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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   28087 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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The breaking of social covenant and the rise of selfish societies

Recently in the news, Red Lobster is reporting an 11 million dollar loss, which is forcing the company to close many restaurants and possible file for chapter 11. The problem? Their '$20 all you can eat shrimp' deal was too good. Some anecdotal evidence indicates that large tables would order one or two orders of the never-ending deal, causing huge losses as large parties would share a single plate for $20, causing significant restaurant losses.

In the past few years, NYC has seen significant increases in retail theft, with stores facing many millions of dollar losses, with the estimate of retail theft being up to 4.4 billion dollars for the state alone. The cost of thefts cause a cyclical cycle, it forces stores to raise prices to cover the loss of the theft, which in turn prices people out of purchasing goods, which again raises theft. So far, the plans the governor has been trying to put into place seems to have done little to curtail any theft.

A 2024 jobs report shows a massive shortage of manufacturing labor, with 770,000 manufacturing jobs open. Labor participation has not recovered from the COVID crisis, with participation at 63.3% just before corvid and around 62.5% from the most recent report. Labor participation was highest before the 2008 housing crisis during the Bush admin around 67%. 7.5 million men have dropped out of America's workforce, meaning that they are not job seeking and therefore wouldn't be tracked as part of unemployment in FRED data.

There's a lot of words spilled on the internet on 'high trust societies'. Places like Japan where a lost item will be much more likely returned to its owner than, say, Detroit. Or rural America, where people will pay money at an unattended farm stand for fresh fruits and/or vegetables. However, trust doesn't fully cover what's going on in the west. /u/johnfabian's post is not about trust, but rather the breaking down of the covenant between constituents and their governments that keep a society basically functions. These social functions are much more simple than trust. It's about not running a red light, not driving the wrong way down a highway, or waiting in line for a train rather than trying to crowd on regardless of capacity.

Western society flourishing was largely predicated on this tacit understood social covenant: on an individual level, each person does their best to contribute through labor - be it stocking shelves to software development to entrepreneurship. In turn, the government upholds the status quo and optimizes legislation for stability and prosperity for the working class.

However in recent times this has changed. I'm not sure if the western governments decided they can have it's cake and eat it, too, or that the only way to perpetuate power is finding a new voter base, but the recent focus on marginalized groups has significantly eroded the trust away from indigenous constituents. It doesn't take a genius to tell that demographic groups are being treated, litigated, and policed based off of completely different rule books, and this type of treatment always creates division and resentment. The covenant between government and the constituencies broke, which changed the payoff matrix. As governments pick and choose which demographics to control, people become more selfish, as the ability to create value from freer markets diminish.

This is why 'selfish societies' is a better term than 'low trust' societies. As much as people love to yell at corporations for perusing short term gains, individuals pursue selfish gains at the cost of others even more as shown from my examples alone. Trust does not fully explain how people behave in the aforementioned examples, but selfishness does. Low male employment, antiwork, and the rise of NEET-dom has nothing to do with trust, but selfishness adequately describes the motivations for the ideological positions they hold. Obesity isn't a trust issue, it's a selfish issue, where people would rather eat themselves into oblivion instead of finding a healthy balance and self restraint. Even the declining birthrate is a result of selfishness; people would prefer to have the increased income and enjoyment of consequence-free fornication instead of laying an effective and positive groundwork for future generations.

The question, then, is it possible for a government to regain the respect of its constituents, and can the people understand that there needs to be some amount of selflessness to create an environment to nurture the next generation?

Yes, the fact that people abuse all you can eat offers by sharing it among a group are "gaming" the system, the system is awfully stupid for letting that happen. Not a single buffet or hotpot near me allows sharing, for this very reason.

I don't know if its more illustrative that people were NOT abusing that system before and they are now, or its just distracting from the core argument that... ohhh wait, people were not abusing that system? I'm not from the west though, so my baseline is probably lower trust than most readers here.

ohhh wait, people were not abusing that system? I'm not from the west though, so my baseline is probably lower trust than most readers here.

Yes. Going from a low-trust to a high-trust society was one of the things that blew my mind when I visited the US. High-trust systems no longer working is probably one of the biggest downsides of immigration, which will not be measurable until it's too late, and won't be easily attributable to it by any data you can gather, so The Experts will be able to gaslight people about it until the heat death of the universe.

Another thing is their electoral system. It's security is laughable by any objective measure, but it more or less worked until now due to high trust. Even if the previous election was more or less fair, it's only a question of time until someone decides to abuse it.

Low male employment, antiwork, and the rise of NEET-dom has nothing to do with trust, but selfishness adequately describes the motivations for the ideological positions they hold.

Does this also apply to women for embracing frivolous promiscuity (far more than men as statistics on how many men vs. women are sexless in a given year, partner numbers, propensity for infidelity, etc. show) and antagonistic notions of "equality", or is it only men who are expected to selflessly hold up the world like Atlas?

Obesity isn't a trust issue, it's a selfish issue, where people would rather eat themselves into oblivion instead of finding a healthy balance and self restraint.

And the CEOs who intentionally manufacture the cheapest, unhealthiest food possible that they've hired organic chemists to make as addictive as possible and market it in the most deceptive and manipulative ways possible that intentionally target the dumbest and most vulnerable people, so they can later sell them subscriptions in pill form to their own endocrine system? Selfish, or just the "freer markets" you prefer?

as statistics on how many men vs. women are sexless in a given year, partner numbers, propensity for infidelity, etc. show

Can you provide some support for these claims. As far as I can tell, every single one of these is wrong.

  • how many men vs. women are sexless in a given year

AFAIK this statistic was from the GSS in 2018. The statistic in 2021 shows the reverse.

  • partner numbers

I just pulled the GSS data for 2022 (attached). I'm not sure how I can squint and that data draw your conclusions. Of the people who actually answered, 752 were male and 826 were female.

0 partners: 19.3% males vs 27.2% females
1 partner: 69.7% males vs 64.0% females
2 partners: 3.2% males vs 4.0% females
3 partners: 4.4% males vs 1.2% females
4 partners: 1.6% males vs 2.3% females
5+ partners: 1.3% males vs 1.2% females

I'm struggling to squint at this data and draw your conclusions.

  • propensity for infidelity

In general, men are more likely than women to cheat: 20% of men and 13% of women reported that they’ve had sex with someone other than their spouse while married, according to data from the recent General Social Survey (GSS).

source

Of the 7 age buckets they look at, women only cheat more than men in one (18 to 29 years old), and only by 1% (10% of men vs 11% of women). Every other age bucket has a larger gap in the opposite direction.

TL;DR I looked at the statistics you asked me to, but they don't support your thesis.

/images/17161532637987657.webp

AFAIK this statistic was from the GSS in 2018. The statistic in 2021 shows the reverse.

The very first graph on the page you linked yourself shows male sexlessness being a decent amount above female sexlessness in almost every year since 1989, other than a small slice at the end that you have chosen to exclusively focus on as a lame "gotcha". What in your original post indicates that you were only judging people's behavior past the year 2021 or so? This problem only started then? If we're only talking about a problem that's barely lasted/evolved for not even 3 years, then obviously it's not a particularly big deal (or at least not nearly as much as you're making it out to be), since it could just be complete statistical noise after all, and there's not much reason for us to even be talking about or for you to have posted about it (or at least not with the apparent seriousness you did). And if all of those prior years of greater female promiscuity (which I highly doubt have ended at all, but I'm not going to play online citation duel over it when I know the social sciences have been almost entirely broken and malevolent post-Floyd anyway) get a pass, then I guess all of the years of alleged selfish NEETdom and low employment that men have supposedly engaged in also get a similar pass, right?

Of the 7 age buckets they look at, women only cheat more than men in one (18 to 29 years old), and only by 1% (10% of men vs 11% of women). Every other age bucket has a larger gap in the opposite direction.

Even if I pretend not to know that women obviously lie out their ass about this subject way more than men (as anyone who has ever been even tangentially aware of the full-court presses of PR manipulation bridal parties will engage in after wild bachelorette parties, as just one example, can attest to), this still means we're allowed to call out young women for their selfishness in this area right?

Or how about one clear demonstration of promiscuity that no manipulated data could even try to refute: the percentage of people (particularly younger and more attractive ones of course) in each gender who are featured publicly half-naked online? Obviously there are far more women (including relatively "normal" ones with "regular" lives: nurses, secretaries, retail workers, average college students, etc.) who have curated generous galleries of softcore (or more) pornography of themselves (including on relatively mainstream platforms such as Instagram and TikTok) online than men. (Source: Any casual perusal of online media-sharing platforms.) (And this isn't even getting into what they often quite readily send out semi-privately on platforms like Snapchat either.) Are these women being selfish with that behavior by subverting society's long-term sexual norms that have guaranteed its stability throughout history for some temporary dopamine hits of attention? Can we say it's a greater indication of selfishness on behalf of the female gender that they do it far more often than men? Or...?

Instead of trying to torture the truth (that women, particularly of course young and attractive ones in any given generation, are obviously responsible, and probably more responsible than men at least within the past 10-20 years, for significantly contributing to the breakdown of traditional familial/sexual mores) with cherry-picking "Akshually you forgot to check this random survey every year which suggests recently that a long-standing trend for decades may have mildly reversed in the past 2-3 years." stat citation-mining gotchas, just answer the core question: Are women to be held account for their selfishness in your formulation or not? Or just men? And if they are, then why only target men in your original post? You don't think women's contributions to a greater culture of selfishness are worth highlighting or what?

Because if your solution to a "culture of selfishness" is that men (and by that I mean basically only White and some Asian men, as of course based on their average level of social/economic development throughout history, and the general culture of low expectations that has evolved in response, most men of the darker races clearly aren't going to be held to much account by anybody, much less by themselves in most cases) need to quit worrying about/not cooperating with a system that's obviously biased against them and simply get back to thanklessly slaving so that they can simultaneously be attacked for being the core problem of society by that same society that incessantly demands their devoted labor then, quite frankly, you can stuff it.

PS: If you wanna talk stats, how about the fact that women's labor force participation rate is below men's overall almost entirely across the board (with, from what I'm seeing, like one or two statistical noise exceptions where they're favored in certain very young age groups by a percentage point or so), including again almost all age groups (even younger ones who would presumably have very little chance of being part of the shrinking residual demographic of purely domestically-bound homemakers), despite the fact that they've been almost entirely unmoored from any obligations to eschew independent employment in favor of strict domesticity?

https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm

So again, why only call out men specifically when the main alleged problem with men that you highlighted is literally worse among women? Simple and exactly as I stated in my view: You think of men as slaves who need to get back to work, even if they're not receiving any of the benefits they're supposed to from it anymore. Meanwhile women are the anointed ones who society exists to serve, not be served by, so that they are more guilty is irrelevant, because they are incapable of actually being guilty in the first place.

If you're so worried about supposed male selfishness, consider this perspective: It is actually your selfishness in not giving a shit if these men receive any sort of meaningful compensation or esteem for keeping the ship afloat that is causing the alleged problem of selfishness on their end that you're perceiving. Fix yourself and work to fix society, and you will find a lot of eager men who are more than happy to selflessly tire on behalf of an actually functional, honorable, and reasonable society, same as they literally have all throughout history. Until then, why would you expect them to rush to perform emergency surgery on a bloated corpse when people like you are swarming around additionally and might as well be actively stabbing it and the remaining few men who are trying to help in the face?

Women being more likely to have a partner doesn’t make them more promiscuous. I don’t know, it doesn’t seem like you’re reading the statistics correctly.

  1. The statistics are about sex, not about having partners, so I'm not sure where you're getting your fundamental objection from. Sure differential rates in coupling could account for some of the difference but...

  2. Given that most women are serial monogamists (and have been for decades, since probably at least the 80s) at best (and for your average woman any given man often doesn't last long), yes it does mean they're more promiscuous. We're not talking about statistics of virginal marriages here.

If you bang 10 guys in a year, it doesn't change anything that you temporarily gave them all the title of "boyfriend".

If you bang one guy for 10 years during your twenties, while a loser male has one or two hookups but otherwise remains single and technically sexless for 8/10 of those years he still has an equal or higher body count to the woman. In this way measuring promiscuity by sexual partner count in the last year doesn’t make sense.

The stat posted is a binary yes/no on sexlessness in the last year as far as I can see, but yes you're right about another aspect of the limitations of these kinds of statistics and how men can apparently come out ahead even though they're actually not by any means.

The very first graph on the page you linked yourself shows male sexlessness being a decent amount above female sexlessness in almost every year since 1989, other than a small slice at the end that you have chosen to exclusively focus on as a lame "gotcha". What in your original post indicates that you were only judging people's behavior past the year 2021 or so?

Two things:

First, Figure 1 is the share of under 35s who have not had sex in the last year. Figure 2 is the same, but only samples from people have have never been married, which is more relevant and shows no meaningful gap.

Second, you're responding to

Low male employment, antiwork, and the rise of NEET-dom has nothing to do with trust, but selfishness adequately describes the motivations for the ideological positions they hold.

Does this also apply to women for embracing frivolous promiscuity (far more than men as statistics on how many men vs. women are sexless in a given year, partner numbers, propensity for infidelity, etc. show) and antagonistic notions of "equality"

When you're replying to a discussion about recent trends like antiwork, NEET-dom, shoplifting, and Red Lobster closures, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume the trends you're choosing to bring up are on a similar timeline.

And if all of those prior years of greater female promiscuity get a pass, then I guess all of the years of alleged selfish NEETdom and low employment that men have supposedly engaged in also get a similar pass, right?

I'm not condemning men. I'm saying you're, at best, massively exaggerating your own complaints about women.

Of the 7 age buckets they look at, women only cheat more than men in one (18 to 29 years old), and only by 1% (10% of men vs 11% of women). Every other age bucket has a larger gap in the opposite direction.

Even if I pretend not to know that women obviously lie out their ass about this subject way more than men

You claimed the statistics supported you. Now that they don't you're claiming the statistics aren't accurate. Why did you claim they supported you then?

this still means we're allowed to call out young women for their selfishness in this area right?

I don't think it's appropriate to focus on a 1% difference in one age bucket and ignore the far larger differences in every other bucket that point in the opposite direction. Doing this falsely represents reality in an effort to push a particular narrative.

Or how about one clear demonstration of promiscuity that no manipulated data could even try to refute: the percentage of people

I agree there are more women actresses/subjects in pornography.

This is completely irrelevant to my point, which is that the statistics your post claimed supported your position do not, in fact, support your position.

Can we say it's a greater indication of selfishness on behalf of the female gender that they do it far more often than men?

I think that's a pretty reductive explanation. There is greater demand for pornography featuring women, and women respond to that. I don't personally think that makes women "more selfish", any more than men making more money than women makes them "more greedy". But these words are poorly defined enough that I'm not going to argue there is much objectivity here.

Are women to be held account for their selfishness in your formulation or not? Or just men? And if they are, then why only target men in your original post? You don't think women's contributions to a greater culture of selfishness are worth highlighting or what?

I've made one post apart from this one, which pointed out the statistics did not show what you claimed they showed. That's not targeting men.

You seem to think I'm some sort of white-knight SJW. I'm not. I've criticized women before. I've criticized progressive policies before (e.g. affirmative action, believe all women, lived experiences, etc.).

I tend not to do it here, because that stuff is in the water supply here.

It's rather grating that you insist that I'm being unfair to men when I've said nothing negative about men this entire conversation.

Because if your solution to a "culture of selfishness" is that men... need to quit worrying about/not cooperating with a system that's obviously biased against them and simply get back to thanklessly slaving so that they can simultaneously be attacked for being the core problem of society by that same society that incessantly demands their devoted labor, quite frankly, you can stuff it.

I also haven't agreed with the "culture of selfishness" thesis either, let alone claimed it needs solving or given a solution.

Again, I've made the very simple point that the stats that you cited don't support the thesis that you made. If you'd like to defend the other two statistics that you claimed support you, you're welcome to.

Please stop putting words in my mouth. Please stop saying I'm blaming men for anything.

I'll start with this:

I'm not condemning men.

It's rather grating that you insist that I'm being unfair to men when I've said nothing negative about men this entire conversation.

Please stop saying I'm blaming men for anything.

From your original post:

Low male employment, antiwork, and the rise of NEET-dom

You specifically chose to qualify this with "male", despite the fact that, as I pointed out with some actually-less-likely-to-be-manipulated (since they're of an economic nature and collected by the government, which has an incentive to know the productivity patterns of its prole cattle) statistics (which I love how you ignored), the problem with low employment and labor non-participation is actually worse among women.

Why "male"? Why not "black"? They're actually far less likely to be employed (unlike men, who as I showed actually aren't) than people of other comparable demographics. Let's say I made your OP, but instead I put "low Indian employment", and then as it turns Indians actually have a higher than average level of employment among the races (which may well be true). Would it make sense to you if I were flabbergasted that you thought I was being anti-Indian? Would it make sense for me to post "Please stop saying I'm blaming Indians for anything."?

You still haven't answered the fundamental question in all of your pointless, evasive verbiage: Why male? Why is male labor non-participation specifically the issue we're worried about here? Why not overall, or again female?

About statistics in regards to women, let me just say this:

  1. On any given day in America (weather being a factor of course), there are millions of females of all ages walking around in public with essentially (at least partially, often far more) exposed genitalia, and this is considered more or less socially acceptable (or at least not punishable or preventable) nowadays. On beaches, it is similarly considered mostly acceptable for their nudity to obscured only by a few small strips of fabric. The number of men walking around with comparable levels of exposure ever is essentially zero, statistically-speaking. Most men, in their entire lives, will never publicly expose themselves in such a fashion, whereas almost all women will do it at least once, and usually far more.

I agree there are more women actresses/subjects in pornography.

  1. You seem to have confused me for only talking about OnlyFans (which isn't a terrible statistical signal actually as it's mostly amateurs and of course women dominate it) or Bang Bros here. Let me rephrase: For a not insignificant portion of women (at least 5%, probably closer to 20% in some demographics, and obviously again going vastly up with lower age in particular and greater attractiveness), the average picture they put online of themselves is softcore pornography (if not just because it features their usual attire, which is softcore pornography attire, though of course most of them in that category choose to intentionally pose and present themselves in additional lustful ways as well). Meanwhile the percentage of men for whom this is true is well below 1.

  2. There is a whole word just for describing the phenomenon of how women are excessively catered to by men without being expected to provide essentially anything in return: "simp". (Yes it is sometimes also applied to women, but not with nearly the same frequency/earnestness/intensity.) There is, as far as I know, no similar word with reversed gender connotations in such prolific use.

Every single one of these facts, in regards to which gender is more promiscuous and has contributed more to the breakdown of sexual norms and which gender is more selfish and expects to receive more from others for less in return from them, is a far stronger statistical signal than any cherry-picked survey stat you can post. It all comes down to a variation of the same old question: "Who do you trust: your lying eyes or our 'data'?"

You claimed the statistics supported you. Now that they don't you're claiming the statistics aren't accurate. Why did you claim they supported you then?

They do support me, as again your own links show, other than again a small slice of the tip of the modern wokeist spear that you've chosen to focus on exclusively for some reason.

Why don't I just roll over like a puppy dog for a few years from some random graph you posted that apparently has the right figures? Let's take the cheating one for example. This can be blown up easily by asking some simple questions:

  1. Do the women who responded considered the massive amount of offline and online thirst-trapping many of them must do (given again how much of it exists overall) "cheating"?

  2. Do their boyfriends/husbands?

  3. Do their boyfriends/husbands even know the full extent of it (in an age of Snapchat and plenty of other ways of hiding it)? And how pressured do they feel because of modern matriarchal norms not to contest it at all even though they would really like their girlfriend/wife to put some clothes on?

This is just one issue that makes the simplistic consideration you're engaging in wholly untenable if you're trying to be intellectually honest. Like I said, you can post as many cherry-picked surveys as you want: No amount of data trumps reality.

I mean, I could respond to you in a Reddit drone fashion by going on a dive and posting my own cherry-picked link dump, but surely we're all aware enough here of Scott's writings on metascience to understand that a graph is not a substitute for using your brain and empirical faculties, right?

But yes, I trust recent statistics less and less, as social scientists have increasingly openly declared war on the truth in favor of what's ideologically compatible with their brainwashing. So also yes when I say that statistics support my position, I'm not including any given random link from 2022 or whatever.

Please stop putting words in my mouth.

If you don't want people to assume malicious implications behind your words, then please stop being so unfair and biased.

You've insisted you're some great known critic of women here, but in our entire conversation that is supposedly (from your perspective) just about a neutral examination of modern selfishness, you have yet to even entertain applying the word to any common female behavior (or any female at all in fact) once. So spare me the disinterested observer pleading please because it is obvious hogwash.

If you want to have a conversation about selfishness as a trend, then include the other half of the population. Otherwise you obviously don't want to have a real conversation.

Wow, there's certainly a lot of conversation going on that I guess I've inspired! I apologize I haven't been active as I've been busy with my personal life, so I don't always participate off of surface level comments.

@you-get-an-upvote

Is correct, I posted the OP, not him. The focus on the male side of the lack of participation in the labor force is simply because that's the current headline and more noticeable trend. Population - wide employment participation seems to rarely fully recover after any financial or social crises. Even 7-8 years after the 2008 financial crisis labor participation never recovered. The male participation is more newsworthy, since the past 25 years has seen a 10% decrease of male labor participation compared to the ~3% decrease in female according to FRED. My goal wasn't to focus solely on males, but rather point out the most noteworthy trends and the underlying reasons behind them.

Whether males or females should increase their participation in employment is another discussion entirely.

/images/17162234284494343.webp

/images/17162234286686988.webp

The male participation is more newsworthy, since the past 25 years has seen a 10% decrease of male labor participation compared to the ~3% decrease in female according to FRED.

Well, hopefully I've helped provide an explanation of that. And hopefully more and more men keep dropping out faster and faster. It has nothing to do with their selfishness though. It has everything to do with the selfishness of others who just expected them to keep slavishly giving and giving all that they always have traditionally while taking away more and more of the traditional benefits for their service.

From your original post:

Low male employment, antiwork, and the rise of NEET-dom

I am not @SomethingMusic

Yeah, my bad. I didn't check properly and just assumed with you jumping in on behalf of a somewhat older original post you were the OP.

Is the number of sex partners in last year corrected for gender-based social desirability bias? Because a man is seen by society as lesser if he is an "incel", while female virginhood isn't stigmatized.

Is the number of sex partners in last year corrected for gender-based social desirability bias

In that case "I believe X and the public statistics on X are not trustworthy because of Y" would have been a much more honest argument than "I believe X and the statistics support me".

Did this functional social covenant between governments and people ever really exist to the extent that you think it did? Take America, for example. In 1776 and then again 1861, tens of thousands of people in America rebelled against the government because they thought that the social covenant was being violated. Then, the late 19th century and early 20th century was the heyday of communism in America, with a massive labor movement that viewed the government as being allied with their enemies. Government-citizen relations got a bit better with the New Deal and then post-war prosperity, but huge numbers of people still rejected the covenant and rebelled against the status quo, fighting against the Vietnam War draft for example.

Your ontology doesn't make sense to me. Selfishness isn't a one dimensional thing. Its more like a lack of Learned Selflessness and higher order planning and self trust. You say "selfishness adequately describes" as though that's an etiology that implies anything useful about treatment. But where is your treatment plan?

I agree that if you flatten everything to 'humans follow incentives', then you can call it all selfishness. But this isn't actionable on a personal level.

Obesity isn't a trust issue, it's a selfish issue, where people would rather eat themselves into oblivion instead of finding a healthy balance and self restraint.

Obesity is an incentive gradient and learnability issue. In most cases it's not that they would rather "eat themselves into oblivion instead of finding a healthy balance and self restraint" It's that they can't alieve in the existence of the healthier state space and/or they are strategically unable to allocate the resources necessary to climb out of the rut that we have built for them with easy-packaged unhealthy foods. They are physically unable to trust themselves enough to overwrite the local incentive gradient built into their minds, and the incentive gradient in their environments is untrustworthy. Shaming only serves to tell them that they are on their own with this, which doesn't help and causes them to double down until they develop a complex about how 'obesity is good actually'.

If you want someone to lose weight- Don't shame them. Teach them how to cook. Smooth out their schedule so they have more time and mental energy. Analyze their life and remove mild inconveniences and stressors.

Low male employment, antiwork, and the rise of NEET-dom has nothing to do with trust, but selfishness adequately describes the motivations for the ideological positions they hold.

I volunteer all my labor to community projects and startups and rehabilitation of atomized individuals- because I don't trust corporations or our government with the produce of my labor. If I'm wrong- this is a trust problem. If I'm right, this is a trustworthiness problem.

If you want more NEETs to work, address their needs one by one and get them back up to a functioning level, practice some selflessness yourself and cultivate some burnouts.

Interestingly enough, the one author I ever link on this site recently did a series of articles talking about his interpretation of some of the same phenomena.

https://www.ecosophia.net/beyond-lenocracy/

The word I came up with is “lenocracy.” The first part of that word comes from leno, the Latin term for a pimp. Yes, what the word means is a government of pimps.

Let’s unpack that phrase a little bit. If, as the saying goes, prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, then pimping must be up there in the oldest half dozen or so. What makes a pimp economically interesting is that he adds no value to the exchanges from which he profits. He doesn’t produce any goods or services himself. His role is wholly parasitic. He inserts himself into the transaction between the sex worker who provides the service and the customer who wants it, and takes a cut of the price in exchange for allowing the transaction to happen.

This kind of parasitic interaction is far from unusual in economics, but it’s not always as common as it is now. There are societies and eras in which most economic activity is mediated by pimps of various kinds, and other societies and other eras in which such arrangements are relatively rare (and often harshly penalized). Right now, in the modern industrial world, we live in an economy where nearly all exchanges are subject not just to the exactions of a single pimp but to whole regiments of pimps, each of whom has to be paid in order for the exchange to take place. Furthermore, this orgy of pimping is sponsored, controlled, and mandated by government at all levels and by the holders of political and economic power more generally. Thus, lenocracy.

I think that this is actually a separate phenomenon to high/low trust societal changes. That's definitely happening and we're seeing the impacts, but I think the idea of lenocracy provides more explanatory power in this case.

The pimp is contract enforcement in a transaction that is usually illegal so normal means can't be used.

Damage the goods or refuse to pay and the pimp steps in.

The author is making the mistake of assuming that without enforcement the transaction just happens 100% perfectly. And so the pimp is a parasite. Now 9 times out of 10 the very presence of the pimp is enough to enforce compliance, so it can look like they aren't doing anything but those positions exist for a reason. If you know an inspector might check your goods, then you are incentivized to not try and slip in shoddy merchandise.

In other words a pimp is just an unofficial judge, jury and leg breaker. And that explains why the official versions exist too, because transactions require oversight. Every society on earth creates these positions for a reason. They are crucially important to building the high trust you talk of. Someone has to enforce "good" behaviour, so that the transaction can be trusted to take place. So we mandate goods inspections, certificates of compliance, paperwork logs etc.

So its not that governments become lenocracies, its that pimps are a shadow of government. Just like gang enforcers are, they commit illegal acts yes, but in the service of maintaining a structure.

Pimping might be what contract resolution looks like in a libertarian world. The private contractor pays someone to enforce the contract if the client does not pay etc. Probably with less leg breaking, canes and hats though.

I assume the "parasite" sentiment comes from the fact that pimps don't always allow their services to be refused. Do you think it'd be a good libertarian world if enforcers showed up uninvited at your office and let you know that either you hire them for the price they set, or something might happen?

Well I am not a libertarian, but whether some pimps do that, doesn't invalidate pimping as being valuable. Anymore than the fact some cops being corrupt invalidates law enforcement entirely.

Why do you think is it called "pimping her out" as opposed to "pimping for her" or something?

Because they are basically management in this scenario. I work for my boss, but that doesn't indicate my boss doesn't bring value. Now there are plenty of bad managers who do not bring value and do exploit their workers, but that doesn't mean that management in and of itself does not bring value when it comes to organizing workers efficiently. Given sex work is generally illegal it seems likely that many pimps do indeed lean towards the exploiting end but that doesn't mean the concept of pimping is invalidated.

My recollection is that pimps do provide a service to a prostitute; primarily protection. Yes yes, I know "protection racket" seems similar, and there is definitely an aspect of that, but prostitutes also have significant threats from customers and a variety of the situations they find themselves in. To some extent, the service the pimp is providing is some measure of protection from some amount of those threats. Of course, the level of service they provide, and the price they extract, may not be part of the most functional market ever, and they may lean a bit more toward the "parasite" end than the pure and honest goods/services end, but I don't know that they're 100% parasitic. I don't know what percent it would be. Of course, society is not going to jump straight to 100% parasitic either; it gradually grows to be that way.

Yeah a prostitute without a pimp or someone similar is gonna get stiffed by customers all the time.

So to speak

How snail-brained gullible are you exactly?

Recently in the news, Red Lobster is reporting an 11 million dollar loss, which is forcing the company to close many restaurants and possible file for chapter 11. The problem? Their '$20 all you can eat shrimp' deal was too good. Some anecdotal evidence indicates that large tables would order one or two orders of the never-ending deal, causing huge losses as large parties would share a single plate for $20, causing significant restaurant losses.

They couldn't see that one coming at their giant company, that's been running all you can eat deals since my grandmother was taking me there as a kid? This is classic "loser execs blame others for their failures." Every restaurant to ever run an all-you-can-eat deal knows that the first thing you do is say, No Sharing on the menu, on the salad bar, and sometimes a couple other places in the restaurant. "Any Sharing of Salad Bar food will result in an additional salad bar order being charged." My local diner run by a greek dude from Lesbos knows that. How the fuck would Red Lobster not know that? Every all-you-can-eat buffet I've ever been to also reserves the right, on their menu, to cut you off. My concrete contractor and his sons had been thrown out of every smorgasbord in three counties.

And Red Lobster didn't have any kind of metrics tracking the Shrimp deal, to notice that it was causing losses and end it early? This whole debacle beggars belief.

In the past few years, NYC has seen significant increases in retail theft, with stores facing many millions of dollar losses, with the estimate of retail theft being up to 4.4 billion dollars for the state alone.

Which can be directly and obviously traced to the trend towards low-staffing in stores. CVS and Walgreens used to have three to five employees in a normal sized store, and the closest you ever got to "Self Checkout" was my local convenience store where I would wave my Arizona Green Tea at the owner and tell him "I'll just leave the dollar on the counter" so he wouldn't have to get up. Now I go into CVS, and if I need someone I spend five minutes searching the store for the one person working there. And that single employee is almost never at the front desk, where they might at least see me leaving and yell at me, they are nearly always somewhere else in the store, stocking shelves or something. If I wanted to steal some stuff, who the fuck is going to stop me?

To say nothing of self-checkout, which invites casual small-scale theft, even by otherwise honest people. On at least three occasions, I've stolen things in self-checkout by accident. A small item in the bottom of my reusable bag (because they charge me for regular bags), didn't make it out of the bag. At no point have I ever felt like there was any chance that if I chose to steal a few small items I would get caught by the bored employee pretending to watch. To say nothing of, say, buying one 15lb bag of cat food and four 20lb bags, and scanning the 15lb bag five times. Even if I were caught, would the bored teenager at Target really call the cops, or would he just accept I made a mistake and make me ring it up again? It's zero risk.

Why do these companies accept these downsides? Because they'd rather lose goods to shoplifting than pay employees, their losses to self-checkout theft are less than the cost of paying a cashier. They could hire greeters and cart checkers, like Costco does, but they don't, because they lose less to shoplifting than they would have to pay greeters and cart checkers.

These corporations are subsidizing dishonesty, and then hiding behind moralistic bullshit pretending that we're becoming a "low trust society." Horse-hockey. The corporations are the ones creating a world where theft is a zero-consequence problem.

Something I've noted about self checkout is that it has been discontinued in all smaller stores, presumably because they can't have anyone monitoring the process.

Larger stores are all in on it but they have one or multiple people going around making sure people are mostly behaving.

This implies to me that the cost of theft isn't neglible and that there needs to be *some" enforcement (or appearance of enforcement) for it to not get out of hand.

How snail-brained gullible are you exactly?

Is this necessary? Cynicism isn't always a necessary characteristic when reading an earnings report. Jordan Peterson said something that I that I try to take to heart, which is "believe people when they say something is the motivation for their actions." This doesn't mean that their explanation is the real reason for the action, but it is what they believe is the reason behind their actions. Corporate entities have a good reason to not lie on earnings reports and losses (getting sued and/or fired for lack of transparent reporting on earnings), I am willing to take their statements as generally factual, even if corporate stupidity is closer to the real reason.

They couldn't see that one coming at their giant company, that's been running all you can eat deals since my grandmother was taking me there as a kid? This is classic "loser execs blame others for their failures." Every restaurant to ever run an all-you-can-eat deal knows that the first thing you do is say, No Sharing on the menu, on the salad bar, and sometimes a couple other places in the restaurant. "Any Sharing of Salad Bar food will result in an additional salad bar order being charged." My local diner run by a greek dude from Lesbos knows that. How the fuck would Red Lobster not know that? Every all-you-can-eat buffet I've ever been to also reserves the right, on their menu, to cut you off. My concrete contractor and his sons had been thrown out of every smorgasbord in three counties.

And Red Lobster didn't have any kind of metrics tracking the Shrimp deal, to notice that it was causing losses and end it early? This whole debacle beggars belief.

You're correct it could be pure mismanagement of their corporate entity, but this is why selfishness vs trust is an important distinction. Adam Smith understood this concept that self-interest could result in creating public good. A corporation would do something 'good' (offer food for a lower than profitable price) at the goal of customer acquisition. The result was increased popularity and attendance of the restaurant, but at the cost of underestimating the popularity and/or any potential abuse of the deal.

Which can be directly and obviously traced to the trend towards low-staffing in stores. CVS and Walgreens used to have three to five employees in a normal sized store, and the closest you ever got to "Self Checkout" was my local convenience store where I would wave my Arizona Green Tea at the owner and tell him "I'll just leave the dollar on the counter" so he wouldn't have to get up. Now I go into CVS, and if I need someone I spend five minutes searching the store for the one person working there. And that single employee is almost never at the front desk, where they might at least see me leaving and yell at me, they are nearly always somewhere else in the store, stocking shelves or something. If I wanted to steal some stuff, who the fuck is going to stop me?

To say nothing of self-checkout, which invites casual small-scale theft, even by otherwise honest people. On at least three occasions, I've stolen things in self-checkout by accident. A small item in the bottom of my reusable bag (because they charge me for regular bags), didn't make it out of the bag. At no point have I ever felt like there was any chance that if I chose to steal a few small items I would get caught by the bored employee pretending to watch. To say nothing of, say, buying one 15lb bag of cat food and four 20lb bags, and scanning the 15lb bag five times. Even if I were caught, would the bored teenager at Target really call the cops, or would he just accept I made a mistake and make me ring it up again? It's zero risk.

Why do these companies accept these downsides? Because they'd rather lose goods to shoplifting than pay employees, their losses to self-checkout theft are less than the cost of paying a cashier. They could hire greeters and cart checkers, like Costco does, but they don't, because they lose less to shoplifting than they would have to pay greeters and cart checkers.

Companies are not accepting these downsides. Many places I see are now employing full-time security guards to prevent theft, are closing self checkout locations (my local Walmart has closed all self-checkout locations and has people checking customer receipts on exit), and has gates to prevent people leaving without going through a checkout. Any store which is unable to adequately prevent losses are closing. Brooklyn has losing 50 different chain stores in the past year. Companies are reacting to increased theft and are shutting down unprofitable stores. The losses of accidental check out are negligible to people deliberately stealing significant dollar amounts of items from retailers.

They couldn't see that one coming at their giant company, that's been running all you can eat deals since my grandmother was taking me there as a kid? This is classic "loser execs blame others for their failures." Every restaurant to ever run an all-you-can-eat deal knows that the first thing you do is say, No Sharing on the menu, on the salad bar, and sometimes a couple other places in the restaurant. "Any Sharing of Salad Bar food will result in an additional salad bar order being charged." My local diner run by a greek dude from Lesbos knows that. How the fuck would Red Lobster not know that? Every all-you-can-eat buffet I've ever been to also reserves the right, on their menu, to cut you off. My concrete contractor and his sons had been thrown out of every smorgasbord in three counties.

But whose going to enforce this? If the people doing the 10 for 1 buffet option complain wont you have to call the police? And in major metros the police will not respond to such a complaint. And if they did, not for hours.

No, Red Lobster won't call the police immediately when they see 10 people eating 1 buffet option.

In a civilized society it's a series of escalations:

  1. Fine print in the menu will say the buffet deal is only available for 1 person, and the restaurant reserves the right to cutoff any customer at anytime without a given reason.

  2. Now when Red Lobster sees 10 people eating from one buffet option, they have a contract justification to have an employee go over there and gently say, please don't do this.

  3. When that doesn't change behavior, Red Lobster has justification to charge the table for 10 buffet meals with the cheque at the end.

  4. When the table refuses to pay, then Red Lobster has justification to take the table to the small claims court.

  5. When the table refuses to pay in court, NOW finally the cops get involved over criminal behavior

  6. Now jail becomes an option because of breaking big laws

This process can break down at any point due to the enforcers lacking will or ability to straightforwardly enforce the law.

However when the system works, it can enforce numerous arbitrarily small contracts (Red Lobster buffet fine print) with the threat of overwhelming force.

#4 isn't a scalable option, if at all. You'd have to know the person's name and address, which RL would not know when a random group of 10 enters RL. Then you have to have the capacity to file the complaint. The average RL manager might be just competent enough to do that. B serve the defendants (expensive) then you still have to win that case. This takes the time of the manager, plus whatever employee who has to testify. And the employee probably has moved on from the job by then.

Plus cops don't get involved in people not paying small claims fees most of the time. We're at best some sort of hold on a person's bank account, and I suspect most of these red lobster fellows prefer the currency exchange and pillows.

Hmm good point.

If this is a serious problem maybe the company would require legal identification and/or a bank account demonstrating sufficient funds before they engage with customers. Which would be inconvenient for everyone if the policy was applied equitably.

Or maybe Red Lobster could cooperate with one of those governments that have a facial recognition based social credit score to identify non-cooperative persons.

This takes the time of the manager, plus whatever employee who has to testify

It's okay to take time and expense to punish wrongdoing. The whole basis of revenge is that it's kinda non-rational after the crime is already committed. But the ability to pre-commit to revenge means that rational agents won't mess with you to find out.

The higher levels should get far less usage because the threat of higher-level punishment prevents rational agents from non-compliance. I concede that this doesn't seem to be how current legal systems are setup. Also I'm not a lawyer and I'm just spitballing fantasy systems on an internet forum.

I don't know. I was also really surprised that Red Lobster could somehow botch a standard all-you-can-eat deal to the point of bankrupcy. Restaurants have been doing all-you-can-eat deals since 1947, and Red Lobster has been successfully operating restaurants since 1968. Why would all-you-can-eat suddenly have become unenforceable to the degree that Red Lobster can go bankrupt from it, when this doesn't seem to be a previously established pattern? Did something change about the enforceability of such deals? Something really does smell fishy, here.

Because they'd rather lose goods to shoplifting than pay employees

They've been telling their employees NOT to interfere with robbers, this isn't a matter of penny-pinching. Plug 'employee fired for obstructing theft in store' into your search engine.

Nor does law enforcement care to crack down on basics like robberies, car theft, vagrants, drug dealing and so on (unless of course Xi Xingping is coming to town). See the open air drug markets in US cities, or how some US train stations are used for enjoying narcotics rather than travelling by train: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-03-14/horror-the-deadly-use-of-drugs-on-metro-trains

It's not just corporations, it's a breakdown in society generally. The corporations don't want theft of their products but they're clearly more afraid of inconveniencing criminals, just like every other institution.

How snail-brained gullible are you exactly?

This was an unnecessarily antagonistic comment in an otherwise fine post.

It seems far more plausible that Red Lobster unleashed unlimited shrimp as a last stand to stay open, hoping it would be a loss-leader that would enable them to pay off whatever debt they had to go into to run it, and that they were in dire straights to even consider it. If unlimited shrimp was the only problem they would have simply revoked the deal and moved on.

"People don't drink that much anymore" seems like a far more plausible explaination -- tables eating free shrimp all night is no problem if they are also getting hammered on $12 Crantinis or whatnot. I could believe that R.L. was slow to update their business model to take this into account I suppose.

Yeah, they probably assumed somebody eating unlimited shrimp would, on average, drink 3 $5 bud lightscoors lights and an $8 winearita, and that it would be a loss leader for that reason. But to run that deal I suspect they were already looking at some bad numbers and desperately trying to get people in the door to do their $5 light beer drinking at RL instead of chilis.

This is a great response, except for:

How snail-brained gullible are you exactly?

Despite the rest of your post being high-quality and very thought-provoking (which is why I gave it an upvote), I'm seriously inclined to also click the 'report' button for antagonistic/unkind. Taking Red Lobster's press release at its word (or at least assuming that the all-you-can-eat shrimp is partially responsible for their losses) is fine, especially in service of introducing a discussion-worthy topic for conversation.

OTOH, the OP taking Red Lobster at its word is a bit ironic, given the broader point about a low-trust society.

I think you’re correct that it’s a selfishness problem more so than a trust problem (the trust problem is developing as a response to the selfishness problem. And I think the cause or at least a major cause of selfishness has little to do with government, but more to do with atomization.

Communities, civic pride, and rootedness in a place have all declined rather rapidly over the course of the last 50 or so years. People don’t stick around the same places, the don’t keep the same jobs, they don’t form deep lasting relationships with people around them. And without a sense of tribe, a lot of pro-social behaviors don’t make sense. Why return a lost wallet when it belongs to someone you don’t know, and you’re not going to get social credit for doing the right thing anyway? Why not cheat Red Lobster? Do you know the owner? Do you worry that friends and neighbors will notice you cheating the system? Even if they do, what social control is there that they could leverage to shame you? Or on the negative end, who in your area knows or cares if you never contribute to society? If you decide to do nothing but game and eat? Who’s going to shame you for being a burden on your family or the government?

The thing that jumps out at me about the so-called high trust societies is the degree of social conformity and shaming that happens in them. There’s a shame to not working hard in those societies, but it’s not the theoretical “grind-core” thing like we have, it’s people you work with (and might work with for decades) noticing that you leave early all the time. Or noticing that you’re not producing as much as they are. In social relationships, they’re close enough that you’ll be shamed if you do something that the society sees as wrong. And the informal social credit system works pretty well most of the time, producing the kinds of pro-social behaviors we actually want. If you want divorces to go down, having a lot of negativity around getting a divorce AND having a network of people willing to gossip and shame you for getting a divorce keeps most people together.

I think shame works for the most part, and the loss of it makes trust-breaking a much more rational decision than it would be in a shaming culture.

Why return a lost wallet when it belongs to someone you don’t know, and you’re not going to get social credit for doing the right thing anyway?

You could ask the same question of people in Tokyo who do return wallets.

Collapsing this to a question of incentives is missing the point entirely. People who return wallets are not following incentives because the incentive is always to defect.

Or on the negative end, who in your area knows or cares if you never contribute to society?

The Japanese literally have several words for the different gradations of these people.

Your model of high trust societies seems lacking.

I don't think it's about shame, but it's absolutely about incentives. In a society that reflects you, where everyone has had a similar upbringing to yours, probably looks somewhat like you, has gone through roughly the same events as you, you can reasonably expect your neighbor to act approximately like you.

So in that kind of society, the incentive to be the kind of person who returns a wallet is that you get to live in a society that would likely return your wallet too.

If your society is not just atomized, but also doesn't reflect you, the link between the action and the incentive is harder to see, and by that token becomes less strong.

I would argue that they absolutely are following incentives. The close-knit and shame-based culture in which having a reputation as a good person is necessary to do well in life simply changes the incentive landscape to promote pro-social behavior. If I can lose face and thus lose out on opportunities that would otherwise come your way if you were doing the right thing.

Now the part you quoted I was actually talking about American society in which everyone is highly mobile and atomized and in which you aren’t shamed for being anti-social. In America, even if someone found out you keep the wallet, you don’t face the prospect of having that information follow you around. You don’t develop a reputation because you aren’t likely to stay in the same place and do the same job around the same people. And honestly the fact the the Japanese have so many words for people who do bad things kinda supports my idea here. Social shaming works to promote pro-social be happy especially when a person is rooted in a community long enough to develop a reputation.

You are missing out on the fact that nobody will know if you don't return the wallet in Japan. Japan is even more urbanized than the US (90%+). Most people live in huge cities where they are just as atomized as any rich low trust society. That's why old people die in their apartments and are not discovered until the stink of their decomposing bodies makes them known.

As for NEETs, until 2004 the US had higher prime age labor force participation rate than Japan. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.ZS?locations=JP-US

I guess Japan invented social shaming for NEETs 20 years ago?

I don't think the trust problem is a response to the selfishness problem, because just saying "people are being selfish" has no explanatory power. Are people more selfish because of genetics? Have all the selfless people selected out of the gene pool?

On the other hand, if you present selfishness as a rational response to a society that they don't trust will repay pro-social behavior, you get a lot further with explanations that match observations. Trust is downstream of shared identity, experience and culture (see: Robert D. Putnam's Bowling Alone). If I think of my fellow citizens as being somewhat similar to me, I can easily imagine them coming to the same pro-social conclusions as me. Shared identity, experience and culture are impacted negatively by multiculturalism and by emphasing diversity. Hence why high trust societies are typically homogenous societies.

Obesity isn't a trust issue, it's a selfish issue, where people would rather eat themselves into oblivion instead of finding a healthy balance and self restraint.

This isn’t true.

I can buy a large pizza and a 12 pack and settle into videogaming while pigging out. I can make an organic healthy meal for after returning from the gym. These imply the exact same level of concern for my fellow man- it’s simply a differentiation between long term consequences(for myself) vs short term pleasure(also for myself). Like sure, one indicates better character than the other. But it’s not about selfishness. It’s about- I think mostly time preference and discipline.

You're right, but time preference and discipline are not randomly distributed, and half the population will be in the bottom half of it anyway.

To the degree that the behavior of those with poor decision making skills, short time horizons, impulse control problems etc. should be controlled, the question becomes then at what level of society to accomplish this control, and what are the upsides and downsides of each?

Gossip is relatively low stakes, but can lead to larger consequences, and isn't that reliable.

Mass public shaming campaigns ala DARE tend to be ineffective at best and counterproductive (DEI) at worst.

Institutional norms are good if you can keep them, a sort of sub-legal process of who gets to have what sort of job, or any job at all. Lots of problems with due process and hypersensitivity to public pressure campaigns, which do work on corporations better than teenagers.

Or you could just sort of build it into the legal structure, don't actually ban the behavior just barrage it with legal inconveniences like smokers or gun owners.

But ultimately, every society has a lot of people who are not going to do the pro-social thing reliably in large enough numbers unless their behavior is..... controlled is a strange word. Perhaps "averaged control" is better. Some people always swim against the current, and some amount of that is good.

The real rules of every society are always enforced. How well they work and on what percentage of the population fluctuates widely.

Selfishness doesn't always come at significant cost to someone else, but I'd argue the choice to pick former over the ladder does imply some amount of selfishness in the term of short term gain over long term benefit.

I am a bit confused by the direction and nature of the relationships you are purposing here. It seems to me that you are saying there is a rise in 'selfishness' because governments 'lost trust', by favoring marginalized demographics. I would assume, based on this, that the increase in selfishness then, would be found in the, non-marginalized, non-favored, demographics, but my vague understanding of the spike in shoplifting is that this is not the case.

I think government action, or often inaction, is probably contributing to the rise in the overtness of these behaviors, but I am not sure the mechanism is any more complicated than, some people will act up if you remove the consequences from their actions.

The system being implemented is a spoils system, and the question to answer is whether it is a result of or a cause of a drop in civic virtue.

You're right this is not clear, I'll admit to this thought being a little half baked but I want to get it out before I forgot or moved on to other things.

I would assume, based on this, that the increase in selfishness then, would be found in the, non-marginalized, non-favored, demographics, but my vague understanding of the spike in shoplifting is that this is not the case.

My argument is when governance stop enforcing laws unilaterally and starts responding to perverse incentives, that all parties start switching to self interest over mutual growth. In a game theory matrix, the best but 'unstable' outcome is both the government and constituents do wats best for each other, when one party defects for one reason or another, they both slide to following self interest, creating a more stable or predictable, but significantly less beneficial, environment.

I think government action, or often inaction, is probably contributing to the rise in the overtness of these behaviors, but I am not sure the mechanism is any more complicated than, some people will act up if you remove the consequences from their actions.

Why do you think governments are selectively enforcing laws? And what are the consequences of the government making these deliberate choices?

Personally I do not really model governments as 'entities' that take action based on some sort of game theoretic rational self interest. Governments seem to be collections of people who are generally following their own individual incentives which can very easily lead to governments doing things that are not really in the interest of the government as a whole, if one was to think of it as an entity.

To the specific question, I think there was a very effective march through the institutions which caused woke/progressive ideas to reach fixation in the university system to such an extent that 90%+ of college graduates to come out of the last 15 years (give or take) are 'true believes' in as much as mid-wits can truly believe anything. One of those true beliefs is that crime is (almost?)totally down stream of societal oppression, and specifically that the criminal justice system is a sort of negative feedback loop that creates and then punishes criminals and that the cruel impositions of the criminal justice system upon the 'criminal class,' is an untenable injustice. I think once enough young professionals filter into the various DA offices of the world who hold these beliefs and similar you eventually get to a point where they are able to coordinate action and push through soft on crime practices based on the idea that contact with the criminal justice system is toxic.

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