Even the best program to reduce inequality will leave some inequality, especially in a system like capitalism (or a capitalistic market system) that works based on rewards for exceptional behaviour. We can (and should) work to make sure this inequality is not horrifying, but we should also support programs which have been shown to help those who are at the bottom of the heap. Because there will always be someone at the bottom.
Ok, ok.
Yggles has this bug that I think he picked up in Sweden about always increasing state services (health care, day care, bike lanes) but not talking about inequality or taxes. If you corner him he will say yeah we are gonna have to pay for it. Carbon tax! Consumption tax!
Once in a while he will overtly say that the way to fix inequality is to increase services
1) It's a twick, silly wabbit. They won't see what hit them. A rhetorical strategy. Taxes and redistribution:dirty. Hard politics.
2) Build the commons and public goods. Start with say the bottom 50% taxing each other to build a nice playground and the little kids in the gated community will get lonely looking thru the bars etc etc.
Soon it is the bottom 60% taxing each other. Rinse and repeat. Soon:equality!
Obviously this is an intentional and overt attempt to avoid class consciousness and class struggle.
Do Yglesii have intent? Or are they merely machines programmed to respond to stimuli?
Yggles has this bug that I think he picked up in Sweden about always increasing state services (health care, day care, bike lanes)
And also reducing state services and giving people money to buy things themselvers.
4 -- and also, in a remarkable display of typical blase ignorance, supporting the Keystone tar sands pipeline.
Was there a worse idea than giving Yglesias the business beat at Slate when he knows nothing about business and little about economics beyond the first 1/2 of an undergrad education? OK, Napoleon invading Russia was worse but it's a close call.
I don't know why I'm compelled to both read and bitch so much about Yglesias. He has a kind of "stuck in smart undergrad mode forever" thing going on that I find both fascinating and superannoying.
5: I don't think it was such a bad idea: it helped me finally kick the habit of reading him.
His posts on monetary policy and stimulus are uniformly excellent, however.
I can't bear to quit reading Yglesias, just because he updates so very, very often, but these days for many of his posts I read the first three sentences and figure it's going to be stupid so I quit there.
I haven't read a single word written by Matthew Yglesias since he moved to Slate, and I'm shocked at how little I care. I thought I enjoyed reading him, but apparently I didn't.
I think that people in the writing biz adore fluent writers, of whom Yglesias is one and Hitchens another. Writing trumps personal character, reasoning ability, and mastery of subject matter. The addoration of fluency seems entirely dominant in TV, radio, and print opinion journalism.
So, from my New Deal heritage perspective, yeah, we should totally do many, many different things to reduce inequality, but knowing that those are hard battles to win, as bob points out, suggests that we shouldn't ignore ameliorative programs if there's a potential for them to be successful and sustainable.
However, from an anarchist/DFH perspective, I feel like the framing of the questions in the OP leaves something to be desired. When we talk about "reducing inequality", without actually scrapping capitalism, we're talking about many of the evils of the status quo seeping back in no matter what.
For instance, re: health care. I think we've adequately discussed in previous threads how the US health care system has fatal flaws at every level and degree. Pharmaceuticals cost too much, aren't effective enough, take too long to develop and are often orphaned when they're unprofitable. Primary & preventive care is rationed in a number of different ways (not just economic, but geographically, linguistically, by gender and sexual orientation, etc.), it ignores too many low-intervention options, it tends to constantly reinforce the need for itself, etc. Specialty care is heavily rationed on many levels, there's too much emphasis on shaving that last statistical point off, specialists tend to over-specialize, not enough good ideology around end-of-life care, etc. Emergency care is probably the crown jewel, or would be if it wasn't clogged to the gills with the uninsured and their often preventable emergencies, but even there I'm sure that insiders have a number of critiques that would probably amount to a major overhaul if implemented at once.
All in all, we have a system that plays right into the hands of the perfidious Econ 101 types, with perverse incentives up the wazoo. Would it be a good idea to spend more money on health care to provide the people who are worst off in the current system with access to more and better care? Of course, and we should totally pursue that if that's the best and/or only option. But ultimately, shouldn't we be looking at some kind of revolutionary health care program that would actually make people healthier? I surmise that this approach would probably incorporate a number of "public health" measures that aren't strictly medical in nature -- like better school lunches, to name one somewhat hackneyed and reformist example, or abolishing private car ownership, for one that would take a real revolution to accomplish.
My unicorn-and-a-pony vision for health care is a holistic, decentralized model that would de-professionalize a lot of basic health care stuff and put that power back in individual and small-group hands. At the same time, it would restructure research and specialty medicine to push forward further and faster than in the current system. And make MRIs and major surgeries and stuff like that more accessible where they were truly needed and wanted. I'm thinking the equivalent of an RN's knowledge on every block, a doctor for every neighborhood, community clinics providing free, 24-hour access to basic urgent care services, a gigantic emphasis on preventive care and healthy lifestyles, initiatives focused on stress reduction, pollution reduction, treating emotional health issues logistically rather than pharmaceutically, etc. etc.
Building another high-tech hospital that means more resource use, more centralization, more estrangement of health care from the community, etc, is not the right way forward.
Maybe I shouldn't have mentioned Yggles, but I did say he picked it up in Sweden.
He is very far from the only one to emphasize increasing (some) services over redistribution. This is, I think, a coherent and profound political strategy for achieving equality in social democracies under the stress of neo-liberal plutocracy. It is very complicated, devious, subtle, nudgey, and possibly idiotic, but I happen to believe it is coherent.
OTOH, Yggles could be evil. But I still think he is smart, coherent, and erudite.
You know my preferred style of social change. But I have realized at this point that the guillotines and bonfires are much more likely than enacting my preferences for 90% marginal tax rates and single-payer healthcare and Green Manhattan project, and I see no point anymore in coming up with policy solutions that are pipedreams.
Socialism, barbarism, or sneaky servants is all we got.
The mission of the J. Howard Pew Freedom Trust was to "acquaint the American people with the evils of bureaucracy and the values of a free market and to inform our people of the struggle, persecution, hardship, sacrifice and death by which freedom of the individual was won."
acquaint the American people with the evils of bureaucracy and the values of a free market
What does that even mean? Is it libertarian? Okay, I'll check the link.
4: Perhaps that position only goes to friends/relatives of Ezra Klein?
I had been reading yggles since before the Iraq war, but I also havnt read him since he moved to slate.
9: Yes. And very reminiscent of the anti-VD posters and training films from WW2.
From Heebie's take on the OP:
Looking at the Pew Center's website, they have three economic programs. First, the Dream program, for economic mobility. I don't love the phrase "economic mobility", because it implies that the classes are intact, only people can move freely in between them.
This. One could argue, I suppose, that there will always be classes (gradations), so mobility's where it's at, but it's notable that just in the last couple of months -- since OWS insisted on a discussion of income inequality -- Republicans have been frantically casting the need to address inequality in terms of equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcomes.* This casts the much-vaunted American Dream in terms of how hard you try, once your opportunities are allegedly equalized, and resolutely ignores that if outcomes across demographic groups remain consistently unequal, then the opportunities weren't equal in the first place, now were they? Yo.
The equality-of-opportunity vs. equality-of-outcomes framing is very clever, I'll give it that. We'd do well to come up with a way to upend it.
* (I gather this is the gist of Romney's newest anti-Obama stump speech in New Hampshire.)
By way of kvetching, I just read the "Get more on their initiative" link in Witt's OP, and the emphasis on how much cost savings will be involved just drives me nuts.
I realize that many people either view social policy and human welfare in these terms in the first place, or else have capitulated to the fact that that's the only language the wielders of power and money will hear, and so pitch their campaigns in those terms, but jesus christ.
Quoting:
The results of quality, voluntary home visiting programs are clear: fewer young children in our expensive social welfare, mental health and juvenile justice systems, with considerable cost savings for states.
And that's what should convince us to take steps .... Which is why we're focused on evidence-based proposals and data-driven policy procedures!
Also, Witt's OP confuses me a tad since it seems to me that home nursing visits do help toward reducing income inequality in the longer run, especially for young children.
I can't fault Pew for the initiative; it doesn't sound like they're the sort of organization to go full out against inequality in some other way (what way?). (Witt, do you just mean that they might call it for what it is, income inequality, rather than framing it in terms of how much money it will save states?)
The equality-of-opportunity vs. equality-of-outcomes framing is very clever, I'll give it that. We'd do well to come up with a way to upend it.
Arguing for equality-of-opportunity is arguing for the redistribution of wealth.
Life would be pretty sweet if everyone had the level of opportunity Mitt Romney had by being born into wealth and political power. But, given that's not possible for everyone to rise up to Romney's level of opportunity, it would be far easier to obtain equality of opportunity by bringing Romney's level down to the level of everyone else.
* (I gather this is the gist of Romney's newest anti-Obama stump speech in New Hampshire.)
The gist of these stump speeches is that communism is the wrong way forward. It's completely post-modern. Not in the sense of saying random blather to put certain connotations into somebody's head, but using carefully constructed sentences that are false in our reality, but true when common words are given abnormal new definitions.
20.last: Sadly, Republicans have been preemptively addressing that as well. Paul Ryan has a couple of times recently presented the argument that we don't want to bring people down to some lower level, you see, we want to raise people up by providing better opportunities! (There's a lot of audience greed/lust/desire being tapped into in this argument; it very obliquely gestures toward some idea that putting us all on a more equal level would have us wearing grey sackcloth, like socialist robots.)
It's fucking clever, is what it is.
Anyway, clearly the way to answer the opportunity versus outcomes dichotomy is to insist that it's not a real distinction.
What I meant in 21 is that the content of these stump speeches is, simply, that communism is the wrong way forward. The form is post-modern. Also, an essential element of the speeches is the person who's delivering them. Mitt Romney doesn't need to say things that makes sense, as someone the media considers reasonable. He can take advantage of a wider range of utterances. From him, rhetoric that would be perceived as nonsensical and belligerent coming out of the mouth of a random citizen is perceived as, by definition, both appropriate in tone and worthy of consideration.
I think that people advocating equality of opportunity need to pony up on the opportunities, is what needs to happen.
24 gets it right. 'course, they're going to argue that minimizing gubmint, which just gets in your face all the time, doesn't it?! is the way to do that.
Good">http://globalcomment.com/2011/why-does-the-media-still-refer-to-%E2%80%9Cbradley%E2%80%9D-manning-the-curious-silence-around-a-transgender-hero/">Good question.
12: The mission of the J. Howard Pew Freedom Trust
The whole untangling of Pew "force for good" vs. "force for evil" is an ongoing thing. Pew is all Sun Oil -> Sunoco* money, and J. Howard in particular was definitely a Kochian believer in God and free enterprise (his father was instrumental in establishing Grove City College and J. Howard and the family were heavily involved in it and helped set the tone for its Title IX battles).
If you believe in freedom for the individual, you must be opposed to any encroachment of government on the rights of the individual. If you believe that everyone should have an opportunity to receive an education, you cannot support government controlled education; if you support the free market, you cannot support government price controls.
*Sunoco pioneered the Athabascan Tar Sands projects.
I'm not going to research this now, but my recollection is that visiting nurses programs were destroyed, at least in part, by the AMA's wanting a monopoly on some of the medical services nurses were providing.
During my time in hospital work I remember jurisdictional disputes between optometrists, opticians, and opthalmologists; chiropractors, naturopaths, osteopaths, and allopaths (what we call MDs); psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts; dentists, oral surgeons, and denturists; LPNs, RNS, and graduate nurses (or what ever they call nurses with a four year bachelors degree); aides and CNAs; midwives and MDs; MDs, physicians assistants, and nurse practitioners; lab techs and med techs; and substance abuse counselors, family counselors, social workers, and nurses.
In the lower levels (such as aides and CNAs above) there was also a consistent move from on-the-job training to community college certification, even though in what I saw the CC training wasn't worth a lot. The effect of this was to shift training costs from the hospitals, etc., to the entering worker.
It was constant push / pull, with the higher levels promising more expert care in return for preserving their monopolies, and the lower levels offering opportunities for more people at the lower level, more individualized care, better training in the nuts and bolts stuff, and cost cutting. It was all political, with coordinated national and state campaigns.
The higher levels also want to shift their dirty work downward while maintaining control and status, and there's a tension there,
These kinds of licensing monopolies are one of the few areas where I think I might be able to talk productively with a non-insane libertarian, if such things exist. (That is, besides imperialism and the drug war, and the militarization of policing, where I already mostly agree). I'm sure it's one factor in the high cost of health care, and the political dynamic is toward increased costs since once a relatively lower level trade establishes itself firmly, it starts trying to upgrade its status and freeze out the even lower level trades.
Obviously there has to be some licensing and quality control, but that's not the main thing that's going on.
Arguing for equality-of-opportunity is should be arguing for the redistribution of wealth.
This is the standard American response to demands for equality. Set some goal in terms of public support of self-advancement, and blame anyone who fails to advance for failing to take advantage of what was there. The inherent advantages of family money are not spoken of.
The "53%" featured people who took this game for fair and beat their brains out trying to claw their way into the middle class, working two jobs while going to school, etc. That's the American dream.
To the extent that the occupiers were, as they perceived, already privileged upper-middle-class college students petitioning for even more support, they had some point. Their failure to understand that the cards have been increasingly stacked against them since about 1975 by the Republicans they fervently support, though, makes it hard to respect them. Republicans talk equality of opportunity against equality of result, but they work to destroy equality of opportunity too.
S/B "To the extent that the occupiers were, as the 53% perceived, already-privileged upper-middle-class college students petitioning for even more support, the 53% had some point. "
I think it's a fair assessment that broadening out the welfare state in the late 70s and at the local level in the 80s worked as a way of resisting Thatcherism. Rather than going after the big prizes like the NHS, they had to keep fighting Buggerlugs Borough Council over their wotsname project.
I don't know why I'm compelled to both read and bitch so much about Yglesias. He has a kind of "stuck in smart undergrad mode forever" thing going on
You mean he has a blog?
I tried to find something to take issue with in 34, and could not.
Oh wait! People have, like, knitting blogs and such. Quite humble, they tend to be.
Yeah, even as I wrote it, I was thinking "this should really be "politics blog"', but then it wouldn't have sounded snappy.
Boy, I hate this whole Christmas gift-giving thing.
I hate this whole sequential christmas celebration thing; I've just heard that a family with which I've sometimes spent Thanksgiving wants to do a christmas thing for brunch Monday. Monday?! Do I have to bring something? Can I beg off? Could there have been more warning?
I think I'm going to be in need of a tried-and-true zucchini bread recipe or something.
don't love the phrase "economic mobility", because it implies that the classes are intact, only people can move freely in between them.
But they are. The classes, that is. Ignoring that fact doesn't get us anywhere.
A lot of social mobility egalitarianism does just involve using education to rescue individuals from the lower class and bringing them up into the middle class. Real egalitarianism would involve improving the situation of people working low-status jobs. One of the things about illegal immigration is the now a big proportion of those people have no political rights, no union rights, and usually no way of educating their children. They're just a sort of entering wedge for the demoted neoliberal working class of the future, as described by Chicago School economists et al.
The thing to understand about Pew is that the institutional space they want to occupy -- chin-stroking respected independent foundation whose findings are trusted by all sides -- means that they *cannot* go too far in talking about deep systemic inequalities and injustices. They have to be 'nonpartisan' at all times. Within the nonpartisan frame they are kind of OK in raising issues of the breakdown of economic mobility, injustice, etc. But obviously there is a big problem with the Overton Window-related problem here.
Condition of a car doesn't really change anything. junk car is junk,simple!. whether a car is in fair condition or in poor shape, it weighs the same, therefore price is the same. Some times, the year of the car changes the price, not the condition.