

Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better - david927
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article5859108.ece?print=yes
The Sunday Times review of the book 
"The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better" by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
======
bokonist
The northern cities of U.S. were very unequal in the early 1900's, but had
much lower murder rates than today. In Baltimore and Philadelphia mansions
inhabited by old money sat blocks away from immigrant tenements. Yet the
murder rates were a fraction of the rates today.

London in 1900 had a much lower crime rate than London today, despite being
far more unequal. (
[http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111....](http://www.parliament.uk/commons/lib/research/rp99/rp99-111.pdf)
)

Crime is the default state when you combine low class people with lax law
enforcement (and by low class, I mean the cultural attributes of the lower
classes. A rich drug dealer is still low class. A grad student living on ramen
is not low class). In general, the countries with more low class people will
be more unequal. But if you just give the low class people McMansions with
pools, they do not become any less violent (
<http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/us/09housing.html> ). Conversely, if you
take an unequal society with a huge lower class, and just get rid of the
middle and upper classes, you get Zimbabwe.

Edit: If you're going to downvote a well reasoned argument that provides
supporting evidence, you better post your own counter argument.

~~~
fhars
The thing people reacted negatively to was probably you unfounded claim about
the causal relationship between lax law enforcement and criminality. Just look
at the US which has a law enforcement that is ridiculipously rigid by western
standards (IIRC an embarrassing 1% of the adult population is stowed away in
jail) and still has considerably higher crime rate than many european
countries, and especially the more egalitarian european countries.

~~~
bokonist
In the U.S. a variety of factors caused law enforcement in the major cities to
break down in the late 60's and 70's (factors include: supreme court rulings,
the great society, demagoguing politicians, lawsuits). As a result, crime shot
upwards. In the 80's and 90's there was a backlash, and law enforcement
increased significantly (Rudi Guiliani, etc). As a result, a lot of criminals
ended up in jail, and the crime rate dropped.

The paradox of lax law enforcement is that in the long run you have a much
higher rate of imprisonment because lax law enforcement creates more
criminals. Conversely, Singapore, with its ultra-strict enforcement has very
low crime.

In terms of policing, America is like the awful parent who alternates between
allowing their kid to drink and get in trouble, and then every once in a while
throws a fit and beats the kid. The recipe for good law enforcement is
consistency and nipping problems in the bud. If you've ever studied American
law enforcement, you'll find it operates in the exact opposite manner.

The crime rate differential between the U.S. and Europe goes back a long time.
If you really want to understand it, I highly recommend this book:
[http://books.google.com/books?id=NGBLAAAAMAAJ&printsec=f...](http://books.google.com/books?id=NGBLAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=crime+in+America+and+the+police)
Written in 1920, it barely needs any updating today. And what is the primary
causes of the difference in crime rate? President Taft sums it up the best:
"It is not much to say, that the administration of criminal law in this
country is a disgrace to our civilization, and that the presence of crime and
fraud, which is greatly in excess of that in the European countries, is due
largely to the failure of the law and its administration to bring criminals to
justice."

------
bokonist
If the author's hypothesis is true, then if the state grants the lower class a
level of material well being equivalent to the middle or upper classes, then
then social indicators should improve. Unfortunately, we have tried this
already, and it did not work. See this article about Antioch, CA, where the
welfare state gave the underclass McMansions with swimming pools, yet crime
did not abate ( <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/09/us/09housing.html> ). The
same thing happened in Memphis
(<http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200807/memphis-crime> ). Or in Britain read
this article about violence and drug abuse (
[http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/world/europe/10britain.htm...](http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/10/world/europe/10britain.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&sq=poverty&st=cse&scp=55)
). Note that the subjects of the articles are already taken care of by the
welfare state. What more should we give them, so that they will stop
committing crimes?

~~~
lutorm
Perhaps it's not a matter of giving them pools but rather giving them
opportunity?

~~~
bokonist
The crime problem needs to be solved first, or employers will simply never
return to the burned out areas. As one super market in Detroit says (
<http://www.detroitblog.org/?paged=2> ):

A day in the life of Tom Boy Super Market consists partly of stopping people
from robbing the place blind. “There’s so many days when I don’t do nothing,”
Jitu says. “My main job is to run the office and I don’t have to be here, but
I have to come anyway. You don’t want to have, like, one person here, and then
half the store is gone. We have to have so many people. They don’t have to do
nothing, but they have to be here.”

------
pg
"By reducing income inequality, they can improve the health and wellbeing of
the whole population."

In the short term, possibly. What they forget is the extent to which technical
innovation is driven by economic inequality.

The UK already tried this experiment in the middle of the 20th century. That's
why there's no Silicon Valley there. At the time companies like Intel and
Apple and Microsoft were being founded in the US, the highest tax rate in
Britain was 98%. It wasn't worth trying to start a startup, and people didn't.

<http://www.paulgraham.com/inequality.html>

~~~
david927
It's not true. Skype comes from Sweden which has a famously high top tax rate.
The experiment is being done everywhere, everyday, in all 193 countries, and I
don't think we should measure the success of a society by the technical
innovation it produces.

Further, you don't need a high tax rate. Slovakia is currently the country
with the least wealth disparity and is a happy, healthy EU country with a
U.S.* / European-like tax rate. The individual income tax rate in Slovakia is
a flat 19%.

I don't think anyone is talking about "punish the winners" but about providing
true equal opportunity. No one is talking about making everyone finish at the
same point, but truly having the same starting line. What Slovakia and the
rest of Europe get for their taxes includes universal healthcare and a free
(or very low cost) university system -- and those two things alone can go a
long way toward a more equitable, and happier, society.

* U.S. tax rates appear lower but when you combine federal, state, local and property taxes, it is similar to most European nations.

~~~
pg
Bad example. Though Skype's founders were from Sweden, the company was based
in Luxembourg, largely for tax reasons:

[http://www.luxembourgforict.lu/en/success-
stories/skype/inde...](http://www.luxembourgforict.lu/en/success-
stories/skype/index.html)

And while I agree entirely that equality of opportunity is the right sort to
aim for, the article we're commenting on was in fact advocating not merely
equality of opportunity, but equality of result.

~~~
david927
Yeah, bad example. But it really doesn't change the point. Companies skirt out
of the US for tax reasons too. Did innovation happen in Sweden? Yes. Is Sweden
suffering from the loss of rich people who don't want high taxes. Not at all.
It's a richer country than America, for starters, the range of social services
is amazing, you can walk home at 2am and not be afraid, etc.

And I disagree about the article. Think about it: most people are roughly the
same. If they really have similar starting points, they'll generally have
similar ending points. Again, Slovakia doesn't "soak the rich". It's about
providing the mechanisms to avoid the rich getting richer and poor getting
poorer. It's about providing the tools for true economic and social mobility.
That used to be the American dream; now it's only a dream since the reality is
quite different.

~~~
pg
It doesn't change your claim, but it now means you're down from 1 to 0 pieces
of evidence for it. If people start lots of startups in Sweden despite the
high taxes, what are they?

I don't think most people are the same. And that is a topic I know a lot
about, since I am in the business of trying to identify the exceptional ones.
I think the distribution of ambition follows a power law, like the
distribution of any talent. So if you give people equal opportunity, you'll
have a power law distribution of wealth.

~~~
david927
Ah, but in a way it was a great example, because while the innovation still
happened in Sweden (regardless of the tax base now), it was real innovation,
disruptive and tectonic shifting. Whereas 99% of the stuff that comes out of
the valley is cotton candy that wouldn't be missed if it went away tomorrow.
There it's about "make something people want," not "make something people
need."

In fact, it's a bit like the film industry. Yes, most films in the cinemas of
the world are American films. And most of these are fun amusement despite
being idiotic. But I wouldn't make the statement that the fact that "Angels &
Demons" is an American film is an indicator that America is on the right
track, and that's exactly what you seem to be saying: Twitter and Facebook are
American companies, so America is on the right track. I know you're a Web 2.0
VC, and you see the world through such goggles, but I don't think it's a
standard indicator of a functional, healthy society.

As for your second statement, sure, Bratislava has its millionaires. Wealth
distribution is always power law to some extent (but not because of people,
but because certain talent aspects are always more heavily rewarded depending
on the culture, time period, etc). What I'm talking about is exacerbating
that. A good example is the Ivy League system, which takes very bright kids
and very rich kids and mixes them up and gives them both the same degree.
Again, it's about mechanisms that make the rich richer and poor poorer and
eliminating those to whatever degree possible.

~~~
oconnor0
I'm curious. What "disruptive and tectonic shifting" developments have come
out of Sweden?

~~~
david927
Skype

------
lutorm
The Economist had an article a while back that showed that, the "American
dream" notwithstanding, social mobility in the US is lower than in most
European nations.

Inequality of outcome leads to inequality of opportunity because the
conditions people grow up in are conditional on the income of their parents.
This is especially strong in the US due to things like minimum wage being
below living wage so low-income parents work several jobs and have less time
to interact with their children, school funding being based on local taxes,
and colleges' need-based financial aid not keeping pace with tuition
increases, to name a few effects.

So people from a low-income background have the deck stacked against them.
It's not that no one can make it, but it's much more difficult. And that means
that the nation as a whole is not tapping into the full talent pool. People
who could have started startups are instead stuck in low-wage jobs because of
their background, and that's going to have a negative effect on the economy
because it's not tapping into the full potential of the workforce.

~~~
anamax
> This is especially strong in the US due to things like minimum wage being
> below living wage

No one pays more than a job is "worth", so a minimum wage simply means that
jobs that are worth less don't exist.

Folks learn to become valuable. Working is one way for them to do so. But, if
they never get that first job, they never learn.

If you think that folks should have more money than their labor is worth, give
them your money (or tax money). Pricing them out of the labor market is bad
for everyone.

~~~
david927
I know it seems like minimum wage would price workers out of the market, but
in reality it tends not to work that way. For example, McDonalds doesn't price
a hamburger based on costs, but the best price point for a variety of factors,
where raising the price will tend to lose profit. And the headcount also is
fairly inflexible. So what gets hit? The shareholders wallets.

In other words, raising minimum wage doesn't mean Bob won't get a job, it just
means Betty won't get a second yacht.

~~~
anamax
> For example, McDonalds doesn't price a hamburger based on costs, but the
> best price point for a variety of factors, where raising the price will tend
> to lose profit.

McDonalds doesn't sell hamburgers at a loss. As its costs increase, the price
where it maximizes its profits is affected.

> In other words, raising minimum wage doesn't mean Bob won't get a job

That's simply wrong. Things that can't be produced profitably aren't produced
voluntarily. There are lots of goods that aren't produced because they can't
be produced profitably. The folks who would have been employed producing them
are either unemployed or doing something else, displacing someone else from
that job.

Of course, good people are welcome to pay folks more than the value of their
labor, price things below cost, or set their prices for reasons other than
profit maximization. If their economic theories are correct, everything will
work out well for them and they'll have significant economic advantages over
folks who do otherwise. Those advantages will cause economic harm to said
other folks.

Yet, good people don't actually act on their convictions. Instead, they try to
coerce others to act on those convictions. Curious.

~~~
david927
> Things that can't be produced profitably aren't produced voluntarily

If for good x to be produced profitably, it needs for the human labor
component to work for less than livable wage, then it shouldn't be produced.
Period.

There are a great many examples of differences in minimum wage (even within
the U.S., the minimum wage has gone up and down) and I assure you, an
Armageddon of unemployment does not ensue when the minimum wage is raised.

Your "good people don't act on their convictions" argument is plain silly,
anamax. Listen, there are rules for everything. If we don't "coerce"
businesses not to put toxins in kids toys and lead in drinking water, they
will. If we don't say, "you can't economically rape your employees," they
will. Look at what happened in the late 19th century: company town, company
stores, child labor. We keep learning; we keep forgetting. It makes me sick.

------
anamax
I find it interesting that these comparisons often focus on income and not
wealth.

"In 1998, for example, the richest 1 per cent of Americans took home 14 per
cent of total income, while in Sweden the figure was only about 6 per cent.
Wealth concentration is another matter, however. The richest 1 per cent of
Americans owned about 21 per cent of all wealth in 2000. Some European nations
have higher concentrations than that. In Sweden—despite that nation’s
egalitarian reputation—the figure is 21 per cent, exactly the same as for the
Americans. And if we take account of the massive moving of wealth offshore and
off-book permitted by Sweden’s tax authorities, the richest 1 per cent of
Swedes are proportionately twice as well off as their American peers."

And, income inequality doesn't always predict poverty the one one might think.

"What about poverty, not the same thing as inequality? Because inequality is
greater in America, relative poverty is by definition also higher. But
absolute poverty rates look different. If we take absolute poverty to be
living on the actual cash sum equivalent to half of median income for the
original six nations of the EU, we see that many western European countries in
2000 had a higher percentage of poor citizens than the US; not only
Mediterranean countries, but also Britain, Ireland, France, Belgium, the
Netherlands, Finland and Sweden. Unemployment benefits in the US, often
portrayed as derisory in the European media, are actually higher than in many
European nations. Greece, Britain, Italy and Iceland spend less than the US on
unemployment, measured per capita."

(Note that the US seems to have lower unemployment rates so higher per-capita
spending combined with lower per-capita rates produces even higher per-
unemployed-person spending. Yes, I realize that spending doesn't translate
into benefits, that administration sucks up a lot of money, but that's a
separable problem.)

[http://www.prospect-
magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10...](http://www.prospect-
magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10746)

------
IsaacSchlueter
The author fails to explore the possibility that perhaps "doing well" leads to
"equality", rather than the other way around.

Or, perhaps "doing well" and "equality" are both caused by something else.

------
anamax
Which way do people move?

Which way do smart people move?

~~~
euccastro
Care to elaborate?

~~~
pg
I think what he means is that the real test of how good things are in various
countries is net immigration.

~~~
wheels
I think that's what he meant too, but it's not a very good metric since it's
only sampling from the maxima. Immigrants are typically either at the extreme
high or low end of social strata. The bulk of people in the middle are neither
desperate nor socially mobile enough to immigrate.

~~~
anamax
The fact that the perceived cost of moving (or the benefits of staying)
exceeds the perceived benefit from moving does not imply that the perceived
benefits don't exist.

Note also that the benefits and costs may be on entirely different dimensions.
It's not uncommon for folks to stay because of friends and family yet consider
moving because of "opportunity".

I think that that example captures something interesting. The benefits from
moving are typically far more speculative than the benefits of staying put.

I do think that folks who move are somewhat different, albeit not different
enough to argue that their choices are useless in determining what non-movers
actually prefer.

However, I put in the "smart people" question because people aren't fungible.

Note that the headline claim is that "more equal societies do better",
suggesting that "do better" depends on "more equal". Maybe that's true, but
it's not the only factor. A less equal society that attracts more productive
people could easily do better than more equal societies which lose said
people.

The question can easily come down to envy vs greed - do you care what other
people have or do you care what you have. Me, I care about what I have.

I find it interesting that the envy-driven folks go to such lengths to argue
that equality has no costs. That would be a very surprising result, as
everything else seems to have tradeoffs. (In engineer-speak, "good, fast,
cheap, pick two",)

That's not to say that the benefits of a particular level of equality don't
exceed the costs, but to point out that "it's all good" usually indicates a
position that isn't as strong as asserted.

~~~
euccastro
The original article doesn't claim income equality is the _only_ factor in
wellbeing.

 _A less equal society that attracts more productive people could easily do
better than more equal societies which lose said people._

That assumes, amongst other things, that productive people will flock to where
they are best paid regardless of other factors, and that more unequal
societies will pay them best, and that the impact of such migrations is an
overriding factor in the overall productivity of a nation. For you that's
probably common sense, in my experience it's utter BS. That's why studies like
the OP are necessary.

~~~
anamax
Actually, it just assumed some difference along those lines.

> more unequal societies will pay them best

Nope. I just assumed that more unequal societies that do pay them better would
have a better chance of attracting them.

All other factors are never the same, but it seems absurd to think that
productive people place no weight on being paid better. After all, non-
productive people place weight on being paid better.

> That's why studies like the OP are necessary.

I don't see how such studies can find anything non-trivial.

Note that there are specialization and globalization effects. For example,
suppose that country A attracts the inventors and is unequal and country B is
equal and attracts the drones. (This isn't far-fetched - there's little
benefit to being a "tall-poppy" in B and being a drone in A really sucks.) If
country B builds the stuff that country A invents, both benefit and have a
better standard of living than either by itself.

Suppose further that concentrating inventors has some effect on their
productivity.

Note that A could easily end up worse off than B, despite being crucial to B's
success.

------
mynameishere
Rome wasn't "equal". The British Empire wasn't "equal". America stills rules
most of the world. It isn't "equal". If China someday rules the world, you
better believe it won't involve an excess of "equality". The research talks
about chronic stress and obesity. Guess what? That's just not a significant
matter in the grand historical sense.

Can we _please_ drop the Oprah-Winfrey view of the world? Please?

~~~
zouhair
Which of the countries you cite is doing good?

~~~
pg
All of them did huge amounts of good along with whatever bad they did. The
Romans (to take an uncontroversially ancient example) were brutal philistines,
but can you say the _pax romana_ was not a net win?

------
ivankirigin
Poverty is often defined by the lowest quintile. By that definition there is
always poverty. That's bullshit.

We should measure a society by how the poorest live and by the heights
achieved. If the problems of the poor are about obesity and not hunger, we're
doing really well.

If you have a society where the capable have an incentive to create, and do,
you're doing well. If they're considering making a tax shelter or moving, you
have problems.

That creative force is what makes it so people on the bottom worry about
obesity and not hunger. Incentives for unequal distribution of goods raise the
general level of wealth.

A public policy should care a lot more about general wellbeing than emotional
wellbeing.

~~~
lutorm
If the problems of the poor are about obesity, because all they can afford to
eat is HFCS-laden industrially processed food that's just cheap calories, that
definitely does _not_ mean we are doing really well.

~~~
ivankirigin
That's not a problem of affordability, but of education. Vegetables, beans,
and rice are cheaper than processed food.

That's just a guess though. I don't know why poor people eat junk. Perception
of cheapness might be a big part of it. Decadent flavors and bright, colorful
packaging also help, I'm sure.

The food topic is really just a metaphor. I could give a similar example with
education. If you the problem is the dropout rate of school, and not that your
kids need to work on your farm to make ends meet, you're doing OK.

Clearly my standard is a bit extreme in western contexts, but not so much with
respect to the rest of the world or recent history.

------
kiba
I believe the authors is confusing correlation and casuation.

Do you see any rich hacker belittling the little poor startup guys? I think it
is more like the rich, successful hackesr is seen as a community resource.
They constantly day in and day out give advices to startup newbies on what to
do and how to avoid their mistakes.

It is as if each hackers are expected to face obstacles, learn, and then
eventually win.

Maybe the inequality problem is more of a cultural thing. Maybe it is about
how we deal with inequality? It is kinda like comparing the immigrants to
native Americans.

You know, the Vietnamese are famous for their nail saloon and their beef
noodles. The Italians specialize in Italian foods. Indian specialize in
computer programming.(Note, not all indians want to be programmer, etc)
Certainly the field of computer programming and the arts of nail were there
long before those immigrants came to America.

Do people rise up to the challenge and overcome poverty or do people hold your
head low and envy the rich?

Edit: I just realize that I am just trying to rationalize away the inequality.
However, I am still very worried about the potential solutions to this
problem.(Assuming it is indeed, correct.)

I know the effect of the mininum wage laws that was supposed to help the poor
have a damaging effect on upward social mobility of the working class.

I am very worried that this capped wage proposal would have undersirable
unintended consequences.

Perhap the solution to the inequality problem is to lower barrier of entry to
the poor such as reducing government red-tape and regulations allowing people
to start up business easier, as well reducing labor regulations to open up
jobs that were not previously availiable due to labor cartelization via unions
and occupational licensure.

~~~
inerte
Oh, c'mon... these guys are not your average armchair statiticians newbies.
One of the authors:

"He studied economic history at the London School of Economics before training
in epidemiology and is Professor Emeritus at the University of Nottingham
Medical School and Honorary Professor at University College London."

The other:

"Kate Pickett is a Senior Lecturer at the University of York and a National
Institute for Health Research Career Scientist. She studied physical
anthropology at Cambridge, nutritional sciences at Cornell and epidemiology at
Berkeley before spending four years as an Assistant Professor at the
University of Chicago."

Their board <http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/about/board> :

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_Scott_Cato> (Phd)

<http://www.shef.ac.uk/geography/staff/dorling_danny/> \- Danny Dorling was
educated at The University of Newcastle upon Tyne in Geography, Mathematics
and Statistics leading to a PhD in the Visualization of Spatial Social
Structure

[http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Author/AuthorPage/0,,1000074828,...](http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Author/AuthorPage/0,,1000074828,00.html)
\- gained a BA in Oriental Studies at Oxford, received a Harvard MBA before
returning to Scotland to manage the family paper mill business, transforming
it into a more open company, for which he was given the ‘Scottish Business
Achievement Award’ in 1998. His St Andrews PhD was on the subject of employee
ownership

<http://www.uel.ac.uk/ssmcs/staff/rustin-michael.htm>

Not saying the book is right, but I'll be damned if we have to teach
correlation/causation to _these_ people.

edited: The Wikipedia article on "Correlation does not imply causation" cites
a "a widely-studied example, (where) numerous _epidemiological_ studies
showed". Just a friendly reminder :)

~~~
ellyagg
Nevertheless. One issue is that the US probably has a much higher segment of
the population that's at least a standard deviation below average in IQ than
European nations do. I'd love to see Finland work with our IQ distribution.
Low IQ demographics cause a lot of problems.

~~~
lutorm
IQ scores are affected by education and training, so if the US has lower IQ
than European nations (a fact I have no idea if it's true) I would suspect
that's because of the differences in education (where education does not just
mean school). If you want to suggest there is a big genetic difference in the
two populations, I think you're going to need to cite some references there
before that's credible.

------
thras
Rephrased: Diversity sucks.

------
bkmrkr
I think we already tried this experiment ... Communism vs Capitalism

~~~
jerf
There's more to it than that. For context, I'm a little-l libertarian and
personally not overwhelmed by a great need for equality, but suppose we take
it as a given that this is a Good Thing and should be aimed for. There are a
lot of questions: When? At what cost? Who? And perhaps most importantly,
_how_?

Communism in practice boiled down to a three-fold plan: Take the money from
the rich and give it to the poor, let the government take over managing the
money now that there's no rich people to do it, and give the goverment
managers perks that turn them back into rich people in practice, if not on
paper. This is what you might call the simple approach, "naive" in the sense
that a simple algorithm is "naive".

It turns out to work absolutely terribly, of course, because it fails to take
into account higher order effects. _Of course_ with a first-order analysis, if
you take all the money in the world and spread it out equally to all people,
all people have the same amount of money! The problem is that the analysis
can't just end there, for reasons well explored elsewhere.

Perhaps there are smarter ways to do this. It's hard to know. But I am fairly
certain that whatever the smarter way is, it doesn't involve just taking money
from one person and giving it to another. That has been shown to be all kinds
of corrosive to society. (Somewhat ironic, as it is promoted as a cure.)

There are other approaches. We could take a long view of equality, listen to
the Singulatarians (even, or perhaps especially, the "weak" Sigulatarians),
realize that we're still in a transitional period of wealth generation and
that breaking our economies _now_ to spread wealth _now_ may be a terrible
idea, as opposed to letting the economies run with a bit of inequality now but
attacking the problems (either of inequality or the secondary/related problems
in the essay) with orders of magnitude more resources later. Perhaps later we
can or should trade economic efficiency for wealth equality, but we can't
afford that yet. The wealthiest country on the planet can't even afford that
choice for its own citizens, let alone share with the rest of humanity. Maybe
the "how" can only be answered in 30, 40, 50 years, and trying to do it now is
as stupid as setting up an interstate highway system in 1870.

Or maybe we recognize that rather than tearing rich people down, we should be
looking at how to bring poor people up without tearing anybody down. This is
possible, but only if you have the correct view of the economy as a non-zero-
sum game, which is unfortunately still "uncommon sense".

So, even if we do agree that equality is a desirable goal in and of itself, we
are _not_ constrained to take the stupid view of it and believe that we must
go with Communism. We could try smarter things, and realize that instant
success is not possible and any plan that promises it is therefore flawed. Of
course, this is predicated on a willingness for large swathes of the
population to think about second-order effects so the odds of this happening
are pretty low.

~~~
stcredzero
Equality of opportunity and social equality are the important factors.

I visited Ireland several years ago. I think it was Sligo where someone
pointed out a local millionaire's house. It was just another house on the row,
and the guy lived a quiet life and still went to the local pub. He didn't fear
his neighbors, and his neighbors weren't stressed out by his wealth, including
the chap who pointed all this out to me, who happened to be on the Dole!

I also note a marked difference between wait staff in Houston, Texas and
Cincinnati, Ohio. Waitresses and waiters seem to be much more servile in
Houston, whereas in Cincinnati, I was often simply asked what I wanted.
Houston is markedly more affluent as a whole, however.

I too think that the problem lies in an underclass that feels "captive." If
you are somehow inferior and underclass because of your _race_ then how in
heck are you going to escape? Also, the US has huge disparities in educational
opportunities. There's some kind of feedback with those disparities and
subcultures that devalue education. (Which seems to be spreading up the
socioeconomic ladder!)

Looking at countries that have very good equality of opportunity in terms of
relatively equal access to education, there does seem to be a higher level of
social cohesiveness. (One example would be Japan, where the education system
is highly standardized.)

I agree with your notion of bringing people up. I think that the best way of
doing this is by raising the level of education. But I doubt that very much
more than lip service and the opportunity to get more money from the
government have resulted from most of those initiatives.

