Tag Archives: inequality

a jumbo jet crashing every hour

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Here are some disturbing statistics on child mortality worldwide.

Child mortality refers to the death of children before their fifth birthday. We live in a world in which 5.4 million children die every year. That’s ten dead children every minute.

Imagine what it means for a child to lose his or her life; imagine what it means for a family to see their child die. Ten families will experience that in the next minute. This will repeat every minute for the rest of the year. That is the horror of child mortality.

These daily tragedies do not receive the attention they deserve. Comparing it with those tragedies that do receive public attention makes this clear. A large jumbo jet can carry up to 600 passengers.3 The number of child deaths is equivalent to a crash of a jumbo jet with only children on board, every hour of every day of the year. 

Max Roser, Our World in Data

It suggests a few points to me. One is that we are most scared and pay the most attention to new threats, like Covid or murder hornets. Meanwhile, old threats like car accidents, heart disease, and malaria cause suffering and death on a much larger scale. We are complacent and accepting of them either because they happen to other people far away (from the perspective of a prosperous country like the U.S.) or because they are so common we assume nothing can be done about them (traffic deaths).

Second, the enormous disparities between countries make it clear that something can be done about child mortality, and that it is a moral imperative to do so. It is not even high tech, it is just a failure of our civilization to recognize the problem, feel the responsibility, organize and act.

The plots of per capita income vs. child mortality are worth staring at. As the article drives home, there are no poor countries with low child mortality rates, suggesting that economic development is necessary in addition to direct interventions (nutrition, vaccination, sanitation, and health care are mentioned.) The U.S., of course, is in the group of richer nations with much lower child mortality rates than the poorer countries. But within its group, the U.S. is the clear laggard compared to the rest of the developed world. We are not applying our wealth and know-how effectively to keep our young children from dying.

poverty, race, and math

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Here’s some math on U.S. poverty.

  • from Census.gov: estimated U.S. population on July 1, 2019: 328,240,000
    • “Black or African American alone, percent”: 13.4% (this works out to 43,984,000, rounding all numbers to the nearest 1,000)
    • “White alone, percent”: 76.3% (this works out to 250,447,000)
  • from Urban Institute: U.S. poverty rate in 2021, all races: 13.7% (44,969,000)
    • Black poverty rate: 18.1% (7,961,000)
    • White poverty rate: 9.6% (24,043,000)

A few points/opinions, which I hope will not be too controversial.

  • A long history of legal and institutional racism in the U.S. is an obvious fact, a moral outrage, and needs to be corrected, particularly in housing and education.
  • A greater fraction of the black population is poor compared to the white population.
  • There are more poor white people than poor black people in the country.
  • You have to be careful comparing averages between groups of very different sizes.
  • From a moral perspective, if you want to help the most people, you would not only help black people. You would try to help people who need help in both groups, while trying to even out the disparities.
  • From a political perspective, an incessant focus on race, and rhetoric equating race and poverty, is going to turn off a lot of poor white voters. This ends up electing politicians who are not going to help poor people of either race.
  • There are other races, there are many mixes of races, and there are many confusing census questions about whether people consider themselves hispanic instead of or in addition to the other races. I am not a professional demographer, and do not know the absolute best way to handle these issues.

checking in with Noam Chomsky

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In this Alternet article, Noam Chomsky describes the business class as Marxists waging a class struggle. They never give up and working class is always on the defensive. So if the working class is less aggressive, which he says they have been since the “centrist Carter administration”, big business will get the upper hand as it has in the U.S. He sees some hope in the movement started by Bernie Sanders.

why inequality leads to crime and violence

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In a rational choice model, cheating and stealing can become rational when people have less to lose from not cheating and stealing than they risk by cheating and stealing. And if they don’t trust one another, they are even more likely to cheat and steal. The more unequal a society is, the more likely people will fall below the threshold where they judge they have nothing to lose, and the less trust there will be between and within social classes.

 If your current resources are above the threshold, then, under the assumptions we make, it is not worth stealing. Instead, you should cooperate as long as you judge that the others around you are likely to do so too, and just work alone otherwise. If your resources are around or below the threshold, however, then, under our assumptions, you should pretty much always steal. Even if it makes you worse off on average.

This is a pretty remarkable result: why would it be so? The important thing to appreciate is that with our threshold, we have introduced a sharp non-linearity in the fitness function, or utility function, that is assumed to be driving decisions. Once you fall down below that threshold, your prospects are really dramatically worse, and you need to get back up immediately. This makes stealing a worthwhile risk. If it happens to succeed, it’s the only action with a big enough quick win to leap you back over the threshold in one bound. If, as is likely, it fails, you are scarcely worse off in the long run: your prospects were dire anyway, and they can’t get much direr. So the riskiness of stealing – it sometimes you gives you a big positive outcome and sometimes a big negative one – becomes a thing you should seek rather than avoid…

So if making sentences tougher does not solve the problems of crime in high-inequality populations, according to the model, is there anything that does? Well, yes: and readers of this blog may not be surprised to hear me mention it. Redistribution. If people who are facing desperation can expect their fortunes to improve by other means, such as redistributive action, then they don’t need to employ such desperate means as stealing. They will get back up there anyway. Our model shows that a shuffling of resources so that the worst off are lifted up and the top end is brought down can dramatically reduce stealing, and hence increase trust. (In an early version of this work, we simulated the effects of a scenario we named ‘Corbyn victory’: remember then?).

Daniel Nettle

Well, you can redistribute, or there are other options. The highest social classes could maintain the social order through sheer force. Or they could try to achieve the same ends through ideology and propaganda that convince the lower classes the social order is natural or desirable, or they can try to use ideology and propaganda to divide the lower classes and turn them on each other. The guy on the second rung from the bottom may very well be willing to kick the guy on the bottom rung in the teeth to keep him from climbing, and thank the people higher up for the opportunity even while they are shitting on his head. Which of these options sounds good to you probably depends on which rung of the ladder you happen to be standing on, and the rung you happen to be standing on is probably within a couple rungs of the one you were born on, in most cases.

Is a modern U.S. civil war possible, and if so what could it look like?

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This article in The Week argues that civil wars can take a variety of forms, so we shouldn’t be overconfident that one is impossible just because we don’t have an obvious geographic basis for one.

  • The original U.S. civil war is a somewhat obvious example of a geography-based conflict. Although, I see it as less of a territorial dispute and more of an economic and class conflict, rationalized and manipulated by racial and religious ideology.
  • Yugoslavia in the 1990s was an ugly conflict between ethnic and religious groups who were interspersed geographically. Rwanda isn’t mentioned but I understand it to be similar, although I don’t fully understand either of these conflicts.
  • The English Civil War “that raged from 1642-1651, pitting the crown against parliament, cities and towns dominated by a rising commercial middle class against the aristocratic countryside, and the staid religious convictions of the ruling class against the theologically driven radicalism of more demotic religious sects.” Okay, I’m almost completely ignorant of this one, because I was only taught U.S. history in school and haven’t gone back to study this one on my own. Perhaps the Crown whipped up a crowd of supporters and said something like, “Hey, why don’t you guys go over there and storm Parliament and have a portrait painted (no cameras yet) of yourselves naked except for a pair of Viking horns”?
  • I did read A Tale of Two Cities in high school, but I always thought that book was false advertising because it was 99% about the French side. I’m not an expert on the French Revolution (not mentioned in the article) by any means, but I understand it to be mostly a class conflict – a revolt of the poor and working class against an exploitative aristocracy. The conditions that could spark something like this would seem to be ripening in the U.S. as wealth and income inequality get objectively worse, but watching Bernie Sanders (who to be clear, advocates peaceful income redistribution to avoid the heads rolling) lose last year convinced me the propaganda here has been so successful for so long among the working and middle classes that this is unlikely. Put another way, our working and middle classes misunderstand the cause of our suffering and have been convinced to support the people causing it, or at least enough of us do that we are hopelessly divided for now. Bernie tried and failed twice (and before that, Ralph Nader tried and not only failed but set the cause back by 20 years), but maybe a more charismatic or more skilled Bernie/Nader will come along in the future, and conditions will have worsened in the meantime.
  • The Troubles in Northern Ireland. I understand this as a group with an ethnic and religious identity wanting regional autonomy, and a central government fighting that, leading to a long, low-intensity insurgency and counter-insurgency conflict. This is happening all over the world (the south of Thailand is just one example I am familiar with), but I don’t see obvious parallels in the United States. The repression of the war on drugs and mass incarceration have some echoes of this perhaps, with the Black Lives Matter movement emerging as a somewhat organized, nonviolent form of resistance. Perhaps it could turn violent if something like the Black Panther movement of the 1960s were to re-emerge.
  • Not mentioned in this article is the increase in right-wing militia groups. Their rhetoric is violent, anti-government, sometimes racist although I don’t believe all these groups identify as racist or white supremacist. It’s not exactly clear to me what they want other than disorder.
  • The Spanish Civil War “that shattered the Iberian Peninsula into a multitude of factions — from anarchists, Stalinists, and anti-clerical absolutists on the left to fascists and Catholic authoritarians on the right — between 1936 and 1939.” Again, my formal education was a complete failure and I am ignorant of this one. Maybe Biden has been fooling us and he will now reveal his true colors as the new Franco/Mussolini/Catholic authoritarian/Emperor Palpatine/Voldemort clone. After all, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Now, continuing this line of thought, who could Joe Biden appoint as Grand Inquisitor? My first thought is Mike Pence. However, an Inquisition will need to be good at things like contact tracing, isolation of victims, and disposal of bodies, and Pence failed his audition as head of the coronavirus virus task force. So I’ll go with Rick Santorum, former Senator from Pennsylvania, who just might have the right combination of political skills, religious fervor and psychopathy to get the job done.

how to collect more taxes without raising taxes

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This Alternet article explains how the IRS has been defunded and hobbled over the last few decades. The rich are able to lobby for all kinds of loopholes and then find ways to exploit them, of course, but even if they outright cheat they are unlikely to get caught. Working people are audited at much higher rates. Audits for the rich and powerful are way down, and tax fraud prosecutions have been almost nonexistent under Trump. The article estimates $47.5 billion could be collected by auditing rich people. It’s good to keep that in perspective though of the annual federal budget of 4-5 trillion. So it would be a one-time recovery of around 1% of the budget. It would be enough to get a baby bond program going. You could give about $11,000 to each of the 4 million babies born in the U.S. in one year (but only that one year), or you could give less and spread it out over more years, or you could give it just to poor babies and spread it out.

ask not what Bernie Sanders could have done for you…

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Warning: political post follows! I’m still thinking about why the continuing Black Lives Matter demonstrations are bothering me a little bit. This Ross Douthat post (the New York Times token conservative op-ed guy) has helped me crystallize it a little bit. Police violence is an important but narrow issue. Renaming streets and tearing down statues is justified in some cases but doesn’t do much to address systemic problems. Maybe the movement will expand to encompass larger issues like violence of all types, mass incarceration, discrimination and inequality afflicting black people. All good, but only a slice of the much larger problems affecting our country and planet.

Many of the people demonstrating in the streets voted overwhelmingly against the candidate who would have done the most on these issues. The article is called “The Second Defeat of Bernie Sanders”. The way I look at it, Bernie Sanders didn’t fail, we all failed to support the candidate who could have brought about real change for all the hard working people of this country, black people included. The “socialism” Bernie stood for was to take just a little of our country’s enormous wealth and use it to provide the benefits that would make ordinary people’s lives better, and that most other wealthy and even functional-but-not-so-wealthy countries in the world are providing. Health care, education, child care, and retirement for a start. If we ever decide to pay reparations for slavery, it is likely to look…something like this. Bernie would have fought to provide these benefits to the descendants of enslaved African people, and to everyone else who needs them. Big business and wealthy individuals would have fought back, tooth and nail. And Bernie would have maybe led a Congress that would have fought back by enshrining meaningful anti-corruption provisions in our nation’s Constitution. He would have led us in doing our nation’s fair share (at least) to address the climate crisis and accelerating ecological collapse. Maybe. Most likely, he would have made real progress on one or two of these issues in our messy real world political system, then tried to lay the ground work for others to continue the fight. But that is more than the next Joe B. Democrat in line is likely to do. Prove me wrong Joe!

June 2020 in Review

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In current events, the coronavirus crisis in the U.S. is spinning out of control as I write this in early July. I made a list of trackers and simulation tools that I have looked at. Asian countries, even developing countries, pretty much have it under control, Europe is getting it under control, and the U.S. and a few other countries are melting down. Some voices are very pessimistic on the U.S. economy’s chances to come back. So of course I’m thinking about that, but I don’t have all that many novel or brilliant ideas on it so I’m choosing to write about other things below. Most frightening and/or depressing story:
  • The UN just seems to be declining into irrelevancy. I have a few ideas: (1) Add Japan, Germany, India, Brazil, and Indonesia to the Security Council, (2) transform part of the UN into something like a corporate risk management board, but focused on the issues that cause the most suffering and existential risk globally, and (3) have the General Assembly focus on writing model legislation that can be debated and adopted by national legislatures around the world.
Most hopeful story:
  • Like many people, I was terrified that the massive street demonstrations that broke out in June would repeat the tragedy of the 1918 Philadelphia war bond parade, which accelerated the spread of the flu pandemic that year. Not only does it appear that was not the case, it is now a source of great hope that Covid-19 just does not spread that easily outdoors. I hope the protests lead to some meaningful progress for our country. Meaningful progress to me would mean an end to the “war on drugs”, which I believe is the immediate root cause of much of the violence at issue in these protests, and working on the “long-term project of providing cradle-to-grave (at least cradle-to-retirement) childcare, education, and job training to people so they have the ability to earn a living, and providing generous unemployment and disability benefits to all citizens if they can’t earn a living through no fault of their own.”
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
  • Here’s a recipe for planting soil using reclaimed urban construction waste: 20% “excavated deep horizons” (in layman’s terms, I think this is just dirt from construction sites), 70% crushed concrete, and 10% compost

socialism by the numbers

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We can argue about the ideology of “socialism” vs. “capitalism”, often without even clearly defining these terms. It’s harder to argue with an avalanche of clearly presented evidence. This article from Current Affairs lays out the numbers showing the United States gradually slipping behind it’s developed country peer group in all areas. Consistently, the Scandinavian and Northern European countries that combine high productivity with policies to redistribute some of the wealth do the best. Our Anglo-American cousins the UK, Canada and Australia tend to do a little better than the U.S. but have still fallen behind the leaders of the pack.

The U.S. does well on measures of average income and wealth, but very poorly on measures of median income and wealth. We do poorly on measures of free time, infant and maternal mortality, life satisfaction, and innovation. I’m sure you can argue about how some of these indicators are defined and measured, but the overall trend is clear – we are creating financial wealth, but not sharing it and not creating satisfying or healthy lives for the majority, and we are continuing to slip behind our peers.

more on fully automated luxury communism

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Here is the Amazon review of the actual book:

In the twenty-first century, new technologies should liberate us from work. Automation, rather than undermining an economy built on full employment, is instead the path to a world of liberty, luxury and happiness—for everyone. Technological advance will reduce the value of commodities—food, healthcare and housing—towards zero.

Improvements in renewable energies will make fossil fuels a thing of the past. Asteroids will be mined for essential minerals. Genetic editing and synthetic biology will prolong life, virtually eliminate disease and provide meat without animals. New horizons beckon.

In Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Aaron Bastani conjures a vision of extraordinary hope, showing how we move to energy abundance, feed a world of 9 billion, overcome work, transcend the limits of biology, and establish meaningful freedom for everyone. Rather than a final destination, such a society merely heralds the real beginning of history.

Amazon