Overall, I like your post. You might be interested in reading about Spivack pronouns - yes, the same Spivack that wrote the well regarded calculus text.
Do you realize that you just jumped headlong onto the slippery slope of complete subjectivity that can only lead to a paralyzing inability to set a coherent thought to paper?
I agree! But that's a terrible example of it, IMO. Singular they should be used when the gender is unknown or not stated, or at least that's how I use it. It flows rather well in speech too for the most part, but if you know the gender then it causes a bit of cognitive dissonance.
> I agree! But that's a terrible example of it, IMO. Singular they should be used when the gender is unknown or not stated, or at least that's how I use it. It flows rather well in speech too for the most part, but if you know the gender then it causes a bit of cognitive dissonance.
Yes, I got a little carried away. I was trying to say that there are cases where gender of the person is not important. I was trying to come up with a case where the person's gender was not important. In hindsight, since there have been no female POTUS I guess the gender is still relevant.
A little off topic, I respect Barack Obama (not being sarcastic at all even though I probably disagree with him on more issues than I agree with him) and can imagine where he is coming from.
In post-mortem, I'd imagine I was thinking in terms of something like an Overton window where I suggest something so outlandish hoping that we'd settle somewhere saner in between...
> I dislike this attitude that sees people as pawns that we should move around for political goals rather than as people who are just living their lives.
There were times, in my country, when they even dared to instruct women to make more children for the state (Eastern Europe, before 1989). It was their "patriotic duty" to make babies. Not to mention that university graduates were distributed by them to whatever city they wanted, at the end of the studies (married students were sent together though). Moving to another city was prohibited generally - for the same reason - they saw people as pawns to move around as they pleased.
It wasn't community first. It was state first. Communities as people in "the west" understand them would often be illegal behind Iron Curtain.
For example if to big group of people met without a good reason - it was illegal assembly and the people could be jailed (depending how strict the militiants were). Owning a printing press (or even a writing machine if you weren't a journalist or a writer) was illegal too.
Each individual may have perfectly rational reasons for their behaviour. It can still be interesting to study side effects of their group behaviour."
If only they kept it to just "study[ing] side effects of [..] group behaviour". However, all these meta and orbit-view studies' conclusions are used as justification for all sorts of orbital-level intervention that has real-world consequences on individual's behavior and possibly well-being.
The gist, the implications of the article, and any possible government-level consequences need to be preoccupied over! This isn't just some nifty little article we're reading on the internet. This is your entire environment being slowly manipulated by agendas and "reasoned" responses to correct supposed "problems" such as statistical inequality. Be informed.
But if there is a systemic-level issue, systemic-level intervention is precisely the right response. Individualist attempts to address systemic issues are mostly romanticism.
I think what he's suggesting is that a systemic issue might not require systemic-level intervention, ceteris parabus. It is possible for regions to decline when overall welfare per person who comes from that region is rising. In a world where people are mobile, this is what you expect to happen.
More broadly, an issue that's "systemic" in that it's observed in a system might not be "systemic" in the sense that something is broken in the system.
I would say that pretty much all of 4500 years of western history directly disagree with this statement. There were dozens of non-individualist societies when we started, there is arguably a single (relatively new) one left, one that is at least partially individualist, and a single new one. There is the western civilization (sometimes referred to as western individualism, especially by non-western scholars), islam, a relative newcomer that is certainly more individualist than most the competition it massacred out of existence (like e.g. the Roman Society it is mostly modelled on), and communism (which is arguably dead today, as China can hardly be called an example of a communist society. Who is left ? North Korea ?).
Any solution that requires individuals reacting against their own self-interest on a large scale is a complete non-starter, for such a thing would not be Nash Balance. Non-Nash-balanced things can only survive until the first unexpected event, and require ever increasing infusions of energy to save their existence. Even that is only true if you can make it a global intervention. If not, it will simply get out-competed and replaced outright.
I don't agree that Western individualism is incompatible with addressing systemic problems on a systemic level. Joining the two ideas is more or less the "Nordic model" that we use here (Denmark): Western culture, mixed public/private economy, a high degree of state planning, and a universalist social welfare system. To some extent the German model is similar. There is individualism as well, but not to address systemic problems. No one expects individual action on its own to build the rail system, address economic inequality, safeguard the environment, ensure sensible urban planning, or maintain a national defense. Individual activity is part of all of those, but individual activity within the framework of rationally designed policies.
Western society is certainly individualist in some senses, especially culturally, and on a micro-level economically as well. I'm not arguing for a fully collectivist society, just to solve systemic problems using systemic approaches. Which we are perfectly capable of doing even in Western culture, using tools like a democratic government.
I can't really wrap my head around the notion of "addressing systemic problems on a systemic level" in the first place? How is it possible to act singularly with respect to the macro-equilibrium of a system that is by definition the product of intersecting micro-level behaviors?
The notion of acting systemically - rather than merely observing the emergent patterns that the system reflects - seems to be almost a kind of creationist mentality: you need to posit some sort of demiurge that is external to the system, and can therefore treat the system as a singular entity that can be manipulated as an engineer would manipulate the overall parameters of a machine he was working on. But there doesn't appear to exist any such demiurge in real life; human individuals and insitutions are limited to shifting their own particular micro-level behaviors. So how is it even meaningful to speak of acting directly against a complex system's macro-level equilibrium?
The big fallacy of modern political ideologies is to equate the particular insitutions of politics with the emergent equilibrium of society at large. The political state is just another micro-level input into the overall pattern; casting it into the role of a demiurge, and charging it with tweaking the parameters of the macro-level social system generally always leads to failures in the form of unattained goals and unintended consequences.
I don't think that this meshes very well with your previous post, where you claimed:
"But if there is a systemic-level issue, systemic-level intervention is precisely the right response. Individualist attempts to address systemic issues are mostly romanticism."
Systemic level intervention without individuals contributing to the effort will simply be fighting against exponential growth. It'll work really well in the beginning ... and fail.
I am aware that the requirement that any intervention policy must create a Nash balance is an onerous requirement. But you should treat it as a law of nature. It's a requirement that defines reality.
I am simply saying that your claim of government intervention simply fixing things is akin to saying that gravity can be ignored when building bridges. Reality just doesn't work that way. Anything that isn't a Nash balance will crash and burn, just like any bridge that isn't stable under gravity.
Sure, intervention should also be designed in a way that works, and monitored/adapted so it continues to do so. :-)
What I have in mind as "romanticism" is the more American idea that major societal problems just need some Ingenious Great Men to fix them (maybe together with something vague like "startups" and "innovation"), rather than actual policies.
So you do not wish to understand the issues involved because they might lead to "government-level consequences", including "orbital-level intervention". Yeah, good to know that college degree of yours wasn't wasted.
I would have loved to stick around to here more about the statistical inequality as opposed to other kinds of inequality but I have to go. Best of luck to you.
no, but unless you push back the moment they start preaching the right and wrongness, then they will use it to implement government policy to push their ideals, probably at 'your' expense. you may not be able to see what the article is doing, but many of us know too well.
I have literally heard urban planners cry foul to plans to fund schools with extra money with the idea that you would get a greater return back in taxes as the neighborhood improved because it would 'push out lower income people' and 'ruin otherwise beautifully economically mixed'.
I really dislike this idea that we should always elevate individual wants over the overall societal benefit of having integrated societies with low levels of inequality.
I similarly dislike the idea that someone else could, in any capacity, have the power to decide for me how I am going to live my life, even if their decisions are "morally correct" for some values of moral and correct.
Rather than thinking about collectivism versus individualism, I ask myself, "Do I want to live in Star Trek or Blade Runner?" and do whatever I think will bring on the Star Trek. Most of the time I think that means towers of individualism (or no individual glass ceilings) supported by a foundation of collectivism. In other words raising the floor for everyone without lowering the ceiling for anyone, whenever possible.
I'm not a fan of Star Trek, but curious - where are all the stupid & lazy people in their universe? Ie have they been bred out, are they back on Earth and the show doesn't dwell on them, or what?
Probably back on Earth (or whatever their homeworld is).
Besides the issue of being theatrically-fulfilling, the nature of something like Starfleet would tend to select against having truly stupid/lazy people there. Even the modern (and for that matter, WWII) U.S. submarine fleets are not cross sections of society, and the technical and training requirements would only seem to have gone up for Starfleet.
I'm presuming the "bred out" thing didn't happen, since the Star Trek canon (and a few episodes, e.g. of DS9) speaks of eugenics as a practice becoming highly disfavored hundreds of years before the events of the various TV shows and movies.
With all that said it is definitely implied that life in the Federation is essential utopian, without lazy/stupid people. Maybe a more knowledgeable Star Trek geek can explain how the show explains it but AFAIK the disparity is never explained by anything more substantial than improved social policies after First Contact.
For the life of me I cannot remember, it may have been in some DS9 episodes about Dr. Bashir. But I believe it was stated that eugenics had effectively eradicated a lot of social ills before the issue of genetically-augmented superhumans led to the Eugenics Wars.
Honestly the takeaway of this is that questions like "do you want to live in Blade Runner or do you want to live in Star Trek" don't work because Star Trek is more fantasy than science-fiction when it comes to how some of that stuff works.
We can't literally live in Star Trek's universe because, so far as we know, the laws of physics don't allow FTL travel. But, there are numerous elements of Star Trek's society that are worth trying to achieve, even if we don't have to go about achieving them the same way the writers envisioned.
As others have mentioned, it's just fiction. It's not a roadmap to a destination; it's encouragement to build that destination ourselves.
Since utopia is implied you can assume the population is healthy, well-fed, well educated (possibly for free), and has a low crime rate across the board.
This alone would pretty much ensure there are no lazy/stupid people. Stupidity is largely a factor of health and education, laziness mostly a factor of social norms (encouragement, expecting success, role models etc.)
What I'm saying is that on average people behave the way you expect them to as long as they know what's expected.
IQ (as one imperfect measure of intelligence) is significantly hereditary.
<quote>
Various studies have found the heritability of IQ to be between 0.7 and 0.8 in adults and 0.45 in childhood in the United States.[4][7][15] It may seem reasonable to expect that genetic influences on traits like IQ should become less important as one gains experiences with age. However, that the opposite occurs is well documented.
</quote>
Don't you think that stupidity is a relative term?
Ie every society will have 50% of the population that is below the average intelligence. And the lower quartile be considered outright stupid - because the rest of society is not tailored to their needs.
The Star Trek of the Kirk period was transitioning into a post-scarcity economy. By the time Picard was captain, money was no longer in use. When you have replicators that can make anything you desire so long as you have the schematics, who needs to trade for anything? People were free to choose what to do with their time.
I want to live in the culture. You get to live your life how you want it, with wide use of mind and body enhancing drugs, with nobody to tell you how to live, with nobody to spy on you, so long as you, in turn, do not harm others. If you are in immediate danger, you will be rescued.
Yeah if you buy what the Minds are selling. (I agree with you and would absolutely live in The Culture, I just felt like playing devil's advocate/discussing the Culture novels).
I buy it, because why should the Minds care to lie? They have absolute control if they want it, no use for humans (comparative advance non-withstanding) and yet they keep them around.
> I similarly dislike the idea that someone else could, in any capacity, have the power to decide for me how I am going to live my life ....
Except that your decisions about how to live your life are integrally bound up with the infrastructure provided by society as a whole. Individualism isn't exactly what it's cracked up to be.
So exactly what life decisions should we not be permitted to make without permission from the collective? Where to live, what career to pursue, who to have children with?
That's a knee-jerk reaction and you know it. The answer is what it has always been: We, as a society, will figure it out as we go along. Right now, the collective says you can't drive over a certain speed, you can't build particular buildings in particular locations, you can't operate on people without training, you can't smoke indoors in several small pockets of society, you can't just broadcast RF at certain frequencies, and so on. No, we don't have central economic planning to the level of detail you sarcastically ask, nor do we have sociological planning like that (though, I do note, that arranged/forced marriages and the accompanying acts of procreation _were_ considered reasonable for hundreds of years).
Being told "no" by society doesn't imply any status of rightness or wrongness, nor is it a reason to get all petulant and start asking "illogically-extending-the-argument" questions.
If I'm parsing that correctly without the gratuitous insults, it would be "yes, society has the moral authority to dictate every aspect of your life, but it will probably leave you some degree of freedom, so quit complaining". I profoundly disagree, but I'll leave it at that.
How free, exactly, would you like the cells in your organs to be --- free from the social rules regarding nutrient flows and replication rates? Free to do something other than its specification?
Go up one or two levels on the scale of life, and we call that cellular freedom "cancer."
That is a poor analogy (unless you are suggesting that human being have no inherent value). Cells are not people and thus do not have the right to make their own decisions. If some of my cells are not useful I have no problem killing them off. My cells only exist to serve my existence; they have no inherent value.
What the fuck. Did you just equate the human mind to an organ cell? As if a single neuronal cell can be compared to the collective neural cells organized in your brain?
A quick Googling of the laws of your town, county, state, and country (or your equivalents thereof) would be one place to start looking up that very list.
I don't understand this position. Individualism has given us everything we have as a modern society. Someone had to build the roads, someone had to build the manufacturing pipelines, someone had to build the distribution networks, someone had to build X, and that X was built by someone hoping to get rich doing so, and that someone did, deservedly.
Capitalism is the only thing that's really capable of lifting people out of poverty. We need to work with people's selfish desires, not against them.
Rubbish. Individualism did not build the interstate highway system, or sewer systems or even the internet. Please put down Atlas Shrugged long enough to take a look around you.
Actually the people who do not succeed (the lower-to-middle classes) pay far more in income taxes than the paltry capital gains taxes of the ultra-successful.
Yeah, but the money is taken from the lower class and given to the overclass by the government through property rights and similar laws. Who pays how much for the common good is an uninteresting question, as money is simply resource allocation by the government/the-powers-that-be.
The Internet wasn't built by private companies? Are you kidding? ARPANET might have been built by the DOD, but the Internet we use today is 100% built and owned by private companies.
You left off the part where de facto government granted monopolies helped build the capital base and in many cases directly funded infrastructure investments.
Here's how I see it. Self-determination is the goal. But that means individual self-determination as well as collective self-determination. We should be able to decide how we want to live our lives, but the collective should also be able to decide what sort of society they live in. Now my problem is with the "in any capacity" part of your statement. I think there is a tremendous range of beliefs that are consistent with recognizing both sorts of self-determination. But saying that society should have no power to decide how you live your life, in any capacity, rejects the second sort of self-determination entirely.
All those articles show are a few correlations. They don't establish causality.
They are also somewhat cherrypicked. If you look at changes over time, you see no relationship between inequality (which has increased) and relative mobility (which has remained flat).
You can also get similar correlations if you put single motherhood on the X axis. And if you compare US commuting zones, rather than European countries, you find the correlations are not so strong.
"I'm not subservient to helping cities-- I'm going to cities because of my own interests, and I absolutely reject any guilt to bringing down those cities."
This dogma has penetrated very, very deep amongst techies. The invisible hand seems to be a drop-in replacement for any reflexion about morality for some.
It's an economic theory right? Go to a shit town buy up houses, fix them up, get some people who can pay the higher rent jobs in that town, and repeat. Think about who really wins in silicon valley. Its the property owners, and they just keep raising rent. People have a way better chance of making money through building houses and influencing migration patterns of skilled labor than building the next Facebook. Life's a game that you can play in many different ways. Don't box yourself in. :)
That's the problem. Wealth people improve a city, which makes it a more desirable place to live which drives up cost of living, which drives out the poor people that lived there before.
I endured high school as a nerd. The city and state had years to convince me I could find respect, camaraderie, and love if I chose to stay, but instead they demonstrated how freaks would be treated and that nobody had my back. I have no loyalty for the place or the people.
To be fair, this is also a function of the immaturity, immense peer pressure, and monolithic idea of social acceptability that exist at the high school level.
After high school (whether in college or as young adults living on our own), people tend to be more open-minded, plus we are better able to choose our own peer groups. So we tend to find more acceptance.
Sure, some cities may have a more tolerant regard for certain groups (which is actually likely more related to higher concentrations of those groups in the city), however, most of our acceptance comes from the fact that we are no longer in the immense social conformity pressure cooker that is high school in most towns.
It's just as appealing as watching self-organizing behavior in ants.
But I'm not an ant or a honeybee and I see no reason to think of my fellow humans as worker drones as opposed to a more familial social patterning. Even the elephants, lions and wolves can do that much...
Dogma has penetrated very deep. If you read Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations", the invisible hand is something that intervenes in markets to prevent free trade among merchants from different nations.
Nowadays, 99% of the time people use his term the exact opposite way. They say it is a hand that gently guides merchants from different nations to trade with one another within a free market, and that such thing. They have twisted his term to mean the exact opposite of how Smith intended it.
> If you read Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations", the invisible hand is something that intervenes in markets to prevent free trade among merchants from different nations.
I don't see how that's the opposite interpretation from the modern usage. It just seems like the modern usage is a generalization of Smith's usage. In The Wealth of Nations, Smith seems to be saying that an individual favoring domestic industry over foreign industry for purely personal gain tends to be good for domestic industry and society, and perhaps even for foreign industry. The generalized interpretation that people use today is that individuals seeking purely personal gain can result in a market that self-regulates and benefits society. What is the contradiction you're referring to?
Also, in The Wealth of Nations, Smith does describe the more general concept of market self-regulation, though in that section he does not use the phrase "invisible hand." In his earlier book "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," Smith uses the phrase "invisible hand" to refer to the phenomenon that rich people tend to provide livelihoods to the people working for them, not out of altruism, but for personal gain, which is another special case of the general concept of market self-regulation.
Disclaimer: I haven't actually read Smith straight through. I've just read various articles about Smith, and excerpts of his work. I might be missing a lot of context (and please inform me if that's the case), although my general impression of his usage of this phrase is in line with Wikipedia's summary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand.
No, Smith used the term "invisible hand" more generically to describe how the actions of individuals when optimizing for themselves can produce outcomes that may be optimal for greater purposes. In The Wealth of Nations, he uses it to refer to the way in which the actions of domestic businessmen support domestic industry in the best possible way (as though orchestrated by an invisible hand).[1]
In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith says that the actions of the wealthy produce beneficial effects for all of society, as though guided by an invisible hand. This idea is commonly referred to as the "trickle-down effect" today.[2]
In modern economics the term is mostly used to refer to the way in which markets tend to self-regulate,[3] and it's known as THE invisible hand, which is a bit unfortunate since it's such a vague metaphor that it can easily be used to refer to almost any gestalt concept.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations#Book_IV:...
"As every individual, therefore, endeavours as much as he can both to employ his capital in the support of domestic industry, and so to direct that industry that its produce may be of the greatest value; every individual necessarily labours to render the annual revenue of the society as great as he can. He generally, indeed, neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it. By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it." (Book 4, Chapter 2)
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand#Other_uses_of_t...
"The rich … consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species."
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand
You quote exactly what I am talking about from Wealth of Nations. How is the "support of domestic to that of foreign industry" free trade in modern parlance? That is protectionism. Your paraphrase echoes what I am saying as well. The modern conception of the invisible hand is not one which leads to tariffs and protectionism, but international free trade. This is the opposite of what he said though.
Could you expand on that? Technological progress has been less about increasing the gross amount of stuff the rich consume than the type. And for most things the poor get that stuff too, just later. iPhones, better, safer, more fuel efficient cars, flat screen TVs, , healthcare innovations etc.
Rich people do have nicer stuff but to a surprising extent they just have different stuff. An awful lot of that is zero sum social status signalling, like living in a richer area, or drinking wine, not beer, or gritting your teeth and congratulating your colleague on their kid getting into Princeton, when yours got into Duke.
I'd actually be really surprised if consumption inequality hasn't gone down since the fifties for most physical goods and services.
Perhaps the definition changed because the invisible hand he described isn't so invisible. It's usually government intervention / foreign trade policy, and it's anything but invisible!
>I'm not subservient to helping cities-- I'm going to cities because of my own interests, and I absolutely reject any guilt to bringing down those cities.
That's the "for the community" view vs the "for the individual" view. When people start thinking in the second, more selfish, way, households, neighborhoods, cities and countries go downhill quickly.
I think that, paradoxically, as most things in life, it's the "community first" attitude that creates stronger and more empowered individuals. The "self first" attitude, despite the widespread mistrust, fear, hate and selfishness, also results to loneliness, depression, less power (because when you're just by youself you can be crushed more easily by others, etc).
>I dislike this attitude that sees people as pawns that we should move around for political goals rather than as people who are just living their lives.
It's not "political goals". It's solidarity, duty, love, connection, ties, roots, caring for where you live, caring for the neighbor, all those things. It's easy to dismiss them as "chains".
So is it a zero-sum deal? If there is a certain "type" of person that makes cities better when they are present can we make more of this type? Or must we simply choose between moving them all to a few special extra-nice cities and scattering them out so that all cities are equally mediocre?
A lot of people do care about helping other people. It is fantastic that you are not one of them but I find it an odd, yet more common theme now, that they like to celebrate this characteristic of themselves..
>I dislike this attitude that sees people as pawns that we should move around for political goals rather than as people who are just living their lives.
While in this case I do agree with your conclusion, the argument that people should just be able to live their lives is what gave the suburban sprawl, which makes it costlier to offer good services, etc.
> They're gaining access to high-cost cities like New York or San Francisco that offer so much more than good jobs: more restaurants, better schools, less crime, even cleaner air.
Yes, and a lot of these folks are spending the vast majority of their disposable income on housing and discretionary income on the so-called "amenities" mentioned in the article.
Don't get me wrong: it's great to be able to live in a desirable area with high employment, but at the end of the day, it's not what you make, it's what you keep. There are a lot of folks like this guy[1] who confuse cashflow from employment with financial security.
The paltry savings rates in this country aren't just a product of the less educated, lower-wage workers. If you look at national averages, it's pretty obvious that most college graduates aren't doing a great job of converting their higher wages into savings and assets.
i dont think that is fair. just because they are not taking advantage of their improved situation doesnt mean they dont have a situational advantage.
What im trying to say is, they do have a huge net benefit, but they may not be financially behaved to actually save it. My former roomate quite a bit of money and spent a great deal of it on alcohol. you could increase his wage, he'd just find a way to spend more. you could decrease his wage, and his spending on those non-accounted things would drop.
"Census data suggests that in 1980 a college graduate could expect to earn about 38 percent more than a worker with only a high-school diploma. Since then, the difference in their wages has only widened as our economy has shifted to bestow greater and greater rewards on the well-educated. By 2000, that number was about 57 percent. By 2011: 73 percent."
Regardless of how I feel about this, I wonder a bit what these numbers would look like if you took the one percent out of the equation. The distribution of wealth right now is totally nuts and concentrated at the very very top. If we were to remove them my suspicion is that it still would be trending up but maybe somewhat less severely.
This article doesnt state what census figure explicitly it was pulling from; however, its the norm to use median household income (or some other median value) as to not be skewed by outliers. In that case, removing the top 1% wouldnt make a difference.
"has shifted to bestow greater and greater rewards on the well-educated."
I'm old enough to have seen that the lifestyle and quality of living for the average college grad has decreased quite a bit over than interval, its just decreased MUCH further for non college grads, who are generally now found only in the trades, unemployed, manual labor, or are special and unusual anecdotal snowflakes. The numbers are of course better because we reward numbers. I'm writing about actual lifestyle and quality of life.
Inherently there's no reason why credentials result in better bartenders, waiters, baristas, receptionists, file clerks, but it does make it somewhat more likely that a given individual will have any job at all.
This gives the article a different tinge. Much as the future is already here, just unevenly distributed, some cities for arbitrary reasons may simply be more or less decayed than others. There may be some survivorship bias such that peculiar theories can be manufactured out of fundamentally random data. That city was in the FIRE business and is now rich, that city was in the automotive business, and isn't rich.
Didn't think of this, very good point. I also have a feeling this is by gross income. When we factor in college debt I think it will level off a lot more.
What degree of this is just how many college students is a city able to attract?
Georgia has worked very hard to make Georgia a good state for choosing to go to a local college, and I find it extremely unlikely that a large number of people are being pushed out of Atlanta due to cost of living, its extremely affordable to live in Atlanta, even more so if you consider the greater metro area.
This is a very good point. There are cities like Atlanta and Chicago that offer good jobs, good amenities and don't suffer in the same way - a large reason is ease of developing housing in areas there are demand. Boston, SF, NYC come with many unnecessary restrictions so supply is not able to shoot up with demand. Ed Glaser's book "Triumph of the City" discussed many of these issues.
This being hacker news I would ask if this is an inefficiency ready to be taken advantage of or a system ready to be disrupted?
I would argue that payment companies/services like Square are successful in part because they are doing just that. They lower the bar to someone with or without a collage degree starting a small business like a food cart or truck that can thrive in a collage grad heavy city.
Similarly sites that offer reviews make it easier for a business to prosper on merit and reduce the tendency of people to just go to a chain because they know what they will get.
I don't think this is an uphill battle. Surly a neighborhood feels more vibrant alive and inspiring when all the workers (tech and otherwise) are out on the street choosing from many unique options then when they all line up the mcdonald's drive through, starbuck's or the company cafeteria to get the same thing they got yesterday.
So what is the next great start up that helps make this happen?
The consequence of the food truck growth is that there are now many more mobile, explosive installations of gas in existence as opposed to restaurants which have a contained, inspected, fixed installations of gas.
At what point did we have the conversation as to whether this is a good thing? We didn't.
Interesting point but I think the recent gas main explosion in new york and the fervor over our aging, difficult to inspect and dangerous gas mains (the one in question was 127 years old) needs to weighed if your going to argue safety. [1] Reputable propane fillers will only fill gas tanks that have been recently inspected and even the largest mobil tank only holds a limited amount of gas compared to what can be released when something connected to a main leaks.
However, my point more then being pro food truck or any one business model is that major socio-economic trends like groups of people needing to move away from some cities is indicative of something that might be target by a startup. Who knows, maybe the next big trend is custom manufacturing with same day delivery via 3d printers, skilled laborers and bike messengers leveraging both the concentrated capitol of the educated workers and creating jobs for people who would otherwise have to leave.
There's another article on the front page right now, http://www.venturedlife.com/episode-three that suggests Detroit could be the next Silicon Valley. I'd like to see an analysis of THAT article in the context of the findings reported on in THIS article.
Oakland and Washtenaw counties (adjacent to the county Detroit is in) have college graduates at rates far higher than the national average.
Washtenaw is about on par with San Francisco (but also only ~1/3 the population).
I think it's relevant because you don't need all those services to exist in the core of Detroit or a huge migration to get access to lots of educated people.
I am not sure how that could be prevented without reducing inequality. And I don't see how to raise the income of lower educated people in a world which is ever more automated.
Progressive taxation on wealth (not income). Then, mess with the curve of progressiveness.
Generating income becomes the unbridled thing. Sitting on mountains of wealth becomes futile. No dynasties. What have you done for me lately? You can live a king's life by generating obscene earned income, but your kids will only be assured easy street. Their kids only assured middle class. This gives grandpa and grandma a reason to improve the lot of the middle and lower classes.
If you let the lower groups fall too far into despondence, they will eventually come for your heads. You can build prisons to a point. You can create mental prisons to an extent. You can pacify the masses for a long while. Eventually, there's nothing left in the tank. Nothing to lose. Then, you lose stability and your choices are few.
The more your society reflects fiefdoms of the middle ages, the more you'll start seeing royalty thrown from windows and put on stakes.
We have the very wealthy (royalty). We have their military class ready to step in: Gun-coveting believers in the system that amazingly keeps increasing inequality. Then we have a growing base of servants who can't own land or tools of production (education). This looks increasingly familiar.
> If you let the lower groups fall too far into despondence, they will eventually come for your heads. You can build prisons to a point. You can create mental prisons to an extent. You can pacify the masses for a long while. Eventually, there's nothing left in the tank. Nothing to lose. Then, you lose stability and your choices are few.
I don't think that's true. People will resort to violence and risk their lives when they're hungry and cold, not because the elite are driving Lamborghinis and they have to make do with Fords. As long as the lower classes have some minimum standard of living, greater and greater wealth inequality is sustainable.
I was unclear. I agree with this and was trying to say essentially this. Rich and powerful can try to contain those at the bottom through various means, but eventually those means won't be able to contain them.
Very interesting idea, as long as there's some decent untaxed wealth level proportional to your average income level, like 3..5 years of income, in order to afford good sabbaticals.
The problem is in the potential for corruption, since your official income number will mean so much more than now.
A lot of the richer cities have major restrictions on development that drive rents very high [1]. The cities that are attracting more low-income people (e.g., the Texas cities) have much more development-friendly policies that keep the rent lower despite massive immigration.
(1) The cost of attending college has grown faster than inflation over the past few decades.
(2) Yet, it seems that the ROI on college is high (for those you graduate), as evidenced in this article.
(3) There's another statistic that gets bandied in education reform circles: 43% of college grads in 2013 were underemployed (working jobs that don't need a college degree).
I wonder how #3 reconciles with #1 and #2. Perhaps this is a case of averages lying, and the ROI data for top colleges might look very different from bottom colleges (to the point where there may even be no income disparity between attending a bad college vs. not attending college).
Has anyone seen a better / deeper analysis of this?
Perhaps it's not the "going to college" that puts one at an advantage, but the "being able to go to college." In other words, the people who are able to make the choice to go and afford it were already at an advantageous position.
That makes sense, but I don't think it is as big of a factor as the actual value of education. Our economy is increasingly shifting to skilled labor. If you have the right skill set, opportunities abound.
To some degree that's still begging the question of whether "education" in the traditional sense is the best way to acquire those skills. In the case of (a good school, a typical person) I think the answer is yes for an important chunk of those skills (while other important chunks are not learned well in that setting). As you move further from that case, more questions are raised, and of course partisans in the pro/anti ("traditional") education camps tend to ignore one or the other of the chunks I mentioned.
I think that surrounding yourself with other smart people with a common interest in learning and where you are expected to learn is the best way to acquire those skills. I think that is harder to find outside of formal educational programs.
Yeah, I didn't mean to imply I disagreed with you. When I think about what makes traditional education so valuable I don't think its the traditional education part of it. When one thinks about what makes a college a college, you think about the quality of the professors and curriculum and while I think that's valuable, I don't that's the key part.
The Economist published a chart in April showing some of the (American) colleges with the highest and lowest rates of return on investment over twenty years. The article admits that the study "surely overstates the financial value of a college education" because it compares college graduates to non-attendees without trying to adjust for differences in intelligence, etc., so take it for what it's worth.
The employers probably "need" employees with at least average intelligence and conscientiousness, for which a college degree (in anything) is a decent proxy.
>Yet, it seems that the ROI on college is high (for those you graduate), as evidenced in this article.
The ROI of a college degree earned 30 years ago is high. Recent college graduates aren't faring so well. Those who do have jobs are frequently underemployed, living with their parents, and buried under school loans.
Pittsburgh is a pretty amazing place right now, because it's a recovering rust belt city that's managed to transition from manufacturing (steel) to services (health care, banking, higher education, technology firms) pretty well but because their initial crash was SO hard they still have very affordable cost-of-living comparitively. So you have all the public transit and nice museums and great libraries and all that but a bartender and a waitress can buy a house and raise kids together too. It's someplace where "hipsters" are not secretly living off their parents' money to front as making it.
Pittsburgh has really weird demographics, with an uneducated older population, an educated younger population, a big gap in middle-aged population, and a massive housing surplus.
Why? Pittsburgh's steel industry, which had tons of well-paid blue-collar union jobs, collapsed in the early 1980s: 'Following the 1981–1982 recession, for example, the mills laid off 153,000 workers.'[0] A lot of the working-age population left in the following years. The main thing remaining were a lot of world-class institutions in healthcare & education (much better than a lot of the Rust Belt, e.g. Detroit/Toledo/Milwaukee), so the people that come to & stay in Pittsburgh today are very well-educated[1]. The older population that had pensions or savings to fall back on when the steel collapse came, and didn't need to relocate for work, is a lot less educated.
"A higher share of college graduates also yielded higher wages for workers without college degrees, likely because employers have to pay them more to keep them in higher-cost cities:"
I'm wondering if the increase in average wage of non-college degree holders outweighed the higher cost of living in the cities with high concentrations of college degree holders.
If so, not so bad, all boats lifted higher by the tide &c. I suspect that the rise does not outweigh the increased cost of living, especially rents/housing costs. The result is a long commute added onto the day for the people who do not hold college degrees and who work in the chi-chi economy. That process has limits.
Perhaps it needs a generation or two to reach steady-state?
"They're gaining access to high-cost cities like New York or San Francisco that offer so much more than good jobs: more restaurants, better schools, less crime, even cleaner air."
lol what? The whole article reads like someone who has a giant boner for SF. Lots of assumptions that it's an objectively better place to live and obviously everyone wishes they could live there.
Tech job hubs are few and far between. There are only a handful of cities you have to choose from. Toledo and Baton Rouge aren't on the table for tech workers just like SF and NYC aren't on the table for a high school drop out.
Interesting article and data, it is basically a deep and narrow dive into one of the issues tacked by the 2008 book 'The Big Sort': http://www.thebigsort.com/
This just in: Rich people have better lives and are happier than poor people! Film at 11.
If they want people to start taking inequality seriously, the first thing journalists might want to do is to figure out what the hell they're trying to accomplish.
What if what the journalists are trying to accomplish is to make information available to people and prompt dialogue about the issues -- whatever the outcome of that dialogue?
And my reaction is: yes, there is inequality, but what we're seeing here is that college graduates are improving their cities. Awesome!
And I really dislike this 30,000-foot view of humanity:
""" "When you have more college grads, all of these amenities seem to improve in your city," Diamond says. "But that may be at the expense of kicking out lower skilled workers to other cities."
It also comes at the expense of other cities that may lose their college grads. What happens to Toledo and Baton Rouge without them? """
I'm not subservient to helping cities-- I'm going to cities because of my own interests, and I absolutely reject any guilt to bringing down those cities. I dislike this attitude that sees people as pawns that we should move around for political goals rather than as people who are just living their lives.