The research participants are in their late-30s now, which means they've had plenty of time to shape their own destinies. But we can clearly see that the experiences of their childhood had a huge effect on their financial situation as adults.
It also has an effect on virtually everything else in their lives."
You cannot infer the direction of causality from this data, i.e. that the traumatic experiences themselves cause the poorer outcomes. I remember reading about how in Chicago someone had noticed that kids who did better had more books at home, so they decided to give poor kids books. Certainly not a bad thing to do, but just giving them some books is not going to make them like the better off kids in all of the other (highly correlated) ways that they're different.
Just as an example, one of the traumatic factors they identify is if a kid had witnessed someone being shot. The wealthy kids are way less likely to see anyone get shot, because if people were regularly getting shot in their neighborhood, they would move. The poor kids' parents don't always have that option. In this case it could be the poverty itself, not the shooting that is causing the poor outcomes. But then you get into why the parents are poor in the first place, and there are many causes, but a lot of them get passed down to the next generation in one way or another.
I think witnessing someone being shot is a good metric because it is factual. Either you saw someone being shot or your didn't, no ambiguity there, and no matter where you live, someone being shot is someone being shot. Not like "uninvolved parents" and "bullying" which are open to interpretation.
This metric is also a proxy for living in a violent environment. It correlates with wealth, but it is also kind of the point. Children who lived in a wealthy environment are better off as adults in terms of income. It is not that obvious, as rich kids could simply burn through their family wealth.
It’s likely strongly subject to Goodheart’s Law, however. In other words, there are probably many things you could do to improve the goal (e.g. figure out how to keep kids from seeing the violence) without improving outcomes for these kids (because they remain just as poor)
That makes intuitive sense, but that's not enough. Many untrue things make intuitive sense, especially when it comes to poverty.
Is there any research that shows that having witnessed someone get shot affects future prospects INDEPENDENT of the factors that lead to the kid witnessing someone get shot?
> This metric is also a proxy for living in a violent environment.
Probably, probably not. The probabilities of witnessing someone being shot is extremely low in both environments. If amount of people who are living in violent environment is much lower, it may be that a person who witnessed someone being shot is more probable from a good environment.
If one feels unhappy about the causality link between a good childhood and a better life as an adult please remember that we are talking about statistical effects here. If more people who were bullied end up in unfortunate positions that doesn't imply direct causality, it implies that people whose live paths lead to bad places often had being bullied as a station on it.
There will always be the tail ends of the statistical function, so people who became phenomenal adults despite all hardships, but also people who had a good childhood and became utterly disfunctional adults. But if we think about devising utilitarian political measures knowing what "broadly" has an effect on people is useful. Ideally you discover small things that if changed would have huge positive downstream effects. E.g. if bullying would be shown to have a big impact on later lives, it could be justified to pick up more funds to prevent it, to help victims and/or to change the way schools work in order to minimize chances someone is being bullied. Bullying is just an example, one could also pick other triggers.
Hard disagree with utilitarian interventionism. It violates core liberal fundamentals. People have the right to be as involved of parents as they see fit, and to raise their children with values of their choosing. Economic and social outcomes are not universal moral values. The collective has no right to impose their utilitarian best-guess on the individual. People should have a right to reject them and raise illiterate children in forest school.
Free society is a liberal ecosystem, where participants are continually succeeding and failing. The authority required to mount a collective response to these inequalities is too susceptible to corruption, and represents injustice in its departure from liberalism. Not to mention that well-meaning interventions by federated authority have an abysmal track record.
> It violates core liberal fundamentals. People have the right to be as involved of parents as they see fit, and to raise their children with values of their choosing.
If that's "core liberal fundamentals," then maybe liberalism is, at heart, rotten. Your take on it certainly is. I don't respect a parent's "right" to neglect or mistreat their children. Society collectively is entitled (in fact, obliged) to intervene in harmful family situations.
That's not what liberalism is, though. Who are you citing here? What aspect of liberal philosophy entitles parents to treat children like their property? Parents don't own their children; liberal individualist property rights cannot apply to the treatment of human beings, who have their own rights.
Rather than any sort of liberalism, what you're espousing here is a form of deep pre-liberal conservatism, where children have no rights and are instead property of their patriarch, whose authority is absolute and arbitrary. How can you possibly believe that the government, with its myriad checks and balances, is too susceptible to corruption to intervene in family life, but that parents, whose power over their children should be absolutely unchecked in your view, cannot be corrupt? That they have an inalienable right to withhold education and socialization from their children; that this self-evidently corrupt and selfish desire is beyond reproach?
Liberalism as an ideology can be derived from two axioms:
1) All people are moral equals
2) There is no moral oracle
It follows from these that no person has a source of moral authority to impose their views on another. What gives you or anyone else the moral right to intervene in someone else's family, presumably by force, over their objections? This isn't a rhetorical question. I'm earnestly hoping for a clear answer.
Liberalism is the ideology responsible for our prosperity. Liberal literature is also pretty clear about what it is:
> Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. - Declaration of the Rights of Man - 1789
Centralized authority, no matter how well-meaning, has failed at every turn. Raising hateful, illiterate children injures no one else. More fundamentally, I think it's critical to separate your personal moral compass from a moral framework you are comfortable using force to impose on other people. The first step on the path to evil is thinking you know better.
> Liberalism as an ideology can be derived from two axioms
Those axioms don't really create a consistent or substantial ethical universe. If I'm a serial killer and I say, "don't worry, we're all moral equals. You're just as entitled to kill me as I am to kill you," then I'm not violating your first principle. And if you were to respond, "killing like that is simply wrong," you'd be violating your second principle and setting yourself up as a moral oracle.
The core of liberalism is not an underlying system of ethical axioms: Mill was both a liberal and a utilitarian, but you can just as easily argue against liberalism from a utilitarian standpoint—moreover, the position you're evincing here is liberal but anti-utilitarian. No, the unifying source of liberalism is the political status quo which produced it. The real champions of liberalism were the capital owners who stood to profit by it, and who had the influence to bring it about, ousting the aristocracy in the process. The idea that liberal hegemony is a moral triumph and not a political one is simply history being written by the victors.
> Liberalism is the ideology responsible for our prosperity.
It's more correct to say that liberalism and industrial prosperity were both products of the industrial revolution, rather than one being responsible for the other. Illiberal authoritarian powers like China and India are demonstrating that industrial prosperity is eminently attainable without liberalism, although I wouldn't consider that an endorsement of their respective ideologies.
> The first step on the path to evil is thinking you know better.
The first step to literally anything is thinking you know better. You can't escape the duty of having to make judgements. Inaction is itself an action that can cause harm, and there's no a priori reason to privilege the choice not to act.
> Raising hateful, illiterate children injures no one else.
It injures the children. Besides which, raising a sufficiently hateful child does injure others if you ultimately induce that child to commit a hate crime.
> Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights. - Declaration of the Rights of Man - 1789
The operant question here is what it means to "injure someone else" and how we intend to "limit the rights of other men to assure others' enjoyment of the same rights." Natural rights are a very flexible concept. Do I have a right to healthcare, or do hospitals have a right to deny me care for profit? Do I have a right to dump my garbage in the river, or do you have a right to clean drinking water? "Natural" rights are an oxymoron; every right is contrived, and deciding which rights we choose to legitimize and prioritize allows us to sculpt a flavour of natural rights theory to suit any belief system whatsoever. For example, just about anyone would agree that a person has a right to evict a violent burglar from their home. A conservative might further argue that Americans have a right to violently detain illegal immigrants in defence of their borders. Finally, a Nazi might plead that Aryans have an absolute right to defend their homeland from ethnic invaders. By tweaking exactly which rights you get and to what extent you get them, you can justify practically anything. That's why I find utilitarianism so much more rigorous.
> You're just as entitled to kill me as I am to kill you
This is exactly it. Your freedom is a function of your relationship to those who can use legitimate force against you - of how much power is held over you. If you can be killed without consequence then you're only as free as you are strong. This is a description of liberal anarchy, which is the natural state.
I guess I should have elaborated that the it is a liberal order which guarantees everyone an equal right do everything which injures no one else. It is the pursuit of order while maximising the freedom of the natural state that motivates the liberal. So the response isn't "killing like that is simply wrong", it's that violence without due process is disorderly.
> the position you're evincing here is liberal but anti-utilitarian
It's not actually, it's anti-authoritarian, which is a synonym for liberal. I'm arguing that the only legitimate use of (physical) authority is in the maintenance of a liberal ecosystem. It is not legitimate to use authority to intervene in the outcomes that ecosystem produces. You've not directly answered my question:
> What gives you or anyone else the moral right to intervene in someone else's family, presumably by force, over their objections?
The answer, should you produce it, would presumably justify any authoritarian intervention in pursuit of a utilitarian objective.
> prosperity is eminently attainable without liberalism
This was tried and failed in the Soviet Union for a reason. It will fail the same way every time power is concentrated in human hands. Liberalism-authoritarianism is a one-dimensional axis. Power is either diluted or concentrated. Neither outcome is utopian, but the failure modes differ. Giving relatively large amounts of power to the average individual produces all sorts of negative outcomes (eg. school shootings), but the consequences of concentrated authority are always catastrophic. The old adage about eggs and baskets applies. Distributed power is antifragile.
> Deciding to privilege non-intervention over any other course of action is itself a choice that can cause harm.
This is an opinion. I disagree. The harm is caused by the agent (person) or natural circumstance that triggered the outcome. If you get sick it's the disease that causes harm, not the person who didn't care to help you. If you're pushed out a window, it's the person who pushed you that caused the harm, not the one who didn't catch you.
> It injures the children.
This is also an opinion. People disagree axiomatically about what sort of upbringing constitutes injuring a child. Some would say failing to enforce attendance of religious school is injurious. You're sure you know best?
> Natural rights are a very flexible concept.
They're not really. It's pretty simple, you have the same rights you would in a state of nature with no other person intervening. So yes clean air and water, but no not the professional services of other people. Yes rights are only meaningful when they intersect with the rights of others. The entire liberal thesis is that the right of people to choose how to live supersedes the authoritarian pursuit of collective outcomes. We can still pursue them, just on a voluntary, consensual basis.
> it's anti-authoritarian, which is a synonym for liberal.
You don't have much grounding in leftist thought, do you? Nobody who had even a passing familiarity with left-wing anarchism would say this. It's not worth getting into; suffice it to say that plenty of anti-authoritarians are also anti-liberal. Politics are not a Manichean battle between Soviet communism and American capitalism.
> The answer, should you produce it
The answer is utilitarianism itself: a more robust system of axioms that justifies different things. I'm still unsatisfied with the system of ethical axioms you've lain out here; I find them overly vague.
> This was tried and failed in the Soviet Union for a reason.
The Soviet Union's problem was a failed vision for centralized planning. China has done quite well as an authoritarian state with more of a market approach. I think it's naive to assume that what is good must be productive and what is productive must be good. There's no inherent reason why an authoritarian state can't be successful. At a time when democracy is in decline both domestically and globally, it doesn't serve anyone's interests to blind ourselves to reality.
> Power is either diluted or concentrated.
Liberalism also concentrates power. It's the ideology of privileging the agency capital owners. "Freedom" in a liberal society means freedom from regulation; freedom for corporations to consolidate; freedom to own as much of anything you want, even when it comes to abstract concepts like land or ideas. It's an ideology in service of a particular status quo, like any other, and the status quo of liberalism is a hierarchy of ownership. It's naive to view "distributed" power as inherently better when that power is distributed primarily to members of a distinct social class with shared interests. That's just aristocracy by different means.
> The harm is caused by the agent (person) or natural circumstance that triggered the outcome.
Who cares? If someone's drowning, and you could throw them a life preserver, and you choose not to, then I don't care if the water killed them. You could have prevented their death at no cost to yourself. They're dead and it's your fault. Responsibility is ultimately not an important concept next to outcomes.
> People disagree axiomatically about what sort of upbringing constitutes injuring a child. You're sure you know best?
I'm not at all swayed by normative moral relativity. If you're a serial killer who thinks murder is good, and I disagree, neither of us is objectively right. But I'll still use as much force as it takes to stop your killing spree.
Yeah, I do think I know best. Or at least, I have no choice but to honour my own subjective morality. It's all I've got. The only conception of right and wrong that can ever matter to me, existentially, is my own.
> It's pretty simple, you have the same rights you would in a state of nature with no other person intervening.
Natural rights are the rights endowed to you by nature, not the rights you would have in the state of nature. Locke thought those were one and the same, but he wasn't the only natural rights theorist. Kant had his own ideas about how you could tell which rights we are supposed to have.
I find the state of nature to be a rather silly idea. We don't live in the woods; why should some imagined conception of what life would be like in the woods have any bearing on the ethics of modern life? Besides, nature honours no notion whatsoever of property, nor does it unfailingly provide us with (e.g.) fresh water. If I steal your wolf pelts, the forest won't send me to jail for it. It is natural for the strong to take advantage of the weak. That's natural selection. Justice and ethics are artificial.
I think the core of natural rights philosophy is just presenting a notion to the audience and going, "see? Doesn't this feel intuitive? Doesn't it feel NATURAL for us to have property?" No, I don't think it does. Frankly I don't care much what is and isn't natural anyway. Rape is natural—animals do it all the time. Antibiotics are not natural.
> The entire liberal thesis is that the right of people to choose how to live supersedes the authoritarian pursuit of collective outcomes.
The purpose of the liberal project is to justify a particular hierarchy of power and control using the language of freedom. "Authoritarian collective outcomes" here include things like squashing the private health insurance sector and guaranteeing coverage for the whole public. This is a very successful policy which is associated with massive gains in public well-being, and yet it's anti-freedom because it violates the freedom to run a private health insurance company, despite the fact that it also frees people from illness. Harm and well-being are elided in favour of the much more flexible concept of freedom, and that concept is invoked in the service of preserving the power of the powerful.
The words are overloaded, but liberal and authoritarian are on opposite ends of the same axis on the political compass. Classical liberalism stands on the ideas of individualism and laissez-faire economics. Today these ideas are also called "libertarian" but the core desire is expressed in the Latin root word. I want to be free - as in without a master, elected or otherwise, who governs my life.
> I find them overly vague
I'd be glad to elaborate. I'm positing that it's more important our interactions be consensual than value-maximizing. Would you kill one unwilling person to save a million? a billion? I would not.
> China has done quite well
China is doing well because it is able to benefit from innovations generated outside its borders. It's not able to generate important innovations on its own. This was also the main problem in the USSR. The Soviets just didn't have as ready of access to innovations born of a liberal society. Where China does use its centralized authority, the results are often catastrophic, eg. its one-child policy or COVID response.
> Liberalism also concentrates power
Some parts of this paragraph are more true than others. There is nothing in classical liberal thought about eg. patent or copyright law. Also you're broadening the definition of power that I put forward:
> Your freedom is a function of your relationship to those who can use legitimate force against you - of how much power is held over you
Corporations cannot arrest you for noncompliance with their policy. They cannot fine you. They are fragile structures, existing at the whim of their consumers and competitors. It takes a revolution to overthrow a government. Corporations live one big mistake away from ruin.
The main issue with today's corporations is regulatory capture, which is actually an issue of our government. If the government were not so empowered to regulate every aspect of our lives, corporations would not so easily be able to capture that power.
> that power is distributed primarily to members of a distinct social class with shared interests
No, it actually matters. The wealthy cannot round people up and imprison them. They do not have that kind of power. The importance of this distinction cannot be overstated.
> Responsibility is ultimately not an important concept next to outcomes.
Responsibility is all that matters in human affairs. All we do in court is ascertain it. All of our organizations are structured around it. A death is only your fault (responsibility) if you had a duty to intervene. A duty that cannot be imposed on a free person without their consent.
> The only conception of right and wrong that can ever matter to me, existentially, is my own.
Aye, but you can have enough respect for others to draw a principled distinction between your own moral compass, and how far you're willing to it that on other people who disagree. The worst human catastrophes happen when power is concentrated into hands that do not make this distinction.
> quashing the private health insurance sector and guaranteeing coverage for the whole public. This is a very successful policy which is associated with massive gains in public well-being, and yet it's anti-freedom
This is anti-freedom because it violates the rights of an individual to choose their own level of risk tolerance, and self-organize into pools with different risk tolerances. Health, just like everything else, is a personal responsibility. If you don't take care of it, it fails. The overwhelming majority of healthcare expenses are consumed by a tiny minority of chronically ill people. Many of these people do not make choices that are compatible with good health outcomes. The 80/20 rule applies. Caring for people who cannot care for themselves is the purview of charity, not authority.
The concept of freedom is actually much easier to grasp than quantifying harm and well-being. It's pretty simple: Did both parties explicitly agree to the interaction? Can either party opt out without being assaulted or imprisoned? If yes then the interaction is consensual. This is not a hard concept: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZwvrxVavnQ
Using force to impose non-consensual binding agreements is slavery. Slave holders in fact often used utilitarian justifications for their atrocities. You are not any more entitled to the services of a doctor than of a prostitute. The guiding principle of all human interaction must be consent.
> Would you kill one unwilling person to save a million? a billion? I would not.
Yes, in an instant.
I find your perspective completely self-defeating here. The cost of your way of thinking is a billion lives, minus one. What is the benefit? A sense of self-righteousness? What thing of value are you preserving here, that is worth more than a billion living people?
> [China] is not able to generate important innovations on its own.
Can you cite a source on this? China has (for example) a huge and very productive tech industry. I don't accept the unilateral assertion that they're doing all of this without innovation. If you contend that innovation comes from the market, China agrees. That's why their policy, post-Deng, has been very market-forward. You seem to be asserting that the world must conform to your beliefs, rather than conforming your beliefs to the world. China is plenty innovative, as far as I can tell.
> If the government were not so empowered to regulate every aspect of our lives, corporations would not so easily be able to capture that power.
You've got this backwards. Corporations express their power through regulatory capture. The less government there is, the more that corporations fill the power vacuum left in its absence. A corporation can arrest you. It simply lobbies to have the police do it on their behalf. The only way to prevent this is either for the government to have the backbone to keep corporations in their place, or for the government to dissolve entirely—at which point law enforcement is replaced by independent security contractors, and a corporation really CAN arrest you.
> The wealthy cannot round people up and imprison them. They do not have that kind of power.
I invite you to revisit the history of the Gilded Age, where Pinkertons brutalized union organizers and robber barons had the US Army drop munitions on striking coal miners. Capital tends to exert power through subtler means today, but don't let it fool you. Capitalists still call the shots.
> Aye, but you can have enough respect for others to draw a principled distinction between your own moral compass, and how far you're willing to it that on other people who disagree.
Certainly it's worth picking your battles, especially when the stakes are low. However, the stakes are high when it comes to violence, incarceration, social hierarchy, poverty, etc. I won't concede to let evil happen simply out of respect for someone else's belief that evil things are actually good.
> This is anti-freedom because it violates the rights of an individual to choose their own level of risk tolerance
I feel like you completely missed my spiel about the flexibility of the concept freedom-based rights. Again, what about the right to freedom from treatable illness? You seem to be starting from the position of "single-payer healthcare shouldn't happen" and working back to a set of "natural" rights which will allow you to justify that.
> Health, just like everything else, is a personal responsibility.
Now, this is a PERFECT example. Consider lung cancer. While, yes, getting lung cancer is a consequence of the personal choice to smoke, let's consider for a moment why people choose to smoke at all. For one, an extensive campaign of misinformation on the part of tobacco companies to suppress evidence of the harm of smoking. For another, high-stress circumstances tend to push people towards substance use. If I were to inject you with a substance that had a 50% chance of making you use drugs, and then you went on to use drugs, it would be absurd of me to blame you for that. Similarly, given that poverty (which can be ameliorated through policy) is a significant cause of substance abuse issues, blaming poor people for using substances is another way to deflect blame in service of promoting public inaction.
On top of this, many health issues cannot be prevented at all by lifestyle choices, which in and of itself debunks the idea that health is a "personal responsibility," but we'll set that aside. Even purely through the lens of lifestyle health, the claim that "health is a personal responsibility" is extremely suspect. People ultimately do not always have the power to live a healthy lifestyle. Nobody wants to get sick; everyone tries their best. It's in their best interest, after all. However, corporations and the state do not try their best to ensure people lead health lives. Neither group is nearly so incentivized to look out for the health of individual citizens. In fact, insurance companies profit by withholding treatment, and the insurance lobby is very powerful.
So when I see you sculpting a careful set of "freedom-based rights" designed to specifically protect insurance companies and high-bracket taxpayers at the expense of the most vulnerable people in society—the poor and sick—I gotta say, I grow extremely cynical as to the motivations behind your philosophy. As far as I'm concerned, natural rights theory is the purview of sophists. I'm sure there are some Kantians somewhere in the depths of academia who have put together a rigorous and consistent system of rights-based analysis, but I haven't met them. I tend to only see rights invoked as excuses to permit evil and turn a blind eye.
> What is the benefit? A sense of self-righteousness?
The benefit is adhering to a set of principles that guard against committing atrocities that have already cost countless millions of lives. Unprincipled people driven by utilitarian objectives have done by far the most harm in human history. The Holocaust, the Cultural Revolution, the Holodomor, the Great Purge, the Cambodian genocide, on and on the list goes.
There is no mechanism to constrain authority so concentrated. It always goes horribly wrong. Democracies elect genocidal dictators. The only solution that has been proven to work in the medium term is a regard for individual autonomy as sacrosanct and inviolable. I'm concerned at the erosion of this principle.
I would rather have a thousand robber barons and school shooters than one Cultural Revolution. If you're preparing kill an innocent person, no matter your motivation, you're always the bad guy. The ends do not justify the means.
> China is plenty innovative, as far as I can tell.
What ground-breaking innovations that changed the shape of the world originated in China? Usable smart phones? Social media? Ride hailing? Online shopping? Mass-market electric vehicles? Self-landing rockets? That's all just California. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_cou... This isn't a coincidence.
> where Pinkertons brutalized union organizers and robber barons had the US Army drop munitions on striking coal miners
You're citing cases where the state failed to intervene to protect the physical safety it guarantees. Where it failed to uphold the very principles it espouses. These errors are far easier to correct than trying to convince some maniac that their utilitarian calculation is wrong. Also, the harm done by these failures is immeasurably less than the aforementioned genocides.
> I won't concede to let evil happen simply out of respect for someone else's belief that evil things are actually good.
You have to define evil though. Would you care to suggest a definition? It's not a synonym of suffering.
> what about the right to freedom from treatable illness?
What is the source of this right? Why is your right to be treated more important than a doctor's right to choose whom to treat? Does it just stem from some back-of-the-envelope calculation that we're all better off if we use a bit of force to compel others to pay for your care? Can't you use the same sort of math to demand a kidney transplant from an unwilling donor? Or to euthanize the mentally ill? Or those who disagree with you? Where does it stop?
> a consequence of the personal choice to smoke
> poverty is a significant cause of substance abuse issues
These are incompatible statements. People have agency, and the responsibility for an action lies wholly with the agent who took it. The difference between forcing someone to do something and convincing them is of kind (categorical), not of degree.
> People ultimately do not always have the power to live a healthy lifestyle
I agree, but I'm saying that your good luck to be born into a healthy body, with a capable mind, or into a stable family, belongs to you. It is no more within the purview of authority to redistribute than your kidney.
> "freedom-based rights" designed to specifically protect insurance companies and high-bracket taxpayers
They are designed to protect the capable and the fortunate, who exist in all tax brackets, from the shackles you would impose on them. In doing so we safeguard against the disastrous consequences of the concentration of power, and create an environment that fosters the innovation which has benefitted us all.
> The benefit is adhering to a set of principles that guard against committing atrocities that have already cost countless millions of lives.
If your ideology would permit the preventable death of a billion people, I'd say it's very bad at preventing atrocities.
> Unprincipled people driven by utilitarian objectives have done by far the most harm in human history. The Holocaust, [...]
I don't know where you got the idea that the Nazis were utilitarians, but you're completely mistaken. They did not consider the lives of the people they exterminated to have value. If they did, they would not have exterminated them.
In fact, if you examine the actual justifications the Nazis espoused for their crimes, you'll find that they were much more in line with rights theory. Nazis believed that Aryans collectively held certain natural entitlements; that their race had the right and a duty to look out for its own interests above and beyond those of other races. Hence the argument in favour of, for instance, German Lebensaraum. Nazis had plenty of rhetoric justifying the idea that nature had endowed Aryans with a destiny which they were entitled and obliged to fight for, but made no arguments that the Holocaust was somehow intended to minimize net suffering across all of humanity.
> What ground-breaking innovations that changed the shape of the world originated in China?
Rideshare apps aren't a "ground-breaking innovation"; they're a way to squeeze profit from bad independent contracting laws. If you think self-landing rockets are a big leap of innovation, just wait until you hear which country was the first to put a satellite in orbit. And right now, Chinese social media is more innovative than American social media. WeChat is what Elon Musk wishes X could be. TikTok is a cultural juggernaut. Your argument here is weak; innovation can't be measured by "number of domestically famous apps."
As far as Nobel prizes go, China's disproportionate lack of awards is fairly well-studied, and is generally attributed to a particular set of cultural practices in their scientific institutions which conservatively reward and empirical advancements over theoretical ones. I think it'd be a mistake to overgeneralize that. China has put itself at the centre of the global economy; to argue that they must be an economic paper tiger because a lack of Nobel prizes proves they aren't innovative is frankly just denying reality via cherrypicking.
> You're citing cases where the state failed to intervene to protect the physical safety it guarantees.
I'm citing cases where powerful capitalists exerted power to get what they want through violence, either using the state or circumventing it. You can frame that as "the state failing to intervene" if you'd like, but it still proves my point. The people in power call the shots.
> These errors are far easier to correct than trying to convince some maniac that their utilitarian calculation is wrong.
I really don't know where you got this "utilitarian maniac" idea from. People in power don't make decisions according to some set of ethical rules. They act in their own interest and in the interests of their backers. Leaders don't have values—they have power bases. This is a universal constant in democracies, dictatorships, juntas, kingdoms, corporations—every form of organization that exists.
> You have to define evil though. Would you care to suggest a definition?
Sure. Anything that creates a substantial deviation from the greatest possible net amount of well-being in the world. But that's just my opinion.
> What is the source of this right?
I'm not a rights theorist; I don't assert that we have any essential moral rights. But if I were, I'd say that it comes from the categorical imperative, or from my interpretation of nature's intent, or wherever you say rights come from.
> Can't you use the same sort of math to demand a kidney transplant from an unwilling donor?
No, because the math bears out that this is a net negative. Can you imagine the harm that would arise in a society where the state permits people to be abducted and have their kidneys stolen? Society would collapse!
These utilitarian "gotcha" hypotheticals tend to have massively negative utility once you take into account the consequences that such policy would have on society more broadly.
> People have agency and the responsibility for an action lies wholly with the agent who took it
You're dancing right past my argument! Let's backtrack and revisit my injection scenario: If I were to inject you with a substance that had a 50% chance of making you use drugs, and then you went on to use drugs, it would be absurd of me to blame you for that. Here, I'm chemically affecting your decision-making process. Do you have agency? Sure, in a sense. But I'm still unarguably causing your drug addiction. Because of this, "agency" is not a useful concept in ethical analysis. It's a way to exonerate the actor in question from the consequences of their actions. I caused you to use drugs. If I hadn't acted, you wouldn't be on drugs. My actions caused preventable harm. Given that my choice is the one being scrutinized, your agency does not change any of this.
Similarly, we can't let the fact that people have agency exonerate the state from putting them in positions where they're highly likely to make decisions that are harmful. This is still harmful policy. "Agency" and "responsibility" are ways of obfuscating that.
> They are designed to protect the capable and the fortunate, who exist in all tax brackets, from the shackles you would impose on them. In doing so we safeguard against the disastrous consequences of the concentration of power, and create an environment that fosters the innovation which has benefited us all.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this reads to me as an admission that you're working backwards from a predetermined conclusion and finding principles which support it. You want to preserve the current status quo (because of its perceived propensity to create innovation, which you believe is responsible for prosperity). You attribute the existence of the capitalist status quo to the freedom of "the capable and fortunate" (i.e. capitalists) to conduct business without government intervention in the market. You contrive a set of "natural" rights which permits them to do this and which does not permit anyone to get in their way; a set of freedoms which concentrates power in the hands of capital owners at the expense of the general public.
Also I find it funny that a bump in the top marginal tax rate is considered an "unjust shackle" while denying coverage to people dying of cancer is simply a tragic sacrifice which must be made in the name of freedom. Surely the wealthy could "tragically sacrifice" some pocket change instead.
Not every event that results in a lot of death is an atrocity. An earthquake is not an atrocity. Your ideology already has resulted in atrocities. Who was the last libertarian that perpetrated a genocide?
> I don't know where you got the idea that the Nazis were utilitarians
You missed the rest of the genocides. Are you going to argue that the Cultural Revolution also wasn't utilitarian? What happened to all the sparrows?
Regarding Nazis, their ideology was complicated, but let's take a clear example of medical experiments. Nazi medical experiments are a pure distillation utilitarian ideals. Having united society in a common hatred of a relatively dispensable minority, they proceeded to use this minority as subjects for the most horrific variety of medical experiments. They had good doctors. Many of the outcomes of these experiments have advanced the state of the art, and benefited society as a result.
Nazi society didn't collapse in fear that people would be abducted. It was only Jews, gypsies and other undesirable minorities who were subject to such horrors. Germans were content in the knowledge that their society would benefit, at the small cost of a few Jews. How would you construct an argument that unequivocally refutes this?
> Rideshare apps aren't a "ground-breaking innovation"
Because of them me and countless others haven't bought a car they otherwise would almost certainly have. I'd say that's a pretty big difference.
> Chinese social media is more innovative than American social media
Sure, but who invented social media? I'm not arguing that smaller iterative innovations happen everywhere. I'm arguing that paradigm shifts come from disproportionality few places.
> [China] must be an economic paper tiger
I never argued this. I argued they're an innovative nonstarter. Yes being the world's factory has economic benefits, obviously. You've also not addressed their one-child policy or COVID response.
> powerful capitalists exerted power to get what they want through violence
Yes, and where they were able to do that the state had failed. And our systems of governance should correct for this. This is their primary and only function.
> this "utilitarian maniac" idea from
Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Chiang Kai-shek, etc. All of these people were in pursuit of the greater good. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
> the consequences that such policy would have on society more broadly.
Only if you keep things simple. If your kidney transplant victims are a minority for whom you hatred has been cultivated, your society will be just fine. The banality of evil.
> If I were to inject you with a substance that had a 50% chance of making you use drugs
Presumably without my consent, you've already violated the core principle I'm defending. I thought this was apparent. So of course you are responsible - you are an agent, and you used force. This example would not apply if you only suggested, or convinced me to use the drugs. In that case it would be me that is fully responsible.
Do you have a hypothetical that doesn't start with the use of force? As I've said, it's a categorical difference.
> Anything that creates a substantial deviation from the greatest possible net amount of well-being in the world
How do you quantify wellbeing? Is a nuclear accident that kills 1000 just as evil as a nuclear bomb that does the same?
> I don't assert that we have any essential moral rights.
I don't either, exactly. I only assert that we are all moral equals, and each of our conceptions of good and evil are, absent an oracle, equally valid. What makes your idea of the good more valid than someone else's?
> an admission that you're working backwards from a predetermined conclusion
I'm working from a 1700s definition of liberty. It was clearly not universally or justly applied in the 1700s, but the definition was good. You owe nothing to no one. You exchange/associate with others on a voluntary basis. Disputes are resolved via due process. Violence is prohibited. I'm all for expanding who is entitled to be thus free. I'm vehemently against eroding the definition.
> the capitalist status quo
Capitalism is just a byproduct of freedom as above described and the right to personal property. I'm not coming out in particular defence of special status for corporations, or even limited liability as a concept. These subjects are, while interesting in their own right, unrelated to individual liberty.
> bump in the top marginal tax rate is considered an "unjust shackle"
It's not about the rate, it's about what the government is permitted to spend it on. Before US v. Butler (1936) the power given to the government to tax and spend on the "general welfare" of the people was limited to what was explicitly written elsewhere in the constitution. After, the government could basically do whatever it wanted as long as it could be construed to be in the interest of the "general welfare". This was the turning point at which our liberty began to erode, and erode it has. If there is one decision I would reverse, this would be it.
Earthquakes aren't preventable. If you could stop an earthquake and you chose not to, that would be an atrocity.
> Who was the last libertarian that perpetrated a genocide?
Augusto Pinochet was a neoliberal, and he committed all kinds of atrocities. The US genocided the Native Americans, and continued to enact genocidal policies up through the 20th century.
And anyway, which atrocities has my ideology—progressive leftism—been responsible for? The USSR was a conservative authoritarian autocracy, not a progressive democracy, so don't go citing the Soviet Union again. I don't know why you're so fixated on them; you bring them up constantly.
> Nazi medical experiments are a pure distillation utilitarian ideals.
Yeah because the Nazi death camps which made them possible generated so much net well-being. No, this is a half-baked caricature of utilitarianism. Consequentialist ethics assesses the goodness of an action based on its consequences, and the consequences of the policies responsible for Josef Mengele's experiments are a massive net negative.
> Because of them me and countless others haven't bought a car
It's just a taxi subsidized by VC money. The fact that it benefits you does not make it an innovation.
> Sure, but who invented social media? I'm not arguing that smaller iterative innovations happen everywhere. I'm arguing that paradigm shifts come from disproportionality few places.
Then why are you citing marginal innovations like "what if we reused rocket boosters" or "what if you could order a taxi with an app instead of a phone call" or "what if electric cars had better marketing"?
Besides, social media wasn't a singular invention; it was the product of a shifting communication ecosystem. The internet led to BBSes, which led to forums and blogs, which led to shared software frameworks for these things, which led to hosted solutions for these things, like Geocities, MySpace, and eventually Facebook. Paradigm shifts ARE smaller innovative iterations. You fail to understand how technological progress happens.
> You've also not addressed their one-child policy or COVID response.
What's to address? They have some bad policies? America has some bad policies too. I'm not here to defend every choice China has ever made; only to debunk the claim that liberal administrations are inherently successful while non-liberal ones are inherently not so.
> Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Chiang Kai-shek, etc. All of these people were in pursuit of the greater good.
Literally everyone claims to pursue the greater good. Even you're justifying your case based on the need to create prosperity and prevent atrocities. That doesn't mean they're principled utilitarians.
"Oh you want to stop people from getting hurt? You know who else wanted that? Stalin!" No he didn't. This is a plainly unserious position.
> If your kidney transplant victims are a minority for whom you hatred has been cultivated, your society will be just fine.
Setting aside that a society would have to be doing much better than "just fine" to offset the harm caused by the mass slaughter of minority groups, what's your go-to example of the "just fine" society where minorities are butchered for their organs?
No, this is a sophistic parody of utilitarianism where you just assert that some nominal benefit outweighs the consequences of whatever harm you want to justify. Any ethical system can be twisted in bad faith to justify bad things; the question is whether such bad-faith analyses can be distinguished from proper rigorous ethical analysis. This is the case here: Your supposed utilitarian argument for organ harvesting doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
> Do you have a hypothetical that doesn't start with the use of force?
Sure. Maybe my factory produces a polluting smog that affects your propensity to make whatever choices. Maybe I've bought up all the property in your province except for land next to a toxic swamp that emits mind-affecting gas. Maybe I'm the only corporation who created a vaccine for a deadly new disease, and I choose to add the mind-affecting chemicals to the vaccine because it suits my interests to affect your decisions. There are countless ways that I can push you into making a particular choice without using force.
> I don't either, exactly. I only assert that we are all moral equals, and each of our conceptions of good and evil are, absent an oracle, equally valid. What makes your idea of the good more valid than someone else's?
Then how can you condemn a serial killer? His idea of good and evil is just as valid as yours, and apparently you aren't entitled to privilege your own morals.
> I'm working from a 1700s definition of liberty. It was clearly not universally or justly applied in the 1700s, but the definition was good.
The reason this definition was created in the 1700s was because the 1700s was the period where middle-class capital owners were beginning to compete for power with the aristocracy, and they needed an ideology which would justify the consolidation of power in capitalist hands.
> Capitalism is just a byproduct of freedom
Exactly backwards. Your 1700s definition of freedom is a byproduct of capitalism, in the same way that the divine right of kings is an ideological byproduct of feudalism. Capitalism arose because of the shifts in power caused by mercantile imperialism and the industrial revolution. Capitalists created an ideology to justify their own newfound power, and that ideology is liberalism. Power doesn't actually follow ethical rules. Ethics is a toy which philosophers play with to critique society. Power is self-justifying; whoever rules, rules, and the ideology of a ruler is just a set of excuses explaining why they are entitled to have the things they have already taken.
Pinochet may have implemented neoliberal economic policy, but he did not support individual rights. The atrocities themselves are evidence of that. Violent suppression of your critics is hardly liberal. Also Chile was a resource economy. None of the ideas I have advanced preclude state ownership of natural resources. They would only preclude state seizure of resources already owned by citizens.
> The US genocided the Native Americans
Right, American liberty did not extend to native populations. Those rights were reserved for white male citizens. As I've stated, I agree that everyone (adult) should have equal rights. I only disagree with watering down what those rights are.
> Consequentialist ethics assesses the goodness of an action based on its consequences
Isn't this precluded on the ability to predict the future? How do you choose a course of action? How do you weigh the consequences? How do you untangle the medical experiments (which have in fact done a lot of good) from broader Nazi policy? Who do you entrust to make these decisions?
> what if you could order a taxi with an app
As I've said, if it were just taxis a la 2000 I'd have bought a car. My not having bought one is a pretty substantial change to my day-to-day life. Same goes for Tesla. Strictly because of their company millions of people drive electric cars that otherwise would not. They get credit for that.
> They have some bad policies? America has some bad policies too.
Again, since the US state has less power the consequences of its poor choices are less impactful. No one was locking sick Americans in cages during COVID. It would not have been possible without facing armed resistance. The US government also does not have the power to limit the birth rate. Such a suggestion would be career-ending for any politician.
In this whole discussion you've avoided the question: In your world of centralized authority targeting utilitarian interventions, who gets to choose the policy? Who gets to wield the power?
> what's your go-to example of the "just fine" society where minorities are butchered for their organs
Again China, where organs are harvested from Uyghur and Falun Gong routinely. Aside the obvious lack of individual rights protecting these people, how do you figure that there it's impossible to construe a policy which violates an individual's rights that may be a net utilitarian benefit?
For your argument to be sound, you need to prove that its impossible to construct such a policy under any circumstances. For my argument to be sound all I need to do is prove one case where extrajudicially murdering someone is a net good.
You've actually already conceded this, when you suggested that killing one unwilling person to save a million is a good trade. From here it's just a matter of price. How many individuals would you murder to save a million? Two? Two hundred? Two hundred thousand? How do you measure the harm that such policies cause? The Nazis very nearly won the war, they were surely a functional society.
> Literally everyone claims to pursue the greater good
No, that's the whole point. I'm not claiming to pursue any greater good, only create an ecosystem where each person can pursue their own good in peace. Thinking you know the greater good is the pinnacle of hubris.
> Oh you want to stop people from getting hurt? You know who else wanted that? Stalin!
No it's "Oh, you think you know what's best for everyone? And you're willing to use force to get there?"
> polluting smog
Again with the natural rights violations.
> There are countless ways that I can push you into making a particular choice without using force.
Aye, but in all of those cases there are ways to opt out. I can refuse to sell you my non-toxic land. I can refuse to take your vaccine. Offering people more choices is never a constraint.
> Then how can you condemn a serial killer?
Based on his actions? I'd never condemn anyone who simply daydreamed of serial killing. Nor would I condemn someone who killed a willing victim. The evil comes from violating consent.
> 1700s was the period where middle-class capital owners were beginning to compete
Or maybe that oppressed people, longing to be free came to a new world unburdened by existing hierarchies, and created a system founded on their equality?
> Your 1700s definition of freedom is a byproduct of capitalism
Capitalism has been practiced since the dawn of agriculture. If you go fishing and trade your fish for cloth you're practicing capitalism. If you're skilled and lucky enough to accumulate wealth, maybe you'll buy a second and a third fishing boat and hire a crew. On the snowball rolls. All of this is possible only when power, however it derives legitimacy, is used to ensure this process can happen peacefully, and restrains itself to a reasonable tax for this service. Such capitalism has occurred since ancient times.
> Pinochet may have implemented neoliberal economic policy, but he did not support individual rights. [...] Violent suppression of your critics is hardly liberal.
America has often suppressed critics. Take McCarthyism. Take the killing of Fred Hampton. I dunno what to tell you. The touted ethics of liberalism are a flourish to disguise the underlying power structure of capitalism. I've been saying this all along.
> Right, American liberty did not extend to native populations. Those rights were reserved for white male citizens.
The striking minors who were shot at Blair Mountain were white men.
Here's my point: You claim that the ideology of the Soviet Union is inherently bad while the ideology of America is inherently good, but atrocities committed by America are always flaws in an inherently just attempt to aspire to a noble ideological goal, while atrocities committed by the Soviet Union always reveal the inherently ignoble underbelly of their ideology. What you fail to understand is that they are the same. Neither nation is/was an ideological project. They are pragmatic exercises in the management of power by a ruling class.
> In this whole discussion you've avoided the question: In your world of centralized authority targeting utilitarian interventions, who gets to choose the policy? Who gets to wield the power?
You think I'm arguing in favour of centralized authority, but that's backwards. I find that capitalism centralizes authority too much. It concentrates power in the hands of the wealthy. It's undemocratic.
Who do I think should wield power? The public, through democratic means, balanced between local and federal governments and trade unions and mass organizations, unhindered by the unilateral amassed power of wealthy capitalists and police-state dictators alike.
> I'm not claiming to pursue any greater good, only create an ecosystem where each person can pursue their own good in peace.
Then why have you tried to justify your ideology on the basis that it prevents atrocities? If you really don't care about the greater good, you should be able to say, "I don't care if atrocities happen. Preventing mass human suffering isn't my priority."
> Again, since the US state has less power the consequences of its poor choices are less impactful.
The US government cedes power to the private sector. The "death panels" which fearmongers claimed would result from public health care already exist in the form of private insurance assessors.
> The US government also does not have the power to limit the birth rate. Such a suggestion would be career-ending for any politician.
Do they have the power to send people to jail for having miscarriages as part of a push to ban abortion and raise the birth rate? Clearly they do, and Republican voters love it.
> As I've said, if it were just taxis a la 2000 I'd have bought a car.
It IS just taxis, only cheaper, because it was subsidized by VC money.
> Again China, where organs are harvested from Uyghur and Falun Gong routinely.
China is not "just fine." They ethnically cleansed their Uyghur population. They massively suppress political dissent. Authoritarianism is not beneficial to citizens, even if the supply of organs is slightly higher. Besides, murdering healthy people to give their organs to sick people doesn't exactly sound like a way to reduce mortality in your healthcare system.
> No it's "Oh, you think you know what's best for everyone? And you're willing to use force to get there?"
You're willing to use force to support your ideology too. Or do you not believe the use of police force to prevent property crimes is justified?
> how do you figure that there it's impossible to construe a policy which violates an individual's rights that may be a net utilitarian benefit?
I don't. I strongly support violating what you consider to be essential property rights in favour of reducing suffering. Rights are not a cornerstone of my ethics.
> How do you measure the harm that such policies cause?
How do you predict the impact of a policy? With political science, of course.
> The Nazis very nearly won the war, they were surely a functional society.
Nazi leadership was a hot mess. Their nation would have fractured very quickly even if they'd won. And when I say "just fine," I don't mean functional. I mean good. I've already argued through my China point that a functioning society is not necessarily a morally upstanding one.
> Again with the natural rights violations.
If you think disruption of the natural world in ways that harm human life are violations of rights that justify state intervention, surely you must support massive state intervention to stop climate change, right?
> Aye, but in all of those cases there are ways to opt out. I can refuse to sell you my non-toxic land. Offering people more choices is never a constraint.
Choices often take place in constraining ecosystems. Who's to say you have non-toxic land? Maybe you grew up here, and the rent is too high anywhere else to leave. This is how ghettos form. In theory, it's possible to leave the ghetto. In practice, it's so difficult that many people cannot.
> (How can you condemn a serial killer?) Based on his actions? The evil comes from violating consent.
But you said "each of our conceptions of good and evil are, absent an oracle, equally valid." In his conception, there's nothing wrong with violating consent. "What makes your idea of the good more valid than someone else's?"
If you take morality seriously, you have to privilege your own morality over other people's. Otherwise you have no standing to condemn and combat evil.
> Or maybe that oppressed people, longing to be free came to a new world unburdened by existing hierarchies, and created a system founded on their equality?
ahaha that's a good one
Yeah existing hierarchies never touched the new world. No indentured servants, no slaves, no poor or rich men. No women. No white or black or indigenous people. Come on.
> Capitalism has been practiced since the dawn of agriculture. If you go fishing and trade your fish for cloth you're practicing capitalism.
No, capitalism is not simply the existence of trade. Or rather, I guess you can define it that way, but then you lose any ability to understand how our society works and how it differs from the societies of centuries past.
In our society, capitalists constitute a ruling class. They derive their power from ownership of assets traded on capital markets. This distinguishes them from aristocratic ruling classes, which owned hereditary assets. Liberal ideology sprang up around the time the industrial revolution was shifting power from hereditary aristocrats to new-money capitalists, and it was created to justify this shift in power.
When I say "created," bear in mind that I don't mean the people who thought it up did so cynically. But all sorts of people come up with all sorts of ideas. The reason liberalism caught on was because it suited the interests of powerful people, and they used their power to magnify the idea. This mirrors how Eastern Bloc dictatorships used communist ideas as propaganda to justify their own legitimacy. Regardless of whether the people who originally thought up the ideas were acting in good faith, those ideas were then used as tools by the ruling classes of particular societies.
This pattern happens all throughout history. One big reason why Protestantism got big was because Martin Luther provided a religious justification for kings to oppose the authority of the pope. The birth of Anglicanism is the clearest example of this pattern, created by Henry VIII simply because he wanted to divorce his wife.
> All of this is possible only when power, however it derives legitimacy, is used to ensure this process can happen peacefully
The "legitimacy" of power is an interesting concept. All power considers itself legitimate. What happens when I declare the power of the American state to be illegitimate? Nothing. It would only matter if I had the firepower to overthrow the state. And at that point, the collapse of the state has nothing to do with legitimacy and everything to do with military might.
And what does "peacefully" mean? Are cops being peaceful when they beat and arrest a criminal?
> How can you possibly believe that the government, with its myriad checks and balances, is too susceptible to corruption to intervene in family life, but that parents, whose power over their children should be absolutely unchecked in your view, cannot be corrupt?
Because generally parents care a lot about their children. That has been a universal experience. There are of course some rotten outliers, but those are the exceptions which prove the rule.
Whereas governments are mostly comprised of faceless bureaucrats who will generally care far less about a child. Again, there will be some great exceptions of government employees who are truly fantastic, but the general perception I have described still holds.
That you cannot see this obvious fact means
> This is a ridiculous and half-baked ideology.
these words seem to describe your ideology. And you may not believe me, but just look at referendums or bills about parental rights and public's reaction to those. Even in a one-party state like California with progressive zealots in power, governor Newsom figured it is wiser to veto bills which encroach on a parent's rights.
>generally parents care a lot about their children. That has been a universal experience. There are of course some rotten outliers, but those are the exceptions which prove the rule.
I have personally seen parents care *so much* for their children that they don't see their abusive behavior. The "most caring" parents can turn out to be absolute monsters to their children, and think they're doing the right thing.
The latter, but parents that think that way would label their parenting style as the former at worst. Authoritative parents that traumatize their children with fear is pretty common in this world.
> There are of course some rotten outliers, but those are the exceptions which prove the rule.
Oh please. This could be used to justify anything. I could say that murder is uncommon, and when it does happen, that's "the exception that proves the rule." Moreover, the prison system is corrupt and violent. Therefore we should stop prosecuting murderers.
> Because generally parents care a lot about their children. That has been a universal experience.
"In the 2012, Canadian Community Health Survey- Mental Health, 32% of Canadian adults reported that they had experienced some form of abuse before the age of 16. 26% had experienced physical abuse; 10% had experienced sexual abuse; 8% had experienced exposure to intimate partner violence." [1] Clearly this is a massive problem, and I don't accept "well what if we pretended it didn't happen" as a solution. If you believe parents are "universally" caring, I suggest you open your eyes and stop relying on your preconceptions.
Besides, being caring is not the issue. If a caring but misguided parent raised their children in the woods, cutting them off from society and education, that would still be an evil act. I have no interest in allowing extreme moral relativism to get in the way of preventing things which we all agree are evil.
> Whereas governments are mostly comprised of faceless bureaucrats who will generally care far less about a child.
I'm sure faceless bureaucrats don't care much about murder victims either. Again, that's not an excuse to stop prosecuting murderers. A bureaucracy does not depend on the enthusiasm of its participants to serve a purpose.
> And you may not believe me, but just look at referendums or bills about parental rights and public's reaction to those.
Which ones? If you've got a referendum to the effect that the public largely does not believe that CPS should ever intervene in families, I'd love to see it. Alas, I suspect you're referring to something much narrower and less relevant.
Bearing in mind we're talking about bullying here, which interventions are going to trample your fundamental civil rights?
Unless we're going with a reductio ad absurdum panopticon solution, I can't think of any way in which more robust interventions in bullying would be a bad thing.
People have the right to be and to raise bullies as long as their behaviour is nonviolent. As tasteless as it is, there is no law against socially excluding and humiliating people. Nor should there be.
Because it's unambiguous, already a core liberal value, and because the enforcement mechanisms for violating the law are invariably physical (arrest, imprisonment). "Free" means "Free from the threat of illegitimate violence", not "Free from the possibility of having your feelings hurt". It would be unjust to impose physical consequences for non-physically-infringing actions.
Why all these appeals to "core liberal values"? You can't justify a bad idea by saying "but it's part of liberalism." If that's true, it just means that liberalism is a bad ideology.
Who says that's what "free" means? Why should we be free only from physical harm and not emotional harm? You can't claim an ideology is self-evident when it rests on arbitrary definitions of terms.
Besides, your definition is flawed. Does sexual assault count as a physical or an emotional harm, if it causes no physical injuries? There are many forms of sexual assault which cause exclusively emotional trauma. Are we not entitled to be "free" from these?
The difference between violent and non-violent bullying can be closer than you'd think. Also, and please note I have much experience in this, physical violence was the one thing I was in permanent fear of as a child but having decades now passed by I came to understand it was the emotional violence that did by far the most damage to me and my siblings. We will not recover.
Meta comment: people like you can argue on the basis of abstractions because clearly that's all you have to argue from – you obviously have no experience of child abuse. And I'm glad of that, but please be careful putting about your opinions ("...no law against socially excluding and humiliating people. Nor should there be.") with Dunning-Kruger boosted confidence.
> Certainly not a bad thing to do, but just giving them some books is not going to make them like the better off kids in all of the other (highly correlated) ways that they're different
From personal experience, I can absolutely vouch for that. 35, came from nowhere with nothing, absentee parents, out of house by 15. Dropped out of college, waited tables, did a startup, sold it, worked for 7 years at Google, now I'm doing my 2nd startup.
Does it fix everything? No.
But it gave me something to do that wasn't TV, and it kept me safe from [redacted] dad and [redacted] mom, I could hole up wherever I wanted and spend hours in them.
You'd be surprised at the things that are lifelines. I had a really hard time explaining to this CS PhD dude who ran a weekend night basketball league for no particular reason how different and better that kept my life the last couple years of high school.
You aren't shifting the whole distribution with one act, but just like the little shifts add up in the negative, they add up in the positive too.
I remember a woman in her 30s running into me in the library lugging around those 7 volume MSDN published sets at 9 years old. She was incredulous and told me to keep it up. That mattered! No one had even noticed me or remarked on it before, gave me pride.
Up front, I have no intention of trying to detract from any of those accomplishments, because you've obviously been grinding pretty hard for a while and admire the tenacity you must have had as a kid and the progression you've seemed to follow.
I do however find it under-discussed how many subsequent dice rolls have to at least partially work out for that tenacity, and those little shifts, to be a compounding positive instead of negative, and usefully applied long-term. I'd be curious if you had any major setbacks that you rebounded from after things started rolling successfully forward for you. Now at 32, unemployed with a spotty resume and no prospects, I could really use a &pointer (or reference ;))
Reading through your comment and picturing my own upbringing (poor, abusive, but I guess I got a handle on it and discovered programming through gaming eventually, it does make me sad that although there were hand-me-down computers available that I gravitated toward and experimented with, I could not picture where the nearest library was, and had to Google it now. I'm not particularly resentful though, I did get out, and I'm grateful for that.
I wonder if the books alone would have been enough, but having the books and the physical escape together is kind of incredible, and it's heartening to hear you used the hell out of that space.
Much earlier on, I had some exposure to small motors, and had some mentorship from my extended family on the programming front, but didn't really have a sense of how to build on that; no conception of how to connect motors with gears in a more complex system, no business exposure at all, no ability or framework for learning how to execute on any project, and just a debilitating lack of motivation up until around 17, along with no appreciation for the idea of proving myself measurably; I thought I was capable, but apparently wasn't. I got my little bots for Runescape running though, and that was empowering.
Thankfully, I did and continue to have a similar refuge at the skatepark, which provided me some social and physical benefits for free, much like your basketball league, that a surprising amount of people I meet now don't have. I was nerdy, but couldn't execute, and couldn't see how I'd get there. My first job was a glimpse into how much potential there was available; I made more than my father who I was on good terms with, but then I was laid off for lack of reason to have me on the payroll, which took a positive signal and turned it into hopelessness in a way. I experienced adult job loss my first time trying. It was a great opportunity that I relish in some ways still. I then got another job as a frontend developer, making a bit more, and then burnt out, slowed down, and got fired, partially because I was trying to do CSS things that nobody was paying me to do, instead of just writing some JavaScript to handle dynamic layout and getting the job done. I was too deep in the weeds and got stuck there, but the idea of just cranking out things quickly wasn't stimulating enough and I'd just sit there trying to convince my brain to do the work.
Since then, it's just been gradual pay increases, some early freelance clients that worked out for a while, but at this point I've never held a continuous job for longer than a year and a half, and I feel like the pieces of minor success are hard to stabilize, despite being in a wildly better situation still than I'd ever have imagined in high school, and a hell of a lot of personal inward reflection. My last job title was Software Engineer II, but really I'm just a generalist that keeps failing upward, and I don't know whether if I were to double-down and specialize more, go deeper, or pivot out completely, I'd be able to do that well; it's a bit of a constant existential crisis. It's hard to be consistent over a long period of time without a manager deciding I was a liability or me just burning out so badly, or a series of unfortunate life events coming together for the negative, and once you're out, it's extremely hard to get back in.
For the last year, I've been working my way through Nand2Tetris, because in a career highlight I landed an actual interview with Apple (that ended up going nowhere, rightfully so because my lowest level knowledge didn't exist) as well as building a small SwiftUI project that may or may not see the light of day, and while I think those are positive moves, it's going to be a hard year ahead that may take me to net zero again unless I can pick up something in general labor for while (Waiting tables would be quite difficult without a solid short-term memory, and don’t believe someone would hire me for that with largely tech experience and random interspersed menial work).
Anyhow, ultimately I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment, those little shifts really do add up for either the positive or sometimes negative. I think the longer you can keep them positive, keep the ball rolling forward, the more likely things will work out, and as a society it's crucial we continue making it possible to smooth out the experience of life, especially for people who grow up in volatile situations.
> My last job title was Software Engineer II, but really I'm just a generalist that keeps failing upward, and I don't know whether if I were to double-down and specialize more, go deeper, or pivot out completely, I'd be able to do that well; it's a bit of a constant existential crisis.
As a generalist that still has the title Software Engineer after over 25 years of experience, I think I am able to empathize. I think, if you are a generalist and, like me, if you like "laying the pipes" to connect things end-to-end and see the satisfaction of having built the entire thing, embrace it. You should be proud that you can build a complete application though OS infra to database to backend services to frontend UIs and provide the glue of scripts as needed, all by yourself (not shitting on working in a team setting, just knowing that you could). I treat that as a badge of honor. Sure, I can't get super deep into one of these verticals, but then I'm a "builder" and I like the feeling it brings.
Well, I have and can do those things, and agree that those are very valuable skills to be proud of. I've just been kind of frontend only in team settings in a professional capacity lately, so it's something I'll be continuing to improve on.
Most of my work has been jumping into some crazy existing codebase and figuring out how to understand and contribute to it, so greenfield buildouts are just not something I've repped out, and think that's a bit of a weakness. As in, I can set up a database, build an API, wrangle a vps, and then build the front-end, but I don't really have much of a sense of how to do it quickly or by using decoupled cloud service providers, simply because I've never been in that position. Laying the pipes is sort of the essense of productive software engineering in my mind.
It is quite gratifying though to gradually be working my way to understanding how each layer of the hardware software stack work, and I'm starting to see those layers in real-world contexts, such as in getting a fault when compiling Swift, it'll show me the lower levels where the problem occured.
> Most of my work has been jumping into some crazy existing codebase and figuring out how to understand and contribute to it, so greenfield buildouts are just not something I've repped out, and think that's a bit of a weakness.
Without any context of the details of the work, one thing that has helped me is to lookout for scope of improvements beyond on the codebase itself. E.g. is there opportunity to provide a UI to the end-users of the code base. If so, since you have touched the codebase to contribute to it, your suggestion to work on those things to improve end-user's life may get accepted and then you have something relatively greenfield to work on. Doesn't always work out that way but sometimes it might. Another approach is building something on the side that you know will be very useful, even though nobody asked for it - helps you figure out the quick way of doing it (what you mentioned) since these are POCs and you can't repeatedly spend too long on them.
Really good suggestions, thanks. I suppose since I'm looking for work, it might not be a bad idea to do this externally as well, if any prospective companies' APIs are available, and use them as portfolio items.
It sounds like some of your thought processes are getting in the way of your success. Have you considered seeing a therapist? I think you would find it beneficial.
Given the order of events (childhood trauma THEN adult outcomes), and the strong relationships identified in the source material (while controlling for confounding factors), I think it's about as close as we can get to inferring directionality.
> I think it's about as close as we can get to inferring directionality.
No, we can try interventions (e.g. do a big and expensive anti-violence/CCTV/policing campaign in a neighborhood) and record the result.
I do think the grandparent has a point and a lot of these could have a common cause. e.g. a violent environment and poor educational attainment could both be caused by poverty or genes for impulse control or a subculture with a higher acceptance these things.
Fair. You can do those kinds of analyses from historical data too, though I don’t think CCTV would have much of an effect. Try free school lunches, after school support, parental benefits etc.
Better nutrition at school increasing attention span and grades, thus increasing hope for alternative life that isn't joining a gang. The reduced stress on family finances could also let them do something like move to a less rough neighbourhood.
> I do think the grandparent has a point and a lot of these could have a common cause. e.g. a violent environment and poor educational attainment could both be caused by poverty or genes for impulse control or a subculture with a higher acceptance these things.
How does a gene for (presumably less) impulse control make you more likely to have seen someone shot?
And yes growing up in a poor/more violent environment makes you more likely to end up poor with health problems later in life is exactly the point of the study.
> And yes growing up in a poor/more violent environment makes you more likely to end up poor with health problems later in life is exactly the point of the study.
My point is that there may be no causation from seeing violence to poor educational outcomes. E.g. instead of [violence->bad grades] it's [poverty->bad grades] and [poverty->violence], so the there may be no causal arrow between the seeing violence and the later bad grades.
> How does a gene for (presumably less) impulse control make you more likely to have seen someone shot?
Don't get hung up on the genes, it's just an example. Put lead in the water if you prefer.
If your question is genuine then the hypothesis here would be that the lead/genes cause poverty which means needing to live in rougher neighbourhoods.
Still books/ study material are of extreme importance.
No one could be living in more extreme poverty than Michael Faraday did. Still he managed to be one of the greatest minds of all times. He read a book called "The improvements of the mind" by Isaac Watts and applied it on himself literally. The book was written for poor people who can not afford themselves books and means to conduct chemistry/electricity/mechanical and biology experiments.
Michael Faraday had to draw and write down everything he learned and imagined meticulously in a military and highly disciplined way where testosterone was expressed in its noble manner: discipline and high focus, no distraction. He wrote himself an extremely dense and technical voluminous book like notes of things he read and noticed while he was still a boy.
The success story of Michael Faraday started only because he was accepted to work for a man selling books. There, Faraday read every single book he saw.
I hope the study mentioned in this article will not be taken seriously by people of modest environments. The victimization mindset is a gatekeeper to success.
Weird way to analyze this. If you look at Faraday's biology he was poor but he had an apprenticeship in his youth, so he clearly had at least adults looking out for him and giving him room to study. I would say it's way more likely that his success can be attributed to him having supportive adults in his life, as opposed to his testosterone(??).
Which apprentcieship are you talking about ? The one he had with the bookmaker ? He did not hire him to help him: he hired him only because he needed him, and Faraday was special as a child. Actually he was exploited by that bookmaker (worked without being paid for few years). It was during that period that he was reading books and he wrote one of his own (a huge selection of technical notes).
He spent 7 years in that library, if I remember. It was much later that Humphry Davy, the chemist, had offered him an internship: again, this chemist, did not hire him to support him but because he met him previously in the book shop where he worked, and many years later, he ad problems with his trainee, so he replaced him with Faraday whom he knew he was too curious and intelligent and cultivated.
So in both cases, Faraday was self taught, and made a huge effort to get the second internship with the chemist (he was rejected few times, if you call this adults supporting him).
And no, Faraday is not known for biology (but I supposed you meant "biography").
About your testosterone question: well, I have nothing to add.
There are common statistical techniques to better get at causality in this situation. E.g. given how relatively unlikely and random "seeing someone getting shot while still a child" is, it should be fairly easy to match this up with other variables to tease out causality, e.g. just looking at someone in the same socioeconomic situation, same parental situation (i.e. married/single), and then comparing gunshot witnesses vs. others.
If you knew even a little bit about trauma, you'd know it's not even up for debate at this point that trauma is a huge setback in life.
Your risk of bad relationships, emotional dysregulation, physical ailments and diseases, stress, life unsatisfaction, (...) all increase as your ACE score increases.
I keep repeating myself at this point, but trauma is the biggest epidemic with the most negative consequences that isn't being talked about enough.
The whole point of the study is to show that kids that grow up with more adverse effects which are out of their control makes them more likely to have problems as an adult.
You seem to say we can't infer causality, but that's exactly what they do. They show that having been affected by more adverse effects does make you more likely to suffer in the future. As the study says being poor is one of the adverse effects but not all. So that's your control right there.
This is classic correlation is not causation. The thing about correlation is that it could be a causative relationship, or there could be another set of untracked variables that's causing some or all the effects, or it could be unrelated coincidence.
Now, maybe this is a difference between the study and the article. Maybe the study makes stronger claims here than the article does. But I didn't see anything in the article that claimed nor demonstrated causation, only correlation.
> I remember reading about how in Chicago someone had noticed that kids who did better had more books at home, so they decided to give poor kids books.
The problem here was not trying to infer causality from population-level data, but rather insufficiently controlling that data for correlated variables. If that study had controlled for the income and education of those kids' parents, it would have been much more able to predict the actual impact of giving kids books.
This visual essay thing doesn't present a particularly detailed data analysis, but I wouldn't be surprised if the original study, being properly academic, did dive into this kind of regression analysis.
I am pretty sure that the fact of witnessing someone being shot has an impact on your life. Maybe not connected with the data that was implemented here but still
I think how people relate to media and attitudes about out-groups can have an even deeper impact on a life. We all can witness people being shot in non-fiction on police bodycam footage, surveillance camera footage, published on video websites, etc.
Most people compartmentalize seeing shooting of a house and killing a child sleeping in their bed in Ukraine in 2024 different from a drive-by shooting on their own street or road rage on a highway killing a child sleeping in bed or car. But we can witness it easily now and most people are taught to detach non-fiction video of "others" and treat it like it is fiction.
It becomes a wealth and power status symbol to move to the "good part of town" and a "safe neighborhood" and create a compartmentalized mindset that what goes on in other areas is "not witnessed" the same. A detachment of compassion for those in the out-groups and a denial that indeed it is reality, it is non-fiction.
unfortunately in the US socialists theories, even the most diluted ones, are almost entirely removed from the public discourse.
These kinds of issues can be better analyzed in the context of the class struggle (or class conflict), of which they are a textbook example.
On a personal level people can get over hardships and have a successful happy life, but statistically, on a societal level, those who are born poor will, more often than any other group, end up being poor(er) adults.
> But then you get into why the parents are poor in the first place, and there are many causes, but a lot of them get passed down to the next generation in one way or another.
Are you trying to say that these people are genetically poor?
To give one example, today's wealth distribution in UK still correlates quite strongly with Norman descent from the original participants of the Conquest. That's over 1,000 years of still-measurable generational wealth transfer.
I took it to infer that there are systemic factors that disadvantage segments of the population disproportionately and across generations.
Having worked with disadvantaged and vulnerable populations I would agree, we only hear about the pulled up by the bootstraps success stories and readily ignore the 99.99% of cases where offspring are worse off financially than their parents.
"It's 2021.
The research participants are in their late-30s now, which means they've had plenty of time to shape their own destinies. But we can clearly see that the experiences of their childhood had a huge effect on their financial situation as adults.
It also has an effect on virtually everything else in their lives."
You cannot infer the direction of causality from this data, i.e. that the traumatic experiences themselves cause the poorer outcomes. I remember reading about how in Chicago someone had noticed that kids who did better had more books at home, so they decided to give poor kids books. Certainly not a bad thing to do, but just giving them some books is not going to make them like the better off kids in all of the other (highly correlated) ways that they're different.
Just as an example, one of the traumatic factors they identify is if a kid had witnessed someone being shot. The wealthy kids are way less likely to see anyone get shot, because if people were regularly getting shot in their neighborhood, they would move. The poor kids' parents don't always have that option. In this case it could be the poverty itself, not the shooting that is causing the poor outcomes. But then you get into why the parents are poor in the first place, and there are many causes, but a lot of them get passed down to the next generation in one way or another.