The way that CPI inflation is calculated accounts for spending pattern changes already, including mortgage/rent. If you don't have a nuanced critique of the CPI calculation method, I'd argue that this point is moot.
It's also worth pointing out that the average square footage of a home has grown considerably in this time, and that even if you are comparing a similar sized home, it is unfair to compare a home 3 miles from city center in a city of 1 million people to the same in a city of 2 million people, after it has grown through the years.
The sociological data regarding being raised by a single parent is out there. It is extremely clear that it correlates with a number of negative outcomes. You being offended by this doesn't change the statistical reality of the situation.
You continue to state that market forces are bad, while not paying any attention to the counterargument that they are pretty good compared to the alternatives. Making an honest comparison would be a much tedious discussion.
I'm not saying market forces are categorically bad. I'm saying they're bad at some things. Market forces are terrible at distributing housing, healthcare, and primary education. As with most things, there's a happy medium between unfettered market forces and central planning.
To me, it seems like man's constant fight against the brutality of mother nature will never end. As long as we need food, need medicine, and entropy destroys what we create, we will need a lot of people working to solve problems.
Any conception of basic income where we can freely give out $2000 a month to everyone has a net present value roughly equal to giving each person a lump sum payment of $500,000. There's not enough wealth in the world to sustain it.
Sure, give someone 500k and they might try to buy some luxury goods and inflate prices of various things. Give someone enough to not be destitute on a monthly basis and you’ll have a huge boon to the economy - because they’ll buy the essentials. People will always want more than just the basics and thus work.
Money is not equal to wealth, money is a device. That's the first and most common mistake in economics.
UBI is a way to reshuffe the cards of modern economy and hope that'll fix some of the current problems. It certainly won't allow everyone to drive a Ferrari.
As is often the case in economics, the scarcity is not an absolute lack of resources, but a result of inefficient allocation.
The world's mean income is about $18000 adjusted for purchasing power parity so it's not a complete stretch to get to $2000 per month for the whole world https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17512040
The USA has a mean income of about $72,000 so in theory UBI could be $6000/mo without bankrupting the country.
It would be very interesting to see what kind of crazy spending-led boom you could achieve by redistributing wealth exactly evenly across every American citizen.
I don't understand what you mean by this. UBI redistributes income - wouldn't it obviously be funded via taxation? USA would be able to afford a much higher UBI than Sierra Leone would because US income is higher. What determines how much UBI can be issued if aggregate income is irrelevant?
If you fund by a 100% income tax, everyone would quit instantly. There would literally be no point in working for money. UBI cannot be funded by the thing UBI would eliminate.
American households own $98 trillion in net worth. Averages to about $340,000 per person. And this is just household wealth. So yes there is enough money out there.
the only wealth that isn't "household wealth" is public assets. I guess there might technically be enough to give everyone $500k (or $2000/month), but do you want the government to provide any services?
$2000 per month is with wealth right now. It will be more than affordable in the future since the country will have more wealth in the future. Pretty much everything in current economics relies on wealth growth (pension funds, 401ks, etc), so adding this into that mix is very reasonable.
the relationship between the two figures is that $2000/month is roughly the safe withdrawal rate for diverse $500k portfolio (ie, the most you can spend without risking that you use up the principal over several decades). if you use the almost all the returns from the nation's capital to pay out $2000/month, there isn't much growth to speak of. of course, it's sort of a naive analysis to treat a nation's wealth like a retirement account, but the idea clearly doesn't pass the "back of the napkin" test. there would have to be some powerful knock-on effects to make it halfway viable.
Growth where? If you "pay out" returns from the nation's wealth to its own citizens, the wealth still stays inside the nation and wealth growth still happens.
You were not incorrect to say they are a minority. Nobody factually disputed you on this detail. However, other folks added relevant details to show the prevalence of fun ownership and to give context to the political influence of gun owners.
I think there are obvious cases where passive moral conformists (which you would argue are at the bottom of PG's rankings) are a net good in the world. PG doesn't spend any time highlighting this because it is not the focus of the essay.
Classifying people by their expressed personality is the best way to do it. If you refuse to judge a person by the content of their character you are blinding yourself.
Many people intentionally mischaracterize Peterson as intolerant. His position is generally extremely open-minded and comes from the position of a psychologist that has seen the failure modes of many different clients' lifestyles. When he tells moral tales that tilt toward a conservative lifestyle, they are told in the sense that straying from a conservative path is morally fine, but subjects you to personal risk of worse outcomes.
One of the main reasons for his rise to fame was the opposition to bill C-16. A bill he claimed to oppose because of its free-speech implications, when all the bill actually did was extend existing legal protections of identifiable groups to also include gender identity and gender expression.
Those exact same protections already existed on the basis of race, religion, national or ethnic origin, age, sex, sexual orientation, and mental or physical disability.
If Peterson's gripe is with compelled speech then how come he didn't strongly criticize the existing legislation for other identifiable groups, but instead just singled out the new protections for transgender individuals?
> straying from a conservative path is morally fine, but subjects you to personal risk of worse outcomes.
Which is a baseless and very questionable claim to make.
> Many people intentionally mischaracterize Peterson as intolerant.
Peterson is a Christian conservative with some fairly patriarchal ideas [1,2], so I think characterizing him as intolerant is pretty fair.
You are explicitly mischaracterizing his arguments. Peterson has spent more time than you or I arguing about the pros and cons of patriarchal hierarchies. The fact that he is willing to admit to their merits and demerits is evidence that he is more open-minded, and arguing at a higher level of abstraction, than most people in the political debate.
Peterson opposed C-16 on genuine and extremely reasonable free-speech grounds. He was speaking as an individual that endorses the value of free speech. Hate speech laws obviously limit free speech, have a chilling effect on genuine debates, and can even hurt our ability to think straight.
Peterson was an academic and decided to fight c16 because it became an an issue in his university and he disagreed with how their policies were going to in fact compel him to speech.
It wasn't as if he was sitting in a room somewhere looking for bills to fight compelled speech..
As I understand it (and maybe I'm wrong) his objection was that the law would compel his speech (in particular to call a transwoman a woman). Is that claim false? Is there any existing similar compelled speech under the existing legislation? If not then that seems to explain why he hadn't previously criticized the legislation.
It would compel that speech in the same way that you are compelled to call me "Joshua" and not "asshole" when we are engaging in a conversation at work.
I think the exercise of considering which historical atrocities you would passively comply with is a good exercise for understanding the banality of evil. PG did little to argue his moral superiority from this perspective, rather highlighted how different people conform to the norm, regardless of the virtue (or lack thereof) of the norm itself. The many anti-slavery individuals of the past still largely did nothing for hundreds of years until popular opinion and material conditions changed tides.
You point out that he did have an axe to grind regarding cancel culture, and highlight that it's not particularly heroic. But in doing so it makes it even more apparent that the anti-cancel-culture crowd is passive and ineffective, making his point clearer.
He could have made the same point regarding conformity by citing the Stanford prison experiment if he wanted to. I'd be willing to bet a dollar that there are personality psychology studies that even correlate 5-factor personality traits to moral conformity. Unfortunately popular culture is bit too much of the opinion that there are no underlying personality traits that predict future behavior nowadays.
> different people conform to the norm, regardless of the virtue (or lack thereof) of the norm itself.
But this is exactly what I'm disagreeing with: there was widespread and popular opposition to slavery from its invention. To act like "everyone was doing it, everyone thought it was ok" is absolutely just not true.
The people in favour of slavery were largely the wealthy, powerful minority who benefited from slavery.
> The many anti-slavery individuals of the past still largely did nothing for hundreds of years until popular opinion and material conditions changed tides.
This is such a strange statement. "anti-slavery individuals did nothing"? Who do you think achieved abolition?! You seem to think that abolition was some passive force which happened as a result of "changing tides": I, on the other hand, seem to remember that there was a war fought about it (in the US at least).
Furthermore, slavery didn't begin and end in the united states: abolition was achieved in many other places before it go to the US, in fact the US was something of a holdout for slavery in the west.
There were countless slave rebellions, some quite successful, and political action absolutely achieved progress towards abolition in many places around the world.
> But in doing so it makes it even more apparent that the anti-cancel-culture crowd is passive and ineffective, making his point clearer.
The "anti-cancel-culture" crowd, by my estimation, makes up the vast majority of positions of power in the US. For god's sake the president routinely decries cancel culture and a large part of his appeal is the fact that he's "un-PC".
> He could have made the same point regarding conformity by citing the Stanford prison experiment if he wanted to
The Stanford prison experiment was a complete fabrication and research fraud. (honestly: you should look up modern information on it. I had kind of thought it was common knowledge that it was bunk, but I suppose it did have a large cultural impact)
> I'd be willing to bet a dollar that there are personality psychology studies that even correlate 5-factor personality traits to moral conformity.
I don't know, but my point is that Graham has clearly picked superficial personality traits that flatter him by associating his idea of himself with his idea of abolitionists. Regardless of whether the idea of "personality types" is valid or not, it's clear that what Graham is doing here isn't.
> Unfortunately popular culture is bit too much of the opinion that there are no underlying personality traits that predict future behavior nowadays.
Again, I would completely disagree.
I don't know what the psychological consensus is, but from laypeople it seems clear that "personality traits are important" is an extremely mainstream view.
Slavery was present for hundreds or thousands of years. It was also obviously morally wrong for the entirety of it's existence. It's decline in the western world was relatively quick compared to the duration of it's existence. This decline came about as the western world became rich enough that eliminating the suffering of slaves was worth the inconvenience of replacing their labor. This change of material conditions gave enough cultural leeway for passive conformists to embrace legislative change.
It is not obvious that the Stanford prison experiment is a complete fraud. Even with it's flaws it suggests that people are much much more likely to engage in immoral behavior when an authority figure endorses it. Historical atrocities confirm this.
I don't think there's a productive way to argue about the cancel culture point. Data supporting which side is "winning" the cancel culture war is too cherry-pickable. The only ground I can stand on is that people such as Stephen Pinker getting cancelled is obviously ridiculous.
I do not think that the personality traits discussed are superficial. Other posters have provided more evidence, especially regarding openness and conscientiousness, that I speculated on earlier. I do not think that the purpose of PG's essay is to flatter himself.
> This decline came about as the western world became rich enough that eliminating the suffering of slaves was worth the inconvenience of replacing their labor.
This is just not true, and certainly not the view of most historians. This is an important claim, and you have not backed it up with evidence.
> It is not obvious that the Stanford prison experiment is a complete fraud.
I'm sorry, but this is quite a strange statement to me. Let me put it this way: if I cited the Stanford prison experiment in a university paper, the paper would be failed. The experiment is widely criticised, outright fraud has been found in a number of cases, and its results have not been replicated.
> The only ground I can stand on is that people such as Stephen Pinker getting cancelled is obviously ridiculous.
Again, Stephen Pinker is an extremely powerful individual.
He's a multi-millionaire, a Harvard professor, I don't think I could come up with a better example of someone with a large platform. If he's been "cancelled" then he's an example of how insignificant and ineffectual "cancel culture" really is.
(of course people looking into his association with Jeffrey Epstein is quite another thing, I certainly don't think that's a "cancelling")
