quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a rolling new york times thread

and in a lot of these places, people aren't driving to the mcdonalds, they're walking! dictating people's behavior through taxes is its own form of prescriptivist paternalism
--dayo

you're not dictating behavior, you're changing the environment in which they make whatever decisions they want. if someone wants to pay $5 for a coke, they can pay $5 for a coke. there are points in my life where I'd be willing to pay $5 for a coke, tho I'd certainly buy fewer overall. I don't accept that the only reason I like sugar and caffeine is cause I've been brainwashed.

laurel otm also

coke's are really expensive these days, damn inflation

xp

There must be a way to distinguish between paternalism and using power to propagate what is good. The alternatives would be either to define doing good as being invariably bad, or (god forbid) to allow that paternalism can often be a source of good in the world.

On a slightly more serious note, the raps against paternalism would seem to be twofold, that it can result in unintended consequence (which failing applies to any attempt to do anything) and more damningly that it can only operate in a relationship of unequal power and therefore contains the seeds of such evils as serfdom and tyranny.

The very existance of power and the predictable fact that power does not exist in absolute equality (which would also amount to perfect entropy) clearly means you're never going to solve either of those problems of paternalism. But it doesn't stop there. Those problems are potential in every form of government, every manner of society and in anarchy as well.

My conclusion is that just labelling something as 'paternalism' or as 'prescriptive' says nothing about its moral or practical value. It is an empty criticism, or what Dr. Johnson would have called "cant".

why does morality have to even play a role here? I don't think eating kale is a morally good or bad thing. it's prob good for our overall social welfare to have fewer people in the hospital and more people eating vegetables will contribute to that so we should do what we can to create a world where vegetables seem cheap and appealing. beyond that, what's left? this whole debate started w/ a poor person who eats vegetables, just...the wrong ones? those he doesn't deserve as a poor person? how does this kinda thinking benefit us beyond feeling good about our own budgeting skills?

eating kale is morally good, is the thing - proven by kant!

please read the critique of cruciferous vegetables

When someone dismisses a proposal on the grounds that it is paternalism, they usually aren't making a critique of its practical value, but castigating it as morally wrong.

kale sux

i don't think it's misanthropic to say that people will follow the laser light off a cliff if the laser light is really spectacular and sophisticated and physically addictive. you can only expect so much from us. and it's a tricky question, what to do with our natural impulse to allow people choice when over time the machine built to provide choice starts to remove it. after a few decades of success selling people food pumped full of stuff they like, when it turns out that the mere physical presence of this food in a neighborhood or town helps destroy nearby attempts to sell food without the benefits of a global distribution network or a vast advertising budget or a system of obscene hyperefficient mechanized deathcamps for chickens or a whole lot of pandering to humans' most basic fat/salt pleasure+addiction centers, and when it turns out that hey /pace/ how you feel when you're eating it this food is not actually that good for you, the companies selling it quite reasonably point out that it is of course Your Choice to eat it! we didn't make you eat it. we just loaded it with pleasurable chemicals, and made it cheaper and easier than everything else, and spammed your towns and cities with it, and hired anthropologists to help us convince your children to eat it, and came into your homes every day to smile at you and play music and tell you how delicious and cheap it was, and watched as all the other available options gradually became less available -- but we didn't put it in your mouth and make you chew. you did that! we're only here because you want us to be. you made us, with your wanting! and if you -- as a species thrown in the space of less than a century into a world where friendly machines who won't leave or shut up are constantly offering to satisfy your immediate sensual desires -- find it kind of difficult to make successful choices about what is actually best for you, or worry that the bodies and minds that evolved for scarcity and hardship aren't very good at dealing with abundance and ambient manipulation... well, we can't be responsible for your personal failings. and we know you certainly wouldn't want any kind of authority to /restrict/ your choice, because your entire culture is designed around that never happening unless you're gay or a girl! so idk. seems like you are in kind of a predicament? collective prisoners of your ids or something? go ahead and let us know if you've decided what should be done; we'll just be over here making money.

I am saving this

BTW I also mentioned a detail that no one seems to have honed in on which is that the guy just got back from India -- this has to have cost at least a couple thousand dollars even if it was a short trip. Regardless of where you draw the line for food quality as a right, foreign travel?

I mean maybe I'm reading too much into his article but what I see is actually privilege masquerading as poverty -- a hip lifestyle, travel, non-lucrative but "interesting" work, inherited money from grandma (I don't know how much, but still) etc. Again, I don't really care whether he gets food stamps as a result or not, I just think he sounds like someone who actually DOES have other options and doesn't want them.

how else would he write this article though

I'm for the dude, but I don't really know what I think about the whole using aid $$$ to travel to foreign countries thing, which I've seen a few times in the past year or two

but whatever, usually I'm like, do you

maybe he went there to report

http://shareable.net/blog/indias-rural-commons-at-odds-with-surging-industrialization

I mean maybe I'm reading too much into his article but what I see is actually privilege masquerading as poverty -- a hip lifestyle, travel, non-lucrative but "interesting" work, inherited money from grandma (I don't know how much, but still) etc. Again, I don't really care whether he gets food stamps as a result or not, I just think he sounds like someone who actually DOES have other options and doesn't want them.

upper middle class people who get thousands of dollars in tax deductions because they bought a nice piece of american sprawl have 'other options and don't want them', they could very well decide not to take that tax deduction, which they might not actually 'need'. do you think those people write articles about how they're ashamed of the money the gov't gave them?

whether or not he 'really took advantage of every option he had' or whatever is pretty much irrelevant. do you really think that the less-than-five-bucks-a-day-of-food-money is going to induce more people into glamorous slacker freelance lifestyles? if not, then it basically *does not matter* why he is poor, food stamps are one of the single most socially advantageous ways of spending gov't money - even when they go to poor people w/ huge tvs and SUVs.

I'm opposed to the mortgage tax deduction fwiw. I don't really think food stamps are the cause of this guy's life choices, I just think he is whining about sleeping in the bed he made. I'm all for extending food stamps too, even though I don't buy into the keynesian multiplier effect.

you have a hard time believing that money that can only be spent at local businesses to buy mostly-american-made products that would not have otherwise been bought would have a high keynesian multiplier?

dude iatee your conflation of economic measures & moral assertions (intentional or not, I dunno) makes this frustrating! like, The_Economy isn't something we should obey independently of our moral judgments about how things ought to work.

like, those economic measures only measure relative to a background framework which contains an implicit moral stance

(though I gotta say I think concerns about food stamps are misplaced, b/c they're so paltry & food is such an important right)

outside of the keynesian multiplier stuff most of what I'm talking about has nothing to do w/ The Economy outside of economics being a useful framework for efficiently allocating money to poor people and achieving social goals that deal w/ consumption habits. I don't think gdp growth is the one and only goal for society but when it can be achieved by giving money to poor people, sure, I'll bring it up.

I think you need to look at this from a national policy perspective - that's where moral assertions inevitable come in. once you've decided how much poverty is morally acceptable in america, how much money the american gov't should give to africa etc. etc. then you have to look at what the most efficient policy for achieving those goals would be - and that's where economics does come in. it doesn't matter if you think that someone w/ a SUV and big screen TV 'does not deserve food stamps' - from a policy perspective it doesn't make that much sense to turn social workers into professional judgers-of-human-decision-making

moral assertions inevitably* come in

find it kinda tragic that I even have to argue w/ nominally left-wing americans about the fact that no, the american welfare state is not too generous

I feel like you're arguing that point with a strawman here

'the american welfare state is not too generous*'

*but I reserve the right to judge anyone who uses it

man I dunno; if a policy prescribes that people get things they don't deserve, then lots of us (maybe me, depending on the case) are gonna think that this is too much poverty reduction.

okay, I grant that. I'm just saying that in a piece where you are harping on how hard-off you are and how much you're struggling, maybe you shouldn't mention that you shop at whole foods, take trips to india and smoke cigarettes!

"america should allocate more money to assistance programs as a way of promoting economic growth and of reaching the same standards set by other first world countries" is a perfectly valid and legitimate argument that can be made without resorting at all to how much poor people need the money.

what do you think 'deserve' means? xp

haha yeah that's the question! welcome to political philosophy.

the underlying theme of the dude's piece was the *guilt* factor not 'how hard-off he was'. xp

paragraphs like

Savings, I tell him. It’s true: For the past few years, as a semi-accomplished, mid-career journalist and writer, I’ve been scuffling in the always difficult, but now beastly hard choppy waters of freelancing, supplementing my obscenely low (often under $15,000) income with some money my grandmother left me years ago. Combined, in the city of San Francisco, I live on something around $20,000. Every year, even as I work my butt off scrambling for assignments and clients, that little nest egg shrivels frightfully smaller. Now it’s almost gone, and though I’ve had some good little runs here and there with work, I’m hurtling precipitously toward poverty.

don't really help his case!

he doesn't need a case

or rather, here is his case "I live on something around $20,000"

fin

can someone hook this guy up with the moneybags in two lights? between all of them they should be able to write the world's best article.

he doesn't need a case

OTOH, if he's putting a story about food stamps on the Internet, where it can get picked up by anyone who wants to attack social welfare/point to those wacky lib'ruls/etc., he kind of does. Or if not a case, then not mentioning things that many Americans do find objectionable (such as people on food stamps buying smokes at $7/pack - and maybe more since the last time I was in SF).

I guess I accept that logic, tho again, his article is about the guilt factor and getting over it. if it makes a poor person in a similar situation feel more comfortable about going to the food stamp office tomorrow, then it's served its purpose. if a right-wing blogger wants to find an article about waste and gov't welfare they can do a lot better than that.

hey guys did you know that the successful quit rate for smoking w/o medical assistance is 1-2%?

and that when you chastise someone for wasting their money on a drug that's more addictive than heroin instead of other stuff you sound like assholes?

i have no idea what the circumstances of this dude's indian jaunt were so i can't judge but i did laugh when he's like "hope he notices!" about the indian food-stamp-office guy who looks at his passport, because like yeah, when you're trying to get a guy to approve food stamps for you what you really want is for him to notice your recent trip to india.

as a freelancer myself though i hope they fucking shower him in food stamps.

and I was an asshole there but: its a shame that the fact that someone buys cigarettes when on food stamps scans as "irresponsible" and not as "dang why can't that person get access to a cessation program via his PCP"

i read posts too fast and i thought that one was recommending spending your money on PCP

honestly if what you're looking for is stability and guaranteed food and housing, PCP might be your best bet, pound for pound

ashes to ashes, dust to dust

If only there had been some kind of public information out there in the last five decades about the addictiveness of tobacco, think what might have been avoided!!

I mean maybe then dude could have made a more informed decision and never even started!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QuLnOncrvY4

Irrespective of the health issues, it’s difficult to see how anyone could not understand that a relatively affordable pleasure (smoking) that can be spread out throughout the day, helps deal with the stress of bad jobs or unemployment and forms part of a communal activity isn’t going to be attractive to a lot of people who are poor.

It’s also difficult to quit without assistance. There may be health warnings on TV but there can also be enormous social and corporate pressure to start. The expectation that, at some point in their life, people aren’t going to make a bad decision is unreasonable.

The whole discussion cedes ground to the right. Rather than focusing on the pittance people are given in basic support, or why there are so many people in that situation in the first place, the focus is on whether that pittance is being used responsibly. It’s such an easy, lazy argument for not doing more to bring people out of poverty – ‘don’t give them more money, they’ll only waste it, the poor are feckless and morally suspect, you can’t help people who don’t want to help themselves, etc’.

funny thing about the cigarettes is that while i do get worrying that the writer's (sort of lovable tbh) obliviousness to the fair-or-not implications of some of the cultural signifiers he's dropping is gonna make him vulnerable, tsk-tsking over his cigarette bill seems to me to be a "liberal" thing; i'm pretty sure middle america understands the need for cigarettes.

Shari obv otm