Is communism still a big taboo in america? if so why?

[Andre]

The rich will always have greater opportunities then the poor. Absolute equality of opportunity in that sense can rarely be achieved. But don't fall into the trap of thinking that if everyone cannot have such opportunity, then no one should (not saying you are, but just in case).

Just some armchair philosophizing, meaning that there is no substantiation. So here is A, offspring of a multimulionairte and B, a nobody of which nobody knows who his parents are. A gets anything he/she wants and even the things he/she had no idea he/she wanted them. B gets nothing and has to fight for every hump of bread.

So after ten/twenthy years who has the most chance to make it? Survive hardship. Grasping any opportunitiy to improve living conditions. A may lose assets faster than B is gaining them.

Just two cents.

 

[Goodison_Lad]

However, I would be interested in hearing what you mean by the "corrosive effect" of relative poverty.

Poorer quality education, low-quality housing, more likely to be the victim of crime - particularly violence, poor general health, die younger, higher rates of depression and suicide, unable to afford the healthcare that the more affluent can, having to hold down two or more crappy jobs to earn just enough money for it to be not quite enough, pay through the nose for high-interest credit because you are high risk, can't buy your children the Christmas presents etc. that richer kids have, can't afford any sort of break/holiday from the grind.

And being told by invariably wealthy politicians it's your fault.

 

[apeiron]

Poorer quality education, low-quality housing, more likely to be the victim of crime - particularly violence, poor general health, die younger, higher rates of depression and suicide, unable to afford the healthcare that the more affluent can, having to hold down two or more crappy jobs to earn just enough money for it to be not quite enough, pay through the nose for high-interest credit because you are high risk, can't buy your children the Christmas presents etc. that richer kids have, can't afford any sort of break/holiday from the grind.

In the UK, you have researchers like Richard Wilkinson publishing on how even relative poverty has corrosive effects - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_G._Wilkinson

And being told by invariably wealthy politicians it's your fault.

Have you been reading Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class? From the book's blurb...

From Little Britain’s Vicky Pollard to the demonization of Jade Goody, media and politicians alike dismiss as feckless, criminalized and ignorant a vast, underprivileged swathe of society whose members have become stereotyped by one, hate-filled word: chavs...The chav stereotype, he argues, is used by governments as a convenient figleaf to avoid genuine engagement with social and economic problems and to justify widening inequality.

 

[Goodison_Lad]

Have you been reading Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class? From the book's blurb...

No - but I will now.

 

[CAC1001]

I don’t think capitalism and free-societies are necessarily the same thing. China is embracing with great enthusiasm many of the principles of capitalism, yet is far from a free society. It is projected to become wealthy, eventually perhaps reaching Western levels of GDP per capita. The interesting question is whether it will retain its nature as a one-party state under these circumstances. Communist it certainly isn’t.

Yes, capitalism unto itself doesn't mean a free society. When capitalism is combined with a market and a liberal democratic government, you have a free society.

I would disagree with you that the only source of a nation’s wealth is the activity of the private sector (if that’s what you meant). Public sector workers pay taxes too. Public sector and private sector combine to produce a nation’s wealth – it is a complex and dynamic interaction.

Public-sector workers are paid for via the tax revenue that is taken from taxing the private-sector. The public sector for the most part produces zero wealth. It is funded by the wealth created in the private sector.

At a daftly simple level, private sector workers get to work on public sector roads, and are therefore able to be productive and pay taxes; if they fall ill they are treated (to varying degrees according to the country) by public sector health systems and are able to return to being productive; they operate in a relatively secure country due to the public-sector police force and armed forces; if they fall out of work, the public sector feeds them (again, to varying degrees according to the country) so that they can get by until their luck (hopefully) turns; and public sector workers, in their turn, spend money in the private sector that enables it to turn a profit.

Sure, the public-sector is an aid to society, but it's ultimately financed by the private-sector.

Governments in control of a sovereign currency have dramatic powers to influence things. The UK government was able to produce £300 billion pounds at the press of a computer key of quantitative easing in an attempts to boost an economy where the private sector was finding it impossible to grow (still is!). The government would have had to wait decades to raise that sort of money through taxes, whether on the private sector or elsewhere.

Quantitative easing is monetary policy, not fiscal policy (taxes and spending). It is not wealth creation by the government.

The homicide and car-accident rates of the US are, indeed, relatively high (I’m guessing perhaps 50,000 to 80,000 per annum, combined – maybe more?). But out of the five or six million deaths per year, this strikes me as relatively small. And the deaths would have to be disproportionately concentrated among the poor for this to be a main driver of the life-expectancy gap. While this is conceivably true for murders, I’m not sure it would be true for car accidents. If you could point me towards anything you’ve come across in this area, I’d be interested. But the US is but one data point – the correlation is generally true across many countries.

Why would the deaths need to be concentrated among the poor for it to be a main driver of the life-expectancy gap?

Regarding the labels ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ you are right that these are not rigidly fixed groups. But neither are they completely fluid. If they were fluid, I’d see less of a problem. Social mobility in both the UK and US is quite low – born poor, likely to end up poor. Not inevitable, but likely. I don’t know about the US but in the UK social class remains, despite vehement claims to the contrary, a major determinant of future success. While only 7% of UK children are educated in fee-paying schools, over 70% of our top lawyers and judges were educated in them. The figures for top medics, government ministers, top journalists etc. are of similar magnitudes. There are correspondingly dismal patterns at the other end of the wealth system.

One thing, social mobility is another arbitrary phrase. It can refer to the generations of people and their economic situation or a person's movement up and down the ladder in a single lifetime.

One of the more interesting changes in the UK in recent years is that people are less likely to self-declare as working class, even if they have very poor education and an unskilled, low paid job. Beats me. Perhaps this is why politicians in the UK spend a lot of time talking about how they’re going to help the ‘middle’.

"Working class" is another one of those arbitrary terms. I mean everyone who works for their money is "working class" IMO, whether earning $30K or $300K a year.

 

[Goodison_Lad]

Yes, capitalism unto itself doesn't mean a free society. When capitalism is combined with a market and a liberal democratic government, you have a free society.

I’d agree if by a liberal democratic government you mean one that doesn’t allow inequality of opportunity take hold.

The public sector for the most part produces zero wealth. It is funded by the wealth created in the private sector.

I don’t think we can reach agreement agree here.

Quantitative easing is monetary policy, not fiscal policy (taxes and spending). It is not wealth creation by the government.

But actually, spent well, it can kick-start an economy back into a healthy mode. In the UK the problem was that the government gave it to the banks, saying ‘please could you lend this’. The banks said ‘thank you very much – we’ll keep this safe’ – and didn’t lend it!

Why would the deaths need to be concentrated among the poor for it to be a main driver of the life-expectancy gap?

What I meant about life-expectancy was the difference between that of the rich and that of the poor within a country. If car/murders were concentrated among the rich, this would have the effect of lowering their average life expectancy, bringing it closer to that of the poor. On the other hand, if the premature deaths were concentrated among the poor, this would lower their average life expectancy, thus widening the gap.

“Working class" is another one of those arbitrary terms. I mean everyone who works for their money is "working class" IMO, whether earning $30K or $300K a year.

It is indeed a phrase fraught with difficulty. I believe (though I’m happy to be corrected) Marxists would make a similar point to yours – anybody who has to work is working class. Poor is probably a more useful term.

 

[Goodison_Lad]

I don't think you meant to use the word "meritocracy" there…

On the contrary, ‘meritocracy’ was precisely the word I meant.

I know people who'se parents have told them: "The odds are stacked against you. You can't succeed. So don't even try."

Actually, the low expectations many poor people have about themselves is indeed a genuine issue. But it’s not the main cause of inequality. An interesting question would be: why are they so fatalistic?

Each human is different: if you were able to do a ‘trading places’ thing with the successful, rendering them impotently poor, I guess an appreciable fraction of them would become demoralised (they’d have to have forgotten everything about what it is to be rich). People who have never been poor would have difficulty understanding, though many of them can still sympathise. (Aside: I find it amusing that some people I know claim to have been poor. Fee-paying school, skiing holidays, the works – then went to university and had to live in a shared flat for a year in a dodgy area of town among the great unwashed. They seem to invite people to cry out ‘Oh my God!, the humanity!’)

Maybe you believe the odds are stacked against you but will try anyway and if so, good for you. Maybe you're not even in the "odds stacked against you" group. I don't know.

For the record, I suppose I was in the odds stacked against me group: generational poverty. Me: attended a state school, won a scholarship to Oxford. Moved from the bottom 5% to the top 3% within a decade. Fancy house, fancy car etc. Result.

Surely an example that proves the ‘all you need to do is try your hardest’ argument?’ Well, actually, no. I just happened to be fortunate enough to have been born with a good brain – not my doing, any more than being tall would be something to be congratulated on. Without it, I would likely still be living in a neighbourhood like the one I grew up in – high unemployment, bad housing, high crime etc. Many of my schoolmates still are. And they’re not bad, feckless people with no motivation. They just weren’t as lucky as me.

So now, for my sins, I mingle with the affluent. And it staggers me how many of them ascribe their own success to ‘merit’, hard work, having a get-up-and-go attitude and so-tiringly-on. They earned it. No luck. They say many of the same kinds of thing you do, but one stands out: ‘while things are very unequal for some people, success is more to do with attitude.’ They have to believe this – they can feel better about their own success because lady luck didn’t have that much of a say. And since they believe with an almost religious zeal ‘I’m worth every penny I earn’, they resent the government taking any of it from me to give to the 'undeserving'.

Oh, and for some reason, they like to think of themselves as ‘wealth creators’. What everybody else is who gets out of bed in the morning to put in a hard shift, I don’t know.

While it is true that the crisis was precipitated by bank misbehavior, government overspending is why it is so bad and we're having so much trouble getting out.

Corporate greed caused the crisis – capitalism with too few brakes. The deficit is, of course, the rate at which your debt grows. The UK debt is very far from it’s all-time high. After WWII, the UK debt was, in real terms, 3 times greater than it is now. The solution? Government spending on an epic scale. Oh, and to introduce what I consider one of the most civilised things in the world – a National Health Service, free at the point of use, no matter how poor you are. No crippling debts to follow your misfortune.
The huge upsurge in UK borrowing coincided with the onset of the financial crisis. Cause and effect are the reverse.

That's not really true, at least in the US. The peaks and valleys don't line up and the top two brackets hit new highs just before the recent recession, but the five brackets and top 5% all saw significant drops in income:

My point stands unaffected. Dropping from a million dollars to $900,000 seems to me like an easier pill to swallow than $10,000 to $8,500. The lay-offs disproportionately affect the poor. As, of course, do any attempts to curb welfare.

So are you willing to accept a lower standard of living for all just so you can say you have equality?

You occasionally refer to strawmen in other people’s arguments, so I can’t resist this one in yours. I wonder if it’s ever occurred to the wealthy that IF everybody had an equal chance (or even anything remotely resembling one) then much more TRUE talent would be able to shine, and we could ALL be richer? Actually, I think it might have occurred to them – and that they might lose their place as top dog.

Circling back to the point of the thread, attitudes like yours are out there and they scare me.

Here we go again with the ‘attitude’. Look, can I put your mind at rest? People who hold beliefs similar to the ones you’ve expressed rule the world. Rest easy. The rich have won – and given their influence, they don’t look like losing anything any time soon. Why would anybody be scared by an argument against grotesque inequality?

 

[Decimator]

You occasionally refer to strawmen in other people’s arguments, so I can’t resist this one in yours. I wonder if it’s ever occurred to the wealthy that IF everybody had an equal chance (or even anything remotely resembling one) then much more TRUE talent would be able to shine, and we could ALL be richer? Actually, I think it might have occurred to them – and that they might lose their place as top dog.

It isn't a strawman. Russ is saying that if you try to make people equal, evidence suggests that all you'll manage to do is make everyone poorer. You are part of "everyone," therefore you would have to accept a lower standard of living to reach your goals.

Here we go again with the ‘attitude’. Look, can I put your mind at rest? People who hold beliefs similar to the ones you’ve expressed rule the world. Rest easy. The rich have won – and given their influence, they don’t look like losing anything any time soon. Why would anybody be scared by an argument against grotesque inequality?

Because it's an argument for grotesque equality?

 

[apeiron]

It isn't a strawman. Russ is saying that if you try to make people equal, evidence suggests that all you'll manage to do is make everyone poorer. You are part of "everyone," therefore you would have to accept a lower standard of living to reach your goals.

Focusing on this question of whether equality of opportunity will in fact result in an overall poverty of outcome, let's consider this very socialistic design for an education system.

All education 100% publicly funded. All school materials provided free. Dental and health care free. Travel to and from school free. Every child is fed a hot 3 course meal every day. Compulsory schooling only starts at 7. No testing until children are 15 years old. No national standards. No school inspections. School days are short. School is 150 days a year. All teachers have a masters degree and further teaching qualification.

This is an education system clearly designed to achieve maximum equality of opportunity. And the result is a system that not only delivers a more equal outcome (the gap between best and worst performers is smaller) but the system's overall performance puts it right at the top of the world rankings. Oh, and the costs come out still around the OECD average.

The country is of course Finand. Its story is told nicely in this OECD chapter...
http://www.oecd.org/pisa/pisaproducts/46581035.pdf

But political point scoring aside, the Finnish school reforms are really worth digging into because they exemplify the kind of healthy local~global, competitive~co-operative, dynamic that I have been talking about. They illustrate how to go beyond the stale one-dimensional thinking of communism or neo-liberal capitalism.

We have been hearing some purposeful caricatures about how socialism is meant to operate. But the Finns did not bulldoze through some centrally designed system to ensure conformity. Instead they only imposed the general global enabling conditions (such as free everything). And they carefully avoided the usual top-down controlling stuff - the all too horribly familiar neo-liberal imposition of market disciplines meant to create competition, such as testing, standards, inspections, etc. Instead, schools were allowed to develop their own local standards and methods. They were encouraged to develop a healthy adaptive variety.

Which for me, in my opinion, underlines the screaming irony of "free market neo-liberal capitalism". It does end up being totalitarian.

If your imperative is to impose "the disciplines of the market place" on social institutions like education, health, etc, then that is used to justify some quite grotesque and extreme state-level actions by those in power.

In the name of the public good, you can get rid of public schools and invite in corporations with charter schools. You can do away with school boundaries and make schools compete for pupils on their test scores.

This is personal because I saw the effects of neo-liberal philosophy in the UK. On the basis of market logic, they brought in batches of tests for primary school kids. The result was that my children were being obssessively coached and judged on only what those superficial tests required. There was nothing freeing or enabling about the outcome. It actually felt totalitarian.

Happily I shifted my kids to New Zealand which, somewhat like Finland, has a proud history of inquiry-based, publicly-funded, schooling. And which also arguably performs as well as Finland on its results, once you factor in that NZ spends proportionately a lot less, and also has to cover one of the most ethnically diverse school populations.

But the neo-liberals are wanting to chip away at this demonstrable success on the basis of their one-dimensional ideological belief. A right-wing government has just brought in national standards. It is trialling charter schools. The system ain't broke but in totalitarian fashion they are right at this moment trying to impose sweeping changes in my town. First they announced a couple of weeks back what they were going to do - close some 30 schools - then they are offering the token "local consultation" afterwards. The Orwellian nature of the exercise can be guessed by the fact that this is officially classified as "rejuvenation".

So when it comes to neo-liberal meddling with the identity of local communities, with the lengths ideologues will go to to ensure that absolute equality of competitive pressure penetrates every last crevice of society, there is little need to create fantasies of "purposeful caricature" here. The reality is quite scary enough.

Again, my argument - as exemplified by the Finnish education system - is that any social/political/economic system needs to balance the rival drivers of local competition and global co-operation.

So at the level of the individual, there has to be some reasonable balance when it comes to the "equality of opportunity". You want a system within which people are motivated to strive, and yet not overly coerced to strive. Where they are free to follow their own interests/abilities as much as possible, yet also are responding to the more general needs of society (its requirement for certain skills, certain abilities).

Likewise when it comes to the global system measure of "equality of outcome", again the aim is for some adaptive balance, not either perfect equality (no statistical variance), nor perfect inequality (no statistical mean).

Having to juggle two complementary drivers of policy might seem "too complex", but I bet the Finns now understand it.

 

[CAC1001]

I’d agree if by a liberal democratic government you mean one that doesn’t allow inequality of opportunity take hold.

By liberal democracy, I mean it protects human rights and freedoms.

I don’t think we can reach agreement agree here.

Just curious, but which part do you disagree with? What difference do taxes paid by public-sector workers make overall if said public-sector workers are being paid with tax revenue?

But actually, spent well, it can kick-start an economy back into a healthy mode. In the UK the problem was that the government gave it to the banks, saying ‘please could you lend this’. The banks said ‘thank you very much – we’ll keep this safe’ – and didn’t lend it!

Yes, we have that issue here too, the banks can't be forced to lend. They got us into this mess by lending excessively, now to get out of it, the government wants them to lend, but they are being cautious (although who could blame them, if they lent liberally and then another blowup occurs, they get the blame).

 

[Goodison_Lad]

Just curious, but which part do you disagree with? What difference do taxes paid by public-sector workers make overall if said public-sector workers are being paid with tax revenue?

I think the idea of private-sector as wealth creators and public-sector as wealth consumers is a false dichotomy. On the face of it, the only contributer to GDP would be manufactured goods or services delivered by the private sector. Farmers might think they were the ultimate contributor to wealth: nothing else can happen if people starve. But another argument is that the private sector is able to function in the first place (in real-world economies, at least) only because of the input from the public sector e.g. education and law. Yes, the teachers and police officers were paid for by taxes, but all we’ve really done is enter a loop. The productivity of the private sector is inextricably woven with the functions of the public sector. In another way, the profits made by the private sector depend to a large part on the spending of public sector workers which in turn…and so on. Ultimately, one can’t function without the other in our societies.
(As with so much to do with money and economics, my brain starts to hurt when I try to follow the path of a pound around the system. Perhaps because I can’t easily shed my training as a physicist, I have a tendency to unconsciously assume it’s some sort of conserved quantity, which it patently isn’t.)

 

[Goodison_Lad]

Have you been reading Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class? From the book's blurb...

Just read it. Absolutely spot on - wish I could have written it. Thanks for the tip.

 

[Goodison_Lad]

It isn't a strawman. Russ is saying that if you try to make people equal, evidence suggests that all you'll manage to do is make everyone poorer. You are part of "everyone," therefore you would have to accept a lower standard of living to reach your goals.

Because it's an argument for grotesque equality?

The argument has been made many times that socialism is about equlity of misery. I don't accept the argument. Even within capitalist systems there are examples where a) wealth inequality is less than in the UK and the US and b) overall wealth is comparable - even greater. Norway and Sweden, for example. And they could do better still.

There was an interesting approach by Mike Norton of Harvard and Dan Ariely of Dule University. They interviewed Americans, asking them to imagine the population spilt into 5 parts, according to wealth. They asked them how much wealth they thought the top 20% of the population would have, then the next 20% and so on.

Unsurprisingly, people got it hopelessley wrong. They didn't realize that the bottom 40% of Americans owned only 0.3% of the total wealth. Meanwhile, the top 20% enjoed 84% of the nationn's wealth.

People were then asked how they would like to see wealth distributed. The answer was a society with greater levels of equality than exist in any country, though the wealth distribution they wanted resembled Sweden.

Doing the experiment a different way, they showed people the wealth distributions of the US and Sweden (unlabelled), and asked them to pick. No prizes - the US distribution was rejected by 92%. There wasn't even much of a difference between Democrats and Republicans.

http://danariely.com/2010/09/30/wealth-inequality/

So I'm all for grotesque equality.

 

[CAC1001]

I think the idea of private-sector as wealth creators and public-sector as wealth consumers is a false dichotomy. On the face of it, the only contributer to GDP would be manufactured goods or services delivered by the private sector. Farmers might think they were the ultimate contributor to wealth: nothing else can happen if people starve. But another argument is that the private sector is able to function in the first place (in real-world economies, at least) only because of the input from the public sector e.g. education and law. Yes, the teachers and police officers were paid for by taxes, but all we’ve really done is enter a loop. The productivity of the private sector is inextricably woven with the functions of the public sector. In another way, the profits made by the private sector depend to a large part on the spending of public sector workers which in turn…and so on. Ultimately, one can’t function without the other in our societies.
(As with so much to do with money and economics, my brain starts to hurt when I try to follow the path of a pound around the system. Perhaps because I can’t easily shed my training as a physicist, I have a tendency to unconsciously assume it’s some sort of conserved quantity, which it patently isn’t.)

I agree that the public-sector begets the private-sector, but the way I'd look at it is that the public-sector takes some of the wealth created by the private-sector in order to finance the governmental functions required to allow the private-sector to continue creating wealth.

 

[apeiron]

Doing the experiment a different way, they showed people the wealth distributions of the US and Sweden (unlabelled), and asked them to pick.

From memory, that study was flawed because it compared US wealth distribution to Swedish income distribution. So yes, people said they preferred what looked like greater equality, but greater even than exists in Sweden apparently.

 

[Solid Snake]

Perfect equality is impossible with such a huge population in the world.

But a just and human equality is very possible. If people had control over their own work (you know, somewhat like a math or physical science professor has control over most of his/her own work/research, etc), you'd see economics become much more equal. Of course there would be some people that would have some more than others, but the disparity wouldn't be to the point where there exists a portion of the population (the elite) who end up owning and ruling everything. This is why elites all over the world (and throughout history) hate democracy. This is why the U.S. does it's best to squash it both at home and abroad. It is why Russia does the same. Well...most states do it. Private power also does it. Power entities fear democracy. If there has been one constant in human history, that's been it.

 

[Goodison_Lad]

From memory, that study was flawed because it compared US wealth distribution to Swedish income distribution. So yes, people said they preferred what looked like greater equality, but greater even than exists in Sweden apparently.

You're quite right that they used income distriubution for Sweden (even in that relatively egalitarian country, wealth disparity is still very significant). But I don't think this necessarily makes the study flawed, since it was about gauging people's preferences for wealth distribution. Sweden's income data was used as an intermediate pie-chart between real US wealth distribution and the perfect equality one.

What was absolutely clear, though, is that participants really didn't like the US wealth distribution.

People do tend to confuse wealth and income, but I'd guess that if the questions had been asked about income alone, similar responses would have been given. Most people seem to be OK with the notion of some degree of inequality, but are woefully ill-informed as to its actual degree.