Comment by imacomputertoo
2 years ago
The conclusion of this data presentation is that so of these people are our collective responsibility, and I just wasn't convinced. I wish they had shown percentages with the visualization. They choose not to.
I was underwhelmed by some points that seemed like they should have been more shocking. Look at the huge number of people in the many adverse experiences category who made it to college, and make a high salary. that was shocking! and look at the people who had no adverse experiences and still managed to end up poor. how does that happen?
I was left with the impression that if the government threw a lot of resources at it we might be able to move a noticeable percentage of those people in a better direction, but not most of them.
The questions that remain are, how many people's lives could we improve and by how much? And, critically, how much are we willing to collectively sacrifice to move that percentage of people in a positive direction?
The point is, likely intentionally, understated. I cannot speak for the author, but the gist I got is that our society thrusts wholly unprepared people into adulthood and we could get a lot of improvements from just making it harder for people to fail at adulting. IYKYK and if you don’t you will get fucked - repeatedly.
Basic life skills are not taught so it’s up to the individual if their family fails. Importantly, it is unreasonable to expect someone to teach another how to do something they don’t know how to do.
I’m talking about stuff like navigating health insurance, paying taxes, budgeting, managing credit, home maintenance, vehicle care. Mistakes in any one of these domains can have devastating consequences that profoundly change one’s life. Simple things like single payer health care (only complex because of greedy people demanding a tax for the privilege the laws wrote grant them), personal budgeting education, and teaching basic home improvement skills will markedly improve many people’s lives.
We could also discuss more difficult topics like the complete lack of a meaningful social safety net, and the rippling consequences of systemic injustice but that’s less on topic and more likely to get me flamed or trolled.
The outcome of this has been to make it harder to fail as a kid. We don't hold kids back anymore and we don't suspend kids anymore. At some point in time the rubber meets the road and you will be held accountable and have to be. We could improve the social safety net but we never want to match other countries that have more supervision of their at risk population.
When I worked temp jobs there wasn't a place I worked where if you showed up on time two days in a row and worked hard I wasn't offered a job. All of these places paid well over minimum wage you just had to be willing to do hard physical work. Society plays some role but I have zero trust that our institutions know how to help people.
> The outcome of this has been to make it harder to fail as a kid.
I'd like to go a little further and suggest that more recently there's been a trend of not holding the adults accountable either.
Instead of trying to improve outcomes for all, we seem to have decided to choose the path of collective failure.
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There are so many teachers explaining how and why kids don't fail anymore and that leads to issues from grade 1 to graduation. At some point people just need to _do the thing_.
Answering:
> I’m talking about stuff like navigating health insurance, paying taxes, budgeting, managing credit, home maintenance, vehicle care.
With:
> We don't hold kids back anymore and we don't suspend kids anymore
is a truely weird logic to me. Is it related ? Or are you offering to let kids get credit lines and suspend them over their mismanagement ?
That could actually be a great idea TBH. And while we're at it, adults could also get suspended or have to attend additional courses, instead of getting thrown into debt spirals.
I went to primary school in the 80s and 90s and even back then it was pretty hard to be held back a grade level. Typically it only happened when a kid missed a lot of school, like they were hit by a car and spent 2 months in the hospital. Failing grades alone didn't usually cause it, at least the kids who seemed completely uninterested in school still somehow managed to graduate.
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I think ... right ok, I guess harder-to-fail but really it is easier-to-fail, easier to remain in a failure state, as a kid right? Same thing eh?
> We don't hold kids back anymore and we don't suspend kids anymore.
Does that contradict real data that shows holding kids back and suspending them makes them more successful?
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>making it harder for people to fail at adulting
That has been the direction school has gone and, at least from my perspective, it seems worse. It has lead to a loss of agency among now so-called adults who expect to always be in a situation which guides them toward success. They struggle without a guidebook.
Learning to fail, and crucially, how to handle failure and recover are better approaches.
This is how you end up with people that are "book smart" but do not how to create something from vague instructions or connect the dots. The easiest way to weed these people out of the applicant pool is if they link to their github and it is just projects from online courses.
The things the above poster suggested are largely man-made, artificially complex things seemingly designed to trap people. Things like paying taxes and handling healthcare are pretty much automatic in most European countries for example.
> navigating health insurance, paying taxes, budgeting, managing credit, home maintenance, vehicle care
The self-perpetuating lie in American life is that all of these get solved by <insert market good/service here>. Silicon Valley has only made it worse because these solutions are just monkey-patching poor "source code". Why learn how to balance a checkbook when Chase online can do it for you?
Our parents' generation had it different. They had fewer health provider options, a smaller tax code, fewer financial products, simpler home setups, engines that didn't have planned obsolescence built into them, etc, etc. We assume that things like 6 different options for MRIs or 2,304 different credit cards mean better products/services, but what is ignored is that these have only made for more complex and yet brittle systems that are harder to navigate and create much greater analysis paralysis.
I learned out to fill out a basic Form 1040 tax return in middle school (late 1970s).
Banking now is WAY easier. Balancing a checkbook? All your transactions and your balance are available 24/7 on your phone. Your paycheck appears in your bank account automatically. You used to have to get a paper check at work and then take it to the bank (open 9-5, maybe a little later on Fridays, and 9-12 or maybe 2pm on Saturday) to deposit it. Paying for stuff at the store today? Tap your phone. You used to have to carry cash, or a checkbook (if the merchant would accept checks) and hope you had figured your balance correctly.
I don't remember a lot of lessons about managing credit but we did study simple and compound interest in math and talked about how that can work for and against you depending on whether you're borrowing or saving.
Home maintenance and vehicle care --- covered the essentials in home economics and driver's education. Most people then and now paid others to do that, or went to the effort to teach themselves what they needed to know.
Cars back then were much less reliable than today. Today's cars will go 100K miles easy with little more than oil changes and maybe a new set of brake pads and tires. Cars then needed regular tune-ups and generally started having more major problems after only a few years.
Health care does seem worse now. You don't have as many family doctors with their own or small group practices, where getting an appointment was pretty easy and they actually knew you. But overall daily life is way more convenient now than it was 30 years ago.
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Society is consciously created by the active participants in that system. Government fails to hold them accountable for directly creating unwanted outcomes. Task companies with robust interoperability and let’s see how that goes.
If you say the problem is social class and poverty, and not having available role models to show how adult life actually works, you’ll get flamed and trolled. If you say the problem is racial issues, you’ll get upvotes. I’ll just sit here and await my downvotes now
Role models are kind of a non-answer to the question. It's like saying the problem is "bad luck." Role-model-based policy solutions are, if not impossible, at least deeply impractical. Childcare subsidies and other forms of welfare, including simple direct cash transfers, have been shown to be strongly beneficial and are much simpler to implement. What people dislike about those is that they involve starting fights with lobbyists. Hence non-actionable perspectives like "the problem is role models" or "the problem is personal responsibility," which are not solutions so much as excuses for collective inaction.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Is it possible that the issue is both and that the two are interrelated?
It seems to me that there can be both a problem with lack of role models and problems with racial issues and that both should be improved.
It seems to me that lack of role models could be exasperated by structural issues (mass incarceration, parents having to work too many hours) and in turn the lack of role models could exasperate the structural issues (unattended kids getting into crimes, kids struggling to get into college since their parents don't have time to tutor them).
The pattern I've noticed is that the poor and the poorly educated have no career expectations from their kids. If the kids with wealthy and/or highly educated parents showed up at home with just one poor grade all hell broke lose. Grounded for 6 months, allowance cuts, no more TV or video games etc One kept his kid at home during the holidays to tutor him himself, screaming 90% of the time. The other parents would look at the grades for < 1 minute and compliment the single thing they did well. Later on, when the other kids ended up in their first factory job the mantra was if only my parents gave me a good kick in the but I wouldn't be here right now
I would send all 13 year olds to the factory for a good few months. Earnings to be paid when 21. I would also introduce Sunday school if your grades are crappy, 8 hours every week until you are no longer behind. And finally, call in the parents regularly just to annoy the fuck out of them. You don't seem very involved mr Jones. Could you be so kind to explain these grades?
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It's hard to look at visualizations like this and reflect on the experiences of the individuals living through hardship. Even those who 'make it out' may struggle in ways not fully captured in the data or this visualization.
I grew up in a 'high risk environment', and experienced all the adverse experiences with the exception of gun violence (yay Canada). I'm one of the few that 'made it out'. Many of my childhood friends are dead (usually overdoses), suffer from substance abuse, or are still stuck in the poverty cycle (on average it takes 7 generation to break the cycle).
I look at this visualization and I can feel, to my core, what these folks feel. Even for those that 'made it out', I feel for them. I struggle with my mental health, I've had to actively reparent myself, and I feel pretty lonely. Many of the people I'm surrounded by don't know what it feels like to carry all the weight from your childhood.
I do agree that the government shouldn't just throw resources at the problem. There are some things the government can do, though.
1. Teach conflict resolution skills to young children. This mitigates adverse experiences and prepares the children for adulthood (especially if they 'make it out')
2. Address addiction as a health problem and not a criminal problem. Children don't need to see their parents as criminals, they need to witness them get better.
3. Reduce the burden of poverty. For instance, the poorer you are the further you have to travel to the grocery store. The people who often don't have the means to easily travel for food have to travel for food.
4. Access to education. The people I grew up around who have found success did so because our schools were really well equipped.
You'll notice I didn't list access to support systems. Honestly, they are kind of useless. As a child you understand that if you open up about your experience there is a solid chance your parents will get in trouble or you'll be removed from your home. No child wants this. You end up holding it all in because you can't trust adults.
These are just some of my thoughts. Definitely not comprehensive, I could ramble on about this for ages.
(edit - formatting)
> Teach conflict resolution skills to young children.
This is pretty huge. A lot of my experience growing up in California during the 90s was "tell an adult" and "zero tolerance" coming down from school administrators. This is useful at a very young age, but it neglects to equip the children with agency for when the adults aren't around. You can't tell an adult when you're on the school bus and conflict breaks out. You can't tell an adult when you're out on a soccer trip and people are getting rowdy in the locker room. The bystander effect is very strong in school aged children because we neglect to introduce them to their inherent agency in conflict.
There is also a degree of antifragility that parents could teach as well. Your emotions aren't reality. What people say about you isn't either. Again, these should come from parents.
What do you mean?
In the adult world, you'd just call the police.
In the child world, sometimes you tell the adults, but they don't do anything, and the abuse continues. That's at least my experience with bullying in primary school. "Conflict resolution" and such virtue-signalling buzzwords don't work against violent bullies.
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Unfortunately a solid number of these things would rely on the moral equivalent of slavery.
> Reduce the burden of poverty. For instance, the poorer you are the further you have to travel to the grocery store. The people who often don't have the means to easily travel for food have to travel for food.
No one wants to work in these neighborhoods because they are invariably awful. At some point the risk of an employee being murdered / assaulted means stores close down.
There's no good answer for this, other than to keep doing what we're doing. Our current economic system has consistently lifted large numbers of people out of poverty historically, and is still doing it today. We should at least give it a go for seven more generations.
That's not to say we should do nothing, but large overhauls seem uncalled for given the data.
> Unfortunately a solid number of these things would rely on the moral equivalent of slavery.
Weird conclusion to jump to. GP did not suggest grocery stores staffed under threat of jail time anywhere.
Better public transit benefits everyone. Better urban design favoring walkable neighborhoods benefits everyone. Better zoning allowing neighborhood shops at street level benefits everyone.
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OTOH, if being a cashier at the 7-11 paid $100k/yr in hazard pay, I'm sure you could find people willing to work there. the only question is where that money comes from.
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My context is Canada where getting killed at work wouldn't been an issue. In the context I'm speaking about it would likely drive opportunity in low income neighborhoods.
Canada also have horrific city planning, so when I say people need to travel far I mean they need to spend up to 3 hours in some major (major for us) cities just to get groceries.
The US is a whole other can of worms, I don't know how to solve those problems. I'm also not as familiar with the nuances.
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>Our current economic system has consistently lifted large numbers of people out of poverty historically, and is still doing it today.
Debatable.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2316730121
>We should at least give it a go for seven more generations.
Are you being sarcastic? Underclasses and the declining classes are both on the verge of revolt. Seven generations of status quo won’t occur. That’s a fantasy of someone who does not understand the problems severity.
> No one wants to work in these neighborhoods because they are invariably awful
Yeah, no kidding. But why are they awful to begin with? I'd hazard that it's because families have been asleep at the wheel in teaching their children to be good citizens. The change for something like this comes bottom-up, not top-down.
You could try to boil it down to economics, but that's misguided. The markets are a terrible tutor of morality and accountability.
Fix the families, fix the society. Hold parents accountable. Teach morality in the schools. It's not slavery to do that. You're not harming anyone by teaching children to have a modicum of respect for their communities, elders, authority figures or eachother.
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>Our current economic system has consistently lifted large numbers of people out of poverty historically, and is still doing it today.
Debatable.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2316730121
>We should at least give it a go for seven more generations.
Are you being sarcastic? Underclasses and the declining classes are both on the verge of revolt. Seven generations of status quo won’t occur. That’s a fantasy of someone who does not understand the problem.
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There's other options than slavery.
We could provide better public transportation so that people could more easily travel to the grocers.
We could provide incentives for grocery stores to open in underserved areas.
> Our current economic system has consistently lifted large numbers of people out of poverty historically, and is still doing it today.
I think you mean China's economic system, which was in turn based on the practices of the USSR. China's economic system is lifting millions out of poverty, but western systems are systematically dragging people into it. Poverty in the US has never been lower than it was in 1973. Since then, poverty in China decreased by about 85%.
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Not to mention, if you rat on your parents and get yanked into a group home, your experience is very likely the same or worse as it would be at home, and growing up, you know kids who this happened to and more or less have proof as to why you don't talk about it. I certainly saw this happen to people I knew, one of them lived with us for awhile and my folks arranged for her to live with a relative, which allowed them to really make it in life instead of being stuck in the system. Weirdly, after some initial trouble that looked impossible to overcome, it was very simple to get them placed into our home, and, very simple to get them in with a relative. Most of that was the workings of the social worker assigned to them, who was hard to reach out to, and very clearly over worked.
Basically, there has to be a better intervention than just taking people's children away, which certainly keys into your points.
I'd take it further to the point where, the poverty line is re-evaluated per locality, and inflation needs to be accurately reported, and with it the tax brackets as required by law. Then we need to dump the tax burden completely off the lowest earners, along with their requirement to file taxes at all. Then, we need to re-evaluate the bottom tiers to ramp in slowly to help eliminate welfare traps. It'd probably be a good idea, additionally, to no longer tax things like unemployment/workmen's comp/disability/social security/etc, for similar reasons. Reporting taxes itself is a burden all its own, and it negatively affects people who already struggle with math.
Also, something that isn't currently done, and certainly should be done, is to create interactions between the kids who have poor situations with the kids that have good situations. My elementary school had a 'buddy' program, where the older kids would hang out in a structured way with the younger kids. I think it'd go a long way in terms of support to have a system where kids from the good side of town interact with kids from the bad side of town in that way, and to make it a K-12 program. You additionally get the side product of the kids who have better situations being able to socialize with, and therefore have empathy for, kids in bad situations, and real empathy at that, not "spend some more tax money" empathy, actual boots on the ground empathy, person to person.
I had a lot of what you're talking about in your last paragraph in our Air Cadet program. I was exposed to a lot of different people, both adult volunteers and peers, from different walks of life. It had a really positive impact on my life.
I'd love it if the government would throw resources at the problem, though. People act as if we're already flushing huge amounts of cash down the toilet of socialized benefits, but the fact is that the government has been extremely laissez-faire for decades. The midcentury boom was characterized by extensive intervention and public spending. There are much worse ways combat poverty than simply giving people public works jobs building the houses they need. Even direct cash transfers massively reduce the burden of poverty.
That's because Canada has safety nets for people. They have affordable healthcare and places to turn to if you're out of work and need assistance. It's because Canada is a compassionate society. It doesn't take this down right mean attitude of a "f-u" you're poor because it's your fault.
I think it's a compassionate society only when compared to the United States. Not if you compare it to a place like France, Germany or the Nordics. Those places have safety nets that Canadians would find unbelievably generous.
I'm 2 generations from immigrants on one side, 2 from pioneers and 1 from blue-collared work on the other. I wish more people could empathize with those who struggle within poverty as it is an incredibly hard row to hoe, not just physically, but also mentally.
I think a lot of people take for granted what an impact a small amount of money, or the lack thereof, has on a person's ability to thrive and contribute to their community, and how much its impact on a person's mental health contributes to hopelessness and often ultimately substance abuse.
I do like your thoughts on things the government could change. Frankly, though, I actually think they know these things but have perverse incentives to keep the population stratified. This country would financially crumble without the abuse of those in poverty for every one of those 7 generations, if not more.
I think managing this pool of exploitable resources is actually a primary component of most govs immigration strategies.
I'm really surprised that you consider it a "sacrifice" to help others. Because when "others" are doing well, I'm doing better too.
Give a job or a good life to anybody and you'll see, they'll just be better. Most of the poor/unemployed people are not like that because they choose to but because they had more hurdles to pass and ultimately were more at risk to fail. And it's not because some made it that it proves that the others should have made it too (survivor bias)...
You're just being obtuse. The topic is about spending resources in an attempt to achieve a goal. You can't just say "whatever we spend just makes people's lives better so it's worth it". There's a very real cost involved, and a very real effectiveness of spending that cost.
To put it to extremes as an example, if we're spending $1 per person to give them a 99% chance of living a better life, that's a much different situation than if we're spending $1 million per person to give them a 1% chance of living a better life. That million dollars per person could have otherwise funded countless other programs which may have had a better positive affect on the population. You can't just say "well others are doing better when we spend that money so it's worth it" with no other thought given.
> The topic is about spending resources in an attempt to achieve a goal.
I don't think that's the topic at all.
I grew up in a high-ACE environment. Money was mostly not the problem, and to the extent that it was, relatively small amounts were what made the difference.
If anything, tackling these problems would result in massive savings. One of the core points of this is that Alex's childhood resulted in life-long impairments: lower education, lower economic productivity, higher personal and societal costs. That costs us both directly (lower output, lower taxes) and indirectly.
So the question I'd like everybody to sit with: If it would be cheaper long-term, why aren't we already solving these problems? Who benefits, and how, if we keep creating Alexes?
Almost all of these calculations work out extremely in favor of just giving the poor money. It's expensive to be poor, and not just for them. They cost more in healthcare, crime, and other support systems. Literally just giving all the homeless cheap housing for free is by far the better option if you actually pay attention to the numbers. The same is abundantly clear for free education. But we can't, because we like the suffering. That's it: Americans like it when other people are suffering. We like it so much that we're willing to suffer ourselves just so that those other people can suffer even more.
To a lesser extent, there's also the Boomer Trolley Problem: if you divert a trolley onto a track wherein nobody dies, how is that fair to all the people who it's already killed!?
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If parent is obtuse, so are you. The topic is clearly not entirely contained in "spending resources in an attempt to achieve a goal", if how you do it can either be understood as a "sacrifice" or something else entirely (though, to you, it might, if you don't care about the difference).
There is a cost that can be measured in money. There is an outcome that can be measured in a variety of ways. And then there is also different ways of how we think about something, that definitely informs what we do and how.
You're always "spending resources", even when you decide not to spend time and money: in effect, you decide to expend some people's lives.
Is it effective?
Why is it right for you that the starting point should be "we spend nothing", and then "we spend on one action only if it is proven it is effective", and not "we spend everything to help others", and then "we stop spending only if it is proven it is ineffective"?
(And before anyone makes a reverse Godwin point by shouting "communism!", reminder what the taxation rates in Nordic countries are: Denmark 55.56%, Finland 51.25%, Iceland 46.22%, Norway 47.2% and Sweden 57%. And these are not khmer-rouge hellholes where nobody can be rich and people are beaten into submission by an overwhelming state.)
I dunno as someone who grew up with relatives who have been trapped in these cycles, I do think some of it is a choice. I realize people are affected by all kinds of things, but when things are given to you and you have no interest, it's hard to see that as anything but what it is.
But of course, it's important to help people who are down; but being poor does not absolve you of all self responsibility.
I fully agree. OP also ignores the compounded returns. If you lift a person out of poverty you immediately set their children up for better outcomes.
Interesting. Would you agree that not everyone is the same? How about that not everyone is a "good person" by nature?
Why? State funded social programs are funded by taxes, I pay money so these programs exist. How would I feel better in any way? I certainly do not.
>Give a job or a good life to anybod
This is beyond the capacity of almost all people. I don't even have any idea what you are thinking of.
>Most of the poor/unemployed people are not like that because they choose to
Simply not true. Being willing, but unable to work is extremely rare. They just do not like the work they would have to do, which I don't begrudge them for I wouldn't do that work either if the state was paying my rent and my food. But pretending that somehow they can't do basic jobs is simply nonsense.
>The conclusion of this data presentation is that so of these people are our collective responsibility, and I just wasn't convinced.
That conclusion came out of left field for me. He started off saying these certain adverse events affect you in adulthood. So the logical conclusion would be:
Be involved parents, give your kids a quiet place to study, don't have a drug problem as a parent, don't tolerate bullying, don't let your kid fall behind and be held back in school, don't let your kid do things that will get him suspended, don't shoot people in front of kids.
The vast majority of these are about good parenting. I would not describe that as a "collective responsibility," though, rather an individual civic duty.
I do think the trend towards single parent and dual income homes makes all these things harder for parents. Clearly standard of living issues from lack of real income growth effectively filter down through parents into more of these adverse events.
Exactly, and I've always said the same thing about murderers. Why should we pay for police to catch murderers when the murderers could just not murder? This seems like a matter of individual, rather than collective responsibility. If they don't murder, it is better for us, better for them, and better for their victims. Why should we have to protect the victims of murderers when murderers could simply not kill people?
Without the sarcasm now, the victims of bad parents are no different than the victims of any other crime. Yes, it may be the parents' fault that their child has a bad life just as it is a murderer's fault that his victims die, but that hardly justifies it happening. A child cannot choose their parents any more than you can choose not to be the victim of a crime. It seems obvious to me that, as a society, we should protect the vulnerable from those who might harm them.
It would be better for society if someone inclined to murder did not. Police do not protect the victim of murder -- they are dead already.
Your view appears to say "society" (the police?) should "protect" children from their own parents, if they are deemed "bad"? The line for police intervention should probably not include "living in a bad neighborhood" or "being poor". Those strategies are tried pretty often by evangelicals who steal poor children from vulnerable countries/populations, yet are perceived as bad by most people.
If the fault is with the parents then isn't it just as likely with the grandparents? or great grandparents? and so on down the line?
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We have largely moved away from anything so crass as holding parents responsible
Do you realize that having the time and resources for those things is a privilege that many in poverty don't have?
Of course! Poor children are innocent victims. But once they turn 18 and start having children, it's time those adults pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and their deprived childhoods don't matter anymore. Flawless logic.
Those in poverty do have that time. Number of hours worked increases with wealth. Share of people working more than one job has fell since the 90s, and never exceeded 7%. Average commute time (one way) has been 20 - 30 minutes since the 90s.
You're pushing rhetoric, not reality. Which is fine, but I won't let you lie.
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Yes, so the best thing to do for these children is to help bring their parents out of poverty.
And, critically, how much are we willing to collectively sacrifice to move that percentage of people in a positive direction?
This begs the question, at least to some extent. A big lesson of modern economics is that lots of things are win-win.
For example, if you could eliminate years spent in prison by spending more on K-12 education, that looks like a big sacrifice if you don't have the prison counterfactual to compare to, but it's potentially the cheaper path.
There are lots of interventions that show massive returns on investment in social welfare: a recent one has been extended availability of support for teenagers aging out of foster care, that takes their outcomes from something like "percentage who have become homeless within one year of their 18th birthday" from 70% down to 30%, and similar for arrest records and pregnancy among girls.
But, sadly, many people feel morally injured by spending money to proactively help adults who should be eating their own boots or whatever, and so it is less of a sacrifice to spend 5 times the money on jailing them instead.
Critically, the industries dedicated to putting people in jail and keeping them there are well-organized and politically-connected.
And the industries that could benefit from an expanded workforce are aligned with the pro-jail bloc for political gain.
Unfortunately it's not all economics. The prison system in the US exerts its power on the population using fear. The goal is to have a certain amount of people in prison, not to save money by getting them out. There are myriad ways to achieve reducing the prison population if that was the goal.
The argument of the data seems to say we should put resources towards those with more adverse experiences in childhood.
But I wonder, if you were optimizing for improving more people's lives in a more meaningful way with limited funds, would you come to the conclusion that you could do so by focusing on improving the lives of those in the no adverse experiences group because you might be able to get more "life improvement units" per dollar?
Most think resources should be targeted towards groups that "deserve it more" because they are "worse off", but it's interesting to think if your goal is to create more happiness or whatever per dollar, maybe the discussion would lead us to investing in groups that are not on the proverbial "bottom"
If you haven't already look up John Rawls he's probably the most famous person who has argued for helping the worst off.
Of course reading his books would be the best source but for now here's a link: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rawls/#JusFaiJusWitLibSoc
>Most think resources should be targeted towards groups that "deserve it more" because they are "worse off"
I believe there is behavioral game theory research that shows we are hard-wired for "fairness", even at the expense of a more optimal solution. E.g., Two subjects are given $100 to split and one was allowed to determine the split and the other the choice to accept it or both would go with nothing. A "$90/$10" split would often be rejected, even though the decider is giving up $10 and instead choosing nothing because of a sense of being slighted.
We're hard-wired for fairness toward ourselves than to others. That's why $90/$10 splits exist, but $10/$9 splits don't.
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It depends entirely on how you define utility.
Making rich people happier makes me more unhappy that it makes them more happy, so by your calculus it's not worth helping them.
See how quickly this line of reasoning runs aground?
Probably the whole concept of utility breaks down if we were to include schadenfreude like that
The idea that we're collectively responsible is abjectly untrue. The only people with responsibility are the parents because they are the only ones who are allowed to make decisions. That is unless the government wants to take their children away because they're "uninvolved." Not that a government employee or paid foster family is likely to be better.
The fact is that people with positive influences and role models will do better. It would be great if we could maximize that, but who chooses who is "better," one of the majority who didn't have those role models themselves?
I think this conclusion should encourage people to think about the current problem and how childhood can influence success in adulthood
> The conclusion of this data presentation is that so of these people are our collective responsibility, and I just wasn't convinced. I wish they had shown percentages with the visualization. They choose not to.
> I was underwhelmed by some points that seemed like they should have been more shocking. Look at the huge number of people in the many adverse experiences category who made it to college, and make a high salary. that was shocking! and look at the people who had no adverse experiences and still managed to end up poor. how does that happen?
What do you mean huge number of people in many adverse experiences making it to college? If you look at the graph from 2011 with highest qualification obtained. There's probably less than 1 in 8 of the many adverse effects that obtained a college degree, while about 50% of the no adverse effects kids did. Those are huge differences.
Did you expect that none of the many adverse effects kids make it to college? That's the nature of statistics with humans, yes some succeed but the probabilities are so much different.
> how much are we willing to collectively sacrifice to move that percentage of people in a positive direction?
Thats the wrong question -
How many adolescents and citizens of the future are we willing to sacrifice for our comfort today.
It will come back to byte us in the ass, condemn adolescents to life of poverty today, and get lost productivity, crime and political instability.
Push it far enough and get French Revolution
You have to balk when anyone says that anybody is the same person they were 24 years ago.
You have to disbelieve anyone who says they aren't a derivation of their previous person states. That's just physics.
Oh you have a comprehensive physical model of individual human behavior do you, in particular the decision making process of life-changing choices? I'd love to see the publication.
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This is too simplified. What is the state of a person? It's an object of infinite information, the question what aspect you focus on is very non-trivial.
You don't have to disbelieve anyone who says a certain aspect of a persons life typically has little influence on their later life. Another issue is that for some a particular event might be life changing and for some the same event might be a nothing burger, for no obvious reason.
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Sounds like homeopathy more than physics.
You have like zero molecules left in your body from 10 years ago. If you are worried about physics, the most important consideration is your diet.
And are you really a derivation of your state, or of the things that happen to you? The guys who were drafted into war in Vietnam and then got killed there, was there anything about them that would have made a difference to their cruel fate? If we go by this philosophy, the most import decisions are when you were born, where, and into what environment.
For example if you want a house, you should have timed your birth to 30 years ago.
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A big part of what makes a person is their unique collection of experiences.
You can be the same person but different because of those experiences.
Whether it counts as a collective sacrifice would sort of depend how it balances against the benefits of living among a population with a lower desparate/safe ratio. It may well be a collective investment instead.
In every society, taxes and government are the lens used to focus collective social responsibility and direct actions that will benefit the society as a whole, and individually. Even in a collectivist society, some work is done to benefit a small group of individuals when it's deemed necessary by the society. And in an individualist society, effort is also undertaken to benefit the whole.
The questions you pose are good questions, but they can't be answered by this presentation. Even if you were to ask a much more "fundamental" or "simple" question, like "How much should we sacrifice for sanitation?", the answer is not clear, as it will vary by location and other criteria.
This presentation can't answer the questions, but it can cause us to ask them. Let's remember these questions and take them forward into our local communities, and try to focus more on local solutions, and less on one-size-fits-all.
This highlights what Judea Pearl's causal framework gets at: Pr(Y|X) versus Pr(Y|do(X)), where we can set early.
Causality isn't easy to establish. Correlation is insufficient.
Note, too, I am unfamiliar with the literature cited by the Infoanimatedgraphic.
> And, critically, how much are we willing to collectively sacrifice
If we bring back wealth taxes "we" probably wouldn't have to sacrifice much if anything (not sure if your net worth is > 20 million)
Yeah, agree with you that if they used percentages - it would have been much easier to see - disagree with you about what their data is implying. Think it clearly shows that those with less adverse experiences have more success in life.
Took another look at their data visualizations, and yeah, look at 2013, for the people with no adverse experiences, it looks like at least 40% make $45k more, while those with multiple adverse experiences it looks something like 15%.
And, in 2021, it's harder to see (because looks like people's income rises as they get older), but it looks like for no-adverse experiences, good 50% are making over $60k, while maybe 30% for multiple adverse experiences.
... and actually, do agree with one aspect, it is interesting that the older they get, the less the differences in income and other life attributes are. Maybe it just means that for people who had difficult childhoods, it takes more time to get past all the early obstacles, and live a more stable life.
The classic answer to that question would be to move to a more Scandinavian model.
I took these types of surveys in junior high. All my friends did heroin and were prostitutes. (it was funny). I wouldn't trust a survey like that more than toilet paper and tea leaves. The truly horrifying thing is adults thinking the data is real and making decisions.
How would you interpret the results then? That there's a correlation between lying in the survey and doing worse in life?
This isn’t a jr high survey. This is a study of select individuals over decades.
I had very similar takeaways, you said it well!
The person in the story might has well have been me
- I repeated 7th grade
- Was suspended Multiple times
- Lived in 11 different houses
- Lived with a teacher for two months
- Good friend murdered
- Mom of good friend murdered by their Father
- Gnarly parents divorce with police etc regularly
I joined the AF because I read a book about John Boyd and figured I could pursue technology that I saw in the movies so I got out
What could the govt have done? The question is incoherent.
Are they going to make my toxic narcissistic parents stop being that way?
No, I needed a family and community to take care of me. So unless you believe government = collective community then there’s nothing the govt can do but stop letting businessmen and conservatives keep standing on our necks
I mean you did join a government organization that provided a (more or less) guaranteed job and training.
Also, this is a genuine question, how much of the chaos in your life was due to financial hardship? Do you think just having more money would have lessened the chaos?
It’s far from a guaranteed anything actually but I understand your point that we can have a robust government that is useful as a bridge to the middle class - and that’s exactly what it is in a lot of cases
Impossible to tell unfortunately but it doesn’t seem like it in my case
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>The questions that remain are, how many people's lives could we improve and by how much? And, critically, how much are we willing to collectively sacrifice to move that percentage of people in a positive direction?
What exactly would we be "collectively sacrificing"?
Something like, 1% higher taxes?
Same taxes, but the use of some of the public money currently massively wasted in all kinds of endless sinks?