I'm not concerned with non-material quality of life issues. Besides using law enforcement to cut down on domestic abuse, child neglect, and other horrible things that people to do eachother; its impossible to provide everybody with a decent emotional life. However, I'm pretty sure that the rich suffer from emotional pain just as much as the rest of us if celebrity gossip is basically truthful. If anything, there dramas can get slightly more excessive.
Also, I think Harrison Bergeron was supposed to be a satire on the Rightist version of socialism than a satire on socialism. Vonnegut was pretty left-leaning in his politics.
I'm not necessarily sure I can support the casual dismissal of consumer goods as luxuries. Do people strictly need these things from a survival sense? No. However, nearly every society that grew rich enough to produce luxury goods and other frivolous things has. That suggests that they do perform a necessary function for human happiness.
@jm3z-aitch , I think that the difference between societal and governmental support isn't that great. This is especially true in a democracy. As I see it, governmental support can be more effective than private support in many cases. Government has an easier time raising money through taxes for one reason. Aid can also be directed towards people who need it without worrying if they are deserving or not. I loathe the concept of the deserving and undeserving poor. Its better to help everybody who needs it rather than worry to much about whether that person is deserving or not.
I suppose my general philosophy is "shit happens" rather than "the wages of sin or death." A functioning society is one that protects everybody in it from the vagrancies of life to the extent possible. A capable government is better at this than a randomly organized charity. In case of mass tragedies like great natural disasters than government aid is simply the only way to do it. Private charities can provide band aid help but natural disasters can wreck such havoc that one requires tax power to raise enough money for recovery.
To me, quality of life issues are very much a part of income inequality. I believe that a system where a few individuals collect the overwhelming amount of wealth is likely to lead to a much lower quality of life for everybody else for a variety of reasons. I also think that it threatens democracy in that politicians pay more concerns to the needs of the wealthy than everybody else.
Will, thats basically my point of view. Its not just the point of affording affordable housing but decent and affordable housing. Not only is it immoral to require people to live in flop house or slum-like conditions but I think its dangerous from a political or a social standpoint. Like ND, I am not an anti-capitalist. We have ample evidence that Far Left economic policy doesn't work well. However, I do think that capitalism should be saved from its worse excesses.
James, what I'm pointing out is that when we had the glorious age of no rent-control, there might have been affordable housing but it wasn't, as Will pointed out and what I meant, decent housing. And I think you are over estimating how much choice that people have in their living arrangements. They also need to worry about getting to and from work and a host of other factors. A lot of people are constrained by circumstances and have to accept poor quality housing out of necessity not choice.
There is no evidence that it works this way. What actually seems to happen is that people accept really bad living arrangements.
I represent immigrants. A lot of my clients live in conditions out of How the Othet Half despite the NYC building code. You have apartments made for one family holding 2 or 3. You have single family homes filled with bunk beds.
I conceded that rent control does not work but I think history shows us that the market doesn't work either. Affordable tends to mean as miserable as humans can bare in market speak.
Just Me, has it ever occurred to you that in a differently ordered society you would be able to take care of your mother without the unnecessary hardships that you had to go through?
Like I said above, life is naturally sucky or has Hobbes put it brutish and short. One of the good things about the welfare state is that it allows us to blunt some of life's sharper edges.
Most people have never been able to support themselves and their families for most of human history and always needed societal and governmental support in order to make ends meet. Self-reliance is basically a myth. Without some form wealth redistribution, the result is widespread struggle.
I'm actually in agreement with you. The United States and have generally horrible outcomes when it comes to building public housing. Its not even strictly a race issue. Social housing in other Anglophone countries and France is just as bad. Germany, Austria, and the Scandinavian countries have much better track records.* I just wanted to point out that there was an alternative policy besides rent control and stabilization from the left.
I think the housing issues that inflicted American cities during the Gilded Age is evidence that the libertarian solution won't work the way they want it to. Housing might be more affordable but its probably not going to end up very nice unless you like slumming.
*If I had to hazard a guess, the architects of public housing in Austria, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries seemed to be completely unwilling to sacrifice aesthetics in the names of getting things built. They were able to secure the tax money for aesthetic concerns. In the Anglophone countries and France, there seems to be an unwillingness to address this concerns; maybe out of a belief that people need something to strive for so public housing shouldn't be too nice.
Does anybody have any good statistics on what percentage of people were virgins at the time of their marriage before the sexual revolution? To keep things simple I'll be content with the period between the end of WWI and 1960, when the birth control pill was introduced.
Prostitution was around forever and as far as I can tell from old movies, which might not be the most reliable source, men were kind of expected to have some sexual experience before marriage at least even if they were theoretically supposed to be virgins. Somehow I can't really imagine all those leading men in romantic comedies as never having sex and I'm pretty sure the audience at the time was supposed to feel similarly.* Even women are implied to have a certain amount of experience even if the expectations for virginity was higher.
*The exceptions are Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby or Henry Fonda in about everything but especially the Lady Eve. Grant and Fonda were better at portraying innocence than Tracy or Gable.
Lets look at one of the current problems of income inequality, rent. Rent is going up in many of the metropolitan areas in the United States. The average rent in Brooklyn is apparently now $3000 a month. Very few people can afford $3000 a month. That means that people are either going to move in with several people and split rent or that they are going to have to move out further from their jobs and deal with long commutes. Telling the poor to middle class people to the more affordable parts of the country isn't really an option because moving is very difficult even for single people without a job or housing lined up. Plus, the people who can afford $3000 a month rent need the services of people who can't afford $3000 a month rent, whose going to work in the restaurants, bars, or other places of entertainment; whose going to do all the boring grunt work, pick up the garbage, drive the trains and busses; teach their kids, etc.?
We need more affordable housing. I concede that rent control was a failed experiment and that it doesn't work. However, we have another option besides the libertarian/market solution of building luxury condos for the rich and allowing trickle down affordable housing or bringing back flophouses and SRO apartments. The government can actually build affordable and decent housing like they do in some European countries. It would be something like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeindebau
The reason why we don't build Gemeindebau in America is because doing so would require taxing the rich and taking some of their income away to support the rest of us. How much are billionaires and millionaires willing to sacrifice in order to fight inequality?
I wouldn't go as far as ND but I'm likewise very underwhelmed by this post Vikram. It misses what people mean by income inequality. When people refer to income inequality they mean one thing, the majority of the people aren't earning what could be considered a fair wage and are struggling economically since the necessities of life are expensive. When you add some necessary discretion spending, because people need some luxury/pleasure/entertainment in order to remain mentally healthy.
We have a society where some people are incredibly blessed with lucrative jobs that last their entire working lives and others are having to change jobs or even careers with great frequency. The ultimate question we need to ask is how hard we want life to be and how much struggle we want people to experience in order to make end's meet. Like can kind of suck but that doesn't mean we should make it intentionally suck.
ND commented on this above. In the past being a life-long single as an adult wasn't really that good of an experience. Society did not offer much leisure time or options and social mores made sex outside of marriage somewhat more difficult to obtain. The type of society created by capitalism, I wouldn't go so far as to call it decadent, gives single people many more options for happiness even if you aren't in a romantic relationship.
There is still one problem though, nobody is going to young or middle-aged forever. People get old. One real thing that kids can do for their parents is take care of them in their old age. You need a certain amount of young people to take care of the old people.
Having a kid at 20 or 21 is historically kind of young. We have reliable evidence that the age of marriage was 25 or 26 on average in the Anglosphere from the 1600s to the 1960s.
The other issue is whether we actually need an increase in fertility. Technology and globalization are killing lots of jobs. If you don't think that new categories of work are going to come along and replace the jobs that no longer exist than we have the question of what these children are going to do when they grow up. We also have seven billion people on this planet and we need to be concerned with environmental impact of more humans. The main reason why an increase in fertility might be desirable is that we are going to need people to take care of us during our old age.
The reason why there are a waiting list for Pre-K is that the United States doesn't have enough them thanks to Richard Nixon. A little known fact of Nixon's presidency is that Congress passed universal pre-K legislation during the Nixon administration. Nixon vetoed it because the Evangelicals did not like it since they thought it would destroy house-wifery or something like that.
Murali, I don't think thats quite right. The nuclear family existed in at least in some form since Ancient Greece. European family life never revolved around an extended family they way it did in other continents even before Christianity.
Greginak, Western families usually were smaller than families elsewhere in the world. Even in the days of high infant mortality, Western women tended to have fewer pregnancies during their life.
Is it really the system thats causing people to have fewer or no children latter in life though? The 19th century was a time of near constant population booms and its not like the capitalist system was any less brutal than. Yes, middle and upper class women did not work but lots of women did have to have to work in some rather harsh conditions to make ends meet. Lots of fathers were working long and brutal hours to.
What really changed was the nature of childhood. For most of human history, children were an economic asset who did all sorts of labor to help their family. Even in middle and upper class families, where kids weren't sent to work in the factory or field, kids provided economic benefits sooner than latter through bringing them into the family firm, securing the family line, or a marriage alliance. This thankfully change during the 19th century and childhood as we understand it today was more or less in place by the early 20th century. Times were generally prosperous enough to allow this, especially after WWII and the subsequent boom. Since people are struggling and kids aren't an asset in an economic sense, people don't have kids.
Russel, the songs are original to the Disney movie but from what I've read, Peter Pan is one of the more faithful adaptations done by company. I suppose my point is this, Peter Pan the movie came out in 1953. These sort of things were just accepted at the time. They are still immoral but most things aren't ahead of the their time. Changes were beggining to happen but as I pointed out, the world of 1953 has much more in common with the world of 1904, when Barrie first published Peter Pan, than it does today. Read my second post on this thread. We really shouldn't be surprised that works from the past aren't really that enlightened when it comes to issues of gender, race, and sexuality. Especially if they are mass market family entertainment, which always hews closely to what is and is not socially acceptible. Who weren't going to get something that meets current ideas about race and gender from Disney in 1953.
That leaves you two choices. You can either prevent your son from watching Peter Pan or you could allow him to watch but explain why parts of it are bad.
ND, there is no historical evidece for "No Irish Need Apply." Irish Catholics weren't particularly liked in 19th century America but there is no evidence that they were treated that level of disrcrimatinon. They had too much political clout for that.
Kazzy, its a good point but there are problems. Very few businesses require a specific dress code these days. There might be an assumption that you should dress nicer at some restaurants or bars than others but I can't think of any that have strict requirements anymore like they did in the past.
The other issue is that when you are going to a restaurant or place of entertainment where dressing nice is required, you probably know this beforehand. When you pass by an ordinary store during your daily life, you really don't expect to get kicked out because the store owner doesn't like how your dressed. Also, a lot of fancy dress these days does allow women to dress what would be considered immodest in the past.
Does Disney's Peter Pan laugh at Native Americans on its own accord or is this just a problem of the source material? Disney's works are adaptations from fairytales, mythology, and literature.* Back when Peter Pan was adapted into a movie, eliminating the problematic elements of fairy tales wasn't the style yet. The faults of Disney's Peter Pan should be more properly attributed to J.M. Barrie.
*I would really like to why Disney thought turning the Victor Hugo's Notre Dame into an animated family movie was a good idea. All their other adaptations, even Hercules, were less problematic and more kid-friendly in their original forms.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Just how committed are you to fixing inequality?”
I'm not concerned with non-material quality of life issues. Besides using law enforcement to cut down on domestic abuse, child neglect, and other horrible things that people to do eachother; its impossible to provide everybody with a decent emotional life. However, I'm pretty sure that the rich suffer from emotional pain just as much as the rest of us if celebrity gossip is basically truthful. If anything, there dramas can get slightly more excessive.
Also, I think Harrison Bergeron was supposed to be a satire on the Rightist version of socialism than a satire on socialism. Vonnegut was pretty left-leaning in his politics.
"
I'm not necessarily sure I can support the casual dismissal of consumer goods as luxuries. Do people strictly need these things from a survival sense? No. However, nearly every society that grew rich enough to produce luxury goods and other frivolous things has. That suggests that they do perform a necessary function for human happiness.
"
@jm3z-aitch , I think that the difference between societal and governmental support isn't that great. This is especially true in a democracy. As I see it, governmental support can be more effective than private support in many cases. Government has an easier time raising money through taxes for one reason. Aid can also be directed towards people who need it without worrying if they are deserving or not. I loathe the concept of the deserving and undeserving poor. Its better to help everybody who needs it rather than worry to much about whether that person is deserving or not.
I suppose my general philosophy is "shit happens" rather than "the wages of sin or death." A functioning society is one that protects everybody in it from the vagrancies of life to the extent possible. A capable government is better at this than a randomly organized charity. In case of mass tragedies like great natural disasters than government aid is simply the only way to do it. Private charities can provide band aid help but natural disasters can wreck such havoc that one requires tax power to raise enough money for recovery.
"
To me, quality of life issues are very much a part of income inequality. I believe that a system where a few individuals collect the overwhelming amount of wealth is likely to lead to a much lower quality of life for everybody else for a variety of reasons. I also think that it threatens democracy in that politicians pay more concerns to the needs of the wealthy than everybody else.
"
Will, thats basically my point of view. Its not just the point of affording affordable housing but decent and affordable housing. Not only is it immoral to require people to live in flop house or slum-like conditions but I think its dangerous from a political or a social standpoint. Like ND, I am not an anti-capitalist. We have ample evidence that Far Left economic policy doesn't work well. However, I do think that capitalism should be saved from its worse excesses.
"
James, what I'm pointing out is that when we had the glorious age of no rent-control, there might have been affordable housing but it wasn't, as Will pointed out and what I meant, decent housing. And I think you are over estimating how much choice that people have in their living arrangements. They also need to worry about getting to and from work and a host of other factors. A lot of people are constrained by circumstances and have to accept poor quality housing out of necessity not choice.
"
There is no evidence that it works this way. What actually seems to happen is that people accept really bad living arrangements.
I represent immigrants. A lot of my clients live in conditions out of How the Othet Half despite the NYC building code. You have apartments made for one family holding 2 or 3. You have single family homes filled with bunk beds.
I conceded that rent control does not work but I think history shows us that the market doesn't work either. Affordable tends to mean as miserable as humans can bare in market speak.
"
Just Me, has it ever occurred to you that in a differently ordered society you would be able to take care of your mother without the unnecessary hardships that you had to go through?
Like I said above, life is naturally sucky or has Hobbes put it brutish and short. One of the good things about the welfare state is that it allows us to blunt some of life's sharper edges.
"
Most people have never been able to support themselves and their families for most of human history and always needed societal and governmental support in order to make ends meet. Self-reliance is basically a myth. Without some form wealth redistribution, the result is widespread struggle.
"
I'm actually in agreement with you. The United States and have generally horrible outcomes when it comes to building public housing. Its not even strictly a race issue. Social housing in other Anglophone countries and France is just as bad. Germany, Austria, and the Scandinavian countries have much better track records.* I just wanted to point out that there was an alternative policy besides rent control and stabilization from the left.
I think the housing issues that inflicted American cities during the Gilded Age is evidence that the libertarian solution won't work the way they want it to. Housing might be more affordable but its probably not going to end up very nice unless you like slumming.
*If I had to hazard a guess, the architects of public housing in Austria, Germany, and the Scandinavian countries seemed to be completely unwilling to sacrifice aesthetics in the names of getting things built. They were able to secure the tax money for aesthetic concerns. In the Anglophone countries and France, there seems to be an unwillingness to address this concerns; maybe out of a belief that people need something to strive for so public housing shouldn't be too nice.
On “The Child-Free Generation’s Hard Bargain With Capitalism”
Does anybody have any good statistics on what percentage of people were virgins at the time of their marriage before the sexual revolution? To keep things simple I'll be content with the period between the end of WWI and 1960, when the birth control pill was introduced.
Prostitution was around forever and as far as I can tell from old movies, which might not be the most reliable source, men were kind of expected to have some sexual experience before marriage at least even if they were theoretically supposed to be virgins. Somehow I can't really imagine all those leading men in romantic comedies as never having sex and I'm pretty sure the audience at the time was supposed to feel similarly.* Even women are implied to have a certain amount of experience even if the expectations for virginity was higher.
*The exceptions are Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby or Henry Fonda in about everything but especially the Lady Eve. Grant and Fonda were better at portraying innocence than Tracy or Gable.
On “Just how committed are you to fixing inequality?”
Lets look at one of the current problems of income inequality, rent. Rent is going up in many of the metropolitan areas in the United States. The average rent in Brooklyn is apparently now $3000 a month. Very few people can afford $3000 a month. That means that people are either going to move in with several people and split rent or that they are going to have to move out further from their jobs and deal with long commutes. Telling the poor to middle class people to the more affordable parts of the country isn't really an option because moving is very difficult even for single people without a job or housing lined up. Plus, the people who can afford $3000 a month rent need the services of people who can't afford $3000 a month rent, whose going to work in the restaurants, bars, or other places of entertainment; whose going to do all the boring grunt work, pick up the garbage, drive the trains and busses; teach their kids, etc.?
We need more affordable housing. I concede that rent control was a failed experiment and that it doesn't work. However, we have another option besides the libertarian/market solution of building luxury condos for the rich and allowing trickle down affordable housing or bringing back flophouses and SRO apartments. The government can actually build affordable and decent housing like they do in some European countries. It would be something like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemeindebau
The reason why we don't build Gemeindebau in America is because doing so would require taxing the rich and taking some of their income away to support the rest of us. How much are billionaires and millionaires willing to sacrifice in order to fight inequality?
"
I wouldn't go as far as ND but I'm likewise very underwhelmed by this post Vikram. It misses what people mean by income inequality. When people refer to income inequality they mean one thing, the majority of the people aren't earning what could be considered a fair wage and are struggling economically since the necessities of life are expensive. When you add some necessary discretion spending, because people need some luxury/pleasure/entertainment in order to remain mentally healthy.
We have a society where some people are incredibly blessed with lucrative jobs that last their entire working lives and others are having to change jobs or even careers with great frequency. The ultimate question we need to ask is how hard we want life to be and how much struggle we want people to experience in order to make end's meet. Like can kind of suck but that doesn't mean we should make it intentionally suck.
On “The Child-Free Generation’s Hard Bargain With Capitalism”
ND commented on this above. In the past being a life-long single as an adult wasn't really that good of an experience. Society did not offer much leisure time or options and social mores made sex outside of marriage somewhat more difficult to obtain. The type of society created by capitalism, I wouldn't go so far as to call it decadent, gives single people many more options for happiness even if you aren't in a romantic relationship.
There is still one problem though, nobody is going to young or middle-aged forever. People get old. One real thing that kids can do for their parents is take care of them in their old age. You need a certain amount of young people to take care of the old people.
"
Having a kid at 20 or 21 is historically kind of young. We have reliable evidence that the age of marriage was 25 or 26 on average in the Anglosphere from the 1600s to the 1960s.
"
The other issue is whether we actually need an increase in fertility. Technology and globalization are killing lots of jobs. If you don't think that new categories of work are going to come along and replace the jobs that no longer exist than we have the question of what these children are going to do when they grow up. We also have seven billion people on this planet and we need to be concerned with environmental impact of more humans. The main reason why an increase in fertility might be desirable is that we are going to need people to take care of us during our old age.
"
The reason why there are a waiting list for Pre-K is that the United States doesn't have enough them thanks to Richard Nixon. A little known fact of Nixon's presidency is that Congress passed universal pre-K legislation during the Nixon administration. Nixon vetoed it because the Evangelicals did not like it since they thought it would destroy house-wifery or something like that.
"
Thank you for rating me higher than a random person from Craigslist. ;).
"
Murali, I don't think thats quite right. The nuclear family existed in at least in some form since Ancient Greece. European family life never revolved around an extended family they way it did in other continents even before Christianity.
"
Greginak, Western families usually were smaller than families elsewhere in the world. Even in the days of high infant mortality, Western women tended to have fewer pregnancies during their life.
"
Is it really the system thats causing people to have fewer or no children latter in life though? The 19th century was a time of near constant population booms and its not like the capitalist system was any less brutal than. Yes, middle and upper class women did not work but lots of women did have to have to work in some rather harsh conditions to make ends meet. Lots of fathers were working long and brutal hours to.
What really changed was the nature of childhood. For most of human history, children were an economic asset who did all sorts of labor to help their family. Even in middle and upper class families, where kids weren't sent to work in the factory or field, kids provided economic benefits sooner than latter through bringing them into the family firm, securing the family line, or a marriage alliance. This thankfully change during the 19th century and childhood as we understand it today was more or less in place by the early 20th century. Times were generally prosperous enough to allow this, especially after WWII and the subsequent boom. Since people are struggling and kids aren't an asset in an economic sense, people don't have kids.
On “Rethinking a classic”
Russel, the songs are original to the Disney movie but from what I've read, Peter Pan is one of the more faithful adaptations done by company. I suppose my point is this, Peter Pan the movie came out in 1953. These sort of things were just accepted at the time. They are still immoral but most things aren't ahead of the their time. Changes were beggining to happen but as I pointed out, the world of 1953 has much more in common with the world of 1904, when Barrie first published Peter Pan, than it does today. Read my second post on this thread. We really shouldn't be surprised that works from the past aren't really that enlightened when it comes to issues of gender, race, and sexuality. Especially if they are mass market family entertainment, which always hews closely to what is and is not socially acceptible. Who weren't going to get something that meets current ideas about race and gender from Disney in 1953.
That leaves you two choices. You can either prevent your son from watching Peter Pan or you could allow him to watch but explain why parts of it are bad.
On “The Price Of Citizenship (Updated)”
ND, there is no historical evidece for "No Irish Need Apply." Irish Catholics weren't particularly liked in 19th century America but there is no evidence that they were treated that level of disrcrimatinon. They had too much political clout for that.
"
Kazzy, its a good point but there are problems. Very few businesses require a specific dress code these days. There might be an assumption that you should dress nicer at some restaurants or bars than others but I can't think of any that have strict requirements anymore like they did in the past.
The other issue is that when you are going to a restaurant or place of entertainment where dressing nice is required, you probably know this beforehand. When you pass by an ordinary store during your daily life, you really don't expect to get kicked out because the store owner doesn't like how your dressed. Also, a lot of fancy dress these days does allow women to dress what would be considered immodest in the past.
On “Rethinking a classic”
Does Disney's Peter Pan laugh at Native Americans on its own accord or is this just a problem of the source material? Disney's works are adaptations from fairytales, mythology, and literature.* Back when Peter Pan was adapted into a movie, eliminating the problematic elements of fairy tales wasn't the style yet. The faults of Disney's Peter Pan should be more properly attributed to J.M. Barrie.
*I would really like to why Disney thought turning the Victor Hugo's Notre Dame into an animated family movie was a good idea. All their other adaptations, even Hercules, were less problematic and more kid-friendly in their original forms.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.