This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I'm not claiming this, this was my summary of BurdensomeCount's argument. If it's an uncharitable summary of his view then fair enough but he literally said "Today the USA is much richer than other peer countries in Europe etc. because it has and has had for a long time significantly lower taxes and a much weaker redistributive welfare state compared to places like Sweden and the UK." A distribution of resources would lower the wealth gap.
Also, I don't see any reason to believe the bell curve of IQ distribution has significant differences between countries. The only statistics I've ever seen was on median/average IQs by country/race, not on the IQ distributions in each country. If you have any studies on this I'd be interested in seeing it, as I could not find anything. Regardless, there are literally 0 countries in the world where everyone has the same or similar amounts of ability. I don't see any reason to believe that Ukraine, Belarus, or Armenia is quite homogenous in regards to IQ. If you look at any IQ bell curve charts on race, you'll see that there is a common bell curve pattern. The best example of one bell curve being thinner or flatter on the tails is in regards to gender (women being more clustered around the mean) but even that gender difference still has gaps between the smartest and dumbest. You're claiming the bell curve of IQ in a place like Ukraine is extremely tight around the median but I see no evidence for it.
That's a logarithmic scale on the X-axis, most of the countries with a high Gini coefficient are quite poor. You can see the richer countries are clustered to the bottom right with the United States being the exception. I'll admit I didn't do a great analysis writing from my bed late at night and only spot-checked the map chart in my link, which showed that the countries with the largest Gini coefficients were mostly in Africa/South America which are poorer 2nd/3rd world countries. I took the data from your link and organized it by the most recent data for each country sorted by highest to lowest Gini coefficients (which you can see in the table below) and you can see the years vary, so doing any actual statistically valid analysis on this is quite difficult. A quick correlation on this data shows -0.36 which admittedly is a weak correlation, but this is by weighting each country equally regardless of population, and this is a univariate analysis which is not a good analysis for something as complex as this topic. As I pointed out earlier the dates aren't even the same, ranging from 1992 to 2021.
Anyway, I'm not making any claims in terms of the impact inequality has on economic growth as a whole, I'm providing some counter-evidence to BurdensomeCount's claim, which is that the lack of a redistributive welfare state leads to economic prosperity. I doubt any of the top 20 (or even top 50 except the United States) in the table below have a strong welfare system, yet these countries are not economic powerhouses. My rebuttal of BurdensomeCount's argument does not mean I believe a low Gini coefficient leads to economic growth. It should be clear from my points further down in my previous post that I believe there are other factors other than inequality that better explain economic growth and development.
In retrospect using the Gini coefficient alone is not a good analysis as it doesn't reveal much about welfare, and you'd want to look at changes in GDP per capita over time, but at this point to properly do a statistical analysis is a lot of effort for what is a rebuttal of an argument which in of itself doesn't even have statistical backing. I still think my general point here stands, which is that BurdensomeCount's argument is wrong.
What are you trying to say here? My point is that wealth redistribution is not a major factor in the economic growth of the United States compared to Europe and I'm not sure what your statement here either refutes or adds to the discussion.
If you actually believe obesity is good for economic growth then I'm genuinely curious as to why you think so.
Edit: Reworded my last point to be less antagonistic, I just assumed you were being sarcastic but I realized I don't know if that's true.
Table of Gini Coefficient Data
/images/17044029569390996.webp
This is correct, but I do not think BurdensomeCount's thinks redistributive welfare state and gini index are interchangeable (I don't). This is my main objection.
There are lots of countries with large percent of GDP in wellfare system having very high Gini index regardless.
adding individual bell curves with averages far apart does not look like bell curve.
Fair enough. But see my point on the correlation between welfare spending and Gini below.
I have organized and sorted the data for you in my previous post, can you pick out a few countries (other than the US) that are high on the list and has a large percentage of GDP in welfare system?
I've also tried to add some stats on welfare spending, there isn't much, so I put togther a new table below using what sources I could find. Newly added data in new columns is from here: https://data.oecd.org/socialexp/social-spending.htm
If the country is missing that means there was no data on the percentage of GDP spent on public spending.
The correlation between Gini and % spending is -0.61, the correlation between % spending and GDP per capita is 0.36. Again, the same caveats as the previous analysis, except this time we also don't have much data on the highest gini coefficient countries so any analysis here shouldn't be used for any serious argument, but we now see a medium/strong negative correlation between public spending and gini coefficient. I mean is that such a surprise? If you don't like the use of gini coefficient then look at the correlation between GDP per capita and welfare spending and you see a small positive correlation. You could correctly point out that correlation != causation and the more likely explanation is that richer countries distribute after getting their wealth (to do a more appropriate analysis on this we would have to look at changes in GDP per capita over time) but my point is that welfare distribution is not a major factor in economic growth/development and there are more likely answers.
The populations are likely weighed heavily in one race or the other, not like those populations have equal distributions, and again this reveals very little about the tail end of the IQ distributions which is more important when we consider your argument on large gaps in ability leading to higher wealth gaps. Do any of the countries below have significant amounts of populations with differing means of IQ to properly explain the inequality outcome? I'm not saying your argument has no value, if we were looking at specific countries such as the United States there's definitely some merit, but as a general trend across all the countries, I don't think IQ gaps are the main or primary explanation for the higher Gini coefficient in these countries.
List of countries with high Gini index: Namibia Zambia Central African Republic Eswatini Colombia Mozambique Botswana Belize Angola Saint Lucia Zimbabwe
That is such an arbitrary cutoff that conveniently cuts off all the high gini coefficient countries, don't do this.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link