Back in 2003 & 2007, Thomas Piketty & Emmanuel Saez [PS] published tax-record-based estimates of U.S. top income shares from 1917 until then. They found inequality rose until 1930, fell until WWII, stayed flat until 1980, and then rose again until today. They blamed WWII tax policy and the absence of similar taxes today.
I don't think the beginning of this post matches the end at all."Everyone agrees roughly that inequality rose til 1930, fell to WII, and then rose after 1980,""inequality mainly falls in bad times and rises in good times"While the wars in the mid-century were obviously bad, 1930-1980 was also the period of the American middle class revolution, massive spread of new technologies, and fast economic growth. I'm not sure any simple characterisation of this period as "good" or "bad" can be useful.
But, as you say in your linked previous post, while it is clearly the bad times that precede the equality, there are serious missing mechanistic details that should prevent you from calling this story causal.
Which direction does the causation run? Is it that more equality causes bad times or that bad times cause more equality? In the former case you don't want equality because it has bad effects, in the latter you don't want the bad times but have no reason to object to the equality they bring.
I did. He said he liked it -war included. Obviously thete are a variety of views on that. He went into the special forces. And I knew someone who served in Korea too. He was not so happy with that one.
Any time period has some bad things happen. That period was special in history in terms of low unemployment, low inflation, good economic growth enjoyed by most, many famies getting to own their own houses for the first time, and having time and money to travel and emjoy themselves.
In most of biology, it mostly doesn't matter if times are good or bad - what matters is how you are doing *relative* to your peers - i.e. for the most part, fitness is relative. That's an important and fundamental explanation for why people care about inequality.
Michael, it sounds like your reasons for asserting that GDP is in general a bad thing go beyond the points made in your 2nd paragraph. If so, can you say what those reasons are?
The official narrative says that economic times are bad if and only if inequality is falling.
Life expectancy in the US grew fastest in the Great Depression and fastest since then in the 1970s. It is currently falling while GDP grows rapidly.
This is what you would expect given the technical definition of GDP. We haven’t been sold a lie about what GDP means, but weirdly, have been sold a norm of not analyzing what it means and noticing that in general it’s a bad thing, even though it’s trivial to point out that with total abundance GDP = 0
I doubt that non-tyrannical collective action can rise to the level of rationality that is achieved by many individual agents. I do not think that "futarchy could solve this."
Does it mean anything about what I "want"? I shouldn't ask a genie to make a random pull from some natural distribution conditional on inequality falling, but I don't have a genie. My actions are based on causal models of how to achieve what I want, how to engineer outcomes that may be unlikely under the old distribution. It would be useful to know about the unforeseen consequences of my plan, but that's the opposite of the common causes of my goals. A communist revolutionary is not going to accidentally cause a war. He has chosen war, apparently having weighed the costs.
A plague is an exogenous shock. I don't wish for a plague. But if a plague comes, what should I do? The Black Plague did not have uniform effects. It increased equality in Western Europe, but inequality in Eastern Europe. It seems to have made class conflict salient, causing a reset of the system, an opportunity for people to change the system. It looks like this was a fulcrum of history, a place where large change was possible. But it's not clear what made the difference. Both places tightened their serfdom laws similarly, but the western peasants managed to just ignore them.
I don't think the beginning of this post matches the end at all."Everyone agrees roughly that inequality rose til 1930, fell to WII, and then rose after 1980,""inequality mainly falls in bad times and rises in good times"While the wars in the mid-century were obviously bad, 1930-1980 was also the period of the American middle class revolution, massive spread of new technologies, and fast economic growth. I'm not sure any simple characterisation of this period as "good" or "bad" can be useful.
But, as you say in your linked previous post, while it is clearly the bad times that precede the equality, there are serious missing mechanistic details that should prevent you from calling this story causal.
In Scheidel’s story, it is clearly bad times that cause more equality.
Which direction does the causation run? Is it that more equality causes bad times or that bad times cause more equality? In the former case you don't want equality because it has bad effects, in the latter you don't want the bad times but have no reason to object to the equality they bring.
I did. He said he liked it -war included. Obviously thete are a variety of views on that. He went into the special forces. And I knew someone who served in Korea too. He was not so happy with that one.
Any time period has some bad things happen. That period was special in history in terms of low unemployment, low inflation, good economic growth enjoyed by most, many famies getting to own their own houses for the first time, and having time and money to travel and emjoy themselves.
Ask anyone who served in Vietnam.
In most of biology, it mostly doesn't matter if times are good or bad - what matters is how you are doing *relative* to your peers - i.e. for the most part, fitness is relative. That's an important and fundamental explanation for why people care about inequality.
Michael, it sounds like your reasons for asserting that GDP is in general a bad thing go beyond the points made in your 2nd paragraph. If so, can you say what those reasons are?
I did blog all Turchin's books here: https://www.overcomingbias....
The official narrative says that economic times are bad if and only if inequality is falling.
Life expectancy in the US grew fastest in the Great Depression and fastest since then in the 1970s. It is currently falling while GDP grows rapidly.
This is what you would expect given the technical definition of GDP. We haven’t been sold a lie about what GDP means, but weirdly, have been sold a norm of not analyzing what it means and noticing that in general it’s a bad thing, even though it’s trivial to point out that with total abundance GDP = 0
This curve roughly tracks with the secular cycle from "Ages of Discord" by Turchin as discussed by Scott Alexander here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/...
I doubt that non-tyrannical collective action can rise to the level of rationality that is achieved by many individual agents. I do not think that "futarchy could solve this."
How many people think WWII until 1975 was bad times?
Does it mean anything about what I "want"? I shouldn't ask a genie to make a random pull from some natural distribution conditional on inequality falling, but I don't have a genie. My actions are based on causal models of how to achieve what I want, how to engineer outcomes that may be unlikely under the old distribution. It would be useful to know about the unforeseen consequences of my plan, but that's the opposite of the common causes of my goals. A communist revolutionary is not going to accidentally cause a war. He has chosen war, apparently having weighed the costs.
A plague is an exogenous shock. I don't wish for a plague. But if a plague comes, what should I do? The Black Plague did not have uniform effects. It increased equality in Western Europe, but inequality in Eastern Europe. It seems to have made class conflict salient, causing a reset of the system, an opportunity for people to change the system. It looks like this was a fulcrum of history, a place where large change was possible. But it's not clear what made the difference. Both places tightened their serfdom laws similarly, but the western peasants managed to just ignore them.