The Glade 4.0

No, I really don't need to watch this specific video to know why they are relevant. You posting a video does not obligate me to watch it to understand the issues involved.

This man's ideas have recievied considerable criticism for his poor methods. Those have been cited, and the sources are linked to the wikipedia article. This guy simply does not understand causes and effects, or rather, ignores correlation/causality in order to assigne the causes he wants to the effects.

Basically, he's a crappy scientist. That's all there is to it.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

The WHO does not do data collection in the United States itself for the most part; that's always been part of the problem with saying the United States has a low infant mortality rate. We count literally ALL deliveries in the statistics. The viability standards the WHO uses would not be tolerated here.

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1) Does this video have a transcript? Streaming isnt' always available or preferred option.

2) If he tried to use WHO standards for US data, he had to fudge it based on assumptions, in which case all further data in the study is essentially irrelevant from a scientific basis due to confirmation bias. No "US based, WHO derived" data exists, as such.

Edit: Ninja'd on (2) by Khross.


Also, (@)(@) boobs.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

That may be true for infant mortality, however that particular metric is a very very small part of the overall body of data that he's reviewing. So while it may introduce some variability I don't see how it invalidates the rest of the data or the overall conclusion.

Hard to say without a transcript.

Regardless, you're looking at the specifics rather than core point: comparisons of health data across nationality are essentially unfeasible. Due to this difficulty, it also makes comparisons by economic level across nationality also essentially unfeasible.

In fact, just doing internal comparisons within OUR country are quite difficult.

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

No, the core point was made with one specific as the example for why it was unfeasible. One point out of many being difficult does not a valid argument make.

And yet there are numerous arguments against his positions. Just because some posters are pointing out some of them and others are pointing out others does not mean they exist isolated from each other.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

So lost in shuffle here but it sounds like Aizle (or Sixpence if we are to believe Android autocorrect) has come down firmly on the side of everyone hand over everything for redistribution?

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C'mon Hop.. Why should you be entitled to something you worked your *** off for, when some lazy *** doesn't have as much as you?

Really? That's what you get from my posts? And I wonder why I don't post here much anymore.

I have nowhere argued for that, nor has anyone that I've linked argued for that. All that I've argued is that there appears to be a strong correlation between the size of economic inequality and the overall quality of society. I haven't specified anything as far as what I think should be done about it.

What's also interesting about this thread, is that all the usual suspects immediately jumped on the first half of the article you quoted in the OP. That is, we have to tax everyone more. The article contends, and I agree, that is only half of the answer with the other half being that we have to address income inequality. (i.e. economic inequality)

Well it appears from the outside looking in that you would rather accuse DE and Khross of not watching the video rather than saying what the video is or purports to be. You've deferred arguing for or against the original post by saying, check out this other dude's opinion.

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It's more that the 16 minute video much more articulately provides the data than I will be able to, and in a fraction of the time that it would require me to compile all the information.

I have yet to hear why simply posting a video obligates everyone else to spend 16 minutes watching it when we're already familiar with the man's positions. It doesn't matter how articulately he lays out his points; he is not in consensus with other experts and there are serious criticisms of his methodology. This is nothing more than a very elaborate appeal to authority.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

And yet, you also aren't able to provide a transcript and want to defend methodologies that apparently numerous sources call into question. I don't have 25% of an hour to waste on that. Provide some context, don't just say, "hey guys watch this."

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“The duty of a patriot is to protect his country from its government.” - Thomas Paine

DE, get with the program... if you don't watch the video, there is no possible way to brainwash you into believing what it says...

The other problem is.. ok, there's a correlation between income "inequality" and the "quality of society".. So what?

First of all, I question what they call the "quality" of society. High taxes rates and other heavy regulatory burdens, hate speech laws, strict gun laws, and other hallmarks of these European societies inherently lower the quality of society. Just because the measures that various social science authorities say are the way to measure societal quality are high does not necessarily make those places actually better to live. There is nothing about the European countries this guy discusses that particularly make me want to live there, and we don't see masses of Americans trying to expatriate there.

Second, we aren't supposed to have a government that's "effective" at combating income inequality because that A) isn't a problem and B) isn't something the government should be trying to combat at all.

Demonstrating a correlation does not demonstrate that income inequality actually causes social problems. It really does not matter how unequal your income is to anyone else; it matters where you are in the absolute. Remember when I posted the poorest county in the country? That county is still vastly better off than some shithole village in Africa because they society its in is richer overall, and its absolute wealth is much higher than some remote African villages. It doesn't matter how unequal it is to any other place in the U.S.

The problems that people in that county face are generated by the fact that they live in a remote, rural county with little of value to push out to the rest of the world. That's why they have income inequality; there's not a lot they can do to create income. The government can't, and shouldn't try, to combat that.

What matters is not whether or how much income is "unequal", what matters is whether people can try to change it without being unduly obstructed. When some dictator is keeping his family, tribe, and favorite supporters in palaces and everyone else in mud huts, the problems that society has are not due to income inequality, they're due to the dictator. In this country, the problems we have are lingering leftovers of past inequitable political arrangements; poverty and ignorance become generational problems. Trying to "combat" those problems has become the problem, partly because this country is so large and so diverse in terms of local situations that attempts at central management are ham-fisted at best, and partly because we have created the idea that it is someone else's job to educate the poor or create solutions for them rather than creating a situation where they can do that for themselves.

What this guy has done is try to take "income inequality" and use it both as a primary measure and a cause of other social problems, and other researchers have called him on it. There's a reason for this. He is a sociologist whos primary focus, social inequality, is itself a political position, and one he is personally invested in. He has managed somehow to become a professor emeritus in sociology as seen through his personal political lens.

As an aside, this is a problem with sociology in general. It necessarily focuses on large groups, but it lacks the focus on the individual of psychology, and the understanding of motivation at the individual level that psychology grants. Sociology is highly susceptible to political intrusion for that reason; it is remote from the observational basis of psychology.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Haven't watched the video, so this is just a general comment on the issue, but I'm not sure why (other than ideological resistance) there's so much pushback here against the idea that inequality matters to social and political stability/cohesion. It's just basic human nature for people to (a) compare their situation to that of others that they see as being valid comparisons (i.e. people in their own country, not people in some random village halfway around the world) and (b) get jealous/envious, particularly if they think the playing field isn't level.

That said, I think inequality is only one of three major economic factors affecting social and political stability/cohesion; absolute standard of living and opportunity for mobility also matter a great deal. An absolute standard that's high enough to satisfy people's basic needs is kind of a threshold matter, but once that's met, the degree to which each of the three factors matters depends, I think, on the cultural/moral lens through which people view them. For instance, in a society where people are raised to believe that it's natural and right for there to be a ruling class and a working class (e.g. an over-simplified version of societies with hereditary aristocracy), inequality and mobility won't matter as much as they do in a society where people value the fundamental/underlying equality of all people.

I think contemporary US society's emphasis on meritocratic advancement makes inequality less important here than mobility and absolute standards, and personally, I think that's a good thing (though it can be taken too far - e.g., the kind of credentialism that says a collection of Ivy League degrees = unimpeachable evidence of awesomeness and poverty = conclusive proof of laziness). That said, I think inequality does matter, even in our society, particularly when people start to see the ways in which the playing field isn't exactly even.

It may be natural for people to compare their status to others. That's fine. The problem is when we start saying that the fact that people have different economic statuses is a problem or a form of "inequality".

It's only "unequal" in a mathematical sense. The word is being used because it's true in that sense, but trying to capitalize on the idea of political inequality. We don't approve of a political system that does not permit equal participation, and the attempt is to imply that somehow inequality in terms of income is equivalent. It really isn't; that would really be like saying that because not everyone can get elected to some office that therefore there's "political inequality."

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I'm just going to put this out there.

Income equality doesn't promote wealth equality. It just suppresses class mobility. Because high incomes are how you elevate your wealth and climb the social strata ladder. Trying to create income equality doesn't help the middle class -- it dooms the middle class to never advance and become part of the upper class.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Sooner or later, someone has to point out to these people that resources are limited, the laws of supply and demand still apply, and that American liberal politics isn't about parity; it's about denying people luxuries you don't have.

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I think 'they' have a plan for this...

For me, it's not about denying rich people "luxuries I don't have," it's because the "rich" have consistently shown in the past decade that whenever they get any more money, it's immediately invested outside of the country. So while capitalism does make everyone better off on average, that average now includes the 1.5 billion people in China, so I am overall much worse off.

I don't know whether the analysis ir the exaggeration in that is more asinine.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

eh..wut?

So liberalism is the new national socialism?
(Thread shutting down in t-8)

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill