GBRK
1hr ago
If you want to talk about actual combat scenarios...
If you can de-escalate the situation, you should. If you have a weapon and your opponent doesn't, use it. If your opponent has a weapon and you don't, just do what they tell you instead of getting stabbed or shot. If your're both unarmed and there's nothing keeping you where you are, just run. If you're both unarmed and you're trapped-- and this is the scenario woman (rationally) fear the most-- you're probably already grappling, so you might as well bring out the bjj.
Striking may be tactically useful, especially as a supplement to grappling, but if you get into a stand-up fistfight you've almost certainly making some sort of strategic mistake. I say this as someone who's dabbled in a few different martial arts. The most important thing your instructor can teach you about fighting is how not to. The second most important thing they can teach you is how to win the specific kind of fight you're training for-- whether that's in boxing ring, or in the living room against a rapey tinder date. To that extent, I think it's an important result that a 50th percentile women can spend three to five years to get to a point where she can win a grappling match against an 80th percentile man.
GBRK
1hr ago
A three percentage point gap may be statistically significant, but I don't think it's very interesting or notable. There's an eight-point gap in labor force participation rate, and one full-time-volunteer wife with a working husband can get a lot of volunteer hours. Heck, with a gap that small it could be something as banal as different responses to the same activities as men and women have different standards.
Sorry I posted the wrong link. I mean to link this: https://aibm.org/research/men-and-volunteering-gender-gaps-and-trends/
Admittedly, a 5% gap still doesn't seem like as much of a difference, but you need to compare the proportions of the people volunteering. 27% vs 35% already means that the base ratio of volunteers is 84 men for 100 women. Then add in the fact that the genders choose different types of volunteering-- men are much more likely to be coaches, for example, while women are much more likely to be anything else. Finally, volunteers are going to spend different amounts of time volunteering. It all multiplies together into a crisis of male volunteers for specifically mentorship roles.
Male spaces get disrupted and socially attacked.
I occasionally hateread crystal.cafe and they complain pretty often about unwelcome males (successfully) inserting themselves into female spaces and disrupting them. My priors are telling me to that their complaints are still less relevant than yours, and I'm confident in those priors because if I wasn't I would have them, but I'm not meta-confident in those priors because I'm fully aware that my incentives as a man are to seek out information that supports pro-man priors. Generalizing, I find myself in this situation pretty often when it comes to gender-war stuff-- I'm confident enough in my object-level beliefs to argue for them, but I'm not confident enough in my confidence to accept any totalizing theories because even small changes to my priors should force me to completely rethink the specifics of a broad philosophy.
For example, I was talking to my little brother about the lack of male mentorship recently and he said he thought about doing big brothers big sisters/boys and girls club, but decided against it because he figured if he was going to be doing that sort of thing anyways, he might as well be paid for it-- like he got paid for working as a substitute teacher. If you let your eyes go out-of-focus this generally melds into the "particular gender roles are unfairly imposed on me" supertheory, but in-focus it's completely at odds with the, "men don't want to be mentors because they're afraid of being called pedophiles" theory.
GBRK
2hr ago
The most politically active individuals remain men, but as a cohort men are less politically active
GBRK
5hr ago
HPMOR has many flaws, but it really does achieve what it sets out to do. It...
- Provides a fantasy wherein merely being actually intelligent (as opposed to being iron man or sherlock holmes intelligent) is enough to gain social status, wealth, and power.
- Actually manages to teach general principles by which its audience (high schoolers) can become more intelligent.
- Captures the essential fantasy of harry potter in general.
- Doesn't make any of the invisible-to-normies but backbreaking-to-autists mistakes found in most ordinary literature.
GBRK
3d ago
Don't put words in my mouth, buddy. I'm not part of some sort of anti-man conspiracy; my position is that basically no one (including myself) should have the epistemic confidence to have a position.
Speaking very broadly, I suspect the problem is less about actual costs and more about opportunity costs-- basically, I think that most men just have better things to do than volunteer given their goals and incentives. I think I would enjoy volunteering for boy scouts, liability and bureaucracy (and the risk of false accusations) be damned. But I'm trying to get myself in position to secure a wife and kids, and to that extent the best uses of my time are earning money, getting fit, and seeking legible status. Optimizing for the intersection of those things and also enjoying my life generally leaves me focused on working, working out, and trying (so far, futiley) to get published. And I'll have to keep focusing on those things indefinitely because suddenly letting myself go wouldn't be a great recipe for keeping a wife and kids.
But to the extent that all the things I said are true, and generalizeable, I know I'm still not reaching the bottom of the issue-- I'm not getting to why these opportunity costs exist. And even discovering that wouldn't necessarily suggest which actions could or should be taken to mitigate them. I could make suggestions, but no matter how hard I tried for apolitical neutrality they would probably flatter my interests and goals in particular. So the problem remains intractable, and everyone who says otherwise without addressing the full complexities just makes more convinced that no one really knows what's going on.
GBRK
3d ago
Again, this sounds like noncentral, reasoning-backwards stuff. Women don't like bureaucracy either. Men tolerate liability when it comes to other pursuits. Other countries and organizations have varying levels of both but still face a surplus of male suicides and lack of male mentors. Without rejecting your premise that bureaucracy and liability are onerous, I find myself unconvinced by the argument that they must therefore be the principal causes of our crisis of masculinity.
GBRK
3d ago
You're really underestimating female bjj practitioners. I'm fat at 6'1" 245 lbs, but I think I'm pretty convincingly 80th percentile or higher at fighting compared to men in my age cohort thanks to previous martial arts experience. But the (short, fat, female) purple belt at the jiu jitsu gym I joined still beat my ass on the rare occasion that we fought. Multiplying it out a female jiu jitsu purple belt is probably far rarer than 1%-- relative to women her age, I'd guess she's at or above the top 0.01% in terms of fighting ability-- but the interesting result is that it's not athleticism, but technique that puts her over the edge.
"Men are afraid of being called pedophiles" seems like an insufficiently powerful explanation. While it may explain some fraction of why men volunteer less for boyscouts, it's almost certainty downstream of why men volunteer less in general, which in turn is downstream of whatever combination of factors leads to less male involvement in communities/pro-social activities/the male loneliness epidemic in general. I have a hard time believing that pedophile-accusation-risk is the reason why men commit suicide and abandon their children more often, but conversely I can imagine a satisfying explanation for suicides and absent fathers also being applicable to the problem of why men don't lead boy scout troops anymore. "Men are afraid of being called pedophiles" isn't false, but my gut instinct is that it's noncentral. Actually, the link I posted seems to hint at the real causes by looking into the crosstabs-- men with children and/or bachelor's degrees volunteer at much greater rates than single and/or uneducated men. Given that men are facing rising rates of singlehood and falling rates of education, I'd look in that direction for the true causation. Just don't make the mistake of fingering whatever most flatters your beliefs as the problem... you might not be wrong to blame misandry, or anti-intellectualism, or whatever your personal bugbear is... but a lazy epistemology isn't going to convince anyone of your point, and won't do anything to get the issue fixed.
GBRK
4d ago
I saw a study offsite about the lack of male role models and there was a lot of anxious whining about how men are afraid of being seen as creeps/pedophiles but I think any attempt to explain the problem without accounting for the general reasons why men are under-included in communities in general is going to fall prey to occam's law. It seems obvious to me that a satisfyingly complete explanation for why men don't join the scouts will also explain...
- Why men volunteer less
- Why men commit suicide more often
- Why men so often abandon their children
- Why men are more politically inactive
... And so on, and so forth.
But agreeing on that explanation is near-impossible because nearly without exception, people work backwards from their preffered solution to determine what the cause of the problem is. Anti-safetyist mottizens want to make scouting dangerous again, anxious redditors want counter-propaganda to convince women to not be afraid of men, women want to pressure single fathers into taking responsibility, and I even saw one dude that thinks the solution is masculine bonding via class warfare. If any of these groups is right, I suspect it's mostly by accident.
GBRK
11d ago
You are much more optimistic about AI than I would be. I'm afraid I consider AI an unmitigated disaster for creative industries.
AI is a tool, like any other. It saves time on technical execution, but near-completely lacks vision. The problem is, the vast majority of people who use it also lack vision, so we get "art" that is technically excellent but totally uninteresting. Where an artist uses the time-savings to add even more vision, though, it performs a strictly additive service. For example-- I've seen a lot of webfiction where the story is wholly human-generated, and then AI art is just used for character portraits. The art only benefits, because a constant amount of vision is still being expended on the writing without the opportunity cost of the author having to learn how to draw.
I agree that Star Wars is functionally dead now
Andor was legitimately great, and managed to make the already-fantastic Rogue One movie even better in retrospect.
I wouldn't count out star wars just yet. I think there's some small but nonzero chance that a good sequel-sequel trilogy could be made, on the conditions that it be managed by a single visionary director that loves the aesthetics and themes of the star wars series without being beholden beholden to a committee or pandering to existing fans. Or, shooting smaller, I think if the upcoming harry potter reboot TV show ends up working out, I could easily imagine a complete star wars TV series reboot to essentially re-tell the entire story, but with judicious editing, so that all the incoherent and terrible-in-retrospect parts get smoothed out.
That might seem overly hopeful, because 9 movies worth of events (plus however much background detail they want to add) is a lot to coherently condense, but I think advancements in AI will massively reduce the labor of making creative work, and as a consequence multiply the effectiveness of auteur geniuses. Where before all of an artists vision and wisdom could be poured to fill a trilogy, at best, AI might soon be able to spread that effort across a much longer period, like an upscaling algorithm applied to the problem of getting "twenty years to write book 1, and one extra to write book 2."
GBRK
13d ago
Why should you have to pay? Because you live in a big society, and state capacity costs money.
Your argument doesn't follow from your premise. Yes, I agree that we should pay the taxes required to mantain state capacity. Cutting old-age security from the budget, and reducing taxes proportionately, wouldn't affect that. "You need to pay taxes because we need roads" is a good argument. But adding, "So then you can't complain about giving money to a vampiric class of elders," is just building a bailey around your motte.
We don't pay old people entitlements because it's moral or just; I gather we paid them originally to ensure continued consumption and get them out of the labor market,
At this point you're just arguing against yourself. If there's no morality or justice in paying old people, why in the world would I want more of my consumption re-allocated toward old people? Why would I want services to become more expensive because there's fewer workers? You might be able to convince me that it would be worth getting everyone else to pay for old people specifically in my industry to retire, but why would I care if I get a promotion and a raise if the extra money was just going to go to old people anyway? I'd prefer to keep working at my current responsibilities and pay. I don't think I even need to address the "skim off the top" bit.
You would legitimately have a better argument if you appealed directly to my morality. I'm taking a bit of a hardline stance, but I could imagine wanting to maintain some level of old-age security out of pure altruism. It wouldn't be structured the way it is now, and it would definitely be less generous than social security + medicare, but I'd support a unified program designed to supply enough food, water, housing, and dollars-per-QALY efficient medical interventions to keep the elderly, destitute, and disabled alive. Such a program would, by design, offer very few luxuries-- but I would also allow local communities and charity groups to supplement those luxuries, and also create a simplified program to enable whatever marginal employment the participants are capable of performing to afford small luxuries. Babysitting children, cooking meals, performing chores, etcetera-- untaxed, and with maximally flexible hours. Basically, those "preschool + retirement home" setups should be the model.
GBRK
17d ago
So you'd be cool with your mom taking a cut of your paycheck?
I would be much happier if the money I paid into social security/medicare just went directly to my parents instead, yes. And even without the coercion of the state, it's not like children sending money to their parents is anything new. My mom has sent remittances to her mother in brazil for decades. That's effectively the same thing. If she hadn't been unfairly taxed to pay for feckless american non-parents she could have sent even more money back, and had more money to save for herself.
What would be the point of draconian policy if the community weren't planning to socialize the benefits?
So you admit that taxing the youth to pay for medicare and SS are draconian, and yet you think somehow socializing the benefits makes them any better?
Remove the taxes. Remove the social programs. If parents are good parents, their children will be happy to help them. If parents are bad parents, then they deserve what they'll get. If non-parents don't plan for the future, they don't deserve society's help. If non-parents try and invest responsibly for the future, they shouldn't be stymied by the fact that they have to also pay for the upkeep of bad parents and lazy non-parents.
in exchange for a nebulous promise of additional workers two decades down the road
What's "nebulous" is Medicare and Medicaid. Thanks to the demographic crisis, I have zero expectation of getting any substantial old-age benefits. So why should I have to pay for the lazy old people that hollowed out the base of the demographic pyramid in the first place?
And since I'm getting this vibe that you're blue-tribe, and suspect you're just not interested in arguments about personal responsibility, let me try also appealing to a value I suspect we share:
The fact that dumb old people don't need to keep younger generations happy to receive benefits is why we have trump, climate change, and the housing crisis. Gerontocracy thrives off the back of old-age welfare.
GBRK
17d ago
It does apply to veterans. Re-read what I wrote, I never said it didn't. But veterans compensate for being relatively less capable, experienced, knowledgeable, etcetera in a job area by having their service be a hard-to-fake signal of a wide variety of positive qualities, plus training analogous to what they'd find in a lot of high-paying jobs.
For the record, I agree that motherhood is also a hard-to-fake signal of a wide variety of positive qualities, but the training it provides and the qualities it is a positive signal for just have greater overall supply relative to demand and therefore less total market value.
Just look at South Korea if you doubt my words. In a society where every man is conscripted, there's less of a relative advantage to being a veteran and young men face delayed achievement and worse outcomes compared to young women. If we massively increased the supply of veterans in the united states the same thing would happen. It's not systematic oppression, it's just the free market rationally allocating resources.
GBRK
17d ago
Canada Child Benefit.
To the extend that child tax credits directly help parents, they're unfair... But I'm not heartless enough to deny support to the blameless children. On net I think we'd have a lot less need for them if we removed elder-support programs and therefore let working parents keep more money in their pockets.
enabling them to minimize the amount they owe in taxes
The american tax code is designed to help families in a "working parent/homemaker" situation but ironically punishes cases where you have two high-earning adults. I've got some DINK friends who had to pay more taxes after getting married. TBH, I also think that's unfair. They shouldn't get elder assistance in their old age, but also they should be able to save and invest more of their taxes now so that they don't need it. Basically, our society can let people decide of their own volition whether investing in children or career advancent is their best retirement bet. Anyone who chooses to be both unproductive and childless can suffer the consequences and resign themselves to either poverty or becoming such a pillar of their community even unrelated adults are willing to help thm.
In an "almost certainly not what you meant" sort of way,
That's kind of exactly what I meant, actually. By removing the need to pay for unrelated elders, adults can focus on supporting their own parents. Reciprocally, that also increases the incentive for elders to help their adult children with childcare. My grandmother helped my mom with me while my mom was doing her PHD; in return, my mom has helped her quite a bit through the years with remittances. That all winds up with a greater incentive for adults to have children, and in particular to raise them well so that the children will be happy to take care of them.
GBRK
17d ago
#1
But I'm getting from your comment that you pretty much agree that mothers should be disadvantaged in hiring?
I don't think mothers should be disadvantaged-- I think people who are relatively less capable, experienced, knowledgeable, etcetera in a job area should be disadvantaged. And unfortunately, raising children makes it harder to become those things. I don't like that, but it is an unfortunate fact. Forcing companies to preferentially hire mothers is just going to lead to economic inefficiency and poverty. Yes, there are some specific roles where motherhood is actually good training. To the degree that those roles are prevented from hiring on merit, those roles should be reformed. But if you genuinely think mother are better for already-meritocratic roles like C-suite roles, then no actual intervention needs to happen. Companies will be darwinistically selected until they have the appropriate amount of mothers and everything in perfect.
Similarly, while I can tell that your whole veteran argument is non-salient, can you not see how it's proving my point? Yes, being a veteran makes you better at mcdonalds. Also, it makes you better at a whole lot of other places. Therefore those places preferentially hire vets, so that demand outstrips supply and military vets end up paying well. And judging by how well vet-owned companies seem to do, it looks like those place are actually making reasonable decisions. So why aren't I hearing about any companies that preferentially hire companies making it onto the fortune 500? If it was legitimately a good strategy, it would just be money on the floor. But it isn't, so it's not.
#2
All that being said... I completely sympathize with
then it's no wonder young women get nervous about the tradeoffs involved
I definitely don't blame young women for not wanting children. You seem to be coming at this from a perspective where you think I both expect women to have more children and yet have zero interest in giving the woman what they want. That's not my perspective. I understand that the tradeoff is skewed against women, and that not having children is simply the rational option for many of them. But you seem to have this weird belief that motherhood is intrinsically skewed, and that therefore we need special government to make it not suck, but that's the opposite of reality. Motherhood isn't a profession, but it is an investment-- and one that has historically paid off very well. People have given up part of their entertainment and leisure potential to raise kids since the dawn of time because they reasonably and rationally expected that their kids would contribute to their well-being in turn.
From that framing, it's obvious that we don't need to specifically promote motherhood, we just need to stop hindering it. We need to let parents internalize the full value of their children by ending government-mandated transfers of labor to freeriders by ending medicare and social security. I know that might be difficult to process emotionally because there's this idea that those programs are "helping grandma," but if it weren't for the money they lost to taxes, grandma's descendants could help her themselves.
Look, just imagine if women gave birth to massive piles of money, or robot servants that did their chores and took care of their needs. If that were the case, they would obviously be happy to accept less professional advancement in order to give birth more often. Conversely, if the government started taking 90% of their robots and their piles of money, women would stop giving birth in favor of looking for professional advancement. That's the situation we're in: everything about our society is geared around socializing the benefits of motherhood while privatizing the costs. All we need to do to get above replacement fertility is to just stop doing that.
GBRK
17d ago
Not all work experience is universally applicable in every other domain. Experience in the military is highly transferable to jobs where you are expected to carry out orders while working as a team under time pressure-- a.k.a, most well-paying jobs. Experience as a mother is highly transferable to jobs where you are expected to determine your own schedule and manage small children. That admittedly does prove useful in stuff like hr/people manager/project management roles. (Basically all the managers I've ever had have been parents, and I think that makes perfect sense.) But the supply for those roles is much greater than the demand, so rationally self-interested companies filter for accumulated domain knowledge, which disadvantages mothers. Meanwhile the most numerically common jobs that benefit from experience as a mother are childcare and teaching related, but those jobs have a whole ton of structural problems that prevent them from accurately renumerating employees based on the quality of their work. The incentives of school district administrators are poorly aligned at best with actually maximizing learning, and any attempt to assess teacher skill and renumerate appropriately will piss off so many entrenched groups.
There are a few fields-- like nursing, for example-- that avoids the problems I've mentioned... but if you just compare the number of veterans versus the number of order-following jobs, and the number of mothers versus the number of caretaking jobs, and you see why things get to be the way they are.
GBRK
18d ago
making it easier for moms to return to the workforce after staying at home through toddler years
This is one of those things that sounds great when you say it but in practice requires some extremely unpleasant political compromises. Are you going to...
- Redirect the labor of childless women toward parents? That sounds a lot like coercion to me. (Also all taxes are coercion, but I'll only mention this here because this seems like the only type of coercion you care about.)
- Redirect the labor of childless men toward parents? To put it bluntly: taxing incels to subsidize chad and his baby momma is deeply unfair and liable to result in suicidality and violence.
- Redirect the labor of parents towards other parents? Congratulations, you have made parenting even less appealing.
- Force employers to disregard that the fact that having less experience and less availability to work makes someone worse at their jobs? In the best case, they'll route around you by just being more bigoted. In the worst case, every business collapses.
The only thing that could possibly raise birth-rates non-coercively is for society to stop forcefully redistributing the labor of working age adults to unrelated elders. Removing social security and medicare would give people a much stronger incentive to either invest productively during their working years or have children to support them in their old age. There would still be a need for welfare, but it could be distributed as a UBI: flat cash payments to every citizen.
GBRK
20d ago
Based and true. Remove the filibuster so congress haas to actually legislate instead of passing the buck. Stack the supreme court every election so there's no point being an activist judge. Make the house of representatives 25x bigger to match constituency ratios in the early republic. (Optionally) Return the senate to selection by state assemblies. RETVRN to tradition.
GBRK
2mo ago
You might think that in an age of frenetic short-form content it would be the tautly written books, in terms of both plot and prose, that would break through as they make less demands on our time and pack in more beats per page, but that has not been the case. At all. My theory is that people are so used to scrolling at speed and not having to think that they read in sort of the same way, so that repetition and cosy re-confirmation is the only way they can actually take in and understand what's going on in the story. Conclusion: the faster we read and the more distracted we become, the longer and flabbier novels are going to become.
I've been thinking of something similar... looking at royal road every popular webnovel has extremely obvious, in-your-face exposition, presumably because they don't expect anyone to slow down and take their reading seriously. (And also because of all the foreigners reading english language fiction by other foreigners.)
I think the left-wing position needs to reckon with the fact that some percentage of people have problems that can't easily be solved and, even worse, risk becoming disproportionate consumers (of welfare or police resources or park space, etc. ) whenever you liberalize controls on them or make systems more generous and less skeptical.
Yes, there are some people who are bad targets for the policy. That's the exact argument for making these programs less conditional-- ideally, not conditional whatsoever. ubi pilots consistently show improvements in welfare, and while GiveDirectly wastes effort trying to pick specifically extra-disadvantaged villages, it redeems itself by distributing payments to everyone within those villages.
Consider this simplified model of the economy:
- Group A, given money, will generally improve their lives and their community with it
- Group B, given money, will generally waste the money
After a decade, semi-random economic events will have sorted people into "poor" and "rich". The "rich" group is mostly composed of people form Group A, and the "poor" group is mostly composed of people from Group B. But you know in principle that there are still poor people who might improve their lives with more money, and that, meanwhile, the rich people have mostly hit diminishing utilitarian returns for improvement-by-money. Your first instinct-- well, not your first instinct, because you're a conservative, but the first instinct of someone further left than you-- will be to take money from the rich people and give it to the poor people. At first, you see the lives of people of the poor people rapidly improve-- because they're improvers, and using that money to take all the low-hanging-fruit they were previously unable to. But soon, most of the improvers move into the rich group, and now you're just giving money that the improvers could be using to improve things to wasters instead, and the program fails. The better option would have been to take more money from the rich, but pay it to everyone. The richest of the rich would suffer a little as they're paying disproportionately more, but they're far at the reducing-rate-of-utilitarian-returns section of the scale. So given that they're also recieving the UBI, the only way they move from rich to poor is if they're wasters... and if they are, then society should want them to be poor, to discourage waster behavior. Meanwhile, the improver poor become improver rich, and the improver rich maintain their position, while the waster poor get to control a proportionately smaller share of the economy than they would if they were receiving direct welfare and also aren't facing any incentive to remain poor.
Funny, I just saw a new left-wing outlet wrestling with research that hinted at weak results when people are given money.
The funny thing is, I've also seen that same article, and I consider it direct proof of my point-- even though the leftist writing it doesn't seem to understand that. For example, they say,
Homeless people, new mothers and low-income Americans all over the country received thousands of dollars. And it's practically invisible in the data.
but then turn around and say,
But I do think cash as an intervention is best used in emergencies, for pregnant women, domestic violence victims
completely ignoring the obvious conclusion that if all these targeted giving schemes are failing, they should stop advocating for targeted giving schemes. Just give the money to everyone. The pregnant women/domestic violence victims that will use the money productively will still get it-- and so will everyone else that actually needs the money, and would use it to improve their lives. Sure, plenty of people who won't use the money to improve their lives will also get it-- but at least they're not directly incentivized to not improve their lives, and also they're probably going to be paying their money to people who can make better use of it.
Using the meme definition of insanity, this "transfer money to particular poor households" scheme is definitely it. Wealth-transfer research has promising results. Wealth-transfer-to-poor-people research has less promising results. Why do these leftists keep insisting that we trying to find even worse-off people to give the money too? That's just going to result in even worse results. Just give the money to everyone! The trump stimmy checks were the right idea, only held back by the fact that they were unfunded and increased the deficit (because deficit-mediated inflation is effectively a regressive tax on poorer people, who hold more cash wealth and suffer more from sticky salaries.)
To sketch out an ideal tax + welfare system...
Revenue:
-
LVT used almost exclusively as a revenue-generating tax
-
Pigouvian taxes applied in conditions of high economic certainty
-
Service charges for excludable use of sensibly government-provided services (e.g., getting your passport renewed, driving on a toll road)
Spending
-
Pigouvian subsidies applied in conditions of high economic certainty
-
security (including military)
-
contract enforcement (the courts, plus the parts of the regulatory state that do stuff like fine people for lying about the efficacy of medical treatments)
-
the strictly necessary parts of the administrative state (e.g., salaries for judges, lawmakers)
-
the parts of the regulatory state that exist to solve multipolar traps/tragedies of the commons/failure states of capitalism/etc. (e.g., climate change, national parks, trustbusting)
-
the parts of the regulatory state necessary for auditing the other parts
-
A UBI calculated to be the higher of {[enough so that almost* no one starves, dies of exposure, dies of easily treatable disease*, or otherwise lives considered strictly unacceptable for a citizen*], [Whatever figure maximizes the equation: RISE IN(MINIMUM OF(aggregate GDP, aggregate population utility*)) DUE TO PAYMENTS - FALL IN (MINIMUM OF(aggregate GDP, aggregate population utility*)) due to taxes]}
-
A service designed to care for people who are strictly unable to make economic choices (the mentally challenged, the insane, and the senile)
* I'm using fuzzy language in a few cases because some of these concepts/thresholds are strictly subjective... I concede that even in my "ideal" economic system there would be plenty for people to fight over and disagree about
GBRK
2mo ago
You're considering redistributive programs in a vacuum, but I contend that that's not the best way to understand my proposal. My position is that the best way to perform welfare is unconditional wealth transfers, and to various degrees UI, SS, and even GiveDirectly are all conditional. That naturally leads to problems, like your mention of the "repeat users" thing, but that's proof of the conditionality being the problem, not the nature of transferring cash. Consider if, alternatively, these programs were administered as deliveries of particular baskets of goods. Think of how much more room there would be for corruption and inefficiency. Cash is better than food stamps is better than a council of politicians getting bribed by ag lobbyists to buy specifically high fructose corn syrup and distribute it. Anti-welfare people look at poor people choosing to buy inefficient luxuries and claim that that's proof that programs should be reformed to give politicians more control over program administration... but the alternative isn't poor people getting a healthier diet, the alternative is financially motivated politicians forcing poor people to buy even more inefficient luxuries.
And yes, "giving people money to stay alive" does result in dependency, for the uncontreversial reason that if you pay someone to do something, they will keep doing it. If you only provide wealth transfers to poor people, they will remain poor. But if you pay people independent of their actions, their incentive is to put the money to the most personally productive use possible. And given that capitalism provides a network of incentives to align personal greed to societal benefit, that in turn funnels money toward what's better for society.
GBRK
2mo ago
Cash works because... everything is fungible to cash, but literal cash has higher liquidity and therefore fewer transaction costs than any other form of welfare. In any economy that is not a perfectly optimized free market, there will be some role for enforced wealth transfers. Unconditional cash payments are just the second-best way to do payments, after pigouvian subsidies.
GBRK
2mo ago
Who is the Pope (or Council, if you happen to be Conciliarist) who gets to decide what the Creed is?
The... the actual pope. The pope who is chosen by the holy, apostolic, catholic church. The pope who is chosen through the direct guidance of infallible God.
When the Creed changes, what should happen to Americans who do not get along fast enough, and to Americans who actively reject it?
Whatever the pope says. Probably some mix of compassionate incentives and stern-but-fair punishments ranging from financial inducements to banishment or life imprisonment (but strictly excluding execution.)
It means that we should first devote our efforts to concerted study and systematization of the phenomenon before throwing away effort on advocating for speculative solutions that often backfire and reduce credibility for future attempts. See: "the boy who cried wolf." See: the modern history of feminism.
That's a fair complaint, but not actually a counterargument. If you see me overconfident in other positions and want me to apply this same reasoning feel free to argue for that. I recognize your username so I think we were probably arguing about eugenics and/or immigration before? My eugenics position is already "lack of epistemic confidence" so that would be a miss, but I'm pro-immigration so I can see the outlines of an argument that goes, "we can't be confident that immigration is good, so we should avoid it as a default." Were you to make it, I would accept the fundamental "epistemically uncertain->don't do the thing" argument but then disagree with the "epistemically uncertain" premise.
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