I have been a long time free subscriber, however after this article I decided to become paid. I am a right of center Southerner that thinks your obsession with license plates is weird, but really enjoy your balanced and thoughtful take on most subjects even when I don’t always agree with you. And just picking with you about the license plate. It is good to have a quirky thing we become known for.
Good choice to subscribe. Best comment section on the web. And plenty of us center adjacent readers here.
I happen to agree with his license plate obsession. Big crimes/problems arise because of lack of enforcement of small issues.
I follow the rules. Why should some asshole get to part wherever he wants with no consequence because no one bothers to check his internet printed "temporary tag"
I think part of MY’s larger point is that there’s nothing inherently “anti-liberal” about being interested in enforcement. Indeed, it helps achieve some “liberal” goals; e.g. you can’t have decent mass transit unless people pay for it, and that requires punishing - in a proportionate way - people who (literally) free-ride. Likewise, I ride a bike, and I’m in favor of enforcing good traffic behavior among drivers and bikers alike so that I’m not killed or maimed by selfish recklessness (I hold a special antipathy for irresponsible bikers, because they make drivers more angry and aggressive, which is more dangerous for bikers because drivers will win in a collision basically 100% of the time).
I think there are plenty of us “liberals” who follow MY in being quite frustrated that large chunks of both the Democratic Party and our social/professional circles who have lost their minds on enforcement and have found it fashionable to promote plainly ignorant positions on the topic that are, to put it nicely, hot garbage. In that sense, what MY’s on is not a “kick”; he’s long argued for better enforcement and better police funding. And I think a lot of us are happy that he’s currently doing so in a performative way, if for no other reason that to counter equally performative, but totally vapid anti-enforcement nonsense.
Funnily enough, I actually talked about broken window policing today in a class I taught to some French masters students (different context - I talked about how it was ported from NYC to Iraq), and it didn’t occur to me to look up the French term. Turns out it’s a fairly boring more or less straight translation (« théorie de la vitre cassée »). More to the point, sure, I’m there for the conversation - and I think the license plates thing is a fairly clear example of how “broken windows” lead to other problems.
People here are, for the most part, nice to each other even when they disagree. A few weeks back I wandered into Matt Taibbi’s comments and came back here somewhat shell-shocked, grateful for this oasis in the midst of such raw anger and, frankly, cruelty that you see elsewhere.
True; I’ve seen people get somewhat snippy here on occasion. And MY has said that posts on transgender issues have generated some genuinely mean-spirited comments (which I have not read; I’m going off of his description). Overall, though, I feel like I usually learn something here and like this comments section is in the vicinity of what you might call a community.
If I can wax ranty for a second, I genuinely don’t understand the scene in places like Matt Taibbi’s or Bari Weiss’s comments. What is the appeal of abusing strangers? I mean, sure, I get the adrenaline rush of saying something nasty against an avatar of all that you hate with few if any consequences. I may have even indulged in it myself on occasion when I was younger and far stupider. But after a while, wouldn’t a relatively normal adult realize how pointless it is? Does it really move the needle on an issue one cares about to call people names and ruminate over catastrophized scenarios in which “those people” destroy everything?
Realizing that all of the above is totally rhetorical, I’ll repeat what I said a few weeks back. People here are (largely) nice. Thanks for being nice.
Welcome! I'm a bit right of center myself and this is the best place for in depth analysis. Been a paid subscriber for over a year and this is still my favorite thing to read.
"...12.6 percent of the U.S. population was poor in 1970; two decades later, it was 13.5 percent; in 2010, it was 15.1 percent; and in 2019, it was 10.5 percent..."
Saying that this run of numbers shows no change -- handwaving away the difference between 15% and 10.5% -- is malpractice. That is a huge difference. If we were talking about a medical intervention in eg cancer treatment, this would be a cause for celebration.
Any honest investigator would respond to this by saying, "holy shit! For every three people with Condition X in 2010 there were only two people with Condition X in 2019? Someone has stumbled on a powerful causal lever! Let's find that thing!"
So...what was the new thing in 2019 that produced this striking change in the numbers? Because we should probably keep doing that thing.
I always enjoy when Matt notices how journalists dishonestly frame arguments and present data misleadingly to support their predefined narratives. It happens more often that we'd all like, unfortunately.
I think it’s less dishonesty as such and more that there are basically zero incentives for making an out-of-narrative argument or actively researching data (whether primary or collected by others) that could falsify your thesis. This affects everyone in the form of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, but people who write for a living (including me!) are especially prone to it. In my corner of the social sciences world, the incentives for theory generation as opposed to hypothesis testing (to say nothing of testing previous results) are so lopsided that we are drowning in “theories” that are always presented as “calls” for researchers to do more in a particular line of reasoning but end up never mentioned again. And yet those irrelevant theories - often generated on _very_ small-n studies with zero experimental design - are what get people jobs and tenure.
I think I got off track there - sorry! My point is that although of course sometimes people intentionally mislead, I think the way more common and boring tendency, at least among certain “intellectual” types, is to get so used to passing off motivated reasoning as actual reason that it becomes a very difficult habit to break.
I had a professor in graduate, Wolfgang Stolper ("Stolper-Samuelson" theorem :)) who had a saying about "professional sins. He said that seducing virgins and telling lies are both sins. But seducing virgins is a "professional" sin for bishops and telling lies is a "professional sin for academics."
I'm pretty sure that Desmond was talking about longer term trends and not the variation in the poverty rate attributed to business cycles. In 2010, we were still recovering from recession, and the economy was understimulated. By 2019 the economy was pretty strong. That doesn't really reflect major differences in policies regarding people in poverty.
So I just realized that there’s a heck of a mailbag question in this:
The pre-transfer OPM measure of poverty in the US hovers between 10 and 15 percent based on where in the business cycle we are. How does *that* figure compare to Europe, instead of the post-transfer SPM?
Europe has made its labor market all soft and cuddly in the name of fairness to the folks at the bottom of the scale. But if that’s not reflected at all in the measure of standard of living folks “earn” before the welfare state steps in, then what’s the point? If so, we should stop looking longingly at any of the labor market measures (codetermination, fixed-term contracts, for-cause firing) they’ve taken and simply take the bits of their transfer state which we want.
This is an astute observation. Of course most major pieces of red tape have entrenched interests to defend them.
The biggest single imposition upon free labor markets is anti-discrimination laws. Companies spend a lot of money complying and defending lawsuits, yet it’s far from clear anti discrimination laws have done much to raise the wages of protected groups. However, ending anti-discrimination protections sounds douchey and racist, so those laws will stay even if they are mainly inefficient symbols of inclusion
This is the inverse of a trend that never fails to “vex” me (to use MY’s term): failing to contextualize changes over time, and as a result either minimizing (in this case) or catastrophizing (see: any media in the UK that has to do with weather or inflation). As dysphemistic says, there is a huge difference between 10 and 15% - but a simple rhetorical trick (“statisticians hate this one simple trick!”) can handwave them away (or, alternatively, blow out of proportion a change between 5 and -1 degrees Celsius).
You’re pulling that out of context. Desmond made it very clear that poverty is cyclical, thus the high 2010 figure and the low 2019 figure. Desmond is explaining that changes in the standard poverty measure are driven by the business cycle, and he’s right.
"The line curves slightly up, then slightly down, then back up again over the years, staying steady through Democratic and Republican administrations, rising in recessions and falling in boom years."
Is that his acknowledgement that poverty is driven by the business cycle?
Because it comes in the context of the claim that the poverty rate "curves slightly up, then slightly down," which is not an accurate way to describe falling from 15.1 to 10.5.
Even if you want to say the change is all due to the business cycle, the right conclusion here would be, " the business cycle can have a large effect on poverty," not "there's no appreciable change."
all the data are consistent with poverty oscillating around a mean of about 12-13 percent, with the oscillations driven by the business cycle.
matt’s point about spm is explosive because it shows that “poverty has fallen by half. traditional poverty measures don’t capture this because they exclude public assistance.”
My new pet peeve is people who see a graph that is clearly meant to show change over time and then get mad that the y axis doesn't start at 0 or go from 0% to 100%. Here you can clearly see the downfall of "0 Y Axis Thinking." Sometimes differences that look small on a y axis that starts at 0 are still very meaningful!!!
It’s casual lying by people like Demond that makes me angry. They know better but they take the lazy path. One does not need to lie if their opinions have merit.
We need a law that requires all stats to come with a certainty measure. It’s a nominal 50% reduction in poverty, but if normal variation is ~2.5 points then it’s impossible to distinguish and Desmond is right to call it flat.
This one is a real winner. I have to note that Desmond's essay on capitalism in the book version of The 1619 Project is perhaps one of the most problematic of all the chapters there. There are economic historians of diverse political stripes who think he doesn't know what he's talking about, that the essay is really pretty outrageously wrong in its rhetoric and the interpretations that it at least implies (minor revisions having been made to an earlier, more explicit version). In short the controversial thesis there is that large-scale plantation slavery in the American South introduced accounting and labor management innovations that then spread to other forms of capitalist production, meaning that in some ways slavery actually can be said to have caused or led to or pioneered or even perhaps provided the crucial investment seed money for American capitalism. James Oakes is simply scathing in his criticism of Desmond's contribution to T1619P. So there may be some kind of a pattern here, and unfortunately because of Desmond's linkage to the debates around T1619P there are going to be a lot of progressives who are inclined toward knee-jerk hostility to his critics. He's supposed to be on the side of the angels. Less tangentially, the addiction of today's progressive politics to the thesis of the impossibility of social improvement (and thus the futility of progressivism) is a thing to behold, verily.
Yeah, I think that's totally fair; I don't mean to imply that he has never done brilliant research, but he definitely doesn't do his reputation any favors with some of the knots he ties himself in rhetorically. He's still better than Robert Reich, but I find even his nominally nonpartisan analysis worse than similar efforts by Delong, Noah Smith, etc.
Was waiting for this (and agree mostly). The funny thing is, this progressive usually holds up the the problematic Desmond essay as a reason to say the criticisms of the 1619 project are wildly over the top. The intellectually honest* criticisms are (correctly) focused on his essay and his pretty wildly inaccurate claim that slavery created modern capitalism (talking about the creation of modern capitalism and not bringing up the UK and the beginnings of industrialization is seriously intellectually dishonest. Any discussion of how the modern economy came to be needs to start there). To a lesser extent the other intellectually honest criticisms are directed at Nicole Hannah Jones. Although, I actually found her essay not nearly as problematic as people say and honestly think her very lefty Twitter presence is a bigger part of 1619 criticism then people like to admit**.
One thing I always come back with when people make sweeping criticisms of 1619 is that I basically never see criticisms of the essays by Kevin Kruse and Jamelle Bouie. In fact, there essays could basically be Yglesias posts. I find the lack of any commentary or their essays telling.
* it’s extremely clear to me a lot of the criticisms are not actually intellectually helpful or honest. And come from people who never read any essays in question and are basically saying “how dare you say America has a racist past and not say America is the awesomist country in the history of awesome”.
**considering Andrew Sullivan basically claims NHJ is responsible for him losing his job at New York Magazine, I take his criticisms of 1619 with a grain of salt. I’m not privy to internal emails, maybe he’s right and NHJ wrote an email to an editor that got resulted in Sully getting fired. I have no idea. But when he says (or said) NHJ is the most powerful person at the New York Times I really had to role my eyes.
One issue, although a boring one for most observers, is that many of the initial, pungent criticisms of T1619P were issued after the NYT Mag version (v1.0) came out, and the changes made for the book (v2.0) rendered some initial remarks irrelevant. Critics of 1.0 said "No mention of Frederick Douglass in a supposed new history of America that centers slavery and the Black experience? Srsly?" That’s why you see all those references to Douglass in the book. Oops! Many of the changes were even more superficial, however, e.g., adding small qualifying phrases to sentences while really not reconsidering shaky interpretations. Of course NHJ has been the biggest target for criticism, but this feeds the culture war dynamic that she too feeds (as does Jake Silverstein, editor of the Mag) -- all the critics are sentimental about the Am Rev or are otherwise conservative, which isn't true, as critics were ideologically diverse. I have seen serious criticism of the Bouie piece, e.g., by Daryl Scott in the American Historical Review, as it jumps from Calhoun to the 20th century, a doubtful form of historical argumentation, but this is the standard method in the essays. Part of the clean-up job was to get fine historians like Martha Jones, Tiya Miles, and Kruse involved in 2.0 to enhance its credibility. Jones's essay might be the only one that follows a conventional scholarly method of clearly aligning evidence, narrative, and original interpretation. Most of the others are paste jobs in service of a job that is clearly political but not very coherent in purpose (the stated purpose has shifted around: to show how slavery is the hidden source of much of American history, to recognize and celebrate African American history, maybe one or two other things).
This actually might be the most intellectually honest criticism I’ve read. It would be churlish of me to suggest I read literally every criticism and some of the names you’ve noted are a bit new to me (and have me interested in reading more).
In a way you’re kind of buttressing my point. As I noted, it’s not like I thought the 1619 project was beyond criticism or didn’t have a number of flaws worth pointing out (I especially want to read that criticism of Bouie’s essay; curious if nothing else). But wow, your comment is way way more nuanced then some of the commentary I read in National Review for example (again, only going on the commentary I read)
>>> even perhaps provided the crucial investment seed money for American capitalism.
I don't know enough about this particular aspect of American history or this particular debate to have a strong opinion here, but this *specific* bit of it...doesn't sound that crazy to me? I mean, Southern planters had a lot of money; the South was actually wealthier than the North in the early years of the American republic. It seems plausible that they could have funneled some of that money towards New England textile mills in the 1820s or whatever. And of course, those mills often did work with Southern-produced cotton.
Now, if the argument is more like "American industrialists looked at the slave plantation and decided to recreate a version of it in the factory," then, yeah, that stinks of some real garbage.
I didn’t say slavery was efficient, I said Southern planters were rich. And by “early Republic,” I meant, like, 1790s to 1820s or so, not the entire pre-Civil War period (I realize this was not immediately obvious from the phrase).
I was making a fairly narrow point about who had money to invest in the earliest days of American history, not a broad point about the economics of slavery or industrialization.
I'm honestly not sure how important "having money to invest" actually was in the antebellum agrarian south. (I'll bet industrial historians know the answer to this though!) On the one hand, obviously there was an investor class in the US in the pre-civil war 1800s -- someone had to build the railroads, after all, and cotton-growing slaveholders were growing for export rather than consumption -- but were Southern plantation slave holders really any kind of meaningful source of investment capital to the industrialized North in the days when it took weeks just to *get* to Northern financial hubs from the agrarian South?
True. I'm definitely not sure they were, and, as David R points out below, there is good reason to believe they weren't. I was just saying that this isn't a totally crazy notion at first glance, because they did have money.
Still seems a bit of a stretch. Southern capital was not mobile, it was tied up in physical "plant" at home; plantation owners didn't go venture their money in northern factories, they bought and sold slaves and occasionally cotton and tobacco futures.
Yeah, it might be a stretch. I’m not necessarily endorsing it, just pointing out that there is a narrow sense in which part of it it seems plausible.
I certainly *do not* think American industrialization is a direct consequence of slavery. Even if it were the case that some Southern planters invested in some very early industrial operations (and I’m not saying it is, just that it doesn’t sound crazy), that doesn’t mean that slavery directly led to industrialization. It *definitely* doesn’t mean that industrialization would not have happened were it not for slavery - I mean, the UK didn’t need plantation slavery to industrialize.
Yea, it seems quite clear from the historical record that slavery was an impediment to industrialization everywhere it was practiced in the Americas and also dragged down the pace of industrialization in other regions which were integrated with slaveholding societies economically. Financial capital from slave-owning regions was not invested in industrialization within the United States and the agricultural economies of the slaveholding regions were not efficient in supplying nascent industry in the US with any of the precursors it needed to become world-beating. Moreover, the slave-holding regions in the US consistently viewed industrialization in the free-labor states as a threat and did their utmost to knife it in the back at every turn in favor of buying the industrial produce of faraway lands.
It's our original sin, but no one alive today profited an iota from it, it gravely harmed the national interest at a macro level, and we should stop pretending otherwise in support of a false-but-compelling moral narrative for what we "owe" the descendants of slaves.
if nothing else, england industrialized earlier and there were basically no slaves there. ditto massachusetts.
indeed, slavery eats up capital. pay your workers wages and you pay their cost one week at a time. buy your workers, and you have to pay sums of cash up front. money spent buying slaves could not easily be invested in railroads or water powered mills.
there were some examples of slaves performing skilled labor, eg at the Tredegar iron works in Richmond. In Haiti, many of the overseers were mixed race and some were former slaves. Given time, slavery might have evolved into a system suited to more complex tasks than growing cotton. However, emancipation came before industrialized slavery could really get off the ground, and slavery probably allocated capital to less efficient tasks than building efficient water powered textile mills.
slavery was an efficient way of producing cotton. the union blockade caused a depression in northern england precisely because other sources of cotton like india and egypt were less efficient and more expensive
This is wrong. The gang system of planting was extremely unpleasant, and not something free labor was willing to do. However, it was much better at growing cotton. Fogel and Engerman estimate the non-pecuniary losses to slaves at 90 million dollars, offset only slightly by the 6 million slaves earned in compensation above free labor (yes, slaves earned more money than free farmers).
if that were really true, capitalists could have lent slaves money to buy their own freedom and made a profit doing so.
compensating slave owners was the obvious way to get them to go along with manumission. most would have gone along for the right price, though their demands would have been high. still, the fact that white people couldn’t design functioning system where black people would pay for their own manumission suggests that plantation slavery was reasonably efficient.
Definitely -- it's totally plausible that plantation profits might have contributed meaningful to industrial capitalism. That question has been hotly debated in the context of the British industrial revolution since Eric Williams made a parallel argument in _Capitalism and Slavery_ in 1944 (re: the profits of British Caribbean slave-based sugar plantations). So to a great extent this is question for empirical investigation and analysis by economic historians, and there has been a ton of that. Overall I'd say the weight of scholarly opinion runs against Williams specifically, although a lot of people (including me) think there is still good reason to take what he says seriously at a macro level and because he was a fantastic writer who made important, provocative arguments in the 1940s with far less data than we have now. But you wouldn't simply recycle his argument now without looking at the data or the scholarship collected in the intervening 75 years. That's sort of what Desmond's essay in T1619P does. And the really weird thing he does is base an argument for the origins of American industrial capitalism in slavery not on coherent claims about investment capital (I believe there might have been some of that in his v1.0 essay, which then dropped away from v2.0), but rather on evidence of capitalist labor-management and accounting practices in large slave-based plantations, which doesn't make much sense. Those practices didn't originate in those plantations, as Oakes and others have pointed out.
Most of what I’ve read on the topic, which post-dates Williams, is that no only did the South contribute very little financial capital to northern industrialization, they in fact spent considerable political capital attempting to kill it as a threat to their way of life. By 1820 it was already very clear to the South’s leadership that the northern free soil model was a grave demographic threat, by 1830 or so it was a grave economic one that would eventually reduce them to a mere appendage of the north, slavery to be dispensed with on a whim.
They weren’t wrong. Had they somehow clung to the Peculiar Institution until 1880 or 90 before trying to secede they’d have been crushed in a matter of months.
"if slavery was such an efficient system (as the Southerners claimed at the time and as the 1619 project oddly claims too), why did the South lose the Civil War?"
+1000 There's also the point that by basically every objectively verifiable metric we have (life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, etc.) median whites in non-slave states were better off than median whites in slave states.
Winning or losing a war is a terrible metric for efficiency. Relying upon Fogel and Engerman’s “Time on the Cross”, yes, slavery was efficient in the sense that it maximized outputs given inputs.
> I think most people found his book a little dull and will find Desmond’s more interesting, which is unfortunate because I don’t think it’s helpful for Desmond to over-complicate the situation.
I think many of us are far more interested in reading and discussing social issues like poverty than we are in actually addressing these problems. Doubly so if it would come at a personal cost to us affluent wanna-be noble aristocrats. We simply enjoy the thrill of applying our thinking and sophistry in something of a status game where we cosplay as philosophers. A hundred years ago we’d likely be arguing about the interpretation of scripture in our application of the Social Gospel, without much need to actually apply anything.
And yes, this comment is an example of that. I hope to have some debating partners in the replies who can chastise me for being overly uncharitable to us progressives.
Obviously with that final sentence you killed the conversation- and yet I’m impervious;)
I counter - a hundred years ago we’d have supported the progressive movement 1.0 that ended child labor in the us , recognized labor unions, busted trusts etc
Sure there is always navel gazing going on to some extent, but conversations change minds and people with new ideas vote, donate, protest, engage in civic society and drive real change.
(I’m optimistic this morning and that’s even before my coffee :)
If I’d been in the debate a century ago, there would have been a large dose of social Darwinism. With so few examples of minorities or non-Western cultures thriving, there also would have been a monster sized portion of white supremacy. I probably would have been a white supremicist in 1923 and so would most people on this thread.
P.S. while how one would have been back in x period before one’s birth is always a hypothetical with not real answers, for the sake of the fun argument I’d point out that slowborers are proven independent or at least heterodox thinkers. Assuming we take that characteristic with us back in time I think it’s fair to suppose we’d have some qualms with some of the mainstream ideas of whatever group we end up being a part of back then.
The giganerd question is of course what’s the 1920 equivalent of Slowboring ??
All twelve of them in Louisiana and Maine? Probably ok, no? Been there longer than the Anglos and once owned everything (and everyone in the former case).
What does "addressing these problems" mean to you, Mr. Hagy. I think that in large countries the greatest number of people participate in addressing problems by voting or advocating through public speech (you've dismissed the latter), with smaller numbers participating by making campaign donations, campaigning, making charitable contributions, or choosing activist professions.
A century ago, in the wake of World War I, progressives were back on their heels for a variety of reasons, including the temporary mirage of capitalist triumph. But in the periods I'm familiar with since becoming politically aware in the early '60s, I'd say progressives (the term varying in meaning over time) have been more active at all income levels when their numbers were larger and the odds of success greater, and less active otherwise. The peak of activity in my experience was probably 1966-68, and when diminished it was spectacular failure because the numbers of non-progressives turned out to be far greater after divorce with the southern majority. Basically, activism goes out of favor when it seems useless, and returns to favor when the odds shift towards some success.
There is a very progressive young person I know who in their fervor laments that most people do not devote themselves full-time to activism because "they think it's so important just to live their lives." If that's your complaint too, then your pessimism is well justified. I think you'll find that most people--even people living at poverty levels--prioritize living their personal and family lives over living for social ideals. Since I think that's a given, I'd suggest not devoting too much progressive energy to lamenting it.
Life is very long. People do change their minds. And things that are obvious to one generation were debated in the generation previous. Maybe this particular discussion is writ in water, but in the broad sense public debate in its myriad forms has long fingers that do grasp and work.
Since Yglesias is often credited with inventing (or at least widely popularizing) the #slatepitch, allow me to express gratitude for a "don't overthink it, the answer is simple and the statistics bear it out" post!
And this is really the unique innovation Matt made that gets kind of mistaken for a traditional #SlatePitch: he's said before that he has had made success by making counter-contrarian rebuttals to galaxy brain takes that are getting an excessive amount of attention. The one example I always remember him using from about two decades ago was, in reply to takesters that were saying that Roe v. Wade is hurting progress on abortion rights, Matt would simply say "Actually, Roe v. Wade is good.".
After reading that 10 year old Vox article, I realized two things. One, my current 9-5 CST workday would be 1500-2300 GMT. And two, how would the International Date Line work? The number of times earth rotates on its axis in the amount of time it takes complete an orbit around the sun is basically constant even if the entire world is on the same 24 hour time.
Yeah. I was going to write this, too: the "this is actually a pretty simple problem" angle of this piece is what I think is most analytically useful about it.
It’s not that we need a feel good “poverty is falling” story. What we really need is a post like the current one. Welfare state is working and we could do so much more! That’s the true progressive spirit -backed by facts- that the best version of so called “activist” journalists ought to pursue.
Modern very-online Twitter "progressives" are oddly allergic to the idea that we do, or even can, make "progress" in addressing any particular problem.
Agree! We absolutely do not need a "good news" story in this area. This post and Desmond's discussion of exploitation put the proper focus on what could be done, as difficult as it may be. The discourse related to poverty reduction is fraught with bad intentions, and I have come to believe that talking about "improving conditions" ends up being an excuse to do less than an encouragement to do more.
I think Matt's point is mostly right - welfare programs are very good at limiting the absolute downside of markets. But I also think that markets have done much more to improve people's lives - indeed, without markets, there's radically less to redistribute via welfare.
So having said all that, are you willing to consider that "poverty reduction" might ever hit diminishing or negative returns? Is there any point at which you might hesitate to interfere with a successful positive process?
The Right can never say government programs have been successful: government is bad so don't feed the beast.
The Left, for very different reasons, can never say government programs have been successful: Things must always be getting worse; we must act urgently to avoid catastrophe but the type of actions that would solve problems and take them away from our consciousness, always vanish into the event horizon, so instead we must always remain alarmed and insist that the only solutions are maximal and utopian.
The Middle is willing to believe that government programs can work but still just secretly yearns for more fun SB posts on sports and movies
> But the numbers involved are big and scary, GOP elites think it’s a bad idea, and Democratic Party advocacy groups who like this idea generally have higher priorities.
I think a lot of this comes down to us misdiagnosing a persuasion problem as a political problem.
We just don’t yet have substantial consensus that we Americans should pay higher taxes to reduce child poverty. Yes, almost everyone agrees that child poverty is bad and should be addressed. Even many Republican voters and politicians agree. But when personal sacrifice in the form of higher taxes is added to the proposal, we recoil in discomfort. We simply can’t address child poverty through politics until we’ve persuaded a sufficient number of fellow Americans to support this policy.
And yet we progressives deny the nature of the problem before us. We want to believe that our ideas are already broadly popular, or that we can eliminate personal sacrifice with some nebulous concept of “tax the rich.” Some of this may be our own unacknowledged selfishness. Some of it may be a lack of seriousness at actually addressing the problem.
But the biggest cause in my opinion is our lack of convictions in the power of our beliefs. We can’t even consider the possibility our ideas may be unpopular because that could suggest that we are wrong. We also don’t want to do the hard and dirty missionary work of converting others to our faith. That would require empathy for nonbelievers and a concerted effort to meet them where they are at as we spread the good word.
Yet I’m actually optimistic that the situation will improve because our ideas are strong, just, and persuasive. We’ll probably need a bit more pain before we’re forced to recon with the cold hard reality. Ultimately the power of our beliefs will compel us to do so.
Once upon a time, Mitt Romney designed a universal child allowance that didn't raise tax rates and was fully funded. The bill fully eliminated the state and local tax deduction and TANF to pay for the child allowance. Unfortunately, Democrats ignored the bill because it was authored by Mitt Romney, and most Republicans ignored the bill because it didn't have work requirements. Romney has also unfortunately moved on to a less generous child allowance other Republicans designed.
He also made the very ignorant mistake of claiming Russia (of all places) was our biggest geopolitical foe. What a naive and backward-thinking thing to say. Didn't he realize the cold war was over?
Sorry, I'm still salty over how he was treated and I think it contributed, albeit in a small way, to Trump's rise.
I mean... we've crippled Russia beyond any possibility of recovery with a tiny fraction of our defense spending, using a proxy which in 2012 was regarded as basically a failed state.
Yes, Russia is an enemy. No, Romney was still dead wrong to cite it as our greatest geopolitical foe, hard stop, even in full context.
Sure, Obama's soundbite was "unfair," but this is politics, it's all unfair. The object, as a politician or political strategist, is to win. It's not the politicians' fault, in the main, that the way to win is to press all of the tribal buttons at once. Romney did the same thing in playing footsie with the Tea Party/Birther nuts and leveling frankly startling hypocritical criticisms of the ACA.
And also sure, Romney losing in 2012 contributed to Trump, but only in that the latter was the only GOP primary candidate to ditch the losing message on Social Security and Medicare and promise an improvement to ACA rather than just killing it.
Given that they are at war with Ukraine and just took down one of our drones over the Black Sea, I will respectfully disagree with your assessment of Russia's placement on the geopolitical foe list.
Hard to list our greatest enemies and the horror and insult to America of a downed drone. Could it be our biggest enemy is our own paranoia. It's driven us into something like five stupid wars in my lifetime. By comparison what happened over the Black Sea won't be remembered next Christmas unless we escalate it stupidly. Maybe btw it would help lessen tensions if we thought of other countries as competitors rather than enemies.
Having just given a pretty negative reply to your earlier comment, I'm enthusiastic about this: "We also don’t want to do the hard and dirty missionary work of converting others to our faith. That would require empathy for nonbelievers and a concerted effort to meet them where they are at as we spread the good word."
If you're focusing on persuasion, I think that's a huge progressive failure. Many (not all) contemporary progressives seem to me to have chosen a "strengthen the cult" approach instead of a "convert the masses" one. Ideas being strong and just is good, but they're not persuasive until you understand whom you're trying to persuade and learn which strategies work and which tend to backfire. In my lifetime I've seen an amazing shift from an era where the Left was getting better at persuasion because they were reading people like Saul Alinsky (in his later days) to now, when the Right has learned to read Alinsky and can manipulate the overwrought Left like puppets.
Sure, THP. Young people have tended left for as long as I can remember, though today's new generation may be the most left-leaning since mine in the '60s. But they will likely do what all generations do: move right as they age. And--speaking as an amateur when it comes to sociology--I think the "persuasion" among young people has much less to do with arguments or conscious recruitment as it has to do with age-group peer influence (which is why many young lefties tend to move right when they enter multi-generational workplace environments).
I think people conflate the inefficiency of many government programs with the ability of government to write a check to people. And if welfare was so possible, Clinton wouldn't have made hay of making it workfare in the 1990s. People felt like they were somehow being cheated by the poor.
I don't know, I think a lot of left wing persuasion already exists and is trying to convince people that we should be willing to pay higher taxes for better benefits, though I agree with you that generally they like to tell a fairy tale about only taxing the rich. If you want to convince people who haven't already been convinced by the "won't somebody think of the children" argument then you have to code it in right wing terms. Framing it as pro-family is one way. Framing it as necessary for our future fight with China is another way. Framing it as an investment in a future workforce rather than a handout is another. As a former Republican I think those kinds of arguments are pretty persuasive.
The segment on conservative welfare-thought feels chalk-full of strawmen or motte-and-bailey type arguments.
"But essentially, their basic idea is that a proper anti-poverty policy should create a situation in which nobody has low labor market earnings."
The extreme take that nobody would have low market earnings is ridiculous, I agree. But prioritizing fewer people in that position seems reasonable, right? I'm sure there are plenty of dipshit conservtaives out there arguing the extreme version on Twitter, but that doesn't make the more reasonable "let's prioritize teaching men to fish rather than giving fish whenever we can" wrong.
Likewise, the "lack of sympathy for large classes of people." Is that supposed to advance the argument? Or course people have varying degrees of sympathy for large classes of people. In 2023, working class / non-college whites have become the people for whom the Left has little sympathy. The only question is whether or not the sympathies are "good" or "bad".
In the context of welfare, of course I have more sympathy for an 70 year old or a disabled combat veteran than I do for a healthy 20 year old who would rather smoke weed and play video games all day. It's fine to have disagreements about who "deserves" help. It's not as if Democrats are above having "bad" sympathies or a lack of them.
>I have more sympathy for an 70 year old or a disabled combat veteran than I do for a healthy 20 year old who would rather smoke weed and play video games all day.
Do you have some sense of what % of the poor are 20-year olds who would rather smoke weed and play video games all day? I know that about 33% are children. A large fraction are disabled or elderly.
In general I think it is factually true that anti-poverty programs are going to end up benefiting some "undeserving" people, but I'm not sure what that fraction is (probably not that large) and I'm also not sure how relevant it is.
Say 20% of the poor "deserve" it by your definition. Would a policy that eliminated poverty suddenly be a bad idea because the 1/5th of recipients were undeserving? How many "innocent" poor people should we allow to languish in poverty, to avoid helping the 20% of them who shouldn't receive help? It's not a super persuasive argument, in addition to philosophical problem of deciding who does and doesn't deserve help.
"It's not a super persuasive argument" I'm not following what the argument is? I'm not lying out a definition of who is deserving or not, I just think everyone probably has one at some level, so when Matt points out that Conservatives think some groups are more deserving than others that is just an entirely banal observation.
"are going to end up benefiting some "undeserving" people"
As to how I personally feel about it, I think another miss is the assumption that welfare is always a benefit. My bigger concern is whether it influences people in negative ways by incentivizing unhealthy behavior. Drawing only from my personal, individual experience, I've seen neighbors and people in my family use welfare to continue drug and alcohol problems, or simply to avoid working when they were otherwise perfectly able to. YMMV, but for at least some of the people I know welfare actually seems to have harmed them
Despite having "little sympathy" for non-college whites, it is the Democratic party that supports labor unions, that directs federal dollars towards high poverty white areas to hire teachers and cops, and that tries to raise the minimum wage. Having sympathy for someone is meaningless if you won't vote on policies that support them. Republicans don't vote for policies that will help the poor OR the white working class.
Maybe. This is a tangent from my previous comment, but I think the more you zoom in the less that looks like hypocrisy.
I'm fairly familiar with the culture of West Virginia, a non-college, pro-union, mostly White and fairly poor state. People there have a mix of opinions on various welfare programs, but when they oppose them, they mostly do it from the mindset that the welfare programs will make the communities they live in worse-off. They might believe that poverty is sometimes encouraged by welfare and the receivers actually harmed. That's been my own personal experience with friends and family, in any case, also.
Totally get that they believe it, I used to believe it too. Then I learned how to read data. Mainly I just wanted to push back on the idea that Democrats have abandoned working class whites which you were alluding to. I think a lot of Democrats are frustrated with working class whites for demanding help without being interested in helping anyone in a lower economic status than them. But in real terms it is still the Democrats that provide the most support to white working class citizens, regardless of what the current rhetoric might sound like.
It's not exactly a straw man argument that Matt is making about conservative views on welfare. Sure there are varied opinions on the Right about the subject but for the purpose of writing an article he can't address every single one of them, it would just be too long. I think the generalization he picked is pretty charitable and broadly true, that Republicans mostly want a person to work in order to receive assistance. A straw man argument would be to say that Republicans hate poor people, and Matt didn't say that.
To play devil's advocate and try to defend Desmond a bit, I think one of his points is that, while material standards of low-income people have been going up in some regards (like access to inexpensive material goods), that their access to certain markers of middle class life (like housing, healthcare, higher education, and child care) is not. And he says that these are the things that "matter most." So, it could be true that in dollars poor people are better off than they used to be after transfers, and that they have better clothes, better household appliances, and better cell phones than they did a generation ago. But overall they are still as burdened because of high housing, education, child care, and health care costs. I think it's worth taking this argument seriously.
Now, I don't know if I agree with all of his analysis. I agree with you that misrepresenting statistics isn't a good way to make your point. And some of the stuff about rent isn't as convincing (it's perfectly possible to have a strong middle class made up of primarily renters--look at Germany). But I can see how other areas of exploitation have gotten worse over time--such as the availability of high interest loans targeted to the poor, lack of unions to bargain for their interest in the workplace, and a more costly banking system. I'm not sure these can explain current poverty levels in full, but I think it's worth engaging with these issues in addition to just government transfers.
Mild pushback: at least in part, we consider better clothes, better appliances, and better cell phones to be luxury goods because they materially improve our lives! Not so sure on better clothes, but I think it's neat that poor people and rich people can now get lost in the city at roughly the same zero-ish rate.
I'm not saying they are luxury goods. Clothes are a necessity of life. Cell phones are close to one in our society. And some clothes and appliances are of course luxury. But everyone's got to do laundry (or pay a bunch of money each month at a laundromat) and cook food. I live now in a country where consumer goods are much more expensive than in the US (and salaries considerably lower), and I can see that this makes a difference to standard of living. Here people live in smaller, shittier apartments. They drive worse cars (or no cars at all and take the bus/train, like me). They own fewer clothes (hardly any walk-in closets (or even closets at all) in apartments--so you only have clothes that will fit in an IKEA wardrobe). People in the middle class will buy clothes and other consumer goods abroad on vacation--but that's probably off limits for low-income people. And it makes a difference to your life. But... here college costs $2,700/ year. A hospital visit at a public hospital (as annoying as the public system is) is usually free (that is it's covered by taxes) or pretty cheap, and a private one isn't anywhere close to American costs. Parents only need to worry about shelling out an arm and a leg for child care for 3 years instead of 5 because kindergarten starts at age 3 instead of 5. (Housing here is still expensive though). So these things make it that even people earning what in the US would be considered low income still have pretty middle class lives.
In the country where you live, perhaps there is a connection between the size of the welfare state and the fact that salaries are lower, costs are higher and people live in shittier apartments and drive worse cars.
That college and medical care are cheaper is good, though. That is a policy choice to favor those things rather than an overall richer & more productive nation. Not one I would make, but I see it as a fine alternative choice.
It's definitely not fully causal, but the higher deadweight loss from higher tax burdens in other countries probably contributes to a lower standard of living. There are only four European countries with a higher GDP per capita than the US: one is a petrostate (Norway), two basically have fake GPDs (Ireland and Luxembourg), and the last one has weird laws regarding capital and banking that would never fly in American culture (Switzerland).
Also, it should be emphasized that in European countries, this broader welfare state is paid for by broad-based taxes (not high taxes on people making over $400k/year). It's paid by middle class people as well as high earners.
That means 20% VATs and income tax rates of 40% at above around $50,000/year.
The US markets for higher education and medicine are shot-through with rent-seeking, impenetrably opaque pricing structures, kick-backs, legalized graft, regulatory capture, and deceptive financing practices.
If we ruthlessly applied to them the features of the rest of the economy which make us richer and more productive… I think there’s reason to believe the situation in those two sectors would improve without any substantial trade-off towards “shittier apartments and worse cars”.
So, MY has argued before that making things like healthcare/childcare etc. widely accessible also involves increasing supply. That means building more doctor's offices, hospitals, child care facilities, and having more workers go into nursing, medicine, and child care providers, as opposed to other areas of employment. All that entails shifting parts of the economy (like making cheap consumer goods and providing services) towards these sectors. So it is possible that there is somewhat of a tradeoff. With that being said, I think there are lots of inefficiencies in our current higher educational and medicine systems that there's some room for reform that may not involve such large tradeoffs.
But it’s captured state stuff, like the fact that medical residency seats are capped, that are holding back “more supply” coming into the pool of working physicians in the US… I think the point stands on reform being the issue, here. If we really let as many people become doctors or recognized licensure from other parts of the world, etc, we could increase supply without much investment or shifting beyond just letting the market take over on areas like this that are really capped by interest groups and such.
There’s a substantial difference between the situation in childcare and healthcare; the former requires more material resources, the latter requires more efficient use of huge material resources already made available to the sector.
To be honest, I don’t think that childcare can be solved in a meaningful sense.
There surely *is* a somewhat glib answer to this vis a vis higher education, no? Specifically, that for-profit higher education has been an unmitigated, graft-ridden disaster. Higher Education may be mostly a signalling game, but it seems like one that the private market absolutely sucks at.
Perhaps there's a connection--but it is by no means the only explanation. The two countries have wildly different histories and wildly different economies. I think that there are other factors that contribute to high cost of living here other than the welfare state--such as monopolies on imports of goods.
I'm not saying that it's bad to have cheap consumer goods. But it's not the whole story. You can't say you meaningfully lifted someone out of poverty if they can't afford the copays for bringing their kid to the doctor when they're sick, or their rent takes up the majority of their income, or they can't send their kid to college.
"You can't say you meaningfully lifted someone out of poverty if... they can't send their kid to college" is actually an incredibly radical idea. I'm not sure I *disagree* with it, but it would be sky-is-green up-is-down stuff to anybody in the New Deal era. We should be honest with ourselves about that.
We are not in the New Deal Era, when college degrees were only for the elite. We are in the 21st century, where not having tertiary education is generally required for most middle class employment (whether or not it should be like that is a different story, but that's the situation we live in).
In my neighborhood, costs are high, apartments are small and shitty, the cars are two tons over weight, as are the people. The health care system sucks. What dream country are you living in? I get it the sun shines and you can walk the beach. I don't think that sets you apart from most of the world. I doubt there's any connection between 'the size of the welfare state', high salaries and low costs. if you can show us a correlation, much less causation, please share. We all get it you think you're paying taxes to support deadbeats. I'm sure you are, but that's how the world works.
More people have access to insurance (because of Medicaid expansion and subsidies...i.e. more generous transfers). But cost of healthcare has gone up (and was going up well before the ACA). The ACA didn't really solve the problem of growing healthcare costs. That doesn't mean it should be scrapped.
Healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP has indeed stabilized at about 18% since the passage of the Affordable Care Act. I'm not giving that legislation credit, mind you. I reckon it has had something to do with it, but healthcare's complicated and there are multiple moving parts.
But the US for the time being doesn't appear to have a serious healthcare inflation problem. What we have is "stuck at too expensive" problem.
"Healthcare costs" can mean billing costs or costs to the consumer. The ACA shifted the billing for many low-income people away from direct consumer cost, making health care much more affordable. It shifted the billing to insurance companies and taxpayers. The insurance companies reshifted in ways that added costs to some consumers and, again, taxpayers. It doesn't all come out even--health care inflation remains high because of the intrinsic leverage healthcare providers (from drug companies to device manufacturers to hospitals) still have. But in terms of consumer affordability, accessible options are far greater at low-income levels with the ACA, and not priced out of reach for those paying through employer plans. (There's probably too much of a squeeze for those who fall under neither category.)
I thought including housing is his point with switching to the new measure(which shows a higher absolute poverty rate) and that Matt didn't disagree with that measure.
Where he disagreed was Desmond said "the slope of OPM is flat. Plus it's a baf measure, and the better measure is even higher right now than OPM is!", Which _implies_ the slope of SPM is also flat, but that is, crucially, not true.
I think this argument has merit and probably agree with you that those things matter more than, like, cell phones (though this is to some degree a judgment call). However, these aren't really issues particular to poverty - higher housing, education, health care, etc. costs impact the middle-class, too. Of course, to a lesser degree, but still - I'm not sure it's best to frame this problem as something that's about poverty, per se.
I mean poor people also need to live somewhere, need to see doctors, need someone to watch their children when they're at work. I get what you're saying, but I'm not sure I totally agree.
The idea that housing would be more available to low-income people if only we had less market and more political control over housing production seems… remarkably uninformed.
2. It depends. There are some countries that do public housing reasonably well (France for example). The US is not one of those countries, and given its political environment and its history it probably won't be one of these countries.
3. The US could make housing vouchers an entitlement (instead of a program that's essentially a lottery, with a huge backlog). It would cost a substantial amount of money, and would be essentially a transfer. In high demand supply-constrained areas, if housing supply didn't increase, such a policy would probably increase housing costs across the board.. In this way, housing subsidies only get you so far if you don't take Yglesian steps to allow for housing supply to expand. In lower-demand cities (say Buffalo) the increased subsidies may not have as drastic an effect on housing prices. And very low-income people also struggle with housing in these areas where housing demand is not as high.
It could be perfectly possible to have public low income housing and squeeze the crap out of the middle class because they're not subsidized and the supply is tighter because of the low income housing.
European Gini coefficients are so low because it takes into account government transfers. Pre transfer, the Gini coefficients are much closer to the US, including in Scandinavia.
Let me play devil's advocate from a European perspective.
Americans who like European-style welfare states do tend to point to them as a way to decrease relative poverty. There are other methods that Europe does employ and don't involve raising taxes on anyone. Bring your best public universities (UC, Berkeley and Texas A&M and UIUC and...) to the level of the best EU public universities. Bring universities like MIT to the level of ... I'm not sure I can think of a good private engineering school in the EU. Make it more likely that new companies in both futuristic (Apple) and traditional (Tesla) sectors of the economy will be started elsewhere. You can do all these things by observing that taxing investment income or reducing the funds that are available for UIUC gives you more funds for food stamps without raising anyone's taxes. After all, probably more people will benefit from an increase in food stamps funds than they will benefit from attending UIUC.
I know that there are most likely trade-offs involved between growing the economy and fighting poverty, but I would like to understand what Americans that like EU style welfare states think on this balance.
Even solidly rigorous analytical thinkers on the left like Matt tend to hand-wave away the indirect costs of welfare or completely ignore potential 2nd order affects like the ones you mention.
Instead they assume that welfare opposition is all about being "mean" or something,
As a clarification, I do believe that the US probably has some room to spare right now in increasing its welfare spending without getting to EU living standards. But I don't have a good answer about whether I'm correct on this, and where the limit should be, if I'm indeed correct.
I think there are both "smart" ways to expand and to contract welfare spending. More or less is pretty useless, imo, without breaking it down to more granular ideas. My critique of Matt Y welfare thinking it he tends to strawman opponents of "more" as stingy, selfish A-holes seemingly without engaging in potentially strong counter-issues.
Yeah, weird, you call people lazy welfare queens for 40 years all while supporting massive tax cuts for rich people, then wonder why people don't think you have virtrous reasons for wanting to cut food stamps.
As a proud American, I think the richest nation in the world can afford to not only have great universities, but also a sizable welfare state. Just because second-class countries like France or the UK can't pull it off, doesn't mean that we can't either.
This seems awfully strawmannish on your part. I suppose America could, if it wanted, strengthen its safety net by shifting resources out of higher education, sure. But nobody seems to be proposing such a course of action. Most American liberals just want higher taxes. A Denmark-ized (or, more realistically, a Canada-ized) United States would be a country where people live in somewhat smaller houses, eat out a bit less frequently (or less sumptuously), and replace their phones and cars less often.
I doubt it would mean their universities would have to decline.
Check my previous answer to briross, as well. Some additional things.
"Most American liberals just want higher taxes."
I think that's true indeed, but I also don't think it's an accident that higher taxes in the EU come with worse universities.
I could be having a much less stressful PhD and also a worse post-PhD salary, if I stayed back home. If American taxes go to a level where the extra salary here isn't that appealing, don't you think that research in the US would suffer? (To be fair, I don't think we are there yet. I think there is still room to raise taxes in the US without becoming EU.)
If Americans air-condition their homes less, and reduce the amount of money they spend on phones and cars, don't you think that the incentive for the next Apple or Tesla will go down? Thus, don't you think that a career in Apple or Tesla will become less attractive? Again, the US (I think) has room to spare. I do believe that a more egalitarian society though comes with real trade-offs in growth, and I feel that this is the main thing that Americans won't be able to stomach.
PS: I think it's much easier to convince the American voter to go after universities rather than downsize homes given the percentage of Americans with a university degree.
The US had higher taxes in the past and still had to the world's best universities. That a return to pre-Reagan era tax rates would mean much to American universities seems unsupported but the actual historical precedent of universities when taxes were at that level.
The US did have higher tax rates, but did it have higher taxes? I'm not so sure that this is true. I checked here (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S), and I don't see anything dramatic happening after roughly the end of the Korean War (other than recessions).
My understanding is that when the rates were higher, there were also more loopholes, so the taxes themselves were largely the same. If I'm taxed only on 5% of my income but at 100%, I have a higher marginal tax rate but pay less in taxes compared to an alternative of getting taxed at 10% for all of my income.
I don't understand your argument? You're saying that we spend too much money subsidizing our best public universities, and should instead spend that money on food stamps?
I'm saying that having elite universities contributes to inequality (hence exacerbates relative poverty), and that I don't think it's an accident that there aren't really any Harvard level universities in the EU. That's not an argument (I think) but an observation. I'm curious what Americans think about it.
Of course, my earning prospects rose considerably when I moved from my EU university to my American university (without me suddenly becoming any smarter or anything), so I'm definitely a beneficiary of American policies here.
I'll take a stab at explaining this, with the caveat that I have no expertise here whatsoever (as befits a guy on the internet).
I think the argument would be that American universities and American private sector innovation is mostly orthogonal to the country's relatively paltry welfare state. I'm not sure this is actually the case - it could be, but I don't the find idea that they are connected wholly implausible. But that's the argument.
With regard to universities specifically, I think the argument would basically boil down to scale + immigration. In the 19th century, the US attracted loads of immigrants from Europe - and, notably, immigrants tend to differ from people who don't immigrate in important ways (which I think align well with stuff like "propensity to start business"). At the same time, the US invested a ton in colleges - the land grant schools - and it became a really big country with a really big potential market. (Point of comparison: why is it so hard to get Western businesses to really leave China? It's big! Bigness is good for business.) This created a positive feedback loop, which led to talent agglomerating in the US. Talent attracts talent, and here we are.
Of course, the EU nowadays is bigger than the US in terms of sheer population. But it's still multiple different countries - scaling a business across the EU is harder than scaling it across the US - and, more importantly, the EU didn't really get going until the 1950s-1960s, by which time the agglomeration effects were already working their magic on this side of the Atlantic.
It's also worth noting that the US has always been a very literate society. I'm not sure why this is, though.
Addendum: Plus, mid-20th century Europe was devastated by two giant wars. The US wasn't. That probably played a role, too.
I think the most charitable understanding of conservatives' opinions on poverty is that taking specific steps to address it (higher taxes and a more generous welfare state) would mean reduced growth, and there are some tradeoffs between optimizing for living standards at the middle of the income distribution vs optimizing for living standards at the lower end.
"Would you end all poverty in the US today in exchange for all reducing future GDP growth by half" is a question that's so obvious to not be worth asking to people on both sides of it
I have always understood the Republicans' complaints about the inefficacy of welfare spending to be its demonstrated failure to make big inroads in intergenerational poverty. Put another way, "no country has successfully addressed poverty this way, and I doubt anyone ever will."
I'm not sure it is possible to have a thorough discussion of poverty in the US while leaving out talk of drug and alcohol abuse. Even if it isn't having as large effects as other factors, such as government policy, it is so pervasive in many areas and if you don't see what it does to people it is hard to know how bad it can really get. Not an easy problem to tackle.
I’m probably one of the few people here who associates regularly with people that are in poverty. For instance, my daughter, who lives in section 32 housing has food stamps, and a bunch of other social programs.
I think many middle-class to upper middle-class people don’t realize how pervasive drug and alcohol abuse is among the working poor.
I have an out of town friend who I would very much classify as working poor, and I always like to visit her and spend just one night with her and her friends. The amount of drugs they consume is insane, last time I covertly took a tally of all the drinks she ordered and was amazed.
It really keeps me grounded and informed on how a segment of society that I'm not a part of really lives.
Yet, alcohol consumption rates are higher for wealthier people. This doesn't mean alcohol abuse rates aren't higher for the working poor: it's probably something like "most upper-middle-class people are moderate drinkers, whereas working poor people are either problem drinkers or abstainers," so it nets out to higher per-capita consumption for the former group.
Also, Europe tends to have lower poverty and higher alcohol consumption than the US. This doesn't mean you are wrong and certainly you seem to have more personal experience with this than I do [1]. But I think alcohol, drugs, culture, and poverty intersect in complex ways that are kind of hard to parse. Like, a progressive would probably say that poor people are more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs because their lives are poor and miserable; I wouldn't wholeheartedly endorse this view, but I do think there is a real chicken-or-egg problem here.
1. I actually was raised in a mostly-blue-collar family, but I can't say I've ever known many poor people.
I don't think you can entirely distinguish drug and alcohol abuse from policy. As a non-American, one of the weirdest parts of America is visiting a CVS and seeing drugs you'd need a prescription for in the UK available pretty much by the bucket. I appreciate you're referring to illegal drugs but the path from legal to illegal appears well trodden.
That's before you even get to how much support addicts do or don't receive.
As someone who is around it... I respectfully disagree. It has nothing to do with what sort of drugs are available at pharamacies.
It's entirely to do with marijuana and meth and opioids (pain pills which are highly restricted in US and UK).
Any problem we have has more to do with our proximity to Mexico and having a pretty porous border.
addendum... Yes I know there are problems with pain clinics which cater to addicts, but this is more a result of our deregulated medical system than which drugs are over the counter.
Can I ask which drugs? I know some formulations of codeine is available in the UK without a prescription. I can't think of any OTC drugs in the US that present particular abuse issues, besides maybe some OTC sleep aids.
It's a complex issue so I probably didn't explain myself properly. But my perception is legal drug use, prescription or otherwise, is much more common in the US than elsewhere. I did some quick googling which indicated about 50% of the US population is on prescription medication compared to 25% in the UK. That's obviously 2x and I'd imagine among the non-elderly population the gap is much wider (assuming in both countries a relatively large share of elderly folks on medication).
So:
1. More people use legal drugs
2. Legal drugs are more widely available
3. TV ads for (legal) drugs are an order of magnitude more common
My guess is that this leads to more illegal drug usage. Both thru gateaway drugs (oxy => illegal opiates) but also thru a reduction of social stigma. If (legal) drugs are widespread, it's gonna feel less weird to use illegal ones than if usage of any drugs is unusual.
> My guess is that this leads to more illegal drug usage. Both thru gateaway drugs (oxy => illegal opiates) but also thru a reduction of social stigma.
I can understand a pathway from legal opioids to illegal drugs, but the most commonly prescribed drugs are for high blood pressure, high cholesterol, hypothyroidism, diabetes, heartburn, and asthma [1]. There is one pain killer in the top 10 most prescribed drugs (a combination of acetaminophen and hydrocodone).
When you see a statistic like "50% of the US population is on prescription medications" that basically means that "the US hands out statins and drugs for related conditions like candy" (if I'm doing my math right, 14% of the US population takes some sort of statin [2]), and I don't see why taking a medication that lowers your blood pressure would reduce the social stigma of illegal drugs. I could maybe see a connection with, say, adderall (which is amphetamine) and reduced social stigma, but that's fairly far down the list --- about 1% of the US population [2].
I think it really depends on what drugs we’re talking about.
I don’t see how, for example, people taking antidepressants or blood pressure medications has any connection to illegal drug use. I think the more relevant factor would be the availability of things like pain medications.
I should add - the prevalence of the phrase "drug store" in American English also seems to me indicative of a society with a lot of drugs. I haven't heard that phrase in the UK
I share your curiosity as my understanding has always been that the US is more restrictive on requiring prescriptions for a wide variety of drugs, at least compared to Canada and Mexico.
I've always thought this cuts both ways: in the US I can buy as much melatonin as I want over the counter, but in the UK, I can buy acyclovir and co-codamol (paracetamol and codeine).
Matthew Desmond also wrote by far the worst piece of the 1619 project (which is saying something!) and came under zero mainstream criticism.
I am generally with Matt’s theory that the medias ‘bias’ is just commercial, but when you look at pieces like this and 1619 that view seems really naive. It’s just pure ideological polemic, always in the same direction.
What do you mean by “always”? From NYT? Perhaps, although they’re getting better again in the range of opinion writers etc (eg affirmative action and trans debate coverage). However that’s hardly all of the media, is it?
I think what I’m trying to get at is not that all media stories are left wing propaganda, but when they publish a piece that is barely concealed propaganda it is all left wing. For example NYM wouldn’t publish the same article from a right wing perspective about how the ‘failure’ of anti-poverty programs indicates that we should repeal the Great Society.
99% of stories in NYT/WaPo/NYM are excellent but the 1% that are not tend to all be from the same ideological perspective.
I would not say 99% are excellent. I would say 85% run the gamut from decent to excellent, while the remaining 15% that are awful come from one perspective. That having been said, 15% is a lot better than the 35-40% you were seeing in mid-late 2020.
1. If poverty is a relative measure there will always be a bottom 10% of the income distribution. So measuring without benefits could be more compassionate if your hope is to lower the number of people who actually need help not just arbitrarily give them money and call the problem solved.
2. As we see with labor participation and inflation after the generous COVID assistance, “just giving people money” really does have risks like high inflation that can go up faster than wages and end up counterproductive. And *if* we think that high labor participation is good then we should be mindful that generous assistance does work against it at the margins.
3. I never see people on the left to talk about this, but there are a lot of studies that show that the people who are in the bottom income quintile in any particular year are generally not still there when you measure again later. It’s actually a pretty important question to ask how many people are *stuck* in poverty, versus how many people only temporarily pass through. Why do they get stuck, and is there anything we can do about that?
4. We do not talk enough about trying to solve the poverty on the cost side if we were very serious about driving down the cost of housing, that would greatly alleviate poverty, no matter how you measure it. We’ve got this idea that basic education needs to be free but not any other basic human needs? Lowering the costs of health, and education, and housing, or possibly more important for quality of life than raising incomes.
I have been a long time free subscriber, however after this article I decided to become paid. I am a right of center Southerner that thinks your obsession with license plates is weird, but really enjoy your balanced and thoughtful take on most subjects even when I don’t always agree with you. And just picking with you about the license plate. It is good to have a quirky thing we become known for.
Good choice to subscribe. Best comment section on the web. And plenty of us center adjacent readers here.
I happen to agree with his license plate obsession. Big crimes/problems arise because of lack of enforcement of small issues.
I follow the rules. Why should some asshole get to part wherever he wants with no consequence because no one bothers to check his internet printed "temporary tag"
Seconding the point about the quality of the comment section -- there's often as much to learn here as in the original post itself.
I agree on the license plate issue. It's a highly visible form of lawlessness that encourages others, and our streets are already far too dangerous.
Law breakers make society less civil for the rest of us
Yeah, I like any time a liberal gets on a big law and order kick, even if it's just license plates.
I think part of MY’s larger point is that there’s nothing inherently “anti-liberal” about being interested in enforcement. Indeed, it helps achieve some “liberal” goals; e.g. you can’t have decent mass transit unless people pay for it, and that requires punishing - in a proportionate way - people who (literally) free-ride. Likewise, I ride a bike, and I’m in favor of enforcing good traffic behavior among drivers and bikers alike so that I’m not killed or maimed by selfish recklessness (I hold a special antipathy for irresponsible bikers, because they make drivers more angry and aggressive, which is more dangerous for bikers because drivers will win in a collision basically 100% of the time).
I think there are plenty of us “liberals” who follow MY in being quite frustrated that large chunks of both the Democratic Party and our social/professional circles who have lost their minds on enforcement and have found it fashionable to promote plainly ignorant positions on the topic that are, to put it nicely, hot garbage. In that sense, what MY’s on is not a “kick”; he’s long argued for better enforcement and better police funding. And I think a lot of us are happy that he’s currently doing so in a performative way, if for no other reason that to counter equally performative, but totally vapid anti-enforcement nonsense.
Great! Let's bring back broken windows policing! ;)
Funnily enough, I actually talked about broken window policing today in a class I taught to some French masters students (different context - I talked about how it was ported from NYC to Iraq), and it didn’t occur to me to look up the French term. Turns out it’s a fairly boring more or less straight translation (« théorie de la vitre cassée »). More to the point, sure, I’m there for the conversation - and I think the license plates thing is a fairly clear example of how “broken windows” lead to other problems.
And parking isn't even the proximate problem, it's when the car moves when its driver will really try to get around the law.
Welcome to the club!! Your gift basket will arrive soon.
This article made me subscribe as well. So happy to find a comment section that stays out of the nastiness that you see so often.
People here are, for the most part, nice to each other even when they disagree. A few weeks back I wandered into Matt Taibbi’s comments and came back here somewhat shell-shocked, grateful for this oasis in the midst of such raw anger and, frankly, cruelty that you see elsewhere.
I mean...we aren't saints or anything. But it's certainly a better comment section than you normally get.
True; I’ve seen people get somewhat snippy here on occasion. And MY has said that posts on transgender issues have generated some genuinely mean-spirited comments (which I have not read; I’m going off of his description). Overall, though, I feel like I usually learn something here and like this comments section is in the vicinity of what you might call a community.
If I can wax ranty for a second, I genuinely don’t understand the scene in places like Matt Taibbi’s or Bari Weiss’s comments. What is the appeal of abusing strangers? I mean, sure, I get the adrenaline rush of saying something nasty against an avatar of all that you hate with few if any consequences. I may have even indulged in it myself on occasion when I was younger and far stupider. But after a while, wouldn’t a relatively normal adult realize how pointless it is? Does it really move the needle on an issue one cares about to call people names and ruminate over catastrophized scenarios in which “those people” destroy everything?
Realizing that all of the above is totally rhetorical, I’ll repeat what I said a few weeks back. People here are (largely) nice. Thanks for being nice.
Welcome! I'm a bit right of center myself and this is the best place for in depth analysis. Been a paid subscriber for over a year and this is still my favorite thing to read.
Welcome to the (paying) SB club. FYI, Matt's "obsession" is not with license plates. It's with housing policy. See you around the comments section.
It is not quirky when out of state violators owe DC hundreds of millions of dollars
Let me extend a slow boring welcome!
Here's where I lose respect for Desmond:
"...12.6 percent of the U.S. population was poor in 1970; two decades later, it was 13.5 percent; in 2010, it was 15.1 percent; and in 2019, it was 10.5 percent..."
Saying that this run of numbers shows no change -- handwaving away the difference between 15% and 10.5% -- is malpractice. That is a huge difference. If we were talking about a medical intervention in eg cancer treatment, this would be a cause for celebration.
Any honest investigator would respond to this by saying, "holy shit! For every three people with Condition X in 2010 there were only two people with Condition X in 2019? Someone has stumbled on a powerful causal lever! Let's find that thing!"
So...what was the new thing in 2019 that produced this striking change in the numbers? Because we should probably keep doing that thing.
I always enjoy when Matt notices how journalists dishonestly frame arguments and present data misleadingly to support their predefined narratives. It happens more often that we'd all like, unfortunately.
I think it’s less dishonesty as such and more that there are basically zero incentives for making an out-of-narrative argument or actively researching data (whether primary or collected by others) that could falsify your thesis. This affects everyone in the form of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning, but people who write for a living (including me!) are especially prone to it. In my corner of the social sciences world, the incentives for theory generation as opposed to hypothesis testing (to say nothing of testing previous results) are so lopsided that we are drowning in “theories” that are always presented as “calls” for researchers to do more in a particular line of reasoning but end up never mentioned again. And yet those irrelevant theories - often generated on _very_ small-n studies with zero experimental design - are what get people jobs and tenure.
I think I got off track there - sorry! My point is that although of course sometimes people intentionally mislead, I think the way more common and boring tendency, at least among certain “intellectual” types, is to get so used to passing off motivated reasoning as actual reason that it becomes a very difficult habit to break.
I think this is a really good point and explains so much of the challenges of academia. Thanks for sharing it!
It seems to me that's worse. The argument was dishonest. It was disinformation.
I had a professor in graduate, Wolfgang Stolper ("Stolper-Samuelson" theorem :)) who had a saying about "professional sins. He said that seducing virgins and telling lies are both sins. But seducing virgins is a "professional" sin for bishops and telling lies is a "professional sin for academics."
And making sppposrfly economic arguments out of his depth
I'm pretty sure that Desmond was talking about longer term trends and not the variation in the poverty rate attributed to business cycles. In 2010, we were still recovering from recession, and the economy was understimulated. By 2019 the economy was pretty strong. That doesn't really reflect major differences in policies regarding people in poverty.
So I just realized that there’s a heck of a mailbag question in this:
The pre-transfer OPM measure of poverty in the US hovers between 10 and 15 percent based on where in the business cycle we are. How does *that* figure compare to Europe, instead of the post-transfer SPM?
Europe has made its labor market all soft and cuddly in the name of fairness to the folks at the bottom of the scale. But if that’s not reflected at all in the measure of standard of living folks “earn” before the welfare state steps in, then what’s the point? If so, we should stop looking longingly at any of the labor market measures (codetermination, fixed-term contracts, for-cause firing) they’ve taken and simply take the bits of their transfer state which we want.
This is an astute observation. Of course most major pieces of red tape have entrenched interests to defend them.
The biggest single imposition upon free labor markets is anti-discrimination laws. Companies spend a lot of money complying and defending lawsuits, yet it’s far from clear anti discrimination laws have done much to raise the wages of protected groups. However, ending anti-discrimination protections sounds douchey and racist, so those laws will stay even if they are mainly inefficient symbols of inclusion
This is the inverse of a trend that never fails to “vex” me (to use MY’s term): failing to contextualize changes over time, and as a result either minimizing (in this case) or catastrophizing (see: any media in the UK that has to do with weather or inflation). As dysphemistic says, there is a huge difference between 10 and 15% - but a simple rhetorical trick (“statisticians hate this one simple trick!”) can handwave them away (or, alternatively, blow out of proportion a change between 5 and -1 degrees Celsius).
You’re pulling that out of context. Desmond made it very clear that poverty is cyclical, thus the high 2010 figure and the low 2019 figure. Desmond is explaining that changes in the standard poverty measure are driven by the business cycle, and he’s right.
"The line curves slightly up, then slightly down, then back up again over the years, staying steady through Democratic and Republican administrations, rising in recessions and falling in boom years."
Is that his acknowledgement that poverty is driven by the business cycle?
Because it comes in the context of the claim that the poverty rate "curves slightly up, then slightly down," which is not an accurate way to describe falling from 15.1 to 10.5.
Even if you want to say the change is all due to the business cycle, the right conclusion here would be, " the business cycle can have a large effect on poverty," not "there's no appreciable change."
all the data are consistent with poverty oscillating around a mean of about 12-13 percent, with the oscillations driven by the business cycle.
matt’s point about spm is explosive because it shows that “poverty has fallen by half. traditional poverty measures don’t capture this because they exclude public assistance.”
My new pet peeve is people who see a graph that is clearly meant to show change over time and then get mad that the y axis doesn't start at 0 or go from 0% to 100%. Here you can clearly see the downfall of "0 Y Axis Thinking." Sometimes differences that look small on a y axis that starts at 0 are still very meaningful!!!
It’s casual lying by people like Demond that makes me angry. They know better but they take the lazy path. One does not need to lie if their opinions have merit.
We need a law that requires all stats to come with a certainty measure. It’s a nominal 50% reduction in poverty, but if normal variation is ~2.5 points then it’s impossible to distinguish and Desmond is right to call it flat.
From a statistical point of view, that's not _uncertainty_. These are two different constructs. Desmonds presentation was dishonest.
This one is a real winner. I have to note that Desmond's essay on capitalism in the book version of The 1619 Project is perhaps one of the most problematic of all the chapters there. There are economic historians of diverse political stripes who think he doesn't know what he's talking about, that the essay is really pretty outrageously wrong in its rhetoric and the interpretations that it at least implies (minor revisions having been made to an earlier, more explicit version). In short the controversial thesis there is that large-scale plantation slavery in the American South introduced accounting and labor management innovations that then spread to other forms of capitalist production, meaning that in some ways slavery actually can be said to have caused or led to or pioneered or even perhaps provided the crucial investment seed money for American capitalism. James Oakes is simply scathing in his criticism of Desmond's contribution to T1619P. So there may be some kind of a pattern here, and unfortunately because of Desmond's linkage to the debates around T1619P there are going to be a lot of progressives who are inclined toward knee-jerk hostility to his critics. He's supposed to be on the side of the angels. Less tangentially, the addiction of today's progressive politics to the thesis of the impossibility of social improvement (and thus the futility of progressivism) is a thing to behold, verily.
Oh, he contributed to 1619. Well then, that explains a lot…
It explains why NYT published him 😁
He writes for the Times and he isn’t Paul Krugman or Ross Douthat. That explains slot.
You might be surprised at the low level of regard many economists have for Krugman, then.
Yeah, I think that's totally fair; I don't mean to imply that he has never done brilliant research, but he definitely doesn't do his reputation any favors with some of the knots he ties himself in rhetorically. He's still better than Robert Reich, but I find even his nominally nonpartisan analysis worse than similar efforts by Delong, Noah Smith, etc.
Was waiting for this (and agree mostly). The funny thing is, this progressive usually holds up the the problematic Desmond essay as a reason to say the criticisms of the 1619 project are wildly over the top. The intellectually honest* criticisms are (correctly) focused on his essay and his pretty wildly inaccurate claim that slavery created modern capitalism (talking about the creation of modern capitalism and not bringing up the UK and the beginnings of industrialization is seriously intellectually dishonest. Any discussion of how the modern economy came to be needs to start there). To a lesser extent the other intellectually honest criticisms are directed at Nicole Hannah Jones. Although, I actually found her essay not nearly as problematic as people say and honestly think her very lefty Twitter presence is a bigger part of 1619 criticism then people like to admit**.
One thing I always come back with when people make sweeping criticisms of 1619 is that I basically never see criticisms of the essays by Kevin Kruse and Jamelle Bouie. In fact, there essays could basically be Yglesias posts. I find the lack of any commentary or their essays telling.
* it’s extremely clear to me a lot of the criticisms are not actually intellectually helpful or honest. And come from people who never read any essays in question and are basically saying “how dare you say America has a racist past and not say America is the awesomist country in the history of awesome”.
**considering Andrew Sullivan basically claims NHJ is responsible for him losing his job at New York Magazine, I take his criticisms of 1619 with a grain of salt. I’m not privy to internal emails, maybe he’s right and NHJ wrote an email to an editor that got resulted in Sully getting fired. I have no idea. But when he says (or said) NHJ is the most powerful person at the New York Times I really had to role my eyes.
One issue, although a boring one for most observers, is that many of the initial, pungent criticisms of T1619P were issued after the NYT Mag version (v1.0) came out, and the changes made for the book (v2.0) rendered some initial remarks irrelevant. Critics of 1.0 said "No mention of Frederick Douglass in a supposed new history of America that centers slavery and the Black experience? Srsly?" That’s why you see all those references to Douglass in the book. Oops! Many of the changes were even more superficial, however, e.g., adding small qualifying phrases to sentences while really not reconsidering shaky interpretations. Of course NHJ has been the biggest target for criticism, but this feeds the culture war dynamic that she too feeds (as does Jake Silverstein, editor of the Mag) -- all the critics are sentimental about the Am Rev or are otherwise conservative, which isn't true, as critics were ideologically diverse. I have seen serious criticism of the Bouie piece, e.g., by Daryl Scott in the American Historical Review, as it jumps from Calhoun to the 20th century, a doubtful form of historical argumentation, but this is the standard method in the essays. Part of the clean-up job was to get fine historians like Martha Jones, Tiya Miles, and Kruse involved in 2.0 to enhance its credibility. Jones's essay might be the only one that follows a conventional scholarly method of clearly aligning evidence, narrative, and original interpretation. Most of the others are paste jobs in service of a job that is clearly political but not very coherent in purpose (the stated purpose has shifted around: to show how slavery is the hidden source of much of American history, to recognize and celebrate African American history, maybe one or two other things).
This actually might be the most intellectually honest criticism I’ve read. It would be churlish of me to suggest I read literally every criticism and some of the names you’ve noted are a bit new to me (and have me interested in reading more).
In a way you’re kind of buttressing my point. As I noted, it’s not like I thought the 1619 project was beyond criticism or didn’t have a number of flaws worth pointing out (I especially want to read that criticism of Bouie’s essay; curious if nothing else). But wow, your comment is way way more nuanced then some of the commentary I read in National Review for example (again, only going on the commentary I read)
Heh, I try to outdo NR. Srsly thanks, and if you're interested the best brief reflection and assessment I've seen is by Lauren Michele Jackson https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-1619-project-and-the-demands-of-public-history. Nuanced and discerning.
>>> even perhaps provided the crucial investment seed money for American capitalism.
I don't know enough about this particular aspect of American history or this particular debate to have a strong opinion here, but this *specific* bit of it...doesn't sound that crazy to me? I mean, Southern planters had a lot of money; the South was actually wealthier than the North in the early years of the American republic. It seems plausible that they could have funneled some of that money towards New England textile mills in the 1820s or whatever. And of course, those mills often did work with Southern-produced cotton.
Now, if the argument is more like "American industrialists looked at the slave plantation and decided to recreate a version of it in the factory," then, yeah, that stinks of some real garbage.
In the 1850s, the state of New York had higher GDP than than the entire Confederacy. Slavery isn't as societally beneficial as markets.
I didn’t say slavery was efficient, I said Southern planters were rich. And by “early Republic,” I meant, like, 1790s to 1820s or so, not the entire pre-Civil War period (I realize this was not immediately obvious from the phrase).
I was making a fairly narrow point about who had money to invest in the earliest days of American history, not a broad point about the economics of slavery or industrialization.
I'm honestly not sure how important "having money to invest" actually was in the antebellum agrarian south. (I'll bet industrial historians know the answer to this though!) On the one hand, obviously there was an investor class in the US in the pre-civil war 1800s -- someone had to build the railroads, after all, and cotton-growing slaveholders were growing for export rather than consumption -- but were Southern plantation slave holders really any kind of meaningful source of investment capital to the industrialized North in the days when it took weeks just to *get* to Northern financial hubs from the agrarian South?
True. I'm definitely not sure they were, and, as David R points out below, there is good reason to believe they weren't. I was just saying that this isn't a totally crazy notion at first glance, because they did have money.
Still seems a bit of a stretch. Southern capital was not mobile, it was tied up in physical "plant" at home; plantation owners didn't go venture their money in northern factories, they bought and sold slaves and occasionally cotton and tobacco futures.
Yeah, it might be a stretch. I’m not necessarily endorsing it, just pointing out that there is a narrow sense in which part of it it seems plausible.
I certainly *do not* think American industrialization is a direct consequence of slavery. Even if it were the case that some Southern planters invested in some very early industrial operations (and I’m not saying it is, just that it doesn’t sound crazy), that doesn’t mean that slavery directly led to industrialization. It *definitely* doesn’t mean that industrialization would not have happened were it not for slavery - I mean, the UK didn’t need plantation slavery to industrialize.
Yea, it seems quite clear from the historical record that slavery was an impediment to industrialization everywhere it was practiced in the Americas and also dragged down the pace of industrialization in other regions which were integrated with slaveholding societies economically. Financial capital from slave-owning regions was not invested in industrialization within the United States and the agricultural economies of the slaveholding regions were not efficient in supplying nascent industry in the US with any of the precursors it needed to become world-beating. Moreover, the slave-holding regions in the US consistently viewed industrialization in the free-labor states as a threat and did their utmost to knife it in the back at every turn in favor of buying the industrial produce of faraway lands.
It's our original sin, but no one alive today profited an iota from it, it gravely harmed the national interest at a macro level, and we should stop pretending otherwise in support of a false-but-compelling moral narrative for what we "owe" the descendants of slaves.
if nothing else, england industrialized earlier and there were basically no slaves there. ditto massachusetts.
indeed, slavery eats up capital. pay your workers wages and you pay their cost one week at a time. buy your workers, and you have to pay sums of cash up front. money spent buying slaves could not easily be invested in railroads or water powered mills.
there were some examples of slaves performing skilled labor, eg at the Tredegar iron works in Richmond. In Haiti, many of the overseers were mixed race and some were former slaves. Given time, slavery might have evolved into a system suited to more complex tasks than growing cotton. However, emancipation came before industrialized slavery could really get off the ground, and slavery probably allocated capital to less efficient tasks than building efficient water powered textile mills.
slavery was an efficient way of producing cotton. the union blockade caused a depression in northern england precisely because other sources of cotton like india and egypt were less efficient and more expensive
Does this have literally *anything* to do with what I said?
you were responding to vjv and my reply has a great deal to do with what he said
This is wrong. The gang system of planting was extremely unpleasant, and not something free labor was willing to do. However, it was much better at growing cotton. Fogel and Engerman estimate the non-pecuniary losses to slaves at 90 million dollars, offset only slightly by the 6 million slaves earned in compensation above free labor (yes, slaves earned more money than free farmers).
if that were really true, capitalists could have lent slaves money to buy their own freedom and made a profit doing so.
compensating slave owners was the obvious way to get them to go along with manumission. most would have gone along for the right price, though their demands would have been high. still, the fact that white people couldn’t design functioning system where black people would pay for their own manumission suggests that plantation slavery was reasonably efficient.
Definitely -- it's totally plausible that plantation profits might have contributed meaningful to industrial capitalism. That question has been hotly debated in the context of the British industrial revolution since Eric Williams made a parallel argument in _Capitalism and Slavery_ in 1944 (re: the profits of British Caribbean slave-based sugar plantations). So to a great extent this is question for empirical investigation and analysis by economic historians, and there has been a ton of that. Overall I'd say the weight of scholarly opinion runs against Williams specifically, although a lot of people (including me) think there is still good reason to take what he says seriously at a macro level and because he was a fantastic writer who made important, provocative arguments in the 1940s with far less data than we have now. But you wouldn't simply recycle his argument now without looking at the data or the scholarship collected in the intervening 75 years. That's sort of what Desmond's essay in T1619P does. And the really weird thing he does is base an argument for the origins of American industrial capitalism in slavery not on coherent claims about investment capital (I believe there might have been some of that in his v1.0 essay, which then dropped away from v2.0), but rather on evidence of capitalist labor-management and accounting practices in large slave-based plantations, which doesn't make much sense. Those practices didn't originate in those plantations, as Oakes and others have pointed out.
Most of what I’ve read on the topic, which post-dates Williams, is that no only did the South contribute very little financial capital to northern industrialization, they in fact spent considerable political capital attempting to kill it as a threat to their way of life. By 1820 it was already very clear to the South’s leadership that the northern free soil model was a grave demographic threat, by 1830 or so it was a grave economic one that would eventually reduce them to a mere appendage of the north, slavery to be dispensed with on a whim.
They weren’t wrong. Had they somehow clung to the Peculiar Institution until 1880 or 90 before trying to secede they’d have been crushed in a matter of months.
"if slavery was such an efficient system (as the Southerners claimed at the time and as the 1619 project oddly claims too), why did the South lose the Civil War?"
+1000 There's also the point that by basically every objectively verifiable metric we have (life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy, etc.) median whites in non-slave states were better off than median whites in slave states.
An agricultural economy of free labour will always be at a massive disadvantage to an industrial economy in war. Slavery has limited relevance.
Winning or losing a war is a terrible metric for efficiency. Relying upon Fogel and Engerman’s “Time on the Cross”, yes, slavery was efficient in the sense that it maximized outputs given inputs.
> I think most people found his book a little dull and will find Desmond’s more interesting, which is unfortunate because I don’t think it’s helpful for Desmond to over-complicate the situation.
I think many of us are far more interested in reading and discussing social issues like poverty than we are in actually addressing these problems. Doubly so if it would come at a personal cost to us affluent wanna-be noble aristocrats. We simply enjoy the thrill of applying our thinking and sophistry in something of a status game where we cosplay as philosophers. A hundred years ago we’d likely be arguing about the interpretation of scripture in our application of the Social Gospel, without much need to actually apply anything.
And yes, this comment is an example of that. I hope to have some debating partners in the replies who can chastise me for being overly uncharitable to us progressives.
Obviously with that final sentence you killed the conversation- and yet I’m impervious;)
I counter - a hundred years ago we’d have supported the progressive movement 1.0 that ended child labor in the us , recognized labor unions, busted trusts etc
Sure there is always navel gazing going on to some extent, but conversations change minds and people with new ideas vote, donate, protest, engage in civic society and drive real change.
(I’m optimistic this morning and that’s even before my coffee :)
'...the progressive movement 1.0 that ended child labor in the us , recognized labor unions, busted trusts..."
...kickstarted the Eugenics movement...
That Tuesday-after-DST this-isn't-so-bad AM energy.
Yay optimism! Boo nihilism!
If I’d been in the debate a century ago, there would have been a large dose of social Darwinism. With so few examples of minorities or non-Western cultures thriving, there also would have been a monster sized portion of white supremacy. I probably would have been a white supremicist in 1923 and so would most people on this thread.
P.S. while how one would have been back in x period before one’s birth is always a hypothetical with not real answers, for the sake of the fun argument I’d point out that slowborers are proven independent or at least heterodox thinkers. Assuming we take that characteristic with us back in time I think it’s fair to suppose we’d have some qualms with some of the mainstream ideas of whatever group we end up being a part of back then.
The giganerd question is of course what’s the 1920 equivalent of Slowboring ??
That is an interesting framing. But I’m not sure how to go about the exercise. Can you give an example?
You’re forgetting that not a few of us would have been part of the “other” in 1923 ;)
Basically all of us who aren't of pure British/German descent, lol.
I've got a nice chunk of Italian but a British last name, good diction, and can probably pass.
But my wife and child would be rather hard to explain away.
What about French descent?
All twelve of them in Louisiana and Maine? Probably ok, no? Been there longer than the Anglos and once owned everything (and everyone in the former case).
I was thinking more of the immense popularity of Lafayette and the second of the Thirteen Toasts, offered to "His Most Christian Majesty."
Ich kann ein bisschen Deutsche sprechen, aber nicht zu viel.
What does "addressing these problems" mean to you, Mr. Hagy. I think that in large countries the greatest number of people participate in addressing problems by voting or advocating through public speech (you've dismissed the latter), with smaller numbers participating by making campaign donations, campaigning, making charitable contributions, or choosing activist professions.
A century ago, in the wake of World War I, progressives were back on their heels for a variety of reasons, including the temporary mirage of capitalist triumph. But in the periods I'm familiar with since becoming politically aware in the early '60s, I'd say progressives (the term varying in meaning over time) have been more active at all income levels when their numbers were larger and the odds of success greater, and less active otherwise. The peak of activity in my experience was probably 1966-68, and when diminished it was spectacular failure because the numbers of non-progressives turned out to be far greater after divorce with the southern majority. Basically, activism goes out of favor when it seems useless, and returns to favor when the odds shift towards some success.
There is a very progressive young person I know who in their fervor laments that most people do not devote themselves full-time to activism because "they think it's so important just to live their lives." If that's your complaint too, then your pessimism is well justified. I think you'll find that most people--even people living at poverty levels--prioritize living their personal and family lives over living for social ideals. Since I think that's a given, I'd suggest not devoting too much progressive energy to lamenting it.
Ideas matter.
Life is very long. People do change their minds. And things that are obvious to one generation were debated in the generation previous. Maybe this particular discussion is writ in water, but in the broad sense public debate in its myriad forms has long fingers that do grasp and work.
I always find it so funny that the best comments on Matt Yglesias posts come from someone also named Matt.
Since Yglesias is often credited with inventing (or at least widely popularizing) the #slatepitch, allow me to express gratitude for a "don't overthink it, the answer is simple and the statistics bear it out" post!
#straightpitch
And this is really the unique innovation Matt made that gets kind of mistaken for a traditional #SlatePitch: he's said before that he has had made success by making counter-contrarian rebuttals to galaxy brain takes that are getting an excessive amount of attention. The one example I always remember him using from about two decades ago was, in reply to takesters that were saying that Roe v. Wade is hurting progress on abortion rights, Matt would simply say "Actually, Roe v. Wade is good.".
Exactly! Also, actually, time zones are good ;)
...why you little! I'm really hoping Matt answers a DST question in the next mailbag so we can properly unleash this discourse.
After reading that 10 year old Vox article, I realized two things. One, my current 9-5 CST workday would be 1500-2300 GMT. And two, how would the International Date Line work? The number of times earth rotates on its axis in the amount of time it takes complete an orbit around the sun is basically constant even if the entire world is on the same 24 hour time.
Would 2100 GMT be called "afternoon" anymore? who's to say?!?! ANARCHY!
Yeah. I was going to write this, too: the "this is actually a pretty simple problem" angle of this piece is what I think is most analytically useful about it.
Just like ACC. We need a tax on metCO 2 but it is not popular
A banal comment: it is sad that there is apparently no incentive for mainline journalists to write a "poverty is falling" story.
It's okay to report good news!
It’s not that we need a feel good “poverty is falling” story. What we really need is a post like the current one. Welfare state is working and we could do so much more! That’s the true progressive spirit -backed by facts- that the best version of so called “activist” journalists ought to pursue.
APOLOGIES FOR HIPPY-PUNCHING,
Modern very-online Twitter "progressives" are oddly allergic to the idea that we do, or even can, make "progress" in addressing any particular problem.
No. Revolution or we all die.
Agree! We absolutely do not need a "good news" story in this area. This post and Desmond's discussion of exploitation put the proper focus on what could be done, as difficult as it may be. The discourse related to poverty reduction is fraught with bad intentions, and I have come to believe that talking about "improving conditions" ends up being an excuse to do less than an encouragement to do more.
I think Matt's point is mostly right - welfare programs are very good at limiting the absolute downside of markets. But I also think that markets have done much more to improve people's lives - indeed, without markets, there's radically less to redistribute via welfare.
So having said all that, are you willing to consider that "poverty reduction" might ever hit diminishing or negative returns? Is there any point at which you might hesitate to interfere with a successful positive process?
The Right can never say government programs have been successful: government is bad so don't feed the beast.
The Left, for very different reasons, can never say government programs have been successful: Things must always be getting worse; we must act urgently to avoid catastrophe but the type of actions that would solve problems and take them away from our consciousness, always vanish into the event horizon, so instead we must always remain alarmed and insist that the only solutions are maximal and utopian.
The Middle is willing to believe that government programs can work but still just secretly yearns for more fun SB posts on sports and movies
I think this is a collective illusion.
I for one love reading “feel good” stories about positive developments.
> But the numbers involved are big and scary, GOP elites think it’s a bad idea, and Democratic Party advocacy groups who like this idea generally have higher priorities.
I think a lot of this comes down to us misdiagnosing a persuasion problem as a political problem.
We just don’t yet have substantial consensus that we Americans should pay higher taxes to reduce child poverty. Yes, almost everyone agrees that child poverty is bad and should be addressed. Even many Republican voters and politicians agree. But when personal sacrifice in the form of higher taxes is added to the proposal, we recoil in discomfort. We simply can’t address child poverty through politics until we’ve persuaded a sufficient number of fellow Americans to support this policy.
And yet we progressives deny the nature of the problem before us. We want to believe that our ideas are already broadly popular, or that we can eliminate personal sacrifice with some nebulous concept of “tax the rich.” Some of this may be our own unacknowledged selfishness. Some of it may be a lack of seriousness at actually addressing the problem.
But the biggest cause in my opinion is our lack of convictions in the power of our beliefs. We can’t even consider the possibility our ideas may be unpopular because that could suggest that we are wrong. We also don’t want to do the hard and dirty missionary work of converting others to our faith. That would require empathy for nonbelievers and a concerted effort to meet them where they are at as we spread the good word.
Yet I’m actually optimistic that the situation will improve because our ideas are strong, just, and persuasive. We’ll probably need a bit more pain before we’re forced to recon with the cold hard reality. Ultimately the power of our beliefs will compel us to do so.
Once upon a time, Mitt Romney designed a universal child allowance that didn't raise tax rates and was fully funded. The bill fully eliminated the state and local tax deduction and TANF to pay for the child allowance. Unfortunately, Democrats ignored the bill because it was authored by Mitt Romney, and most Republicans ignored the bill because it didn't have work requirements. Romney has also unfortunately moved on to a less generous child allowance other Republicans designed.
He also made the very ignorant mistake of claiming Russia (of all places) was our biggest geopolitical foe. What a naive and backward-thinking thing to say. Didn't he realize the cold war was over?
Sorry, I'm still salty over how he was treated and I think it contributed, albeit in a small way, to Trump's rise.
I mean... we've crippled Russia beyond any possibility of recovery with a tiny fraction of our defense spending, using a proxy which in 2012 was regarded as basically a failed state.
Yes, Russia is an enemy. No, Romney was still dead wrong to cite it as our greatest geopolitical foe, hard stop, even in full context.
Sure, Obama's soundbite was "unfair," but this is politics, it's all unfair. The object, as a politician or political strategist, is to win. It's not the politicians' fault, in the main, that the way to win is to press all of the tribal buttons at once. Romney did the same thing in playing footsie with the Tea Party/Birther nuts and leveling frankly startling hypocritical criticisms of the ACA.
And also sure, Romney losing in 2012 contributed to Trump, but only in that the latter was the only GOP primary candidate to ditch the losing message on Social Security and Medicare and promise an improvement to ACA rather than just killing it.
Given that they are at war with Ukraine and just took down one of our drones over the Black Sea, I will respectfully disagree with your assessment of Russia's placement on the geopolitical foe list.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-14/russian-fighter-aircraft-collide-with-us-drone-above-black-sea?srnd=premium&sref=Myi6JIDt
It’s a distant, distant second.
China is more sophisticated, more capable, more systemically important in every way, and vastly more totalitarian.
And with much greater ambitions.
Let’s not lose sight of the ball.
Romney has also spoken reasonably about China, to be fair and has pivoted to that being our biggest geopolitical foe since about 2020
Hard to list our greatest enemies and the horror and insult to America of a downed drone. Could it be our biggest enemy is our own paranoia. It's driven us into something like five stupid wars in my lifetime. By comparison what happened over the Black Sea won't be remembered next Christmas unless we escalate it stupidly. Maybe btw it would help lessen tensions if we thought of other countries as competitors rather than enemies.
"They don't support us because they don't understand their own interests."
...is probably one of the most infuriating examples of being unwilling to proselytize.
Just insisting that the fault for their failure to persuade lies with others being too dumb or defective to determine what their own interests are.
Especially when it is coupled with no real attempt to persuade.
Having just given a pretty negative reply to your earlier comment, I'm enthusiastic about this: "We also don’t want to do the hard and dirty missionary work of converting others to our faith. That would require empathy for nonbelievers and a concerted effort to meet them where they are at as we spread the good word."
If you're focusing on persuasion, I think that's a huge progressive failure. Many (not all) contemporary progressives seem to me to have chosen a "strengthen the cult" approach instead of a "convert the masses" one. Ideas being strong and just is good, but they're not persuasive until you understand whom you're trying to persuade and learn which strategies work and which tend to backfire. In my lifetime I've seen an amazing shift from an era where the Left was getting better at persuasion because they were reading people like Saul Alinsky (in his later days) to now, when the Right has learned to read Alinsky and can manipulate the overwrought Left like puppets.
But aren’t young people ever more to the left? How’s that happening if not by persuasion?
Sure, THP. Young people have tended left for as long as I can remember, though today's new generation may be the most left-leaning since mine in the '60s. But they will likely do what all generations do: move right as they age. And--speaking as an amateur when it comes to sociology--I think the "persuasion" among young people has much less to do with arguments or conscious recruitment as it has to do with age-group peer influence (which is why many young lefties tend to move right when they enter multi-generational workplace environments).
I think people conflate the inefficiency of many government programs with the ability of government to write a check to people. And if welfare was so possible, Clinton wouldn't have made hay of making it workfare in the 1990s. People felt like they were somehow being cheated by the poor.
I believe indeed know that a tax on net CO3 emissions is not popular. I do however blame “evvironmentists” who should know better
I don't know, I think a lot of left wing persuasion already exists and is trying to convince people that we should be willing to pay higher taxes for better benefits, though I agree with you that generally they like to tell a fairy tale about only taxing the rich. If you want to convince people who haven't already been convinced by the "won't somebody think of the children" argument then you have to code it in right wing terms. Framing it as pro-family is one way. Framing it as necessary for our future fight with China is another way. Framing it as an investment in a future workforce rather than a handout is another. As a former Republican I think those kinds of arguments are pretty persuasive.
The segment on conservative welfare-thought feels chalk-full of strawmen or motte-and-bailey type arguments.
"But essentially, their basic idea is that a proper anti-poverty policy should create a situation in which nobody has low labor market earnings."
The extreme take that nobody would have low market earnings is ridiculous, I agree. But prioritizing fewer people in that position seems reasonable, right? I'm sure there are plenty of dipshit conservtaives out there arguing the extreme version on Twitter, but that doesn't make the more reasonable "let's prioritize teaching men to fish rather than giving fish whenever we can" wrong.
Likewise, the "lack of sympathy for large classes of people." Is that supposed to advance the argument? Or course people have varying degrees of sympathy for large classes of people. In 2023, working class / non-college whites have become the people for whom the Left has little sympathy. The only question is whether or not the sympathies are "good" or "bad".
In the context of welfare, of course I have more sympathy for an 70 year old or a disabled combat veteran than I do for a healthy 20 year old who would rather smoke weed and play video games all day. It's fine to have disagreements about who "deserves" help. It's not as if Democrats are above having "bad" sympathies or a lack of them.
>I have more sympathy for an 70 year old or a disabled combat veteran than I do for a healthy 20 year old who would rather smoke weed and play video games all day.
Do you have some sense of what % of the poor are 20-year olds who would rather smoke weed and play video games all day? I know that about 33% are children. A large fraction are disabled or elderly.
In general I think it is factually true that anti-poverty programs are going to end up benefiting some "undeserving" people, but I'm not sure what that fraction is (probably not that large) and I'm also not sure how relevant it is.
Say 20% of the poor "deserve" it by your definition. Would a policy that eliminated poverty suddenly be a bad idea because the 1/5th of recipients were undeserving? How many "innocent" poor people should we allow to languish in poverty, to avoid helping the 20% of them who shouldn't receive help? It's not a super persuasive argument, in addition to philosophical problem of deciding who does and doesn't deserve help.
"It's not a super persuasive argument" I'm not following what the argument is? I'm not lying out a definition of who is deserving or not, I just think everyone probably has one at some level, so when Matt points out that Conservatives think some groups are more deserving than others that is just an entirely banal observation.
"are going to end up benefiting some "undeserving" people"
As to how I personally feel about it, I think another miss is the assumption that welfare is always a benefit. My bigger concern is whether it influences people in negative ways by incentivizing unhealthy behavior. Drawing only from my personal, individual experience, I've seen neighbors and people in my family use welfare to continue drug and alcohol problems, or simply to avoid working when they were otherwise perfectly able to. YMMV, but for at least some of the people I know welfare actually seems to have harmed them
Agree but let’s make minimizing harm the constraint not willingness to pay taxes
Despite having "little sympathy" for non-college whites, it is the Democratic party that supports labor unions, that directs federal dollars towards high poverty white areas to hire teachers and cops, and that tries to raise the minimum wage. Having sympathy for someone is meaningless if you won't vote on policies that support them. Republicans don't vote for policies that will help the poor OR the white working class.
Maybe. This is a tangent from my previous comment, but I think the more you zoom in the less that looks like hypocrisy.
I'm fairly familiar with the culture of West Virginia, a non-college, pro-union, mostly White and fairly poor state. People there have a mix of opinions on various welfare programs, but when they oppose them, they mostly do it from the mindset that the welfare programs will make the communities they live in worse-off. They might believe that poverty is sometimes encouraged by welfare and the receivers actually harmed. That's been my own personal experience with friends and family, in any case, also.
Totally get that they believe it, I used to believe it too. Then I learned how to read data. Mainly I just wanted to push back on the idea that Democrats have abandoned working class whites which you were alluding to. I think a lot of Democrats are frustrated with working class whites for demanding help without being interested in helping anyone in a lower economic status than them. But in real terms it is still the Democrats that provide the most support to white working class citizens, regardless of what the current rhetoric might sound like.
It's not exactly a straw man argument that Matt is making about conservative views on welfare. Sure there are varied opinions on the Right about the subject but for the purpose of writing an article he can't address every single one of them, it would just be too long. I think the generalization he picked is pretty charitable and broadly true, that Republicans mostly want a person to work in order to receive assistance. A straw man argument would be to say that Republicans hate poor people, and Matt didn't say that.
To play devil's advocate and try to defend Desmond a bit, I think one of his points is that, while material standards of low-income people have been going up in some regards (like access to inexpensive material goods), that their access to certain markers of middle class life (like housing, healthcare, higher education, and child care) is not. And he says that these are the things that "matter most." So, it could be true that in dollars poor people are better off than they used to be after transfers, and that they have better clothes, better household appliances, and better cell phones than they did a generation ago. But overall they are still as burdened because of high housing, education, child care, and health care costs. I think it's worth taking this argument seriously.
Now, I don't know if I agree with all of his analysis. I agree with you that misrepresenting statistics isn't a good way to make your point. And some of the stuff about rent isn't as convincing (it's perfectly possible to have a strong middle class made up of primarily renters--look at Germany). But I can see how other areas of exploitation have gotten worse over time--such as the availability of high interest loans targeted to the poor, lack of unions to bargain for their interest in the workplace, and a more costly banking system. I'm not sure these can explain current poverty levels in full, but I think it's worth engaging with these issues in addition to just government transfers.
Mild pushback: at least in part, we consider better clothes, better appliances, and better cell phones to be luxury goods because they materially improve our lives! Not so sure on better clothes, but I think it's neat that poor people and rich people can now get lost in the city at roughly the same zero-ish rate.
I'm not saying they are luxury goods. Clothes are a necessity of life. Cell phones are close to one in our society. And some clothes and appliances are of course luxury. But everyone's got to do laundry (or pay a bunch of money each month at a laundromat) and cook food. I live now in a country where consumer goods are much more expensive than in the US (and salaries considerably lower), and I can see that this makes a difference to standard of living. Here people live in smaller, shittier apartments. They drive worse cars (or no cars at all and take the bus/train, like me). They own fewer clothes (hardly any walk-in closets (or even closets at all) in apartments--so you only have clothes that will fit in an IKEA wardrobe). People in the middle class will buy clothes and other consumer goods abroad on vacation--but that's probably off limits for low-income people. And it makes a difference to your life. But... here college costs $2,700/ year. A hospital visit at a public hospital (as annoying as the public system is) is usually free (that is it's covered by taxes) or pretty cheap, and a private one isn't anywhere close to American costs. Parents only need to worry about shelling out an arm and a leg for child care for 3 years instead of 5 because kindergarten starts at age 3 instead of 5. (Housing here is still expensive though). So these things make it that even people earning what in the US would be considered low income still have pretty middle class lives.
In the country where you live, perhaps there is a connection between the size of the welfare state and the fact that salaries are lower, costs are higher and people live in shittier apartments and drive worse cars.
That college and medical care are cheaper is good, though. That is a policy choice to favor those things rather than an overall richer & more productive nation. Not one I would make, but I see it as a fine alternative choice.
It's definitely not fully causal, but the higher deadweight loss from higher tax burdens in other countries probably contributes to a lower standard of living. There are only four European countries with a higher GDP per capita than the US: one is a petrostate (Norway), two basically have fake GPDs (Ireland and Luxembourg), and the last one has weird laws regarding capital and banking that would never fly in American culture (Switzerland).
Also, it should be emphasized that in European countries, this broader welfare state is paid for by broad-based taxes (not high taxes on people making over $400k/year). It's paid by middle class people as well as high earners.
That means 20% VATs and income tax rates of 40% at above around $50,000/year.
Within reason, porque no los dos?
The US markets for higher education and medicine are shot-through with rent-seeking, impenetrably opaque pricing structures, kick-backs, legalized graft, regulatory capture, and deceptive financing practices.
If we ruthlessly applied to them the features of the rest of the economy which make us richer and more productive… I think there’s reason to believe the situation in those two sectors would improve without any substantial trade-off towards “shittier apartments and worse cars”.
You get no disagreement from me on applying significant reforms to both higher education and medicine.
So, MY has argued before that making things like healthcare/childcare etc. widely accessible also involves increasing supply. That means building more doctor's offices, hospitals, child care facilities, and having more workers go into nursing, medicine, and child care providers, as opposed to other areas of employment. All that entails shifting parts of the economy (like making cheap consumer goods and providing services) towards these sectors. So it is possible that there is somewhat of a tradeoff. With that being said, I think there are lots of inefficiencies in our current higher educational and medicine systems that there's some room for reform that may not involve such large tradeoffs.
But it’s captured state stuff, like the fact that medical residency seats are capped, that are holding back “more supply” coming into the pool of working physicians in the US… I think the point stands on reform being the issue, here. If we really let as many people become doctors or recognized licensure from other parts of the world, etc, we could increase supply without much investment or shifting beyond just letting the market take over on areas like this that are really capped by interest groups and such.
There’s a substantial difference between the situation in childcare and healthcare; the former requires more material resources, the latter requires more efficient use of huge material resources already made available to the sector.
To be honest, I don’t think that childcare can be solved in a meaningful sense.
There surely *is* a somewhat glib answer to this vis a vis higher education, no? Specifically, that for-profit higher education has been an unmitigated, graft-ridden disaster. Higher Education may be mostly a signalling game, but it seems like one that the private market absolutely sucks at.
Perhaps there's a connection--but it is by no means the only explanation. The two countries have wildly different histories and wildly different economies. I think that there are other factors that contribute to high cost of living here other than the welfare state--such as monopolies on imports of goods.
I'm not saying that it's bad to have cheap consumer goods. But it's not the whole story. You can't say you meaningfully lifted someone out of poverty if they can't afford the copays for bringing their kid to the doctor when they're sick, or their rent takes up the majority of their income, or they can't send their kid to college.
"You can't say you meaningfully lifted someone out of poverty if... they can't send their kid to college" is actually an incredibly radical idea. I'm not sure I *disagree* with it, but it would be sky-is-green up-is-down stuff to anybody in the New Deal era. We should be honest with ourselves about that.
We are not in the New Deal Era, when college degrees were only for the elite. We are in the 21st century, where not having tertiary education is generally required for most middle class employment (whether or not it should be like that is a different story, but that's the situation we live in).
In my neighborhood, costs are high, apartments are small and shitty, the cars are two tons over weight, as are the people. The health care system sucks. What dream country are you living in? I get it the sun shines and you can walk the beach. I don't think that sets you apart from most of the world. I doubt there's any connection between 'the size of the welfare state', high salaries and low costs. if you can show us a correlation, much less causation, please share. We all get it you think you're paying taxes to support deadbeats. I'm sure you are, but that's how the world works.
You are ascribing beliefs to me that I do not hold.
I'm sure you don't
Access to healthcare has improved through! And if not, we should repeal the ACA because apparently the GOP was right about it.
More people have access to insurance (because of Medicaid expansion and subsidies...i.e. more generous transfers). But cost of healthcare has gone up (and was going up well before the ACA). The ACA didn't really solve the problem of growing healthcare costs. That doesn't mean it should be scrapped.
Healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP has indeed stabilized at about 18% since the passage of the Affordable Care Act. I'm not giving that legislation credit, mind you. I reckon it has had something to do with it, but healthcare's complicated and there are multiple moving parts.
But the US for the time being doesn't appear to have a serious healthcare inflation problem. What we have is "stuck at too expensive" problem.
"Healthcare costs" can mean billing costs or costs to the consumer. The ACA shifted the billing for many low-income people away from direct consumer cost, making health care much more affordable. It shifted the billing to insurance companies and taxpayers. The insurance companies reshifted in ways that added costs to some consumers and, again, taxpayers. It doesn't all come out even--health care inflation remains high because of the intrinsic leverage healthcare providers (from drug companies to device manufacturers to hospitals) still have. But in terms of consumer affordability, accessible options are far greater at low-income levels with the ACA, and not priced out of reach for those paying through employer plans. (There's probably too much of a squeeze for those who fall under neither category.)
Surely you could convert to PPP, choose a reference year and see what the poverty rate has done.
I thought including housing is his point with switching to the new measure(which shows a higher absolute poverty rate) and that Matt didn't disagree with that measure.
Where he disagreed was Desmond said "the slope of OPM is flat. Plus it's a baf measure, and the better measure is even higher right now than OPM is!", Which _implies_ the slope of SPM is also flat, but that is, crucially, not true.
I think this argument has merit and probably agree with you that those things matter more than, like, cell phones (though this is to some degree a judgment call). However, these aren't really issues particular to poverty - higher housing, education, health care, etc. costs impact the middle-class, too. Of course, to a lesser degree, but still - I'm not sure it's best to frame this problem as something that's about poverty, per se.
I mean poor people also need to live somewhere, need to see doctors, need someone to watch their children when they're at work. I get what you're saying, but I'm not sure I totally agree.
The idea that housing would be more available to low-income people if only we had less market and more political control over housing production seems… remarkably uninformed.
1. I never said that.
2. It depends. There are some countries that do public housing reasonably well (France for example). The US is not one of those countries, and given its political environment and its history it probably won't be one of these countries.
3. The US could make housing vouchers an entitlement (instead of a program that's essentially a lottery, with a huge backlog). It would cost a substantial amount of money, and would be essentially a transfer. In high demand supply-constrained areas, if housing supply didn't increase, such a policy would probably increase housing costs across the board.. In this way, housing subsidies only get you so far if you don't take Yglesian steps to allow for housing supply to expand. In lower-demand cities (say Buffalo) the increased subsidies may not have as drastic an effect on housing prices. And very low-income people also struggle with housing in these areas where housing demand is not as high.
It could be perfectly possible to have public low income housing and squeeze the crap out of the middle class because they're not subsidized and the supply is tighter because of the low income housing.
This effect can be alleviated with Yglesian-style YIMBYism.
European Gini coefficients are so low because it takes into account government transfers. Pre transfer, the Gini coefficients are much closer to the US, including in Scandinavia.
Let me play devil's advocate from a European perspective.
Americans who like European-style welfare states do tend to point to them as a way to decrease relative poverty. There are other methods that Europe does employ and don't involve raising taxes on anyone. Bring your best public universities (UC, Berkeley and Texas A&M and UIUC and...) to the level of the best EU public universities. Bring universities like MIT to the level of ... I'm not sure I can think of a good private engineering school in the EU. Make it more likely that new companies in both futuristic (Apple) and traditional (Tesla) sectors of the economy will be started elsewhere. You can do all these things by observing that taxing investment income or reducing the funds that are available for UIUC gives you more funds for food stamps without raising anyone's taxes. After all, probably more people will benefit from an increase in food stamps funds than they will benefit from attending UIUC.
I know that there are most likely trade-offs involved between growing the economy and fighting poverty, but I would like to understand what Americans that like EU style welfare states think on this balance.
Even solidly rigorous analytical thinkers on the left like Matt tend to hand-wave away the indirect costs of welfare or completely ignore potential 2nd order affects like the ones you mention.
Instead they assume that welfare opposition is all about being "mean" or something,
As a clarification, I do believe that the US probably has some room to spare right now in increasing its welfare spending without getting to EU living standards. But I don't have a good answer about whether I'm correct on this, and where the limit should be, if I'm indeed correct.
I think there are both "smart" ways to expand and to contract welfare spending. More or less is pretty useless, imo, without breaking it down to more granular ideas. My critique of Matt Y welfare thinking it he tends to strawman opponents of "more" as stingy, selfish A-holes seemingly without engaging in potentially strong counter-issues.
Yeah, weird, you call people lazy welfare queens for 40 years all while supporting massive tax cuts for rich people, then wonder why people don't think you have virtrous reasons for wanting to cut food stamps.
As a proud American, I think the richest nation in the world can afford to not only have great universities, but also a sizable welfare state. Just because second-class countries like France or the UK can't pull it off, doesn't mean that we can't either.
I indeed think there's some truth here!
This seems awfully strawmannish on your part. I suppose America could, if it wanted, strengthen its safety net by shifting resources out of higher education, sure. But nobody seems to be proposing such a course of action. Most American liberals just want higher taxes. A Denmark-ized (or, more realistically, a Canada-ized) United States would be a country where people live in somewhat smaller houses, eat out a bit less frequently (or less sumptuously), and replace their phones and cars less often.
I doubt it would mean their universities would have to decline.
Check my previous answer to briross, as well. Some additional things.
"Most American liberals just want higher taxes."
I think that's true indeed, but I also don't think it's an accident that higher taxes in the EU come with worse universities.
I could be having a much less stressful PhD and also a worse post-PhD salary, if I stayed back home. If American taxes go to a level where the extra salary here isn't that appealing, don't you think that research in the US would suffer? (To be fair, I don't think we are there yet. I think there is still room to raise taxes in the US without becoming EU.)
If Americans air-condition their homes less, and reduce the amount of money they spend on phones and cars, don't you think that the incentive for the next Apple or Tesla will go down? Thus, don't you think that a career in Apple or Tesla will become less attractive? Again, the US (I think) has room to spare. I do believe that a more egalitarian society though comes with real trade-offs in growth, and I feel that this is the main thing that Americans won't be able to stomach.
PS: I think it's much easier to convince the American voter to go after universities rather than downsize homes given the percentage of Americans with a university degree.
The US had higher taxes in the past and still had to the world's best universities. That a return to pre-Reagan era tax rates would mean much to American universities seems unsupported but the actual historical precedent of universities when taxes were at that level.
The US did have higher tax rates, but did it have higher taxes? I'm not so sure that this is true. I checked here (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S), and I don't see anything dramatic happening after roughly the end of the Korean War (other than recessions).
My understanding is that when the rates were higher, there were also more loopholes, so the taxes themselves were largely the same. If I'm taxed only on 5% of my income but at 100%, I have a higher marginal tax rate but pay less in taxes compared to an alternative of getting taxed at 10% for all of my income.
I don't understand your argument? You're saying that we spend too much money subsidizing our best public universities, and should instead spend that money on food stamps?
I'm saying that having elite universities contributes to inequality (hence exacerbates relative poverty), and that I don't think it's an accident that there aren't really any Harvard level universities in the EU. That's not an argument (I think) but an observation. I'm curious what Americans think about it.
Of course, my earning prospects rose considerably when I moved from my EU university to my American university (without me suddenly becoming any smarter or anything), so I'm definitely a beneficiary of American policies here.
>>> I'm curious what Americans think about it.
I'll take a stab at explaining this, with the caveat that I have no expertise here whatsoever (as befits a guy on the internet).
I think the argument would be that American universities and American private sector innovation is mostly orthogonal to the country's relatively paltry welfare state. I'm not sure this is actually the case - it could be, but I don't the find idea that they are connected wholly implausible. But that's the argument.
With regard to universities specifically, I think the argument would basically boil down to scale + immigration. In the 19th century, the US attracted loads of immigrants from Europe - and, notably, immigrants tend to differ from people who don't immigrate in important ways (which I think align well with stuff like "propensity to start business"). At the same time, the US invested a ton in colleges - the land grant schools - and it became a really big country with a really big potential market. (Point of comparison: why is it so hard to get Western businesses to really leave China? It's big! Bigness is good for business.) This created a positive feedback loop, which led to talent agglomerating in the US. Talent attracts talent, and here we are.
Of course, the EU nowadays is bigger than the US in terms of sheer population. But it's still multiple different countries - scaling a business across the EU is harder than scaling it across the US - and, more importantly, the EU didn't really get going until the 1950s-1960s, by which time the agglomeration effects were already working their magic on this side of the Atlantic.
It's also worth noting that the US has always been a very literate society. I'm not sure why this is, though.
Addendum: Plus, mid-20th century Europe was devastated by two giant wars. The US wasn't. That probably played a role, too.
That's interesting! Thanks!
I think the most charitable understanding of conservatives' opinions on poverty is that taking specific steps to address it (higher taxes and a more generous welfare state) would mean reduced growth, and there are some tradeoffs between optimizing for living standards at the middle of the income distribution vs optimizing for living standards at the lower end.
"Would you end all poverty in the US today in exchange for all reducing future GDP growth by half" is a question that's so obvious to not be worth asking to people on both sides of it
"...a lie I’m used to hearing from Paul Ryan..."
I have always understood the Republicans' complaints about the inefficacy of welfare spending to be its demonstrated failure to make big inroads in intergenerational poverty. Put another way, "no country has successfully addressed poverty this way, and I doubt anyone ever will."
Matt should really have replaced "addressed" with "eradicated" in that sentence. Poor word choice there.
I'm not sure it is possible to have a thorough discussion of poverty in the US while leaving out talk of drug and alcohol abuse. Even if it isn't having as large effects as other factors, such as government policy, it is so pervasive in many areas and if you don't see what it does to people it is hard to know how bad it can really get. Not an easy problem to tackle.
I’m probably one of the few people here who associates regularly with people that are in poverty. For instance, my daughter, who lives in section 32 housing has food stamps, and a bunch of other social programs.
I think many middle-class to upper middle-class people don’t realize how pervasive drug and alcohol abuse is among the working poor.
I have an out of town friend who I would very much classify as working poor, and I always like to visit her and spend just one night with her and her friends. The amount of drugs they consume is insane, last time I covertly took a tally of all the drinks she ordered and was amazed.
It really keeps me grounded and informed on how a segment of society that I'm not a part of really lives.
Yet, alcohol consumption rates are higher for wealthier people. This doesn't mean alcohol abuse rates aren't higher for the working poor: it's probably something like "most upper-middle-class people are moderate drinkers, whereas working poor people are either problem drinkers or abstainers," so it nets out to higher per-capita consumption for the former group.
Also, Europe tends to have lower poverty and higher alcohol consumption than the US. This doesn't mean you are wrong and certainly you seem to have more personal experience with this than I do [1]. But I think alcohol, drugs, culture, and poverty intersect in complex ways that are kind of hard to parse. Like, a progressive would probably say that poor people are more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs because their lives are poor and miserable; I wouldn't wholeheartedly endorse this view, but I do think there is a real chicken-or-egg problem here.
1. I actually was raised in a mostly-blue-collar family, but I can't say I've ever known many poor people.
I don't think you can entirely distinguish drug and alcohol abuse from policy. As a non-American, one of the weirdest parts of America is visiting a CVS and seeing drugs you'd need a prescription for in the UK available pretty much by the bucket. I appreciate you're referring to illegal drugs but the path from legal to illegal appears well trodden.
That's before you even get to how much support addicts do or don't receive.
As someone who is around it... I respectfully disagree. It has nothing to do with what sort of drugs are available at pharamacies.
It's entirely to do with marijuana and meth and opioids (pain pills which are highly restricted in US and UK).
Any problem we have has more to do with our proximity to Mexico and having a pretty porous border.
addendum... Yes I know there are problems with pain clinics which cater to addicts, but this is more a result of our deregulated medical system than which drugs are over the counter.
Can I ask which drugs? I know some formulations of codeine is available in the UK without a prescription. I can't think of any OTC drugs in the US that present particular abuse issues, besides maybe some OTC sleep aids.
It's a complex issue so I probably didn't explain myself properly. But my perception is legal drug use, prescription or otherwise, is much more common in the US than elsewhere. I did some quick googling which indicated about 50% of the US population is on prescription medication compared to 25% in the UK. That's obviously 2x and I'd imagine among the non-elderly population the gap is much wider (assuming in both countries a relatively large share of elderly folks on medication).
So:
1. More people use legal drugs
2. Legal drugs are more widely available
3. TV ads for (legal) drugs are an order of magnitude more common
My guess is that this leads to more illegal drug usage. Both thru gateaway drugs (oxy => illegal opiates) but also thru a reduction of social stigma. If (legal) drugs are widespread, it's gonna feel less weird to use illegal ones than if usage of any drugs is unusual.
> My guess is that this leads to more illegal drug usage. Both thru gateaway drugs (oxy => illegal opiates) but also thru a reduction of social stigma.
I can understand a pathway from legal opioids to illegal drugs, but the most commonly prescribed drugs are for high blood pressure, high cholesterol, hypothyroidism, diabetes, heartburn, and asthma [1]. There is one pain killer in the top 10 most prescribed drugs (a combination of acetaminophen and hydrocodone).
When you see a statistic like "50% of the US population is on prescription medications" that basically means that "the US hands out statins and drugs for related conditions like candy" (if I'm doing my math right, 14% of the US population takes some sort of statin [2]), and I don't see why taking a medication that lowers your blood pressure would reduce the social stigma of illegal drugs. I could maybe see a connection with, say, adderall (which is amphetamine) and reduced social stigma, but that's fairly far down the list --- about 1% of the US population [2].
[1] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/most-common-medications
[2] https://clincalc.com/DrugStats/Top300Drugs.aspx
I think it really depends on what drugs we’re talking about.
I don’t see how, for example, people taking antidepressants or blood pressure medications has any connection to illegal drug use. I think the more relevant factor would be the availability of things like pain medications.
Ah, I see. Thank you for clarifying!
I should add - the prevalence of the phrase "drug store" in American English also seems to me indicative of a society with a lot of drugs. I haven't heard that phrase in the UK
How about "chemist"? Our "drug stores" are basically Boots.
I share your curiosity as my understanding has always been that the US is more restrictive on requiring prescriptions for a wide variety of drugs, at least compared to Canada and Mexico.
I've always thought this cuts both ways: in the US I can buy as much melatonin as I want over the counter, but in the UK, I can buy acyclovir and co-codamol (paracetamol and codeine).
Matthew Desmond also wrote by far the worst piece of the 1619 project (which is saying something!) and came under zero mainstream criticism.
I am generally with Matt’s theory that the medias ‘bias’ is just commercial, but when you look at pieces like this and 1619 that view seems really naive. It’s just pure ideological polemic, always in the same direction.
1619 was awful, but thankfully Nikole Hannah-Jones is not running the entire NYT. If she did, it would essentially be Pravda.
What do you mean by “always”? From NYT? Perhaps, although they’re getting better again in the range of opinion writers etc (eg affirmative action and trans debate coverage). However that’s hardly all of the media, is it?
I think what I’m trying to get at is not that all media stories are left wing propaganda, but when they publish a piece that is barely concealed propaganda it is all left wing. For example NYM wouldn’t publish the same article from a right wing perspective about how the ‘failure’ of anti-poverty programs indicates that we should repeal the Great Society.
99% of stories in NYT/WaPo/NYM are excellent but the 1% that are not tend to all be from the same ideological perspective.
I would not say 99% are excellent. I would say 85% run the gamut from decent to excellent, while the remaining 15% that are awful come from one perspective. That having been said, 15% is a lot better than the 35-40% you were seeing in mid-late 2020.
Contrarian points on poverty:
1. If poverty is a relative measure there will always be a bottom 10% of the income distribution. So measuring without benefits could be more compassionate if your hope is to lower the number of people who actually need help not just arbitrarily give them money and call the problem solved.
2. As we see with labor participation and inflation after the generous COVID assistance, “just giving people money” really does have risks like high inflation that can go up faster than wages and end up counterproductive. And *if* we think that high labor participation is good then we should be mindful that generous assistance does work against it at the margins.
3. I never see people on the left to talk about this, but there are a lot of studies that show that the people who are in the bottom income quintile in any particular year are generally not still there when you measure again later. It’s actually a pretty important question to ask how many people are *stuck* in poverty, versus how many people only temporarily pass through. Why do they get stuck, and is there anything we can do about that?
4. We do not talk enough about trying to solve the poverty on the cost side if we were very serious about driving down the cost of housing, that would greatly alleviate poverty, no matter how you measure it. We’ve got this idea that basic education needs to be free but not any other basic human needs? Lowering the costs of health, and education, and housing, or possibly more important for quality of life than raising incomes.