A Nation of Village Idiots, by James Moore
Is this really what we want? Welfare for the wealthy, and a sharp stick in the eye for the average American. Seems profoundly backwards to me. Of course, this argument doesn’t just apply here but can be expanded to the entire Libertarian argument. But hey, go ahead, repeat the same experiment and see if you get something different. It isn’t like we haven’t collected enough data to see that this path is disastrous or anything . . .
Did you read the article?
Given the non-empirical nature of the Austrian School, I’m not sure why I should.
It works well for the wealthy.
All forms of govt’. work well for the wealthy. A gov’t may look good on paper but add the human ingredient and poof, good leaves the building.
Compare the crime rates between countries with a mixed economy leaning towards socialism and those with mixed economies leaning towards capitalism. Likewise, compare the social mobility between those groups. Life expectancy is another good metric to check out. Quality of life as a function of GDP is also a good call. They are, admittedly, goods that may not be shared by Libertarians and others, but I think those goods are of supreme importance.
What are you saying exactly? Pinker argues in one of his books or an article somewhere, with a fairly compelling arguement about crime/war rates and quality of life, claiming that capitalism is actually very friendly to human nature and better than other options we’ve tried so far. I’m not saying his explanation is all-powerful, I just remembered that it seemed compelling at the time.
Honesty it still does, he was talking statistics.
a report by the cato institute about evo psych and human nature. This Cato place, not a huge fan of them, but the science they use is solid i’m familiar with most the authors and their expansive works.
cato.org/research/articles/w … 50201.html
it seems like people want to engage in trade, they have innate ideas about property rights, they have specialized equipment for thinking about ‘us’ and ‘them’ and detecting cheaters in social arrangements, etc.
if i’m a doctor doing say, 8 hours of labour a day, and some factory worker or someone else is getting the same amount of money. I think theres a basic part of human nature, where if the person can recognize that their work is worth more than their getting that, it will compel them to fight for it.
In hunter-gatherer societies for example, the meat just isn’t all equally divided up after a kill, people actively demand that they get their share, and argue about what they deserve in comparison to the rest.
Its not only that but people effectively want/strive for social status, they want to be higher up on the chain than the next guy, they want more cash, y’know? In socialism, i’m sure that the same types of dangerous hiearchy forms.
A buddhist monk has been doing a study attempting to determine how happy people are in various geographical locations. He’s invented a measurement that he call “Gross National Happiness” or GNH. They New York Times did a story on it a few years ago. Here’s the link…
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/04/science/04happ.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1
For an easy snapshot, click on the chart on the left-hand side of the page.
The first thing that grabs your attention is how low the rankings are for Russia and the former Soviet republics. In many cases, they rank lower than economically depraved third-world countries. China also ranks low. The highest ranks (no surprise) come in generally free-market, democratic nations.
Despite what some would have us believe, general economic status plays only a small role in human happiness. Latin American countries rank incredibly high despite being some of the poorest countries on earth. (To be fair, I’ve read pshychological studies that indicate the opposite, that wealth is a significant indicator of happiness. But those are mostly done in the US, where wealth, IMO, brings more social status than it does in a lot of other cultures.)
In fact, by and large, the only people that rank as “unhappy” are people in former communist countries.
Stated bluntly:
“In contrast, countries that had experienced communist rule were unhappier than noncommunist countries with similar household incomes - even long after communism had collapsed.”
thats what people personally claim and even then, not always. However when we look at rates of things like heart-attack and disease we see that people of low economic status suffer from diseases linked with stress a lot more than economically wealthy people.
heart attack rates in people with low status, are higher than they are for fat people with high status.
Apparently stress, short-term stress, increases immune function (say, seeing shit or blood or somthing) but long-term stress, has the exact opposite. we see diseases of stress in people who aren’t very wealthy a lot.
So, even if they are happy, their very stressed.
I’d bet a moderate amount of stress is actually good for one’s sense of well-being. Wouldn’t a complete lack of stress = boredom?
I’m sure that some amount of stress could be good, but the types of stress that people with low-status, apparently suffer from, wouldn’t be. Like, stress about not being able to pay your bills, might be different than stress about say, not being able to achieve a goal, which may make you try harder. It might be the same, but i guess rich people do have stress too, just not epic amounts of it.
Yes, the lack of regulation and the catalyst for it is part of what lead us to where we are today.
But we’re a nation of village idiots for another reason.
We are idiots when we go to a bank and ask for a $400,000 mortgage when we make $10.00 an hour. We are idiots when we get approved for $10,000 on a credit card and go on shopping spree after shopping spree. While these large companies are at fault for allowing it, some responsibility has to fall on the dumbass who asked for it.
All that is necessary for the stupid to triumph is for the smart to be greedy.
Cyrene,
You are assuming I am both against any competition what-so-ever and against hierarchy. I favor moderating both. In the case of competition, that is why I cite mixed-economies. I’m not reaching for a platonic ideal of socialism, but rather socialism as it has been realized in Continental Europe. Heck, I’m willing to settle for UK-style socialism in the US though I personally am more of a, errr, Baltic persuasion. As for hierarchy, it is natural and good. I’d just as soon have it aligned with a sane metric, like a meritocracy and/or a geriocracy. Plutocracy doesn’t seem terribly sane to me, sorry.
As Xunzian should know, the issue isn’t about village idiots, it’s about a nation of useful idiots.
Normally one uses rhetorical partisan quips to support a particular agenda. You aren’t even doing that here. Are you serious?
Thank you. I was beginning to worry that I was the only one that saw that an individual should have the responsibility not to live beyone his/her means. Now, if it is a job loss thing, that’s a little different, but in general I agree wholeheartedly.
I went into more detail in the AIG bailout thread, but trust me, Reagan’s laissez-faire trickle-down economics really did not work well in terms of getting more money to the poor, but if you let a major company just completely go under and other stock values fall as a result of it, I promise you, trickle-down will work in making the poor poorer.
What do you think the companies will do to compensate when the stock values of financials go down? They will raise the price of consumer goods so that the profit margins stay the same, and the same people that owned the stock in financials will buy up stock in staples of consumer goods. When demand goes down, prices go up.
Unless you regulated prices.