I don’t think she’s a genius, and I’d quite happily confiscate all of her inheritance and give it away if someone let me, but you can’t be as stupid as everyone thinks she is and pull off the media->fame->media->fame cycle she has.
Once again these are all disputed critiques and only attack a small part of the data that Wilkinson presents. Following the supporting datasets on your first article showed a report from the Lancet noting in it’s abstract that, while they hadn’t found a significant relationship between inequality and life expectancy, they had found a very strong correlation between inequality and child mortality. Neither ‘paper’ is particularly clear at exposing the datasets it is talking about either, it’s hard to tell if they are dealing with the absolute level of wealth required before inequality becomes relevant. Life expectancy is in some sense the softest target to attack in his wide ranging analysis as any changes in the 80’s will take another 75 or so years to completely work their way through.
I accept that there are some criticisms, and probably some valid ones, leveled at portions of the data comparing inequality and a huge spread of negative societal out comes. However I’ve yet to see any data set that comprehensively shows that none of the relationships Wilkinson identifies are correct. I’ve especially yet to see any data showing the higher inequality is correlated with positive outcomes.
But those papers actually did show that his conclusions were incorrect, or rather that they were highly dependent upon selecting particular countries for his data set. When different countries were selected, or different years of data were used from the same countries, the relationship he described didn’t appear.
I’ve especially yet to see any data showing the higher inequality is correlated with positive outcomes.
I wouldn’t expect there to be.
They are all old critiques, so it’s possible Wilkinson himself or others have answered them by now. I know he is also still repeating many of the claims that have apparently been refuted ten years later, and since Wilkinson doesn’t appear to be some kind of crank I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. As I said before they are brief overview pieces that didn’t appear to give enough detail for me to figure out exactly what countries they are including/excluding now and why. Even if the critiques on murder rates and life expectancy were to be proved completely correct they still don’t show a positive relationship with inequality there are still many, many more correlations to counter
Traditionally a conservative trickle down model would expect greater inequality to mean that more wealth was being better directed to the ‘wealth creators’ where it would be most efficiently used, thus benefiting society. So everyone should be better off where capitalism is at it’s most rapacious or where inequality is highest. If they are no better off under high inequality then you have a harder case to justify maintaining it against other more moralistic arguments. Usually inequality is argued as a ‘necessary evil’ for increasing the benefits to everyone; if it isn’t doing that; then the necessary evil argument disappears.
Now , as the past, and in the future, large amounts of capital and power is being inherited, thus what we like to call capitalism, just becomes a feudal power scheme.
Just like Napoleons army, we achieve best results when we put the best people at the right job, rather than who bought the commission. Sadly, the message isn’t getting through, and incompetence will be a future problem as it was before imho.
Its a shame that for all our technology, we will happily use new gadgets, but resist heavily adapting to ALL the research that’s been done on society, and real solutions compared to the same old.
I guess being hard on crime sounds better.
I think that first paper I cited is actually a fairly in depth look at one of his studies, comparing various data sets and demonstrating how dependent the outcomes are on the selection of countries. The second one is more brief.
Why would you need to show a positive correlation? It’s possible for Wilkinson to be wrong, and for there to simply be NO correlation. Since the results appear to be very dependent upon which countries are included in the sample, it could likely be the case that things like life expectancy are simply influenced by other factors, rather than inequality.
Traditionally a conservative trickle down model would expect greater inequality to mean that more wealth was being better directed to the ‘wealth creators’ where it would be most efficiently used, thus benefiting society.
Eh… a supply side economics take on things doesn’t really advocate inequality as some great thing that should be specifically pursued. It just doesn’t care as much about trying to avoid it. So no, I don’t think I agree with your assertion regarding an expectation of a positive correlation between inequality and life expectancy. I think it’s more likely that there’s just no correlation, and that other societal factors are what drive those things.
Well, that may be true, but Wilkinson’s analysis only looks at a few very specific metrics, rather than some ultimate evaluation of how “good” a society is. (note, I’m not suggesting such an ultimate metric)
His work suggests various specific correlations, such as between inequality and homicide rates, with the ultimate goal of suggesting that inequality is linked to all of these various factors getting worse, and thus it is in fact ultimately making society worse.
But, again, his analysis depends upon cherry picking specific parts of data. Certain assertions he made can be seen to be incorrect. For instance, his assertion that the homicide rate in the US was going to reverse its downward movement and start increasing again in 2005. It didn’t do this. It continued to drop, despite the economic inequality in the country dramatically increasing over the same period of time.
Wilkinson is just one voice amongst many. He doesn’t represent some kind of consensus amongst the scientists in his field.
I shoulds probably just let this thread die its inevitable death since we’re really going around in circles now, but this statement “it’s the only option that works” came back to me and I had some thoughts about it, so, here they are.
There are a couple of different ways to establish “truth”, but they give us different kinds of truth. Deduction starts with some set of axioms or postulates and then proceeds to find corollaries, things that must be true if our starting assumptions are true. We generally try to start with axioms that are self-evidently true (eg, “that a+b = b+a”) but we can really start with any set of assumptions, so long as we understand that our conclusions are only as reliable as the assumptions we start with.
However, what you’re talking about here is something else - “functional truth”. “Pigs are unclean animals, hated by God because of the shape of their feet”. Now, this might be rather hard to demonstrate, but for long periods of time this kind of belief was functionally accurate in the sense that people who believed it became sick less often than people who didn’t. And there’s nothing wrong with making use of “truths” established in this way - there are plenty of good reasons not to walk under ladders, and if thinking of it as “unlucky” is a good shorthand to remind you not to do it, so be it.
However, a properly scientific frame of mind should adopt these “functional truths” only conditionally. If we discover some methods for butchering and preserving pigs that allows us to eat them without getting sick, then we should be ready to discard the idea that they’re “unclean”. And we should make sure that we don’t let these kinds of “functional truths” be used as evidence for their own verity - either by circular reasoning or by question-begging.
- “Money is the only measure of value”
- “We know 1. is true because Societies which take money as the only measure of value are more successful than societies which moderate that value by means of other values.”
- “We know they are more successful because they have more money.”
- “We know that 3. is the best way to measure success because, see 1.”
Or to try to put it more succinctly, you’re saying value has to be measured in price because it “works”, and then defining what “works” according to the values you say that this “working” justifies.
I’m trying to bring some reality into this ideological short-circuit. I’m saying, environmental degradation, resource depletion, social disruption, human suffering, injustice and waste matter. We can see plenty of historical examples that show these things matter. And they matter independently of how they are priced. The Easter Islanders had a social system in which the people who subjectively valued the building of giants stone heads had more social power than the people who subjectively valued not deforesting their land, and this worked out fine for a while and then the whole thing collapsed because it turns out all the “incentivising” in the world can’t grow trees out of nothing. If we’re going to judge societies according to what “works”, we need to judge them by these criteria as much as by the subjective well-being of the well-off, and dare I say, perhaps more so. And it’s plain to see that the free-market, price-mechanism is working relentlessly to move us in the wrong direction on virtually every one of these issues and therefore, seen from a long term perspective, does not work well at all. It works only when judged on terms which exclude or redefine every important consideration of what working means into terms which common sense ought to tell us are nonsensical. It’s like saying the Challenger mission was a success because the shuttle got off the ground. Well, sure, it was, if you define your terms that way, but why the hell would you?
I guess the tl;dr version of all this is, “price is the only measure of value, because systems based on that work” is only true to the extent that such systems work better than anything else that’s around, and such an assertion depends heavily on your definition of what “working” means.
The bottom fifth has done better than the next three quintiles! I am outraged!
When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.
It’s worth point out, at least, that everyone is still negative.
Does the “highest fifth” include or exclude the top 5%? I would hope the latter, but the chart is unclear.
that’s only because they excluded the top 0.1 percent
My guess just looking at the chart is include, but you’re right, it should be made clearer.
Ket them eat cake.
munches delicious cake
Hay guise… I just noticed we’re running low on money. According to my learnings, we should just print more, but only a certain amount, and that way money won’t lose its meaning, or anything!
If my plan doesn’t work out, I think we should instead ban pro sports. Untold millions being dished out every week to GOLFERS, to name just one example? Are you f-ing kidding me? And don’t even get me started on how much the organizers and players get paid for corporate sponsorship. I think we need to go ahead and start the bannings so that that money will end up in the right hands where it can do some good. Removing horrid inefficiences like marketing budgets from the system is always a step in the right direction.
How about we just stop making commercials tax deductible?
Interesting blahg article on income inequality.
http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/10/explaining-income-inequality.html
Bottom Line: The highest-income quintile has four times more people working per household than the lowest quintile (2.08 earners vs. 0.48), and individuals in those households are far more likely to be well-educated, married and working full-time in their prime earning years. In contrast, those individuals with low incomes are far more likely to be less-educated and working part-time, and either very young or very old living in single-parent households. Given these significant differences in household characteristics, it’s not too surprising that there are huge differences in incomes among American households. It’s also very likely that those individuals in the highest quintile were once in the lower quintiles before they acquired job experience and education, and they’ll likely be in a lower quintile again when they retire.
The fourth comment under the article from one “Ironman” also adds interesting thoughts concerning generational changes.
Naturally, this doesn’t mean everything is hunky-dorey. For example, it seems to underline the importance of education, hence of educational opportunities, in economic upward mobility. But it does add some perspective on the matter.
You mean tax that money as profit, even though they spent it as an operating expense? Aren’t you already taxing it in the form of profit by the advertising company?
Here’s a much more alarming inequality in the UK and US:
http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/speeches/2010/speech455.pdf
See the charts on page 23 and 24.
(Also, the Scots really kicked some ass the last 50 years I guess.)