Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

https://www.thesaint.scot/post/university-study-finds-reducing-inequality-can-reverse-political-polarisation

by krigath • 4 years ago

100 201 4 years ago

thesaint.scot

lost_soul• 4 years ago

A good place to start is "who does polarization benefit?".

yjakecombinate• 4 years ago

Whoever is living the good life right now, apparently

gtsop2• 4 years ago

A good answer to this question is always "the people who benefiy from the established status quo, aka the economic elites"

umvi2• 4 years ago

The study says, “We see that sufficient redistribution can reduce both inequality and polarisation, although a high degree of redistribution is required to prevent polarisation.”

Have they factored in the act of wealth redistribution itself being polarizing? From a statistical/theoretical perspective it checks out, but I bet practically speaking if you actually tried "a high degree of [wealth] distribution", the middle and upper classes would start screaming and it would cause even more polarization. If the key thing needed to reduce polarization is "reducing inequality", it would probably be good to investigate alternative methods of reducing inequality as well.

Miner49er2• 4 years ago

Maybe this very thing is what is already causing polarization? Many people are already trying to reduce wealth inequality. Maybe the upper classes are fighting back in a way that causes polarization.

pjc50• 4 years ago

Well, yes. There's a number of politically-active billionaires funding all sorts of weird hyper-polarizing "news" sources. I put "news" in quotes because when sued for libel these "news" outlets use the defense of "nobody could possibly have believed this was true, it's just entertainment".

If a redistributionist looks like they will become popular they will get smeared into the ground.

tfigment• 4 years ago

Look at housing in the US. Every home owner gate keeps and many rent seek. It is expected that value does not go down and actually increases faster than inflation. That is rational per person but net detrimental and a significant part of increasing inequity as poor and young cannot keep pace generally. Wealth begets wealth. Its also arguable if home owners are the upper class. Maybe there will be another correction but the govt will likely step in to prevent it.

hotpotamus3• 4 years ago

At what level of wealth inequality do you imagine the upper classes saying, "ok, I guess we've got enough, we can stop fighting back now"?

dylan604• 4 years ago

it would probably be good to investigate alternative methods of reducing inequality as well.

The serfs will always outnumber the lords. It's just a matter of keeping them pacified to sufficient levels so that revolting isn't a serious concern.

As you've suggested, other things to keep the masses pacified can come in many forms other than direct payments of cash. Stop reducing spending on public schools, public transport. Stop tearing down low rent housing in order to gentrify it with new housing that the original residents can no longer afford. Eliminate food deserts in populated areas.

Just a few off the top of head

pyuser583• 4 years ago

Unless “the serfs” are hate and fear other “serfs” more than they hate and fear “the lords.”

This is very much a real dynamic.

0xcde4c3db• 4 years ago

I don't know about the UK (where this study is based), but wealth distribution in the US is extremely top-heavy [1], and there are a bunch of surveys showing that most people drastically underestimate the inequality [2]. I think it's hard to predict the political effect because a lot of people have these unrealistic ideas of how income and wealth are distributed, and it's not obvious how durable those misconceptions would be in the face of a concrete redistribution policy. That is, how many people would still believe that the policy is bad for them if they could go to the IRS website and be told they're getting a bunch of money?

[1] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2011/mar/10/michael-mo...

[2] https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130395...

Maarten88• 4 years ago

This is the genius of what the top 1% in the US have accomplished: they have convinced almost half of the population to take their side, against their own interest, by making them feel they are part of the upper class when they are actually not, or think they will somehow get rich shortly ("temporarily embarrassed millionaires") or that redistribution is for the weak, who do not deserve it and should work harder.

fortran772• 4 years ago

And if they succeed, we'd be in Harrison Bergeron's universe.

johnchristopher2• 4 years ago

Hard to do scapegoating when people's needs are met.

MattGaiser• 4 years ago

Needs will just increase to meet the threshold for scapegoating.

We are the richest and most prosperous humans to ever walk the earth. Scapegoating still exists.

johnchristopher2• 4 years ago

We are the richest and most prosperous humans to ever walk the earth.

Nope. Inequality is increasing locally in the west. There are a lot of poor people everywhere you look.

Needs will just increase to meet the threshold for scapegoating.

That goes against the submission but okay. I suppose you are also against minimal wage increases.

tehjoker3• 4 years ago

I would note that there are centuries of political theory written on this topic with a famous document written in 1848. Unfortunately, most of this theory concludes that class war is required to create an equal society.

nopenopenopeno• 4 years ago

A far more informative document was written in 1894.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Das_Kapital

HideousKojima4• 4 years ago

And when it fails to do so (and leaves behind a new mountain of skulls in the process), it "wasn't real communism" that time.

tehjoker3• 4 years ago

That comparison always leaves out the larger mountains of skulls created created under capitalism, the Nazi regime for one, the 900k+ COVID deaths in the US, the intentional famine in Bengal [0], etc. It's a long list that is rarely considered.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-church...

Jensson• 4 years ago

Yet the best places to live for poor people didn't have class warfare.

gremlinsinc• 4 years ago

No, class war ...is an inevitability. Except the class being fought hardly knows it's at war. To create an equal society requires the classes to rise up and actually join the war for their own souls.

The lower classes are too pre-occupied with survival, the elites have all the control, power, and are the ones pre-occupying them with modes for their survival (shitty jobs to pay exorbitant rents to get enough maybe for an iphone, and netflix subscription) so when you're done working 60 hours per week, you only have enough left over time to focus on distractions rather than a coup against the elites.

The answer is more unions, more worker co-ops, and providing REAL market alternatives to capitalism in the terms of democratic / DAO style companies that give all employees shares based on input, and maybe even shares for consumers who are loyal to their brand... (like a 5 shares per hour worked, 1 share per dollar spent - upto 10k dollars spent/yr) ... then say there's Walmart, and Walgreens, and MCDonalds competitors in the syndicate of co-ops... all the money they earn are pooled, and maybe everyone w/ at least 10k yearly shares gets free healthcare for the next year, and dividends from a pool of 30% of revenue...

These are still capitalist companies in the fact they're ran independently, and created by entrepreneurs they just have governing/managment aspects that give more power to the people who work there... it's a marriage if you will, and one that I think is the only way forward. It provides true dual power, but doesn't require a 'benevolent dictator' which is the evil of communism per se...

Communism always turns to Oligarchy, but apparently so does democracy, however co-op owned companies can run more ethically with more care for employees and the environment, and eventually lobby congress for their behalf which is for the employee's behalf.

arrakis20212• 4 years ago

Yes can confirm, in the USSR we had no political polarization.

Everyone was always satisfied with the ruling party all the time. It was great joy.

aivisol• 4 years ago

You are joking, right? And everyone was equal except some who were more equal.

Yoofie• 4 years ago

I think his sarcasm blew a gentle breeze over your head.

retrac2• 4 years ago

In practice the USSR was an extremely unequal society in terms of wealth distribution. Growing awareness of the enormous gulf in the standard of living and political power between the nomenklatura and the quasi-enslaved contributed substantially to its collapse.

daenz• 4 years ago

Sounds like it "wasn't real socialism/communism."

zajio1am2• 4 years ago

I do not know about USSR, but AFAIK at least in Czechoslovakia the communist leaders do not really have big personal property. They have enormous political power and also access to property through their functions (assigned appartments and official cars), but not in form of direct ownership.

nosianu• 4 years ago

Ex East German here. I think you are mixing a few terms. Polarization, dissatisfaction, inequality - those are different things.

Also, at least for East Germany - no idea how it was in Russia - when they showed the houses of the powerful (Wandlitz - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldsiedlung - You can google for some images of the houses and facilities) even back then in 1990 when I saw it on TV I thought it wasn't really much. Even a middle-middle class American or West German lived better.

The differences were not as big as with billionaires in the mix. It wasn't like in some African dictatorships where the top really had so much more. The GDR elite lived better, but far from extreme luxury as far as I could see after the reunification. I felt zero envy after I saw it even retroactively, I had already seen much better in average West German houses that I had visited by then.

This is how the last head of state of the GDR before the events of fall 1989, Erich Honecker, lived from 1960-1989: https://bmg-images.imgix.net/2021/12/04/58cb9e33-390f-4bf5-a... (the back of the house - the front is even more boring)

Also, again speaking for East Germany (I was 17 when the wall came down and participated in some of the events), I don't think the term "polarized" applies. I mean, we even had am entirely peaceful transition even though one party had all the weapons and the courts and the ability to use them. Still, they were not crazy and/or angry enough. and actually opened the wall instead without much fanfare.

Not sure what would happen with an actually polarized situation, like between some of the camps in the US, if one side had both the means and the legality (full control of police and courts to do as they wanted) in a situation where they would have to give all of that up.

In East Germany We didn't even have anyone drive a car into protesters or anything. That kind of hate between the people just wasn't there.

Was it in the USSR?

christkv• 4 years ago

Comrad your medal from the committee on negating party slander is on its way.

zajio1am2• 4 years ago

Yes can confirm, in the USSR we had no political polarization.

Well, yes. People in concord hated the regime.

HideousKojima4• 4 years ago

The study sounds like a crock of horseshit:

"In this model, we assume that a large population of individuals comprises two distinct identity groups. These identities are assumed fixed, and thus correspond to a fixed feature of identity such as race, religious heritage, or socioeconomic background. Although such identities are fixed in the model, the salience of the identity, and therefore its impact on behavior, varies."

The model assumes only two distinct and unchangeable identity groups, and assumes that these identity groups are solely based on a few specific unchangeable traits. And that's before you get into some of the wacky assumptions in their actual math model.

Also of note, they mention Charlottesville and the capitol riot as examples of political polarization, but make no mention of comparable events on the left like the BLM riots, the GOP baseball shooting, etc. Gives you a good idea of where the politics of the authors sit and suggests there may be motivated reasoning behind their arguments. "Solve political polarization by doing more of what the left has wanted to do for over a century!"

uniqueuid4• 4 years ago

I think you're coming at the paper from a very particular angle.

This is fundamentally a mathematical simulation, so it's bound to be simplified. Assuming fixed identities is not completely unreasonable, given that affective and ideological polarization in the US has been increasing over decades. Yes some people switch, but not as many as you may think.

chinchilla20202• 4 years ago

Complex human thought processes cannot be modeled by a simplified mathematical model

ZeroGravitas• 4 years ago

You say "wanted to do for over a century" yet "the left" has been reducing inequality for several centuries now, abolishing monarchy, aristocrary, slavery and such, introducing voting and democracy and human rights and all that kind of thing. People seem to generally like it.

HideousKojima4• 4 years ago

Some of the earliest efforts to abolish slavery came from Catholicism, especially Catholic Spain and Portugal. Not really sure how the left can take credit for that, but whatever floats your boat

WalterBright13• 4 years ago

I didn't know the Founding Fathers were communists. Learn something every day!

(Actual communists used slave labor on a mass scale, that was the true purpose behind the gulags.)

praxulus• 4 years ago

Not to defend their methodology, but your attempt to equate the GOP baseball shooting with an attempted coup says a lot more about your biases than the study authors'.

WalterBright13• 4 years ago

There was the CHAZ (Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone) established in Seattle where they explicitly seceded from the United States. In doing so, they pushed out all the police and set fire to the police station while barricading the doors with the remaining police inside (fortunately, the police escaped). The CHAZ rioters also occupied and vandalized City Hall.

WalterBright13• 4 years ago

The left does indeed solve inequality, by making everyone poor. Such is the sorry history of communism.

sd8f9iu• 4 years ago

Peacefully protesting (and yes, the vast majority of BLM protests were peaceful [1]) the extrajudicial killing of black men is not remotely on the same level of extreme political activity as the outgoing president orchestrating a coup attempt to try and stay in power.

There is no equivalency between far-right and far-left violence in the US. There is a much, much greater rise in far-right violence [2].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/10/16/this-summ...

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/20...

uniqueuid4• 4 years ago

Very interesting! I've skimmed the paper and what the model seems to refer to is affective polarization (i.e. hatred towards the outgroup).

It gets much more complex when we begin to incorporate other forms (and potentially sources), such as elite, partisan, party and legislative polarization. As umvi mentioned, each of those may be a source or consequence of affective polarization. Or both at the same time!

We really need some long-term field experiments (or natural experiments), but this paper definitely seems like a good contribution regarding the dynamics (models of which often have been way too simple).

Barrin92• 4 years ago

Worth reading Robert Sapolsky on the topic of inequality here[1]. Inequality itself (not poverty, and accounted for the material disadvantages), causes about half of the difference in health and life expectancy outcomes in developed nations, makes people at a neurological level opportunistic and causes biological stress in populations which results in violence, crime, isolation, mental illness, and so forth.

That's empirically backed by research and stands in stark contrast to the technocratic myth of "we just have to make everyone wealthier" that's dominated for the last 30-ish years. It's not surprising at all that a population that is running on extreme levels of stress tends towards political polarization.

[1]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-economic-ineq...

edit: short video interview summarizing it because of the paywall: https://youtu.be/aNRPuBJ02MM

civilized17• 4 years ago

I don't believe it. I think it's woo. There's no reason for my health to be harmed just because someone has more than me.

I'm open to being proven wrong, but I think this is another social science fad, another victim of academia's ideological blinkers and confirmation bias avalanche.

It'll be in and out, just like how eggs and wine and chocolate are good for you on Tuesday and bad for you again by Thursday.

EDIT: Yes, I'm sure envious people can tie themselves in knots over inequality, but I don't see this as a social problem. It's a personal psychological problem for those people. And I am skeptical that it is so common as to be my problem.

lifeisstillgood• 4 years ago

It's not that they have more. It's that you know they have more, that it's not fair they have more because they are not better than you, and the path to get more is blocked / unfairly policed. And that eats you up inside. And that eating up is constantly firing stress hormones and heardening your heart.

In short, anger leads to hate, hate leads to the dark side.

umvi2• 4 years ago

There's no reason for my health to be harmed just because someone has more than me.

You would think so, but I've read several articles that suggest this isn't the case. One example that comes to mind is that in some communities kids experience social stress/bullying if their SMS bubbles aren't blue (because it implies you are too poor to afford an iPhone and can only afford a "lesser" Android): https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-apples-imessage-is-winning-...

From the article:

Apple’s iMessage plays a significant role in the lives of young smartphone users and their parents, according to data and interviews with a dozen of these people. Teens and college students said they dread the ostracism that comes with a green text. The social pressure is palpable, with some reporting being ostracized or singled out after switching away from iPhones.

chinchilla20202• 4 years ago

Furthermore, none of these studies are reproducible.

brewdad• 4 years ago

One obvious example is housing. Those that have more than you can afford to live in safer neighborhoods. Those less well off but still able to afford to own a home will be forced to live in neighborhoods with higher crime, higher levels of pollution, "food deserts", or any other number of negative factors. Sure, you can opt to drive til you qualify and avoid some of those problems but now you spend an hour or more each way in your car. That too comes with negative consequences to your health.

rodgerd• 4 years ago

I don't believe it. I think it's woo. [...] ideological blinkers and confirmation bias

Physician, heal thyself.

scrozart• 4 years ago

Do you have research and data to back you stance, like OP provided?

jl63• 4 years ago

There's no reason for my health to be harmed just because someone has more than me.

Being angry all the time can harm your health. Maybe being envious all the time can too.

Frondo• 4 years ago

Since you're asserting that you don't believe the results of this research because it's "woo" -- can you explain what type of evidence, or what degree of impact, or how deep or impeccable the link must be established for you to accept it?

Is it even possible that you are, as you say, open to being proven wrong? (I ask this in good faith, because I've been arguing on the internet for 25+ years, and whenever someone says this, I end up asking them what would persuade them and the answer is usually "nothing," which, ... okay ..., but I am an eternal optimist and I strive to take people at their written word.)

colechristensen6• 4 years ago

Many studies show chemical markers of these things, it's not just psychological behavioral studies (which are often quite dubious) but easily measurable outcomes. If you're thinking quite narrowly, your point seems reasonable, it's probably below significance to say your neighbor with the bigger house and nicer car is "healthier", but this is a lot different than them vs the family that sometimes skips meals because they can't afford to put food on the table with the knowledge that a lost job will mean homelessness.

Good arguments are resources by Robert Sapolsky https://www.amazon.com/Stress-and-Your-Body-audiobook/dp/B00... or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C... or any of the books he has published (many have significantly overlapping content)

pm902• 4 years ago

You either believe in science or you don’t. A lot of scientific findings don’t make intuitive sense (like relativity). So we rely on the scientific methods to guide us to the truth rather than our primitive ape minds.

Skepticism is part of the scientific method; but just saying “hmm it doesn’t feel right to me” isn’t really useful.

ahoho2• 4 years ago

Ironically, I think you're letting your view of academia distort your own thinking here.

The mechanism isn't that complex. Anywhere resources are limited can lead to outcomes where an unequal society is worse off than an equal one. If I have a finite supply of doctors, for example, then the wealthy will be the ones who receive care while the poor go without.

The wealthy also tend to set up systematic barriers to ensure that the resources they fund serve them alone [1]. In the US, this is probably best exemplified by public education: schools are funded by property taxes, so rich districts have better schools, which in turn further increases home values (a process exacerbated by policies that prevent construction of cheaper, higher-density housing---policies supported by, naturally, the wealthy). Schools in poorer districts are therefore worse off than they would be if wealth weren't as concentrated.

Even if you take the perspective that, net, an equal amount of dollars is going toward education (or healthcare, etc.), it's fairly obvious the marginal benefits are different. A second violin teacher isn't as meaningful as adding a calculus class; elective cosmetic surgery isn't equivalent to treating diabetes.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir...

rich_sasha5• 4 years ago

Who is going to do the redistribution and how?

It sounds nice, these people have too much and these have too little, let’s optimise.

But redistribution via taxes imho leads to politicians having larger budgets for scoring political goals. And anyway how is it meant to work?

If you equalise assets, you’ll find wealth drifting away from it again, as some eat through their assets and some invest/save. It’s a known effect that lottery winners often end up in poverty, having quit their jobs and spent all the money rather quickly.

If you do a Robin Hood tax, how do you distinguish between good/poor standing in life due to starting point vs work input? I’d argue someone who had an unlucky start to life has a different entitlement to support than someone who didn’t but can’t be asked. It’s ok if people don’t want to work harder and earn more, but why should I fund it? I feel very different about the opposite case, people who through bad luck can’t make way forward in life.

My personal answer, and seemingly not so popular, is education, at all stages. Poor people send their kids to poor schools that don’t give their kids enough skills to make it in life. Fund these schools, through taxes, so that every child gets a stab at a good education. Provide professional courses for adults, financial support to those who want to upskill. Maybe do state sponsored grants so that lower/middle class people can try becoming entrepreneurs: a high risk & high reward move otherwise.

Im not against redistribution per se, i just havent seen that as an actual equaliser, just an article of faith.

There are some very egalitarian countries (Nordics come to mind) where tax redistribution is part of the picture, but it seems to me it is just a part of a much bigger picture.

As a counterpoint, Poland is on a massive redistribution spending spree right now and it’s never been as polarised as it is now. Because, guess what, the redistribution is a hugely polarising matter (among other things).

colechristensen6• 4 years ago

You don't directly redistribute. You set taxes and economic policies to target free-market wealth redistribution. That is, find instances where there is significant distribution of money from the poor to the rich and find ways to add friction to those markets. Like landowners renting out housing.

Suck large amounts of money out of the housing market by taxing commercial loans used for residential real estate, doubling property taxes for non-owner-occupied residential real estate and vacant real estate, and putting caps on mortgage vs income though some means or another. Have economists model how these things will actually effect the markets with the goal of turning residential housing into a bad investment and dropping prices. So much money and effort is sucked away from people into bank interest and "cost of capital" for people who already have lots of it. Maybe go to the extent of statutory redistribution of ownership of housing, 2% per year. If you rent a house for 50 years it's yours. This can't raise rents because rent pricing is based on maximizing what the market will pay.

analog313• 4 years ago

I'd simply start a progressive wealth tax at a high enough threshold so that a person could provide themselves with a reasonable nest egg. Pulling numbers out of the air, maybe 1%/year for the first $10 million, up to 10%/year for $100 million. (Note that if you live in a house, you're already paying some wealth tax). This would leave most people with both good and poor standing with enough to live comfortably, and the ones who got there by working will probably continue to make more to cover the tax.

Reducing inequality would hopefully have the benefit of aligning political goals with the interests of the population, in which case politicians would be more motivated to score things such as universal health care, workplace safety, education, a safety net, and so forth.

If the government were to be burdened by too much money, they could give some of it back to the poor. ;-)

tlogan2• 4 years ago

I think that we all agree with education part.

But that is very hard to implement.

Let’s take an example of San Francisco: public schools were closed all of 2021 and that really hurt low income families. Of course private schools were open.

And San Francisco is very left - so I don’t know.

Hermitian9093• 4 years ago

My personal answer, and seemingly not so popular, is education, at all stages.

Former educator here, the problem with this idea is that educational outcomes are dominated by three factors:

1. More individualized education (smaller classes or tutors)

2. Children having a safe, well resourced home life

3. Smarter, less stressed teachers

To get an idea of how strong (1) is it is useful to know of a result called Bloom's Two Sigma which roughly says that a student at the 50th percentile for their class is tutored, they will perform like students in the 95th percentile (the most recent literature I read pegged the effect slightly weaker than this, but not that much).

These results on inequality tell us several things: Increased inequality reduces the quality of home life for children by making parents stressed and unhappy. Increased inequality plus the fundamental economics of public education mean that smart and capable people are less likely to become teachers, and those who do will be more stressed Increased inequality means that richer people can afford to hire the services of tutors for their children, drastically improving outcomes.

As someone who sold my educational services to rich people, and gave it away to poorer students when I could afford to, I can personally testify to the massive difference this kind of resourcing makes. I don't think there's any way to get away from that aside from actually reducing inequality.

nebula8804• 4 years ago

My personal answer, and seemingly not so popular, is education, at all stages. Poor people send their kids to poor schools that don’t give their kids enough skills to make it in life. Find these schools, through taxes, so that every child gets a stab at a good education. Provide professional courses for adults, financial support to those who want to upskill.

Success in schooling is much more than just providing a good building, teachers and resources(computer/books/etc.). It is also a function of what the child has to go through in his/her day to day life. Those early years cement what kind of person the child becomes so you can provide all the Adult education you want, it is too late. Is the family around to provide support outside of school hours? Is the neighborhood stable enough so that you are in an environment to not fall into the edge cases of our society (ex: Are there groups that discourage breaking out of a specific mold?)

Hell this happens even with minorities in suburbs that provide them with all the resources needed for success. As a muslim living in a upper class right wing leaning suburban town I ingrained a self defeating mindset after 9/11 that I cannot achieve specific things and fulfill my wildest dreams. Despite this I ended up relatively successful thanks to the environment I was in giving me multiple chances after I failed time and time again.

Others don't have as many chances. The school is not the only problem. It is the system around the school that resulted in the school being in such a poor state to begin with. Some of this is being brought up(and subsequently banned) in topics such as Critical Race Theory (CRT). These talking points that you have expressed are sometimes brought up in Libertarian and right wing circles. It will not lead to this issue being solved in my opinion.

I have seen it with my own eyes in others as well. One of my many failures led me to being put on probation at my University: A school that prides itself on helping the largest # of minorities achieve STEM degrees in the country. I ended up at community college where I saw first hand how they ran many dozens of entry level math, physics, history and english sections that end up being empty by the end of the semester because there are huge swaths of the population that just cannot get past the first courses in a college level program. So they re-run these sections in all possible schedule combinations to maximize the chances of success. Still a majority students don't make it and give up. Keep in mind many of these people also get enough of a grant to likely be getting their tuition covered. The system failed these people years ago and just free education does not make up for it. They needed a stable environment from childhood in all aspects to maximize the chances of success.

WanderPanda• 4 years ago

I don't think education is a money problem at this point. Maybe it can be gamified more but in the end I think it is a cultural thing. Victimizing everybody doesn't help and stopping it would probably have a better outcome than throwing money at it.

weekthrow12• 4 years ago

Totally agree with this. There is no shortage of ideas/ideals, practical ways of achieving said goals are few and far between. The problem is that many of these problems are very complex and empirical solutions don’t win elections.

tcgv• 4 years ago

Why stop at education? Basic health coverage and housing when not accessible add up to the overall stress level of a low income family and affect their life quality and capacity to dedicate to a profession.

kansface6• 4 years ago

There is no or next to no empirical correlation between school funding and outcome in the US. I’d go so far as to suggest this proposal has cause and effect reversed. The push to send everyone to college at literally any cost has been a generational disaster. The value of a college degree has steadily declined while the cost has increased faster than any other sector of our economy. It’s very hard for me to imagine more education is the solution.

ashtonkem3• 4 years ago

It’s kind of incredible that we now treat income inequality as this impossible to tackle problem with insurmountable difficulties, as if we don’t have over a century of experience of how policies can increase and decrease inequality in this country, let alone in other countries. We’ve literally done this before.

azinman2• 4 years ago

Poor people send their kids to poor schools that don’t give their kids enough skills to make it in life. Fund these schools, through taxes, so that every child gets a stab at a good education.

That’s a very American attitude - that money will solve everything. The school itself with great teachers (assuming money buys great teachers) cannot be enough. There needs to be parental involvement and a culture of advancement to push these kids to their actual capabilities. That’s in addition to everything else in their environment. If parents are stressed or there’s food insecurity, no one is attempting to get to grad school. If gangs are all around and violence is everywhere, few will make it to college.

Culture is the most powerful force, and that has to come as a collective set of ideals. It also doesn’t have to cost anything.

dragonsky2• 4 years ago

I thought the point was that it was not level of poverty that was the problem but the level of inequality... These are of course related, but I would assume that the causality runs from inequality causing poverty rather than the other way around.

Giving people with no or little power a bit more money is not going to allow them to magically take control of their situation. If somebody is flat broke and struggling to pay the bills, giving them a little bit more money may improve their economic situation in the short term, but over the long term with more people having some disposable income, supply and demand will increase prices and good old inflation will balance things out.

If you ensure that people have more equal opportunities by improving access to education, improving access to services independent of location and remove barriers based on sex, race religion health care etc (look I don't have the answers to this) then at least a persons has a similar chance to everybody else to achieve their goals in life.

Trying to solve social problems by just moving money around is a very simplistic solution and can only ever work for simple problems. Inequality is a very complex problem with origins based in history and human nature. If you want everybody to have the same chance to achieve their personal goals then you have to give them the same baseline to start from, and only a small part of that is how much money they have in their pocket.

raxxorrax3• 4 years ago

You have to treat people equally under the law and I don't think there can be any exceptions to it as nobody can objectively determine fairness in each case. You can revise the law to force compliance on topics like accessibility and participation and it certainly should.

Otherwise I agree. Education is the best remedy. Since logistics of knowledge is very cheap today, it is also a manageable problem. At least in higher education. But you have to look at the whole economy and there might not be opportunities for everyone.

Racial or sex quotas should not be used because they would be more unfair than the former solution to treat people equally, even if the unscientific accusation of bias were true. Governments in Europe are obsessed with it though. There would be an end goal and it is only toxic people that decide what is allegedly fair. A Robin Hood tax would show the same faults.

I believe the Nordics use a progressive tax with individual taxed subjects. I would not call that redistribution. Within the EU we actually have a redistribution towards allegedly poorer countries and it is an extremely toxic and unfair system. The most profitable behavior for a subject is to spend money as quickly as possible and put the externalities of bad behavior on the state.

Plus, the inequality in nordic countries is very high, so they also do not have a solution against that. They have a solution for the people that have nothing and that is a strong welfare state (which is accused to foster inequality, but that is not based on sane arguments).

WalterBright13• 4 years ago

Maybe it's crime, violence, and mental illness that causes inequality.

danShumway8• 4 years ago

Haven't we been doing "tough on crime" policy for decades now? We had the entire war on drugs, which we're really only just now collectively pulling back from and realizing was a mistake. We passed prohibition on alcohol. We did stop-and-frisk, all that crud. And our mental illness diagnoses and treatment processes are better today than they've ever been (even if the overall health care system is a mess). We know more about mental illness today than we did in the past, and we have more effective medication and psychological techniques for dealing with it. The overall reduction in violent crime over the long-term in America is a success story, we genuinely have made America safer and less violent. And yet, here we are.

So my question to anyone who acts like there's a very simple causal link from violence/crime/illness to inequality is, "why isn't your strategy working then?"

I think this kind of stuff is generally a lot more complicated than pointing to a single cause; I don't think that inequality is the single cause of every social problem. But if I am going to point to a single cause, it's probably not going to be based on the strategy that we aggressively targeted for multiple decades that didn't yield the results people are now promising. I get a little bit annoyed by people who keep saying, "no you don't understand, if we're even tougher on crime, then we'll see the results. We just haven't been tough enough yet."

At some point, it starts to feel more like "tough on crime" is a philosophy rather than a data-driven, falsifiable theory.

canjobear• 4 years ago

Such studies are either correlational, and therefore cannot establish causation, or experimental in settings that are so abstracted and scaled-down from real world experience that they have no relevance to societal questions.

js86• 4 years ago

See also the book The Spirit Level, which shows that inequality also negatively affects those who are well-off - they become stressed about their social standing too.

This is why naive explanations of inequality that blame the poor or the envious are false.

civilized17• 4 years ago

I don't think it proves envy false as a cause. It just means envy is of a piece with status anxiety more broadly. I doubt that anyone of any historical period would be shocked by this.

1193• 4 years ago

How does this negate the idea of making everyone wealthier? Inequality might account for why the super rich have a higher life expectancy than the sorta-rich, but that does not mean the sorta-rich would live longer otherwise.

zozbot234• 4 years ago

Realistically once you go beyond the simple case of extreme deprivation, inequality in social capital is going to matter far more towards outcomes in health, biological stress, violence, crime, isolation, mental issues etc. than anything strictly limited to income or assets/wealth. What are you going to do to help the social-capital-poor, those most marginalized today by their own fraying communities and neighborhoods? Merely redistributing physical and economic resources is a blunt, costly approach which does not even begin to mitigate the underlying issues.

uniqueuid4• 4 years ago

Having some experience with studies of polarization, maybe I can help clear up where this paper comes from.

Basically, there are at least four distinct types of polarization that are commonly studied:

* affective polarization (used in this study) measures hatred towards the outgroup. It is commonly measured with the feeling thermometer, alternatively with the gallup question "would you agree if your kid marries someone from X". This polarization has been increasing over time, and recently outparty antagonism in the US surpassed (for the first time) racial antagonism.

* ideological/partisan polarization measures diverging support for the two parties, i.e. voters drifting towards the edges of the political spectrum. Note that this does not require that parties also become more extreme.

* elite polarization occurs in politicians and can be identified from speeches etc., but also from co-sponsoring of bills

* perceived polarization is the perception of how polarized society is

Now, the interesting thing is that many of these phenomena have (at least) two distinct causes: Either sorting, i.e. people realizing which party they really want to vote for. This occurs when parties become more extreme and it therefore becomes easier to identify which party is ideologically closer. Alternatively, people themselves may (also) shift ideologically, creating a clearer gap between parties and their electorate.

Most research is done on the US due to its simple two-party system, but there is still some debate regarding the true scope and causes of polarization. For example, one paper could not find a clear causal relationship between internet penetration and different forms of polarization [1].

If you're interested, some good references are listed at the end.

[1] Boxell, L., Gentzkow, M., & Shapiro, J. (2017). Is the Internet Causing Political Polarization? Evidence from Demographics (No. w23258; p. w23258). National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w23258

Abrams, S. J., & Fiorina, M. P. (2012). “The Big Sort” That Wasn’t: A Skeptical Reexamination. PS: Political Science & Politics, 45(2), 203–210. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1049096512000017

Fiorina, M., Abrams, S., & Pope, J. (2004). Culture War?: The Myth of a Polarized America. Undefined. https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Culture-War%3A-The-Myt...

Fletcher, R., Cornia, A., & Nielsen, R. K. (2020). How Polarized Are Online and Offline News Audiences? A Comparative Analysis of Twelve Countries. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 25(2), 169–195. https://doi.org/10.1177/1940161219892768

Levy, R. (2021). Social Media, News Consumption, and Polarization: Evidence from a Field Experiment. American Economic Review, 111(3), 831–870. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20191777

Stroud, N. J. (2010). Polarization and Partisan Selective Exposure. Journal of Communication, 60(3), 556–576. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2010.01497.x

Tucker, J., Guess, A., Barbera, P., Vaccari, C., Siegel, A., Sanovich, S., Stukal, D., & Nyhan, B. (2018). Social Media, Political Polarization, and Political Disinformation: A Review of the Scientific Literature. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3144139

raxxorrax3• 4 years ago

Best way to increase animosity between two groups is unequal treatment. That this basic concept is not discussed in sociology even if its effect is pretty clearly observable doesn't speak for the field in my opinion.

What happens with group A if you constantly prefer group B. Especially if there are no substantial differences, you should see animosity rise quickly.

would you agree if your kid marries someone from X

Quite frankly I believe this is trailing society by at least 30+ years. In the US and other countries. Perhaps there is a divide between older and newer generations somewhere, but the topic certainly does not warrant state intervention.

bell-cot• 4 years ago

Maybe my old memory is getting fuzzy...but my recollection is that "groups who feel despised, downtrodden, and grimly insecure are far more easily swayed to polarized, extreme, and violent politics" was a "d'oh, obvious" lesson from WWII in Europe.

olliej• 4 years ago

This study is not a study - they created a mathematical model that has a bunch of behavioural assumptions, given those assumptions reducing inequality improves it. It seems completely plausible that a different set of assumptions could create the opposite.

A study would mean looking at actual people, and say directly reducing the inequality. Obviously such a study would be infeasible (time, money, ethics, etc), but that doesn’t mean giving this kind of “study” any credence is actually meaningful.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s huge amounts of evidence int the negative outcomes in environments of extreme inequality, but bullshit papers like this aren’t going to do anything except boost the authors H index rating.

ModernMech• 4 years ago

A study would mean looking at actual people, and say directly reducing the inequality. Obviously such a study would be infeasible

Hence models. Your complaint boils down to "This is a model of reality, and not reality therefore it's meaningless." This is a very shallow criticism. Yes, all models come with assumptions. If you have a criticism, it should be about specific assumptions, and not the fact that this is a model.

notahacker• 4 years ago

Some models incorporate real world data. Some models draw analytical conclusions from [slight modifications] to relationships widely agreed to be true.

And some are pretty purely abstract. With this one you can largely guess the conclusion from the stated assumptions despite the complexity of the algebra but... there isn't much reason to believe the stated assumptions approximate reality. Yes, if you model political polarization as economic interactions in which people gain more from riskier trades with people from a different race or political party, pick their political party according to these economic aspirations, and are risk averse in proportion to their income, then the logic of those assumptions is that inequality will make people more likely to sort themselves into parties which match their races and consider those important to their decisions. But I'm not sure that's really how US racial politics works, or that the complexity of the model's dynamics make it more rather than less plausible.

There are better reasons to believe reducing inequality can reduce political polarisation than this model, as well as better reasons to believe it won't make much difference

gtsop2• 4 years ago

This just in: people get angry when facing unfair systems.

champagnois• 4 years ago

I thought this recent drive toward marxist / equity / wealth redistribution positions were the very source of all division and polarisation. I am an extreme skeptic of any such study if it found that appeasement through giving the radicals what they want will result in harmony. These universities today are somewhat infected with the marxist worldview and have been a major source of the polarisation.

As another example of justified skepticism, I wonder what their research departments have to say about student debt forgiveness programs? I am sure they will find such programs fantastic. There is no conflict of interest involved there.

JavaBatman• 4 years ago

Polarization is due to cultural issues, not economic ones. And no, those cultural issues don't stem from economic issues either. That's a Marxian base/superstructure analysis of the situation, which isn't accurate.

Furthermore, inequality will always be with us. Pareto principle is an actual thing and is mathematically sound when it comes to economics. Generally, the top 20% will hold 80% of the wealth. Many phenomena exhibit this distribution.

Reducing inequality can reverse political polarisation: study

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