Chicken and egg problem. What came first, the poverty or the criminal culture?
I'm not sure poverty causes crime. But crime certainly causes poverty.
...you can work to alleviate poverty.
We are, big time. To the point where it drives behavior and has convinced various of my relatives to not get married when pregnant on four separate times over the years.
And... this has created a line. Crime causes poverty, we have lots of programs to alleviate poverty.
Government policy is clearly part of the problem, maybe in ways that are seriously unintuitive.
If Gore had won, the entire GOP would have instantly clamored for his impeachment.
I'm not sure which part of history you're trying to rewrite. A President Gore, with a legit victory, would have been President. My expectation is that a President Gore would have declared war after 911 and we would have gone into Afghanistan. My expectation is that Congress would have backed him.
There were people who actually thought Bush stole the election (ignoring that Bush won every Florida count and by the time the Supremes stepped in, Gore literally had no path to victory).
And all that went away after 911.
Similarly if North Korea nukes California, my expectation is that the Dems instantly forget and forgive everything Trump did or said to get elected.
(and to cite a powerless comment Joe Biden made that the Dems never acted on to try and back it up)
Powerless comment? Biden was *the* guy who could act on that comment given the opportunity. He wasn't talking about what *should* be done, he was talking about what he, *himself*, was going to do with the full support of the rest of the party.
The Dems would have claimed (correctly) that his words were the "fair warning" of a policy shift.
And what's more Joe was pointing out obvious political realities. No Senator wants to face the voters with a vote to help an unpopular opposition President (that he was elected to stop) tilt the court against the will of the people who elected that Senator.
If you have a prison with 100 thieves, and 90 of them are in for petty theft that is closely tied to living in poverty or being addicted, then you don’t have a theft problem, you have a poverty and drug problem, and petty theft is a symptom.
True, but our stats, and thus our problems, are different.
(From Google's): "what percentage of prisoners are violent offenders".
41% percent of convicted and unconvicted jail inmates in 2002 had a current or prior violent offense; 46% were nonviolent recidivists. From 2000 to 2008, the state prison population increased by 159,200 prisoners, and violent offenders accounted for 60% of this increase.
And this is after plea bargaining. We might be looking a poverty-as-a-cause, but we might also be looking at culture-as-a-cause and poverty-as-a-result.
Yes, people writing the Declaration of Independence were slightly more pissed about their inability to make and enforce *their own laws* than about *English troops wandering around murdering people and burning down towns*.
Burning down towns was a rarity and perhaps only a problem in theory. Being abused by foreign laws was a constant.
A husband and wife can talk about, and fight about, small things with great frequency. That doesn't mean rarer, more important, things are unimportant. If one of them cheats then it's war even if it's not mentioned in the 50 previous fights.
we have the highest incarceration rate in the world
Actually we're 2nd. Some micro-country is #1. Weirdly we measure these things in people-jailed-per-100k, and they have less than 100k people so their actual number is less than their rate.
However it's not clear how much of our rate is an abuse of law and how much is other cultural failures. I'd like to think that we get rid of the war on drugs and everything calms down... but maybe it doesn't.
This is an abuse of power. This is certainly possible, it certainly happens. But to what degree is this typical?
We have a lot of people (even as a percentage) in prison for violent crimes. We have a lot of people (even as a percentage) in prison for recidivism. Subtract both of those and I'm not sure how much room is left for civilians whose crime is being poor.
I don't *think* I get an error at all. It just accepts my post, then takes me back to the full comments page without actually posting it. If I'm not paying attention then I won't notice that I didn't actually post.
Remember that I said wealth. I did not say well being. That’s a different measure–and you can certainly argue that closing the underpants factory causes a larger drop in well being than is offset by cheaper underpants, but that isn’t what people are discussing when they talk about the beneficial effects of free trade.
People turn to "well being" arguments only because the math says they're wrong so they don't want to use math.
The “problem” is simple: Advancing productivity, whether through automation or trade or whatever, is steadily decreasing the demand for labor as an input to production....
... The solution would appear to be simple; reduce the supply of labor to match the demand. There are three ways to do this: 1) Reduce the size of the workforce, 2) reduce the amount of time each worker contributes annually, or 3) reduce the number of years each worker stays in the workforce.
This is a very old line of reasoning disproven multiple times over the years. I'll quote wiki.
In economics, the lump of labour fallacy is the idea that there is a fixed amount of work - a lump of labor - to be done within an economy which can be distributed to create more or fewer jobs. It was considered a fallacy in 1891 by economist D.F. Schloss, who held that the amount of work is not fixed.[1]
The term originated to rebut the idea that reducing the number of hours employees are allowed to labour during the working day would lead to a reduction in unemployment. The term is also commonly used to describe the belief that increasing labour productivity, immigration, or automation cause an increase in unemployment. Whereas some argue immigrants displace domestic workers, others believe this to be a fallacy by arguing that the number of jobs in the economy is not fixed and that immigration increases the size of the economy, thus creating more jobs.[2][3]
The lump of labor fallacy is also known as the lump of jobs fallacy, fallacy of labour scarcity, fixed pie fallacy, or the zero-sum fallacy - due to its ties to zero-sum games...
What is true is entire industries are being redone, much as farmers drastically increased their productivity many years ago. The increase in farmer's productivity was a massively good thing for society long term, my expectation is that automation will be proven to be so as well.
And what will you do when free trade withers on the vine?
Like everyone else, I'll pay lots more for clothing, food, cars, electronics, etc. Anything that has a global supply chain will become problematic, anyone who does business that way will take a big hair cut.
Economic activity will take a huge hit that will make the Great Depression look small because our economy is far more trade involved than we were then. We'll see negative economic growth for a long time.
There will be 2nd and 3rd order impacts from making everyone poorer that will also be ugly; we won't be able to pay for entitlements, we'll default on the debt, we'll probably end the dollar as the world currency.
So yes, I most certainly can contemplate it, it's even easy. What's unclear is how the world reacts politically to something like this... as ugly as what I'm suggesting, politics might drive it to get even worse before it gets better.
So, when Columbians, the Zetas, and the Sinaloans are free to ship crack cocaine and heroin into the US in unlimited quantities, everybody is better off!
Free Trade is what happens when the Law allows trade to happen. The Drug war is an effort to prevent Trade.
Drugs in general are issues created via the lowering of world-wide transportation costs to almost zero.
No matter what we do Trade-wise (Free, Regulated, or Outlawed), the Drug problems are going to happen independent of that.
Sure those American textile workers in the south benefited from have cheaper clothes, it just came as the expense of their jobs.
That's right, they're the big losers in this one (unless of course they found other work that was the same or better), and everyone knows who they are.
The winners on the other hand are everyone in the USA who buys clothing... the problem is they don't understand that they've won.
And of course, putting more money in the hands of everyone in the USA (because clothing is cheaper) also has multiplier effects, some of that money went into buying everything from cars to electronics...
...and the people who sold that stuff and benefited indirectly really don't understand that they've been helped a lot by FT.
That's why the optics and politics of this are terrible, even if the math says it's great.
Dark Matter: The math of it (from hundreds of years of research involving millions of trials across hundreds of countries involving hundreds of thousands of scientists) says that the benefits to the economy are greater than those individual losses.
I think you exaggerate the scientific studies. ^_^
No, I'm not exaggerating. We have literally been looking into this for hundreds of years, with hundreds of countries, and so forth. This is one of the best researched topics in economics. The politics has always been ugly so generation after generation of scientists have always had the ability and interest to make a name for themselves by overthrowing the theory.
When I compare it to the theory of gravity, I'm being serious. It's *possible* that someone somewhere will win a handful of nobel prizes by overthrowing Free Trade as a Theory (just like with Gravity), but it's not easy and my expectation is that we'll see Gravity fall long before Free Trade.
Free trade means the two parties benefit, not that everyone benefits.
"Everyone benefits" because resources are allocated in a more efficient manner, and products are made more efficiently and cheaply. Unless you make your own clothing, you benefit from clothing being imported, that's virtually all households, not "the two parties".
The general then rounds up a bunch of villagers and forces them to work in his factory, where their regimented life sucks and they live in bunks in concrete barracks.
Are you seriously trying to claim life was better for Chinese peasants before trade 50 years ago when starvation was expected and malnutrition was omni-present?
There is nothing in economics that says that doesn’t happen.
For one, or even 10, factories? Absolutely.
Some of my ex-factory workers are looking at lifelong problems and they'll never make back their economic footing. And they're going to know who they are, and that's why the politics of this is really nasty.
But what you said doesn't actually disagree with what I said. Free trade being Good for the Economy is to Economics what the Theory of Gravity is to Physics.
The math of it (from hundreds of years of research involving millions of trials across hundreds of countries involving hundreds of thousands of scientists) says that the benefits to the economy are greater than those individual losses.
More, when we look at trade we're normally looking at benefits which are very widespread. Everyone in America having their clothing costs reduced sharply and so forth.
Eventually the first country has the advantage in not just rice and sledgehammers, but everything else, too, while the second country is reduced to producing corn and wheat.
The Theory of Comparative Advantage does NOT claim that one country is better at producing something than another country. One country might be better, AT EVERYTHING, than another country, and trade is still a great thing for both.
The Theory of Comparative Advantage claims that different countries produce produces with different levels of effectiveness internally.
Example #1:
Country B can produce one unit of product X with 2 units of inputs.
Country B can produce one unit of product Y with 4 units of inputs.
Country C can produce one unit of product X with 1 units of inputs.
Country C can produce one unit of product Y with 2 units of inputs.
There is no point in "B" and "C" trading, because in this very simple example neither has a Comparative Advantage over the other (yes, really). Both produce one Y at a cost of 2 X's.
Example #2:
Country B can produce one unit of product X with 2 units of inputs.
Country B can produce one unit of product Y with 4 units of inputs.
Country C can produce one unit of product X with 1 units of inputs.
Country C can produce one unit of product Y with 1 units of inputs.
Country C produces EVERYTHING better than Country B, it is STILL in their interests to trade. B should be producing as much X as it can, C should be producing Y. Each should trade with the other.
Free trade being Good for the Economy is to Economics what the Theory of Gravity is to Physics. The problem is, as always, that the politics and optics of Free trade are normally terrible. The benefits are invisible and widely dispersed across the entire economy, the negative effects can be focused on people who know darn well who they are.
A rent seeking monopoly free from market forces would tend toward internal protectionism (employees are secure absent criminal conviction)
Runaway empire building is exactly that. UofM (University of Michigan) has roughly 41k employees (news) for 44.7k students (wiki).
The employees poorly served by this are the ones who deal with the students (adjuncts) because they're not part of anyone's empire. That this poorly serves the students and the people who interact with them is expected. It's gotten bad enough that (long ago) the U(s) decided to cut muscle to increase fat.
On “Pitchfork Republic”
I'm not sure poverty causes crime. But crime certainly causes poverty.
We are, big time. To the point where it drives behavior and has convinced various of my relatives to not get married when pregnant on four separate times over the years.
And... this has created a line. Crime causes poverty, we have lots of programs to alleviate poverty.
Government policy is clearly part of the problem, maybe in ways that are seriously unintuitive.
"
Interesting idea... I'll try it the next time I'm locked.
"
I'm not sure which part of history you're trying to rewrite. A President Gore, with a legit victory, would have been President. My expectation is that a President Gore would have declared war after 911 and we would have gone into Afghanistan. My expectation is that Congress would have backed him.
There were people who actually thought Bush stole the election (ignoring that Bush won every Florida count and by the time the Supremes stepped in, Gore literally had no path to victory).
And all that went away after 911.
Similarly if North Korea nukes California, my expectation is that the Dems instantly forget and forgive everything Trump did or said to get elected.
"
Powerless comment? Biden was *the* guy who could act on that comment given the opportunity. He wasn't talking about what *should* be done, he was talking about what he, *himself*, was going to do with the full support of the rest of the party.
The Dems would have claimed (correctly) that his words were the "fair warning" of a policy shift.
And what's more Joe was pointing out obvious political realities. No Senator wants to face the voters with a vote to help an unpopular opposition President (that he was elected to stop) tilt the court against the will of the people who elected that Senator.
"
True, but our stats, and thus our problems, are different.
(From Google's): "what percentage of prisoners are violent offenders".
41% percent of convicted and unconvicted jail inmates in 2002 had a current or prior violent offense; 46% were nonviolent recidivists. From 2000 to 2008, the state prison population increased by 159,200 prisoners, and violent offenders accounted for 60% of this increase.
And this is after plea bargaining. We might be looking a poverty-as-a-cause, but we might also be looking at culture-as-a-cause and poverty-as-a-result.
"
Burning down towns was a rarity and perhaps only a problem in theory. Being abused by foreign laws was a constant.
A husband and wife can talk about, and fight about, small things with great frequency. That doesn't mean rarer, more important, things are unimportant. If one of them cheats then it's war even if it's not mentioned in the 50 previous fights.
"
Actually we're 2nd. Some micro-country is #1. Weirdly we measure these things in people-jailed-per-100k, and they have less than 100k people so their actual number is less than their rate.
However it's not clear how much of our rate is an abuse of law and how much is other cultural failures. I'd like to think that we get rid of the war on drugs and everything calms down... but maybe it doesn't.
Culture is one of the hardest things to change.
"
You're covering 350 years. Do that in any country in the world and I've a feeling it will look pretty bloody and "revolutionary".
"
This is an abuse of power. This is certainly possible, it certainly happens. But to what degree is this typical?
We have a lot of people (even as a percentage) in prison for violent crimes. We have a lot of people (even as a percentage) in prison for recidivism. Subtract both of those and I'm not sure how much room is left for civilians whose crime is being poor.
"
Nothing concentrates minds like a noose... and we're not dealing with that.
And the country *was* really unified after 911 so there's that.
"
I don't *think* I get an error at all. It just accepts my post, then takes me back to the full comments page without actually posting it. If I'm not paying attention then I won't notice that I didn't actually post.
"
Hmm... looks like I can post now. Weirdly I go through periods where I'm banned or locked out or something. Anyone else having that issue?
"
test
On “Noah Smith: The Man Who Made Us See That Trade Isn’t Always Free”
People turn to "well being" arguments only because the math says they're wrong so they don't want to use math.
"
This is a very old line of reasoning disproven multiple times over the years. I'll quote wiki.
In economics, the lump of labour fallacy is the idea that there is a fixed amount of work - a lump of labor - to be done within an economy which can be distributed to create more or fewer jobs. It was considered a fallacy in 1891 by economist D.F. Schloss, who held that the amount of work is not fixed.[1]
The term originated to rebut the idea that reducing the number of hours employees are allowed to labour during the working day would lead to a reduction in unemployment. The term is also commonly used to describe the belief that increasing labour productivity, immigration, or automation cause an increase in unemployment. Whereas some argue immigrants displace domestic workers, others believe this to be a fallacy by arguing that the number of jobs in the economy is not fixed and that immigration increases the size of the economy, thus creating more jobs.[2][3]
The lump of labor fallacy is also known as the lump of jobs fallacy, fallacy of labour scarcity, fixed pie fallacy, or the zero-sum fallacy - due to its ties to zero-sum games...
What is true is entire industries are being redone, much as farmers drastically increased their productivity many years ago. The increase in farmer's productivity was a massively good thing for society long term, my expectation is that automation will be proven to be so as well.
"
Like everyone else, I'll pay lots more for clothing, food, cars, electronics, etc. Anything that has a global supply chain will become problematic, anyone who does business that way will take a big hair cut.
Economic activity will take a huge hit that will make the Great Depression look small because our economy is far more trade involved than we were then. We'll see negative economic growth for a long time.
There will be 2nd and 3rd order impacts from making everyone poorer that will also be ugly; we won't be able to pay for entitlements, we'll default on the debt, we'll probably end the dollar as the world currency.
So yes, I most certainly can contemplate it, it's even easy. What's unclear is how the world reacts politically to something like this... as ugly as what I'm suggesting, politics might drive it to get even worse before it gets better.
"
Free Trade is what happens when the Law allows trade to happen. The Drug war is an effort to prevent Trade.
Drugs in general are issues created via the lowering of world-wide transportation costs to almost zero.
No matter what we do Trade-wise (Free, Regulated, or Outlawed), the Drug problems are going to happen independent of that.
"
It's stories/experiences like this which make me think these massive bureaucracies we've created are suppressing economic growth.
"
That's right, they're the big losers in this one (unless of course they found other work that was the same or better), and everyone knows who they are.
The winners on the other hand are everyone in the USA who buys clothing... the problem is they don't understand that they've won.
And of course, putting more money in the hands of everyone in the USA (because clothing is cheaper) also has multiplier effects, some of that money went into buying everything from cars to electronics...
...and the people who sold that stuff and benefited indirectly really don't understand that they've been helped a lot by FT.
That's why the optics and politics of this are terrible, even if the math says it's great.
"
No, I'm not exaggerating. We have literally been looking into this for hundreds of years, with hundreds of countries, and so forth. This is one of the best researched topics in economics. The politics has always been ugly so generation after generation of scientists have always had the ability and interest to make a name for themselves by overthrowing the theory.
When I compare it to the theory of gravity, I'm being serious. It's *possible* that someone somewhere will win a handful of nobel prizes by overthrowing Free Trade as a Theory (just like with Gravity), but it's not easy and my expectation is that we'll see Gravity fall long before Free Trade.
"Everyone benefits" because resources are allocated in a more efficient manner, and products are made more efficiently and cheaply. Unless you make your own clothing, you benefit from clothing being imported, that's virtually all households, not "the two parties".
Are you seriously trying to claim life was better for Chinese peasants before trade 50 years ago when starvation was expected and malnutrition was omni-present?
"
For one, or even 10, factories? Absolutely.
Some of my ex-factory workers are looking at lifelong problems and they'll never make back their economic footing. And they're going to know who they are, and that's why the politics of this is really nasty.
But what you said doesn't actually disagree with what I said. Free trade being Good for the Economy is to Economics what the Theory of Gravity is to Physics.
The math of it (from hundreds of years of research involving millions of trials across hundreds of countries involving hundreds of thousands of scientists) says that the benefits to the economy are greater than those individual losses.
More, when we look at trade we're normally looking at benefits which are very widespread. Everyone in America having their clothing costs reduced sharply and so forth.
"
How many other fields are you willing to use Trump as the authority?
"
The Theory of Comparative Advantage does NOT claim that one country is better at producing something than another country. One country might be better, AT EVERYTHING, than another country, and trade is still a great thing for both.
The Theory of Comparative Advantage claims that different countries produce produces with different levels of effectiveness internally.
Example #1:
Country B can produce one unit of product X with 2 units of inputs.
Country B can produce one unit of product Y with 4 units of inputs.
Country C can produce one unit of product X with 1 units of inputs.
Country C can produce one unit of product Y with 2 units of inputs.
There is no point in "B" and "C" trading, because in this very simple example neither has a Comparative Advantage over the other (yes, really). Both produce one Y at a cost of 2 X's.
Example #2:
Country B can produce one unit of product X with 2 units of inputs.
Country B can produce one unit of product Y with 4 units of inputs.
Country C can produce one unit of product X with 1 units of inputs.
Country C can produce one unit of product Y with 1 units of inputs.
Country C produces EVERYTHING better than Country B, it is STILL in their interests to trade. B should be producing as much X as it can, C should be producing Y. Each should trade with the other.
Free trade being Good for the Economy is to Economics what the Theory of Gravity is to Physics. The problem is, as always, that the politics and optics of Free trade are normally terrible. The benefits are invisible and widely dispersed across the entire economy, the negative effects can be focused on people who know darn well who they are.
On “Don’t Blame Me!”
Runaway empire building is exactly that. UofM (University of Michigan) has roughly 41k employees (news) for 44.7k students (wiki).
The employees poorly served by this are the ones who deal with the students (adjuncts) because they're not part of anyone's empire. That this poorly serves the students and the people who interact with them is expected. It's gotten bad enough that (long ago) the U(s) decided to cut muscle to increase fat.
"
They're an uncompeditive rent seeking monopoly who hasn't been subjected to normal market forces. They have political/legal support, subsidies, etc.
Rot is expected.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.