This fits in with many of the grand old conspiracy theories. What the conspiracy theorists miss is there doesn't need to be a unified agenda behind this process, simple banal human tribalism suffices.
Mr Hanson's "elites" here are just as simple, emotional, and irrational critters as any of the rest of us, and their kindergarten politics are no more (or less) noble than our "who stole my lunch?" bullshit. By being big fish in a smaller pond the waves of silliness they slop go further, that's all.
Essentially, elites come from among the people. People generate elites, who generate policy. Bias flows the same way. In any given nation, the people are very likely biased. Which generates biased elites. Who, in turn, generate biased policy.
The problem is not biased elites. The problem is that humans are biased, and little can be done to remove their biases. Much less to ensure they don't manifest those biases in the results of their work.
I agree with everything except your last sentence. Much CAN be done to ensure those biases do not manifest in the results of their work. More generally, this is the power of our institutions.
Turtles would be so much simpler, tho. A tortoise will copulate with a boot for hours with no pretense about what he's doing or why. No justifications or excuses.
Us hairless apes on the other hand, we'll act contrary to all our good sense in the firm belief that "the job requires it" or "the boss wants it this way" or worst yet "the rule book specifies it thus". We can knowingly compound our stupidity and decry the results. Then expect praise for following the rules.
At least the tortoise gets the idea, at the bottom of the hole, "dig up, stupid!"
elites become intellectuals, intellectuals have their solid bias. whenever someone was converted, they will get same bias. e.g., world should be changed to 'better way' by them.
> elites come from among the people ... People generate elites
That's just false! In every society, the elite class is overwhelmingly comprised of families who maintain their high social standing and wealth over decades or centuries. The lower classes are similarly static over the generations, and all classes have a class-specific bias.
If you need proof, take a sampling of the 'Early Life' Wikipedia section of any elite you can think of. Even tech founders, who are more likely socially mobile than most other elites, have overwhelmingly had an upper-middle class upbringing at _least_.
Your second paragraph is completely at odds with your first paragraph. Founders coming from upper middle class families is not what a society with stable elites looks like.
Zuckerberg for example did come from an upper middle class background. His father was a dentist. His grandfather Jack Zuckerberg was in the Air Force. And his great grandfather came here as an immigrant to Ellis island and worked as a fruit peddler and tailor.
I see the point you're making (and mostly agree with it,), but I don't know about calling the Zuckerberg family just 'upper middle class', his grandparents came from humble beginnings, sure.
But I'd rather say Mark himself comes from a squarely upper class background. Upper middle class households don't quite send two kids to Phillips Exeter Academy or boarding schools anywhere in that price range (50-60k per year). There's a big difference in income between a dentist who owns his practice and has other dentists working with him vs. just a dentist; Mark's dad was in the former category.
Upper class families don’t have their kids transfer into Exeter after two years at public high school. But I’m fine calling that upper class, the point is that it’s not anything like generational wealth.
This essay makes exactly the same points as "Yes Minister", except in non-comedic form.
"Yes Minister" is widely regarded as a politician's manual and not as a conspiracy theory.
But perhaps if the elite BBC makes a series that is surprisingly accurate, it is the truth. If an internet commentator makes the same points, it is a conspiracy theory.
Which proves the first paragraph of this very essay.
From my experience, many conspiracies are manuals.
Like, whether they happened or not, they're good ideas. "Good" in that they can be executed successfully. Obviously this depends no which conspiracy comes to mind when you hear "conspiracy theory", but many can be inspirational.
>Operation Northwoods was a 1962 plan by the U.S. Department of Defense to stage acts of simulated or real terrorism on US soil and against U.S. interests and then put the blame of these acts on Cuba in order to generate U.S. public support for military action against the Cuban government of Fidel Castro.
As part of the U.S. government's Operation Mongoose anti-Castro initiative, the plan, which was not implemented, called for various false flag actions, including simulated or real state-sponsored acts of terrorism on U.S. and Cuban soil.
The plan was proposed by senior U.S. Department of Defense leaders, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lyman Louis Lemnitzer.
I don't think anyone in the UK sees "Yes Minister" as a manual. Its comedy derives from exposing things that everybody perceives to be true (politicians want to have morals but are forced to let them go during election season, civil servants know they're supposed to be supporting the current government but will also need to work with the other party when the political tides change again, etc) but saying so in public is "not done".
It doesn't need to be a manual because it is accurately describing human weakness in the face of a complex world, and the results are (as in the real world) often highly absurd.
It (or similar programs) might appear to be a manual if it generates a feedback loop: it starts as a comedic exaggeration of actual truths; people see it and become jaded and cynical, assuming the exaggerations literally to be happening; and this expectation enables politicians to get away with more corruption.
Yes Minister is fiction. The problem with conspiracy theories is that they read as fiction and fail to engage adequately with actual evidence. Things happen like they do in Yes Minister (or more recently, The Thick Of It), but not in identical ways.
On the other hand ..
> What this says is that, even in a democracy, the ~90th percentile rich have the most influence, business interest groups have about half as much, and mass interest groups have about a third as much. We less rich folks only get what we want, to the extent we do, because these elites mostly agree with us, and because we sometimes influence mass interest groups.
.. this is Marxism 101, the most basic set of observations about how classes work made over a century ago. I don't thing any sensible person would deny that there is such a thing as an elite, or that the elite have their agendas, but if you want to make specific claims about specific real people then you need evidence.
> What the conspiracy theorists miss is there doesn't need to be a unified agenda behind this process
There doesn't need to be a mind behind a process. Many things, including some of society's worst troubles and the confluences of malfeasance in politics, are simply emergent properties of large social systems. No intent necessary.
This is an incredibly important point that I agree with. I would take this further to separate "legal person" from "mind", as I understand the mind is itself an emergent and self-supporting adaptive process[1], very common to find among any persistent complex systems. Politicians don't make politics, it's the other way around.
[1] I use this phrase to replace "intent", because outside of requiring the "intender" to be person who can be held to account with punishment or reward, the reward mechanism is the same environmental pressure.
There's an interesting other side there too: corporations are our "slow AI", if we take a more realistic approach to their legal personhood perhaps we can all benefit.
Reminds of research of termite mounds. A researcher mused that maybe mounds are best understood as a composite animal that in some sense, itself has a soul. One particular scientist "imagined that eventually the mound would evolve into a being that could move across the veldt – very slowly in its dirt skin – a monster hybrid of soil and soul."[1]
My personal theory (picked up by reading a variety of sources) is that people who believe in conspiracy theories have some natural propensity to see agency behind every random event. It may be some form of pareidolia [1] or Apophenia [2].
honestly, it's not the worst pattern match; because a lot of conspiracy theories actually were conspiracy theories. E.G. CIA testing LSD, Tuskeegee siphilis study, Polio Vaccines used as a spy operation to catch Osama Bin Laden...
Sometimes the rustle in the bushes actually is a tiger. But I think some people live in a world haunted by tigers. The internet has given these individuals an unprecedented ability to connect with others who see things in a similar way.
People suffering from something like this may feel totally isolated from regular people around them and so meeting fellow sufferers online must be a great relief and comfort. Unfortunately, from their perspective, the affliction is external rather than internal.
To many people, the malicious, or at least "counter to their interests but with forced participation" action they have to deal with every day might as well be a world haunted by tigers. I have Adtech clients, and the lengths that are gone to to track conversions are astounding - Sometimes when I'm explaining the pipelines to myself I'm convinced I'm talking about a crazy conspiracy.
Quite a lot of conspiracy theories are "exactly wrong"; that is, they resemble something that happened or is happening, but the persons involved are wrong and the motives are wrong. Even weirder, the conspiracists don't cite the true events as support of their theories.
"big pharma" => see Purdue
"pizzagate" => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Nolan_(politician) "is an American registered sex offender and former state district court judge, a former leader in the Republican Party and a former chairman of Donald Trump's presidential campaign in Campbell County, Kentucky. On February 9, 2018, he pleaded guilty to 19 counts of child sex trafficking and human trafficking; on February 11, 2018 he was sentenced to serve 20 years in prison"
and so on.
> Tuskeegee siphilis study
And a lot of conspiracy theories are "what if this thing the US did to black people it also did to white people"
I'm not even in the same prison, I'm a Brit, and I strongly agree with this. I actually get to vote in a non-FPTP election as well and, surprise surprise, it produces much better results.
I mean, that's a pretty interesting choice for pizzagate, you could easily have dropped it on Jeffery Epstein, to be charitable to the conspiracy theorists, is known to be associated with Bill Clinton.
edit: removed joke about "epstein not killing himself" because it distracted from the main point by introducing a second conspiracy theory.
The story that Epstein killed himself and it just happened that nobody was watching and the camera was broken is completely implausible. Something is suspicious there.
That doesn't prove any particular course of events did happen, though. In the meantime the next excitement will be Prince Andrew.
The stated person was just the first hit for a republican actually convicted of child sex offences.
Epstein not killing himself was a great moment, a tremendous moment.
For a brief, beautiful period of time, we were united. Far left, far right, normies and the fringes of cyberculture alike; united in thinking “so the cameras magically broke and the guards fell asleep… yea right!!!”
The narrative my mind generated (and it is just a narrative) is that some entirely normal person whose job or circumstances gave them access to Epstein, looked at him, decided he was guilty and that a billionaire like him would never face justice, turned the camera(s) off, and took justice into their own hands.
I have no evidence for this, and don’t want to even imply it’s more than my imagination.
The thing is, high profile prisoners have a whole system set up to prevent a single individual getting in close like that. (Or were supposed to. You'd think they learned after Oswald!)
Sure, but it’s not like software is supposed to be hackable either, and if physical security is like digital security the guards probably have a long list of issues they told their bosses about years ago and about which nothing has been done.
I think this is more an illustration and reminder that "conspiracy theory" was a term that was workshopped to dismiss criticism (about the JFK assassination investigations.) None of those were conspiracy theories, and were trivially verifiable shortly after they happened. They were just aggressively dismissed and ignored by anybody who had the authority to punish someone responsible. This goes on until everyone responsible is dead, or legal clocks have run down.
I enjoyed learning that everyone is skeptical… about different things.
It helped add a lot of clarity and understanding for different viewpoints, because you can begin an information exchange by first trying to parse what someone is skeptical about.
One person’s skepticism is another person’s conspiracy theory.
I saw a Facebook post recently that I really liked:
"Nobody who believes in conspiracy theories has ever been a project manager."
If you've experienced how difficult it can be to cat-herd 10-20 people on some web migration project, you know how impossible it would be to have a huge group of people engaged in some goal that nearly everyone would find objectionable, be effective, and somehow manage to keep it all a secret.
No difference between them and the tribes that can destroy you with guns. And no difference between the ones who can destroy you with guns and the ones that can destroy you with baseball bats. In the end, it's all the same, their tribe employs deadly force against you. One tribe gets fancy lawyers to speak eloquently in defense of the deadly force employed against you, another may just kill you and go home to have a beer. Either way, you're still dead.
The detail of the paper, rather than the headline,
actually undercuts most of the traditional conspiracy theories. The views of the 90th percentile "elite" are highly correlated with those of the median voter, and largely uncorrelated with business lobby groups.
Another quirk is that it appears even supermajorities often don't get their way (the graphs show that if 80-90% of the elite favour a policy, it is enacted a little under half the time. Which is better than the probability if 80-90% of the median voters favour it, but still means they usually don't get their way...)
The headline finding is their model which essentially suggests that the median voter doesn't have much influence except where their views align with wealthier people and/or interest groups, but the thing is, they usually do align with one or other and none of the groups actually get their way that often!
It'd also be interesting to see the findings disaggregated by administration and by policy area. It is not difficult to imagine that some of the most consistent disagreements between the median American and the elite American regards issues like upper tax brackets (which elites pay and median Americans don't). To what extent politicians are seeking the favour of 90th percentile Americans when they (sometimes) don't raise upper income tax brackets even when the average American supports it and to what extent they are simply pleasing themselves and following their preferred economic theory are open questions. Disaggregation would also help evaluate other theories, like one of American's political parties being aligned with the elite, or the reverse causation hypothesis where in a political environment where proposed change often fails, the 90th percentile American is [incidentally] happier with the status quo.
> The detail of the paper, rather than the headline, actually undercuts most of the traditional conspiracy theories.
> Another quirk is that it appears even supermajorities often don't get their way (the graphs show that if 80-90% of the elite favour a policy, it is enacted a little under half the time. Which is better than the probability if 80-90% of the median voters favour it, but still means they usually don't get their way...)
If political deadlock and politicians having priorities of their own means even supermajorities of what the study calls the elite don't get their way, I'm not sure it helps the conspiracy theory about the power of the elite. (I mean, it leaves open claims about specific billionaires and more bizarre theories about shapeshifting lizards, freemasons or pizza shops, but they were outside the scope of the study)
The second point does lend support to the argument that politicians frequently fail to deliver what the public want, but that's less a conspiracy theory and more established fact :)
I've figured this out less than a year ago. It's just a uncaring world full of randomness.
When it comes to surveillance, a lot of people are easily swayed and convinced as long as the ones who are under surveillance are the "bad guys". "I've got nothing to hide" is the go to argument.
When it comes to unfair economic policies, a lot of voters genuinely believe in small state policies. A common policy package is known as neoliberalism.
With housing, a lot of home owners are politically active and they often want to slow down change and avoid an underwater mortgage. What happens is that they vote for short sighted policies that benefit them over the short term, without realizing that they aren't the only ones benefiting. They vote in various things that restrict housing supply or they freeze property taxes. What they didn't think of, is that they prevented residential development but they left commercial developers free to whatever they wanted because they provide jobs. Yet when you have too many jobs, more and more people will come to your city making housing worse.
Freezing property taxes helps landlords who never sell their property or speculators who don't intend on actually renting out the unit.
The average voter gets hurt by the way they vote but they don't realize it. Lots of unintended consequences but that doesn't mean there are people out there conspiring against you. There are lots of greedy people looking out for their own self interest who don't care about others, but that describes pretty much everyone.
The IMF and World Bank shouldn’t be on that list. They help third world countries replicate the practices and systems that have made developed countries wealthy.
I remember reading an article in 2000 from some Brown professor encouraging Bangladesh (my home country) not to listen to the World Bank and IMF and instead do indigenous agriculture or something like that.
Good thing nobody gives a shot what Brown professors think because Bangladesh has developed tremendously over the last two decades thanks to following those policies.
The World Bank and the IMF have led to flawed outcomes in some places, but they’ve also led to phenomenal outcomes (e.g. the Four Asian Tigers, post-war Europe, and Greece recently). Their failures are largely the fault of elite preconceptions rather than open malice
not sure why shouldnt be on the list, the IMF discussed and advocated it, and the Bangladeshi gov followed their lead.
the definition of a conspire is to "work together to someone else's detriment", im sure from the perpective of someone who didn't benefit from that economic development they "conspired".
It shouldn’t be on the list because IMF and World Bank policies don’t “discuss and advocate for policies that benefit the extremely wealthy over others.”
I know many liberals want Bangladeshis to remain in a childlike state of nature doing subsistence farming forever, but the fact is that capitalism lifted America and Europe out of poverty and it’s doing the same thing for Bangladesh. Bangladesh and Vietnam are the two countries in the world where the people have the strongest support for capitalism: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alyssaayres/2014/10/28/banglade...
I think what's missed is that there doesn't have to be a conspiracy behind a unified agenda. People whose goals and interests converge can coordinate without actually colluding.
There wasn't anything in this article that made me think he was suggesting a conspiracy. In fact the word 'bias' (repeated twice in the title) sort of implies it's not a conscious process. The way I read it was that everybody acts in their own interests, without coordination, and trends emerge, with "elite status" being a label you apply to a set of completely unrelated people. No conspiracy, just bias.
Looking at the author's CV, he's an economics professor, and that's a very Econ view of the world. So, I would not be surprised if he doesn't feel like he needs to explain that perspective on his blog.
One time I was in an uber in Paris, and the uber driver felt it was his duty to tell me about all the shadow groups that control the world. The only problem is that they were Parisian versions of shadow groups that would therefore have to be in direct competition with the American shadow groups that control the world.
Anyway, nice to see the filter bubbles working so well. Haha, localized versions of controlling groups. No, but really, the flaw behind these master controlling group theories is that there are so many of them that would have to compete that its the same as none existing.
> No, but really, the flaw behind these master controlling group theories is that there are so many of them that would have to compete that its the same as none existing.
Andrew Gelman has made this same observation, which he calls "the piranha problem", in the context of sociology and psychology papers. The typical paper identifies a random-looking stimulus that nevertheless has a large effect on some behavior like voting or accepting a romantic partner. And the problem is, there are so many of these papers, all showing large effects, that it's impossible for any of the effects to be reliable, because even if the effect a particular paper identifies is real, there are so many other effects influencing the same outcome that the effect described by the particular paper cannot have any meaningful influence.
Oh, it gets better. Once the conspiracy theorists discover each other online, they interact and mesh their theories together, including those "shadow groups".
BTW, it can be rather amusing to see how the culture of different societies is reflected in their respective conspiracy tropes. For example, in US, we have "sovereign citizens", while Germany has "Reichsburgers". Both groups make broadly similar claims - asserting inapplicability of most laws to themselves etc. But while sovereign citizens are completely decentralized and don't even claim any legitimate central authority, the Reichsburgers have an ostensible shadow government-in-exile (although they disagree on which of the many is the legitimate one). And said "government" actually issues documents such as IDs and driver licenses, that are anathema to the sovereign citizens as a matter of principle. Ordnung muss sein?
> We less rich folks only get what we want, to the extent we do, because these elites mostly agree with us, and because we sometimes influence mass interest groups.
The Cambridge Princeton study found the same thing. When "less rich folks" get what they want, it was only because of coincidence with something elites were already pursuing, with sometimes there being mass influence of what the elites were doing, but never really influence of the agencies heads or representatives.
And so there is neither direct democracy (which, duh, but people act like there is at the federal level), nor is there representative democracy unless you elevate an amorphous group of "elites" as the idea of representatives.
Go hang out at some fundraiser dinners and other places politicians, specifically the kind of things that federal congresscritters, state representatives and governors speak at. Bring a camera and write a blog post about it and they'll often let you in as a journalist for free, and might even feed you.
We do have a representative democracy, and a shockingly effective one. It represents the people who can drop $50k + annually on political donations. My time in that world is some time in the past so I'm probably badly underestimating the amount.
Not that these elected representatives don't consider the actual constituents and citizenry, but they listen to their donor list. With all the goodwill and the best people having the best intentions, the system would still have flaws; and these people are just people like the rest of us.
> We do have a representative democracy, and a shockingly effective one. It represents the people who can drop $50k + annually on political donations. My time in that world is some time in the past so I'm probably badly underestimating the amount.
Ha! Yes this is true.
I don't find this controversial, I find it sad that poorer people were lied to about their ability to participate or what the vote means or its weight.
American elites have used the free will bias to justify everything from inequality, healthcare, and faith; for it is easier to blame than to help the unfortunate
If "helping the unfortunate" always worked, why is there still homelessness in the west coast?
You can only help those who wish to help themselves. People who are in this category are willing to put in work and effort, regardless of success. People who are not just want a free handout and will quit if things don't go there way. Which ironically, is the social institution in much of the midwest, whom mostly have some of the lowest homeless populations in the US. Because they don't placate people contributing to the problem. They make people feel ashamed for contributing to it but empower them when they work towards getting out of it.
Doesn't this analysis miss the fact that homeless people migrate around the country to places with better policies? If you're going to die in the midwest because there are no social institutions to support you and you don't see a realistic way for work and effort to keep you alive, you may as well use your last couple of bucks to take a Greyhound out west to Skid Row and take your chances there.
Or, more brutally, doesn't this analysis miss the fact that without a social safety net, homeless people die? If you can get nutritious meals at a soup kitchen on Skid Row and you have a safe place to keep a tent and some belongings, you're going to be alive and contributing to the homelessness numbers in LA. If you die in the midwest, you don't contribute to their homelessness numbers.
Homeless people move to CA because it has great weather and social services and so its great to be homeless there compared to other places. Homeless people are rational so that's where they go.
The crucial fact, though, is that none of these great conditions in CA do anything to actually get people out of homelessness, they just subsidize homelessness and make it easier to be homeless. So naturally, homeless people being rational, the effect of these policies is to increase homelessness overall.
There are people who are legit mentally ill and somehow as a society we've decided that the best we can do is have them live like dogs, scrounging around and shitting in the streets.
There are other people who just really like heroin and would rather do heroin than anything else and california is the probably the best place in the world if that's what you want to do.
A truly humane homeless policy would institutionalize mentally ill people, not subsidize drug addicts, and help people on the edge of homelessness find jobs and housing.
>A truly humane homeless policy would institutionalize mentally ill people, not subsidize drug addicts, and help people on the edge of homelessness find jobs and housing.
But that sounds mean and hard so we can't do that!
No I agree 100%. I personally think mental institutions need to be reestablished by the state because frankly, there are too many severely mentally ill homeless people that need to be off the streets for everyones safety. Drug addicts honestly I'm incredibly apathetic to. I understand it's a big deal but frankly, they've gone the way of ruining their lives. Not much you can do to help them. Placating them only keeps the cycle going. The real people who are just down on their luck tend not to stick with homelessness (except for Californian homeless people where honestly it's the only way for lower income people to get by).
> free will bias
As in the belief to having free will? I find it odd to describe that as a bias.
> justify everything from inequality,
No one justifies inequality, because the word by itself is meaningless. There’s a spectrum from total equality of outcome to total equality of opportunity. People find themselves in different positions on that spectrum.
> healthcare
I’m guessing that by this you mean socialized medicine, because Americans have a level of healthcare that’s way above most nations, including european ones.
While there can be a healthy debate about what option makes a better medical system, it’s pretty obvious that the recent attempts have been disastrous, with the government trying to solve problems that the government created long ago, only to create more problems for the future.
>faith
Call me crazy, but I thought that in liberal democracies we did not mind police people, so why would they need to justify faith?
In Germany in the 60s there was the concept of the "long march through the institutions", implying that the rebels of then would become the elites of tomorrow, with the purpose of then putting into practice the revolutionary policies. It worked to a certain degree, many formerly left-wing policies have now become mainstream, but of course a lot of compromises had to be made and the ideals got watered down.
Many people alive in the 60s will have died by now, and the rest will have had 50-60 extra years of life experience. They're hardly the same, except in a very strict "person with the same name as then" sense.
> They're hardly the same, except in a very strict "person with the same name as then" sense.
In terms of identity that is correct, but don't forget that when we refer to a particular person we are really using a label to point at a specific continuity of experience and agency through time, and unless qualified somehow (twelve-year-old Bob, Alice last year, you committed after yesterday's meeting, etc.) the default time point is either at the moment of reference or a moment just prior (the rest of the 4D 'worm' is incorporated transitively), and (again, by default) the 'now' pointer is thereafter updated continuously (at least in casual conversation in natural languages such as English).
It is pretty rare for continuity of experience (and agency) to be broken, and outside of science fiction physical continuity never is, so it isn't too surprising that English (and other natural languages I'm familiar with) largely elide the point-in-time qualifier by default.
We - both individually and in groups - are all of us Ships of Theseus, passing in the night.
The more specific criticism in Germany in the 60s was that may of the then-current elites had also been in positions of power two decades before, as (literal) Nazis.
It would be interesting to know with whom is being compromised and in what direction the watering down happens. Now that is the force we fail to illuminate but I believe has tremendous power in our society.
“Reality” the way it is used can be broadly subjective. Unless we’re referring to physical laws, almost everything is an abstraction that can be changed with the right societal impetus.
I read an English language article which I wish I could find. A girl was traveling after the DDR collapsed between east and west Berlin, or Nuremberg and Chemnitz or the like. She said on the old western side there were Turks all over, and red light districts and that sort of thing, whereas in the east it was still in many ways like the Germany in 1949. That in a number of ways, west Germany was more left wing than east Germany.
Maybe I missed something written here but very few of the elites I've known meet the description of them offered here. This does tend to describe what I have observed of the U.S. elite left. I would be very surprised to learn that Bezos or Gates were socialists, for example.
Tallying the wedge issues is terrible methodology that focuses on battles and misses the war. Would you rather win at 100 wedge issues or would you rather win at 0 wedge issues but the policies you wanted were already in place and not under attack?
To avoid this mistake, focus on the status quo of policies that facilitate comparison. Taxes are an excellent candidate. Everyone would rather have someone else pay the taxes. True power will arrange for it to be so. Look for tax privilege (types of income, industries, etc) and you will find true power.
By that logic the poor in the US have the most power? As they pay generally close to zero direct taxes (indirectly they pay the corporate taxes and gas taxes and such as hidden costs in their daily consumption)...
Perhaps? If not individually then collectively, whether as motivation toward a cheaper food supply, or as a caution to those who are not poor but only a couple of defiant decisions from losing what they've gained. It seems counterintuitive, but GPs rule of thumb may hold even there. I think the problem is in comparing a few wealthy individuals or cabals (in control) to an enormous number of real people (each without much control at all). Poverty is negative power under the same hierarchy responsible for controlling positive power.
We are looking for policy concessions. Not taking money from someone who doesn't have money to take isn't much of a policy concession.
Also, as you point out, there are tons of indirect taxes on the poor, but other aspects of the policy status quo really drive it home -- poor social safety net, bad public transport, "public" schools funded with property tax, policies that make rent go up, shipping the jobs overseas, etc, etc. We even allow homeless spikes!
My general point isn't so much that taxes are an ideal metric, it's that we should focus on measuring the status quo rather than measuring who won yesterday's wedge issue battles.
Corporation tax incidence falls squarely on shareholders. Profit taxes affect those who are the beneficiary of profits, and the vast majority of the stock market is owned by the very, very wealthy.
It's not unusual for people to be spoon-fed the exact opposite impression, of course.
That makes no sense. You set the price according to whatever gets you the highest profit.
You then pay the tax on the profit. There is no room to adjust the margins of the product based on your profit expectations. By that logic my profit expectation could be 1 trillion and I just set the margin based on that since prices are infinitely elastic and the consumer will always pay whatever I charge. No, a competitor will steal your customers and you will end up making less money.
What the corporate income tax may do is encourage the company to defer its profits overseas and wait for tax holidays or tax cuts. It may also discourage investors from investing in your country. Those are pretty huge downsides but they have nothing to do with product pricing.
> Corporation tax isn’t a cost of doing business, it’s calculated after costs have been removed from revenue.
I think the point being made is that prices have to be adjusted to allow revenue to cover taxes along with other costs.
Heinlein had a scene in Beyond This Horizon (IIRC) where someone is explaining that profits are also an expense that have to be accounted for to the bewilderment of the other character who was insisting that profits are what's left over that you keep after expenses are deducted from revenue.
It's more complicated than that of course. For one thing supply and demand are usually elastic to some degree, substitutions can sometimes be made, concentrations of supply and/or demand can provide efficiencies of scale (which then results in rent-seeking) and technology is always throwing monkey wrenches into the gears to shake things up ala Christensen.
Anyway, that taxes are an expense for the individual economic entity such as a company isn't really debatable unless you want to make some sort of existential argument for arguments sake.
>I think the point being made is that prices have to be adjusted to allow revenue to cover taxes along with other costs.
Profits always cover corporation tax because corporation tax is a fraction of profit (of course it's more complicated than that in reality). But the essential point is if corporation tax is lower then there is more money to distribute to shareholders, if the tax is higher then there is less.
You are conflating corporate income tax on profits with all of the other taxes businesses pay. Those get passed through as cost of doing business and ultimately into the cost of goods sold. Regarding profit, you are also missing the point of profit objectives, which get tacked onto the cost of goods sold, because taxes aren't a surprise to businesses..
The vast majority of the stock market is owned by the very, very wealthy because they're very, very wealthy. It's a tautology. People don't need to be spoon-fed, because if they have any kind of savings, its probably exposed to the stock market.
The idea people get spoonfed is that shareholders wouldnt really care if corporation taxes were jacked up because prices would somehow go up to "compensate" for the tax on their profits. It's "the little guy who gets hurt instead".
Even though increasing corporation tax doesnt decrease supply or increase demand.
It's not that easy, because not all groups are affected equally by all policies. With taxes, for instance, the analysis would suggest that nonprofits are the most powerful group in the country - businesses can occasionally bring their income tax down to $0 with tricky accounting, but nonprofits are exempt as a matter of right! I don't think that's a reasonable conclusion, and I'm pretty sure it's not the one you had in mind.
Let's disentangle the players in this in the following way. Because it would be absurd to believe charities are the most powerful entities, and "tricky accounting" etc reduces tax liabilities to the actual powerful, is there a way to discharge the conflict? Yes, there is. The charities are created by and funded by the actually powerful. I read somewhere that Sierra Club (and Greenpeace?) received millions more from the energy industry than in personal checks from concerned citizens, and among other things, one might consider tax policy a firmer decision making footing than organizational altruism.
Of course it's not that easy -- just because taxes are relatively easy to compare does not mean that they are easy to compare. Good comparisons are always difficult.
Re: nonprofits, I don't think those are the best counterexample to the "look at taxes" strategy because they are absolutely notorious for playing a part in the tax avoidance schemes of the wealthy. That doesn't mean there aren't nonprofits that write open source software, shelter animals, feed starving kids in impoverished reasons... but there are also nonprofits that serve primarily as a mechanism for getting money from point A to point B with the lowest taxes. The two are difficult to tease apart, and unfortunately that is the entire point.
> Tallying the wedge issues is terrible methodology
I'm unclear why you think these are wedge issues. I've copied what I think is the relevant paragraph describing the sample:
These 1,779 cases do not constitute a sample from the universe of all possible political alternatives (this is hardly conceivable), but we see them as particularly relevant to assessing the public’s influence on policy. The included policies are not restricted to the narrow Washington “policy agenda." At the same time—since they were seen as worth asking poll questions about—they tend to concern matters of relatively high salience, about which it is plausible that average citizens may have real opinions and may exert some political influence.
The authors describe the issues as "high salience" because they were deemed worthy of being in opinion polls, and presumably because they were part of the national discourse. To the extent these are wedge issues, what poll question isn't a wedge issue? Polls concern possible changes to society, and that will always have opposing sides.
The concept of the Overton Window is instructive here. Policies like "should local property taxes go up by .5 percentage points to fund school safety" are safely within the range of allowable discussions. These are issues on which the "elites" disagree, or don't have particular attachment to.
But questions that threaten their status, like "Is it good that individuals own the means of production?" are not going to be in the Overton Window any time soon, mainly because those elites agree that they like the status quo.
"Good results" is a subjective measure. The guys winning capitalism are a lot more likely to think the results are good than the people they're standing on.
Who in the world, without some flavor of capitalism, is doing better? China needed to let individuals own companies to get where they are, even if they reserve the right to disappear those individuals at any time.
The original paper refers to specifically to economic elites, but this article quite strangely redefines this group as a credentialist/cultural elite that is motivated by status and influence within bureaucracies and favors socialism. This seems to be a description of the author’s personal experiences within his university, but it ends up being a significant misrepresentation of the actual paper, which refers to an economic elite, where support for socialism is lowest.
It’s quite strange to see a paper about economic power exerting control over government policy being summarized as “elites support harsh, intrusive, and punitive business taxes, regulations, and legal liability.”
> Their highest hopes tend to be of gaining positions in, getting promoted in, or creating, such organizations. When they have dreams for the world, they dream of new versions with higher mandates and bigger budgets. (Think socialism.)
What? CEOs (example from the paragraph before, along with doctors, judges lawyers etc) want socialism?
> What? CEOs (example from the paragraph before, along with doctors, judges lawyers etc) want socialism?
Quite often, yes. For example, that's how we got universal public education in the US. The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto is a reasonable look at how it happened.
>What this says is that, even in a democracy, the ~90th percentile rich have the most influence, business interest groups have about half as much, and mass interest groups have about a third as much. We less rich folks only get what we want, to the extent we do, because these elites mostly agree with us, and because we sometimes influence mass interest groups.
>Thus elites support harsh, intrusive, and punitive business taxes, regulations, and legal liability. Yes when the super-rich are taxed, these elites are also taxed, but that may seem worth the price to take them down a peg or two. Most ordinary people miss this conflict by not distinguishing these two different kinds of “rich”.
American libertarians like Hanson want to be pro-private business/capitalism and anti-elite at the same time. Hence the distinction between the credentialed, academic, govt institute and bureaucracy based elites ("bad") and the business owner class ("good"). I doubt how much these are actually distinct. Rich business owner types still send their kids to be credentialed and some will go into more bureaucratic roles than others and if you get rich based on govt roles and political lobbying etc, you will invest.
your connection in one direction is "send their kids to be credentialed"? That's pretty weak, and I think you might not really have a case for an equivalence relation.
There is absolutely no reason you can’t be a capitalist and against elitism at the same time. If the superrich paid their fair share I don’t think there would be as much animosity towards that group.
Absolutely not, not in any traditional society.[1] The elite are governors; the super-rich are merchants. Those super-rich are what the term "middle class" used to refer to.
In a capitalist society, though, it's next to impossible for super-rich to not be part of the elite. It's right in the name. People with capital are running the show.
Capitalism was invented to manage the slaver's business model in the US, so as long as "the elite" is defined to include the economic class of slavers, the US groups the super-rich and the mere business successes largely within a single discourse. I see this as an aspirational application of hyperdescent[1] by the slavers to elevate themselves in the US's emerging power structure, since I highly doubt the (pre-existing) super-rich would have said "the violent hicks? Yeah they're with us" as the US's self-conception was developing.
Causation seems wholly unattested, and I would guess that the attributed causation is backwards. People who are skilled/talented/privileged/whatever enough to meaningfully influence policy and the world around them will start by using that influence to get themselves to a $210K+ household income, because that's the individually-rational thing to do. As the article notes, there are a bunch of professions where this is median for a single earner and a whole lot of professions where this is median for a dual-income household.
The argument about policy influence implies that everyone is in theory equally capable of influencing policy. (Note this is orthogonal to whether everyone should be equally capable of influencing policy.) But you wouldn't argue that everyone is equally capable of earning high salaries (again, orthogonal to whether everyone should be) - you can empirically see that 10% of households make over $210K and 90% make under that, for whatever reasons. Why wouldn't we expect those reasons to also apply to people's empirical capability to influence policy?
What a bunch of bullshit. I love that the title of this is "overcoming bias", but then the bias in this article is so blatantly transparent:
> Their highest hopes tend to be of gaining positions in, getting promoted in, or creating, such organizations. When they have dreams for the world, they dream of new versions with higher mandates and bigger budgets. (Think socialism.)
Must be nice to live in such a cartoon-view of the world.
I really dislike the conflation of the many different meanings of “elite”. It’s such an emotionally overloaded word. If you define elite status as a top X percentile of income or wealth, then just use the words “rich people”, “wealthy people”, or even better, “high income people”. Using these more specific words get to the core of the matter.
The “anti-elite” sentiment, when it becomes overloaded with education status or domain expertise, really pushes my buttons for getting causality wrong in the world’s problems.
I digress here, but in other words: yes, it’s a problem that rich folks have more opportunities to become educated and to become experts in their fields, and that regular folks don’t have the same opportunities to do so. But the world’s injustices and problems are not caused by “elites” in the sense of “people who have expertise and authority in their fields”.
As an analogy, you can blame (in part) society and government for your lack of maths skills, but you can’t blame “mathematics” (the pure science) or even “mathematicians” for your problems. Pointing the finger in the right direction is super important if you care about accountability and justice.
There was an earlier comment on a different discussion where someone referred to "elites" as basically anyone who worked for the government or had a bachelors degree.
It is a lazy way to get people to agree with your argument when they wouldn't if you were forced to define who you precisely mean.
Indeed, and it’s also terribly counter-productive in that it borders on anti-intellectualism.
If you care about regular folks having a good life and having good opportunities, if you want the American dream (work hard and get rewarded) to be true, then a big part of that requires “vertical mobility”, and that means that you should want regular people to be able to achieve “elite status”.
It’s not the existence of elites that is the problem, it’s how fairly opportunities are distributed and how fairly people are rewarded. Stated in another way, the problem is not the elite, the problem is how the elite is made.
Exactly. So much politics is done by swearword association; "elite", "marxist", "fascist", "corporate", etc. Just stick the label on some non-specified group of bad people.
But a lot of the world's problems are caused by those "domain expert" type of elites, because, in many countries, including the US, they run the government. Anthony Fauci, for example is probably not particularly wealthy, but has had more power over citizens in the US over the last year than any billionaire. Not that some man on the street could do a better job, but you have to expect that people are going to be pissed at the people making the decisions when things go wrong.
Are you suggesting that Dr Fauci does not deserve to have his position, or that somehow the accountability mechanisms that govern his office are unjust?
I would submit that Dr Fauci typically holds very little power, and that he has had an unusual amount of influence lately because there’s a pandemic.
Very thought-provoking article. I think the narrative has a truthful core but it exaggerates reality, almost to a caricature.
Anyway, a related thought, I've been increasingly noticing one phenomenon:
A surprisingly large fraction of human behavior and thinking is driven by an often subconscious desire to maintain or advance social status and respect, this is true for both individual and group identities. I think it's one of the most underrated hidden forces behind political preferences. Some examples:
- Obama becoming the president has increased the relative social status of black people. Some whites used to have or still have a subconscious perception that whites are at the top of the hierarchy and Obama was a threat to their position in the ladder, that's why they hated him.
- China's growth has lead to a relative decrease in the international status of the US. Which is why Trump's anti-China rhetoric resonated so well.
- When someone is rude or dismissive to you, they're subtly saying that you're not important for them and they don't respect you, which is the cause for the anger.
> These elites who set policy [...] love, large bureaucratic organizations.
Bingo. The age of clerks is upon us - when everyone should be a clerk, because we're governed by clerks, who cannot possibly imagine any worthy person being anything other than a clerk ...
> When they have dreams for the world, they dream of new versions with higher mandates and bigger budgets. (Think socialism.)
This sentence was a red flag in terms of the author’s credibility. The wealthy educated class the author generalizes about overwhelmingly despises socialism. This sentence also indicates that the author has internalized that tired misunderstanding “socialism is when the government does stuff”.
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] threadMr Hanson's "elites" here are just as simple, emotional, and irrational critters as any of the rest of us, and their kindergarten politics are no more (or less) noble than our "who stole my lunch?" bullshit. By being big fish in a smaller pond the waves of silliness they slop go further, that's all.
The problem is not biased elites. The problem is that humans are biased, and little can be done to remove their biases. Much less to ensure they don't manifest those biases in the results of their work.
Us hairless apes on the other hand, we'll act contrary to all our good sense in the firm belief that "the job requires it" or "the boss wants it this way" or worst yet "the rule book specifies it thus". We can knowingly compound our stupidity and decry the results. Then expect praise for following the rules.
At least the tortoise gets the idea, at the bottom of the hole, "dig up, stupid!"
Being biased against the extermination of all human life is a bias, but I think we'd agree it's a good one.
That's just false! In every society, the elite class is overwhelmingly comprised of families who maintain their high social standing and wealth over decades or centuries. The lower classes are similarly static over the generations, and all classes have a class-specific bias.
If you need proof, take a sampling of the 'Early Life' Wikipedia section of any elite you can think of. Even tech founders, who are more likely socially mobile than most other elites, have overwhelmingly had an upper-middle class upbringing at _least_.
Zuckerberg for example did come from an upper middle class background. His father was a dentist. His grandfather Jack Zuckerberg was in the Air Force. And his great grandfather came here as an immigrant to Ellis island and worked as a fruit peddler and tailor.
But I'd rather say Mark himself comes from a squarely upper class background. Upper middle class households don't quite send two kids to Phillips Exeter Academy or boarding schools anywhere in that price range (50-60k per year). There's a big difference in income between a dentist who owns his practice and has other dentists working with him vs. just a dentist; Mark's dad was in the former category.
"Yes Minister" is widely regarded as a politician's manual and not as a conspiracy theory.
But perhaps if the elite BBC makes a series that is surprisingly accurate, it is the truth. If an internet commentator makes the same points, it is a conspiracy theory.
Which proves the first paragraph of this very essay.
Like, whether they happened or not, they're good ideas. "Good" in that they can be executed successfully. Obviously this depends no which conspiracy comes to mind when you hear "conspiracy theory", but many can be inspirational.
Figuratively true, and sometimes literally. Take the Operation Northwoods manual for instance:
http://www.smeggys.co.uk/operation_northwoods.php?image=01#t...
>Operation Northwoods was a 1962 plan by the U.S. Department of Defense to stage acts of simulated or real terrorism on US soil and against U.S. interests and then put the blame of these acts on Cuba in order to generate U.S. public support for military action against the Cuban government of Fidel Castro.
As part of the U.S. government's Operation Mongoose anti-Castro initiative, the plan, which was not implemented, called for various false flag actions, including simulated or real state-sponsored acts of terrorism on U.S. and Cuban soil.
The plan was proposed by senior U.S. Department of Defense leaders, including the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lyman Louis Lemnitzer.
It doesn't need to be a manual because it is accurately describing human weakness in the face of a complex world, and the results are (as in the real world) often highly absurd.
On the other hand ..
> What this says is that, even in a democracy, the ~90th percentile rich have the most influence, business interest groups have about half as much, and mass interest groups have about a third as much. We less rich folks only get what we want, to the extent we do, because these elites mostly agree with us, and because we sometimes influence mass interest groups.
.. this is Marxism 101, the most basic set of observations about how classes work made over a century ago. I don't thing any sensible person would deny that there is such a thing as an elite, or that the elite have their agendas, but if you want to make specific claims about specific real people then you need evidence.
There doesn't need to be a mind behind a process. Many things, including some of society's worst troubles and the confluences of malfeasance in politics, are simply emergent properties of large social systems. No intent necessary.
[1] I use this phrase to replace "intent", because outside of requiring the "intender" to be person who can be held to account with punishment or reward, the reward mechanism is the same environmental pressure.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/sep/18/a-giant-crawlin...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareidolia
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia
People suffering from something like this may feel totally isolated from regular people around them and so meeting fellow sufferers online must be a great relief and comfort. Unfortunately, from their perspective, the affliction is external rather than internal.
"big pharma" => see Purdue
"pizzagate" => https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Nolan_(politician) "is an American registered sex offender and former state district court judge, a former leader in the Republican Party and a former chairman of Donald Trump's presidential campaign in Campbell County, Kentucky. On February 9, 2018, he pleaded guilty to 19 counts of child sex trafficking and human trafficking; on February 11, 2018 he was sentenced to serve 20 years in prison"
and so on.
> Tuskeegee siphilis study
And a lot of conspiracy theories are "what if this thing the US did to black people it also did to white people"
Both parties and beyond, everyone must stop the partisan squabbling.
No, I don't care about the psyop you read on reddit.
> Both parties and beyond, everyone must stop the partisan squabbling
Prisoner's dilemma: the first person to stop being partisan loses. And demonstrably hyper-partisanship is working for at least one party.
I'm losing.
You all suck.
Abolish First Past the Post.
I'm not even in the same prison, I'm a Brit, and I strongly agree with this. I actually get to vote in a non-FPTP election as well and, surprise surprise, it produces much better results.
Seems like just trade one problem for another.
The issue with the ranked choice was the rules, the runoff resulted in some random person with fewer votes winning.
edit: removed joke about "epstein not killing himself" because it distracted from the main point by introducing a second conspiracy theory.
That doesn't prove any particular course of events did happen, though. In the meantime the next excitement will be Prince Andrew.
The stated person was just the first hit for a republican actually convicted of child sex offences.
For a brief, beautiful period of time, we were united. Far left, far right, normies and the fringes of cyberculture alike; united in thinking “so the cameras magically broke and the guards fell asleep… yea right!!!”
I have no evidence for this, and don’t want to even imply it’s more than my imagination.
There's so much bad stuff going on, everywhere, why do people feel compelled to make stuff up?
It helped add a lot of clarity and understanding for different viewpoints, because you can begin an information exchange by first trying to parse what someone is skeptical about.
One person’s skepticism is another person’s conspiracy theory.
"Nobody who believes in conspiracy theories has ever been a project manager."
If you've experienced how difficult it can be to cat-herd 10-20 people on some web migration project, you know how impossible it would be to have a huge group of people engaged in some goal that nearly everyone would find objectionable, be effective, and somehow manage to keep it all a secret.
That can only mean that I've obtained a mythical level of financial success and access.
Paper is at: https://sci-hub.tf/10.1017/s1537592714001595
Another quirk is that it appears even supermajorities often don't get their way (the graphs show that if 80-90% of the elite favour a policy, it is enacted a little under half the time. Which is better than the probability if 80-90% of the median voters favour it, but still means they usually don't get their way...)
The headline finding is their model which essentially suggests that the median voter doesn't have much influence except where their views align with wealthier people and/or interest groups, but the thing is, they usually do align with one or other and none of the groups actually get their way that often!
It'd also be interesting to see the findings disaggregated by administration and by policy area. It is not difficult to imagine that some of the most consistent disagreements between the median American and the elite American regards issues like upper tax brackets (which elites pay and median Americans don't). To what extent politicians are seeking the favour of 90th percentile Americans when they (sometimes) don't raise upper income tax brackets even when the average American supports it and to what extent they are simply pleasing themselves and following their preferred economic theory are open questions. Disaggregation would also help evaluate other theories, like one of American's political parties being aligned with the elite, or the reverse causation hypothesis where in a political environment where proposed change often fails, the 90th percentile American is [incidentally] happier with the status quo.
> Another quirk is that it appears even supermajorities often don't get their way (the graphs show that if 80-90% of the elite favour a policy, it is enacted a little under half the time. Which is better than the probability if 80-90% of the median voters favour it, but still means they usually don't get their way...)
I think those two things oppose each others.
The second point does lend support to the argument that politicians frequently fail to deliver what the public want, but that's less a conspiracy theory and more established fact :)
When it comes to surveillance, a lot of people are easily swayed and convinced as long as the ones who are under surveillance are the "bad guys". "I've got nothing to hide" is the go to argument.
When it comes to unfair economic policies, a lot of voters genuinely believe in small state policies. A common policy package is known as neoliberalism.
With housing, a lot of home owners are politically active and they often want to slow down change and avoid an underwater mortgage. What happens is that they vote for short sighted policies that benefit them over the short term, without realizing that they aren't the only ones benefiting. They vote in various things that restrict housing supply or they freeze property taxes. What they didn't think of, is that they prevented residential development but they left commercial developers free to whatever they wanted because they provide jobs. Yet when you have too many jobs, more and more people will come to your city making housing worse. Freezing property taxes helps landlords who never sell their property or speculators who don't intend on actually renting out the unit.
The average voter gets hurt by the way they vote but they don't realize it. Lots of unintended consequences but that doesn't mean there are people out there conspiring against you. There are lots of greedy people looking out for their own self interest who don't care about others, but that describes pretty much everyone.
Here's a short list of organizations (off the top of my head) who discuss and advocate for policies that benefit the extremely wealthy over others:
* Davos
* WTO
* IMF
* World Bank
I remember reading an article in 2000 from some Brown professor encouraging Bangladesh (my home country) not to listen to the World Bank and IMF and instead do indigenous agriculture or something like that.
Good thing nobody gives a shot what Brown professors think because Bangladesh has developed tremendously over the last two decades thanks to following those policies.
the definition of a conspire is to "work together to someone else's detriment", im sure from the perpective of someone who didn't benefit from that economic development they "conspired".
I know many liberals want Bangladeshis to remain in a childlike state of nature doing subsistence farming forever, but the fact is that capitalism lifted America and Europe out of poverty and it’s doing the same thing for Bangladesh. Bangladesh and Vietnam are the two countries in the world where the people have the strongest support for capitalism: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alyssaayres/2014/10/28/banglade...
Looking at the author's CV, he's an economics professor, and that's a very Econ view of the world. So, I would not be surprised if he doesn't feel like he needs to explain that perspective on his blog.
Anyway, nice to see the filter bubbles working so well. Haha, localized versions of controlling groups. No, but really, the flaw behind these master controlling group theories is that there are so many of them that would have to compete that its the same as none existing.
Andrew Gelman has made this same observation, which he calls "the piranha problem", in the context of sociology and psychology papers. The typical paper identifies a random-looking stimulus that nevertheless has a large effect on some behavior like voting or accepting a romantic partner. And the problem is, there are so many of these papers, all showing large effects, that it's impossible for any of the effects to be reliable, because even if the effect a particular paper identifies is real, there are so many other effects influencing the same outcome that the effect described by the particular paper cannot have any meaningful influence.
BTW, it can be rather amusing to see how the culture of different societies is reflected in their respective conspiracy tropes. For example, in US, we have "sovereign citizens", while Germany has "Reichsburgers". Both groups make broadly similar claims - asserting inapplicability of most laws to themselves etc. But while sovereign citizens are completely decentralized and don't even claim any legitimate central authority, the Reichsburgers have an ostensible shadow government-in-exile (although they disagree on which of the many is the legitimate one). And said "government" actually issues documents such as IDs and driver licenses, that are anathema to the sovereign citizens as a matter of principle. Ordnung muss sein?
But you know the chimp troupe will then start crying about how timid leaders are and brave leaders get propped up who dig the hole deeper.
The Cambridge Princeton study found the same thing. When "less rich folks" get what they want, it was only because of coincidence with something elites were already pursuing, with sometimes there being mass influence of what the elites were doing, but never really influence of the agencies heads or representatives.
And so there is neither direct democracy (which, duh, but people act like there is at the federal level), nor is there representative democracy unless you elevate an amorphous group of "elites" as the idea of representatives.
We do have a representative democracy, and a shockingly effective one. It represents the people who can drop $50k + annually on political donations. My time in that world is some time in the past so I'm probably badly underestimating the amount.
Not that these elected representatives don't consider the actual constituents and citizenry, but they listen to their donor list. With all the goodwill and the best people having the best intentions, the system would still have flaws; and these people are just people like the rest of us.
Ha! Yes this is true.
I don't find this controversial, I find it sad that poorer people were lied to about their ability to participate or what the vote means or its weight.
https://trendguardian.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale...
You can only help those who wish to help themselves. People who are in this category are willing to put in work and effort, regardless of success. People who are not just want a free handout and will quit if things don't go there way. Which ironically, is the social institution in much of the midwest, whom mostly have some of the lowest homeless populations in the US. Because they don't placate people contributing to the problem. They make people feel ashamed for contributing to it but empower them when they work towards getting out of it.
Or, more brutally, doesn't this analysis miss the fact that without a social safety net, homeless people die? If you can get nutritious meals at a soup kitchen on Skid Row and you have a safe place to keep a tent and some belongings, you're going to be alive and contributing to the homelessness numbers in LA. If you die in the midwest, you don't contribute to their homelessness numbers.
The crucial fact, though, is that none of these great conditions in CA do anything to actually get people out of homelessness, they just subsidize homelessness and make it easier to be homeless. So naturally, homeless people being rational, the effect of these policies is to increase homelessness overall.
There are people who are legit mentally ill and somehow as a society we've decided that the best we can do is have them live like dogs, scrounging around and shitting in the streets.
There are other people who just really like heroin and would rather do heroin than anything else and california is the probably the best place in the world if that's what you want to do.
A truly humane homeless policy would institutionalize mentally ill people, not subsidize drug addicts, and help people on the edge of homelessness find jobs and housing.
But that sounds mean and hard so we can't do that!
No I agree 100%. I personally think mental institutions need to be reestablished by the state because frankly, there are too many severely mentally ill homeless people that need to be off the streets for everyones safety. Drug addicts honestly I'm incredibly apathetic to. I understand it's a big deal but frankly, they've gone the way of ruining their lives. Not much you can do to help them. Placating them only keeps the cycle going. The real people who are just down on their luck tend not to stick with homelessness (except for Californian homeless people where honestly it's the only way for lower income people to get by).
> justify everything from inequality,
No one justifies inequality, because the word by itself is meaningless. There’s a spectrum from total equality of outcome to total equality of opportunity. People find themselves in different positions on that spectrum.
> healthcare I’m guessing that by this you mean socialized medicine, because Americans have a level of healthcare that’s way above most nations, including european ones.
While there can be a healthy debate about what option makes a better medical system, it’s pretty obvious that the recent attempts have been disastrous, with the government trying to solve problems that the government created long ago, only to create more problems for the future.
>faith Call me crazy, but I thought that in liberal democracies we did not mind police people, so why would they need to justify faith?
In terms of identity that is correct, but don't forget that when we refer to a particular person we are really using a label to point at a specific continuity of experience and agency through time, and unless qualified somehow (twelve-year-old Bob, Alice last year, you committed after yesterday's meeting, etc.) the default time point is either at the moment of reference or a moment just prior (the rest of the 4D 'worm' is incorporated transitively), and (again, by default) the 'now' pointer is thereafter updated continuously (at least in casual conversation in natural languages such as English).
It is pretty rare for continuity of experience (and agency) to be broken, and outside of science fiction physical continuity never is, so it isn't too surprising that English (and other natural languages I'm familiar with) largely elide the point-in-time qualifier by default.
We - both individually and in groups - are all of us Ships of Theseus, passing in the night.
To avoid this mistake, focus on the status quo of policies that facilitate comparison. Taxes are an excellent candidate. Everyone would rather have someone else pay the taxes. True power will arrange for it to be so. Look for tax privilege (types of income, industries, etc) and you will find true power.
Also, as you point out, there are tons of indirect taxes on the poor, but other aspects of the policy status quo really drive it home -- poor social safety net, bad public transport, "public" schools funded with property tax, policies that make rent go up, shipping the jobs overseas, etc, etc. We even allow homeless spikes!
My general point isn't so much that taxes are an ideal metric, it's that we should focus on measuring the status quo rather than measuring who won yesterday's wedge issue battles.
No:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/06/opinion/incom...
>indirectly they pay the corporate taxes
Corporation tax incidence falls squarely on shareholders. Profit taxes affect those who are the beneficiary of profits, and the vast majority of the stock market is owned by the very, very wealthy.
It's not unusual for people to be spoon-fed the exact opposite impression, of course.
The profits of the company are only relevant to investors, not consumers.
What the corporate income tax may do is encourage the company to defer its profits overseas and wait for tax holidays or tax cuts. It may also discourage investors from investing in your country. Those are pretty huge downsides but they have nothing to do with product pricing.
I think the point being made is that prices have to be adjusted to allow revenue to cover taxes along with other costs.
Heinlein had a scene in Beyond This Horizon (IIRC) where someone is explaining that profits are also an expense that have to be accounted for to the bewilderment of the other character who was insisting that profits are what's left over that you keep after expenses are deducted from revenue.
It's more complicated than that of course. For one thing supply and demand are usually elastic to some degree, substitutions can sometimes be made, concentrations of supply and/or demand can provide efficiencies of scale (which then results in rent-seeking) and technology is always throwing monkey wrenches into the gears to shake things up ala Christensen.
Anyway, that taxes are an expense for the individual economic entity such as a company isn't really debatable unless you want to make some sort of existential argument for arguments sake.
Profits always cover corporation tax because corporation tax is a fraction of profit (of course it's more complicated than that in reality). But the essential point is if corporation tax is lower then there is more money to distribute to shareholders, if the tax is higher then there is less.
Profits also aren't a cost. They're a residual claim.
Even though increasing corporation tax doesnt decrease supply or increase demand.
Re: nonprofits, I don't think those are the best counterexample to the "look at taxes" strategy because they are absolutely notorious for playing a part in the tax avoidance schemes of the wealthy. That doesn't mean there aren't nonprofits that write open source software, shelter animals, feed starving kids in impoverished reasons... but there are also nonprofits that serve primarily as a mechanism for getting money from point A to point B with the lowest taxes. The two are difficult to tease apart, and unfortunately that is the entire point.
I'm unclear why you think these are wedge issues. I've copied what I think is the relevant paragraph describing the sample:
The authors describe the issues as "high salience" because they were deemed worthy of being in opinion polls, and presumably because they were part of the national discourse. To the extent these are wedge issues, what poll question isn't a wedge issue? Polls concern possible changes to society, and that will always have opposing sides.The concept of the Overton Window is instructive here. Policies like "should local property taxes go up by .5 percentage points to fund school safety" are safely within the range of allowable discussions. These are issues on which the "elites" disagree, or don't have particular attachment to.
But questions that threaten their status, like "Is it good that individuals own the means of production?" are not going to be in the Overton Window any time soon, mainly because those elites agree that they like the status quo.
We have work to do on how we manage the negative externalities of the approach, but the approach itself has proven solid.
It’s quite strange to see a paper about economic power exerting control over government policy being summarized as “elites support harsh, intrusive, and punitive business taxes, regulations, and legal liability.”
Citation needed. The paper does indeed limit the meaning, but also concedes that this interpretation of what they are measuring is possible.
> Not all “elite theories” share this focus. Some emphasize social status or institutional position
> What we cannot do with these data is distinguish definitively among different versions of elite theories.
https://www.cato.org/blog/poll-59-americans-have-favorable-v...
> Most ordinary people miss this conflict by not distinguishing these two different kinds of “rich”.
The British refer to these classes as the academic elite and the commercial elite. They compete with each other.
What? CEOs (example from the paragraph before, along with doctors, judges lawyers etc) want socialism?
Quite often, yes. For example, that's how we got universal public education in the US. The Underground History of American Education by John Taylor Gatto is a reasonable look at how it happened.
>Thus elites support harsh, intrusive, and punitive business taxes, regulations, and legal liability. Yes when the super-rich are taxed, these elites are also taxed, but that may seem worth the price to take them down a peg or two. Most ordinary people miss this conflict by not distinguishing these two different kinds of “rich”.
Arne't the super-rich a subset of the elite?
Absolutely not, not in any traditional society.[1] The elite are governors; the super-rich are merchants. Those super-rich are what the term "middle class" used to refer to.
[1] Phoenician city-states may be an exception.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperdescent
The argument about policy influence implies that everyone is in theory equally capable of influencing policy. (Note this is orthogonal to whether everyone should be equally capable of influencing policy.) But you wouldn't argue that everyone is equally capable of earning high salaries (again, orthogonal to whether everyone should be) - you can empirically see that 10% of households make over $210K and 90% make under that, for whatever reasons. Why wouldn't we expect those reasons to also apply to people's empirical capability to influence policy?
> Their highest hopes tend to be of gaining positions in, getting promoted in, or creating, such organizations. When they have dreams for the world, they dream of new versions with higher mandates and bigger budgets. (Think socialism.)
Must be nice to live in such a cartoon-view of the world.
That said, I didn't have access to the full linked research article in the story but the actual scientific research, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/278151684_Testing_T..., sounds interesting.
The “anti-elite” sentiment, when it becomes overloaded with education status or domain expertise, really pushes my buttons for getting causality wrong in the world’s problems.
I digress here, but in other words: yes, it’s a problem that rich folks have more opportunities to become educated and to become experts in their fields, and that regular folks don’t have the same opportunities to do so. But the world’s injustices and problems are not caused by “elites” in the sense of “people who have expertise and authority in their fields”.
As an analogy, you can blame (in part) society and government for your lack of maths skills, but you can’t blame “mathematics” (the pure science) or even “mathematicians” for your problems. Pointing the finger in the right direction is super important if you care about accountability and justice.
It is a lazy way to get people to agree with your argument when they wouldn't if you were forced to define who you precisely mean.
If you care about regular folks having a good life and having good opportunities, if you want the American dream (work hard and get rewarded) to be true, then a big part of that requires “vertical mobility”, and that means that you should want regular people to be able to achieve “elite status”.
It’s not the existence of elites that is the problem, it’s how fairly opportunities are distributed and how fairly people are rewarded. Stated in another way, the problem is not the elite, the problem is how the elite is made.
I would submit that Dr Fauci typically holds very little power, and that he has had an unusual amount of influence lately because there’s a pandemic.
Anyway, a related thought, I've been increasingly noticing one phenomenon:
A surprisingly large fraction of human behavior and thinking is driven by an often subconscious desire to maintain or advance social status and respect, this is true for both individual and group identities. I think it's one of the most underrated hidden forces behind political preferences. Some examples:
- Obama becoming the president has increased the relative social status of black people. Some whites used to have or still have a subconscious perception that whites are at the top of the hierarchy and Obama was a threat to their position in the ladder, that's why they hated him.
- China's growth has lead to a relative decrease in the international status of the US. Which is why Trump's anti-China rhetoric resonated so well.
- When someone is rude or dismissive to you, they're subtly saying that you're not important for them and they don't respect you, which is the cause for the anger.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_hegemony
Bingo. The age of clerks is upon us - when everyone should be a clerk, because we're governed by clerks, who cannot possibly imagine any worthy person being anything other than a clerk ...
This sentence was a red flag in terms of the author’s credibility. The wealthy educated class the author generalizes about overwhelmingly despises socialism. This sentence also indicates that the author has internalized that tired misunderstanding “socialism is when the government does stuff”.