h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Dogster wrote, of CS: "his personal experience is, as it seems, the opposite of mine"

Dogster, care to elaborate? Firsthand accounts can only help!



Also: "Someone from a poor background could not achieve the same status as someone from a wealthy background assuming they were equally talented and expended an equal amount of energy."

No, they would have to expend more energy, because they have to break step with their heritage. (Physics analogies come to mind - something like "heat of fusion"? where molecules of liquid water need a big input of energy to become steam, after which it's easy to add more heat... whatever)

The only quick way I can see around this is to separate children from their past and give them all the same upbringing, ala "Brave New World". I don't think that's either easily implementable or even remotely desirable.

The real solution, gradual change of attitudes, will take generations. Worthwhile things are difficult.

Dogster wrote, of CS: "his personal experience is, as it seems, the opposite of mine"

Dogster, care to elaborate? Firsthand accounts can only help!



Also: "Someone from a poor background could not achieve the same status as someone from a wealthy background assuming they were equally talented and expended an equal amount of energy."

No, they would have to expend more energy, because they have to break step with their heritage. (Physics analogies come to mind - something like "heat of fusion"? where molecules of liquid water need a big input of energy to become steam, after which it's easy to add more heat... whatever)

The only quick way I can see around this is to separate children from their past and give them all the same upbringing, ala "Brave New World". I don't think that's either easily implementable or even remotely desirable.

The real solution, gradual change of attitudes, will take generations. Worthwhile things are difficult.

Thanks for the backup, GT. You said pretty much everything I would have, and a few things that hadn't occurred to me.

Dogster's point about equal efforts yielding inequal results is valid. A poor person has to work much harder to achieve, because they start out with fewer advantages. That is true. But the poor person has much more motivation. If and how he chooses to act on it is up to the individual. I'm not sure how you want to solve this one.

The solution, as stated before, is to start every individual on equal footing... same educational system, etc. First of all, that is impossible to do. Everything *can't* be made absolutely equal, because prejudices will still persist, and until we can deal with those, we're out of luck. But more importantly, working to provide the children with greater opportunties is one of the strongest and noblest motivations in our society, and it carries many a hard-working unskilled laborer through the work week.

As for race and performance in school, here are a few more factors for your consideration:

- The first way people determine relative intelligence is through communication skills. Children brought up in minority families often find themselves at a distinct disadvantage from the start, since the parents either speak a foreign language, or a cultural slang that promotes poor grammar. Solution: parents need to expose their children early on to books, educational television, and other sources where they can experience good grammar. They need to improve on their own, as well.

- Cultural factors are especially strong in poor and minority communities that discourage intelligence. Books are boring, school is a waste of time, intelligent discourse is nerdy and intimidating, etc. Peer pressure is a powerful force among children. Parents are the solution. Encouragement at home will counteract discouragement among peers. All too often, though, it is the parent who feels threatened, and discourages education.

If the problems are cultural, how will money solve them?

And another yet unconsidered problem with wealth redistribution is that it will have to have a specific cut-off. Everyone making below $X/year will receive the money, and everyone above $X/year receives nothing. The resentment among the people just above, who consider themselves more deserving than those below (they worked hard for it, didn't they?) will be overwhelming. Expect families to stop working more than one job... why should they work so hard, when they can work less, and get a handout?

End result: The rich hate you, the lower-middle class hates you, a handful of poor rise above their station, while the rest remain unchanged, but perhaps better clothed.

One of the best books that explores the psyche of the poor in industrialized nations in the modern age is by a fantasy author, "The Losers", by David Eddings. Don't be put off if you dislike fantasy, because this is not fantasy. It'll help you understand the sense of worthlessness poor people experience, and the drama they create in an effort to get noticed. Government handouts only make that feeling of worthlessness worse. It's like saying, "Here, we know you couldn't possibly earn this on your own, so we're going to take care of you, like you were some kind of child."

When I say 'redistribution of wealth', I don't simply mean taking money from the rich and giving to the poor, like soem modern day Robin Hood. But you can provide for people unable to support themselves, with - as I've mentioned before - public housing, a national health service, national insurance. Some problems can be helped through purely financial benefits, for example state pensions and unemployment benefits. But few problems are solved, I agree, by merely throwing money at them. That doesn't mean that we can't solve some of them through the redistribution of wealth. And wealth is not just money.

Col. Sellers - I think we both see the same problems within society, and recognise that 'something has to be done', but our solutions are somewhat different. The problems we are talking about here aren't either financial or cultural, but both - and they need a financial and cultural solution.

DG, who needs to go, but is really glad to have found someplace with some grown-up discussion

> "And another yet unconsidered problem with wealth redistribution is that it will have to have a specific cut-off."

No it won't. You just provide a flat-rate benefit to everyone. Those who make a lot of money will pay more in tax than they get off the flat rate, those who make a little will pay less than they get. Problem solved: the more money you make, the more money you have, no resentment around some artifical boundary figure, no feelings of worthlessness, and no cumbersome and inaccurate beauracracy.

Dr. G: If you mean wealth redistribution to mean something other than moving money around, then you're talking about something other than wealth redistribution. It sounds more like you're favoring expansion of social programs. Could you elaborate?

Lucinda: In this case, the reaction would depend on how much the tax rate hikes affect people, since I assume you mean to collect the redistribution money through taxes. There would still be a cutoff, where people are paying the same taxes as before, and paying more than before. It won't be too hard to spot, because they'll notice the money missing from their checks.

And in this case, it looks like you intend to collect at least some of this money from the middle class, who would definitely feel the pinch if an extra $100-300 a month was taken from them. The result would be the aforementioned resentment. You have *no* idea how much the average American resents taxes already (it's a cultural trait not shared with many, I think).

In any case, you would still be presenting people with a handout of money which they did not work for, when all is said and done. I'm not yet convinced that the worthlessness feeling will be abated.

I completely agree with GTB's "The real solution, gradual change of attitudes, will take generations. Worthwhile things are difficult" and mention of the undesirability of the Brave New World idea (separate children from parents). There are institutional changes that can be of some utility as well though.

The much maligned 'affirmative action' programs are an attempt to compensate for the fact that children from certain racial groups have a more difficult task to achieve a similar result, and weight the odds in their favour. These are not the same as a handout, these are providing better opportunities to disadvantaged groups to compensate for the greater difficulty for these groups in obtaining these opportunities, and so they are not unfair, nor are they pushing out clever people for stupid people.

So, although in general I agree that a change in attitudes is the real solution to the problem, there are some institutional changes which can help further this change in attitude and provide a temporary remedy in the mean time.

I'd love to include some of my personal experience, but I don't think my friends would appreciate my discussing their private lives on the internet .

I agree with what you have to say, GTBacchus. I merely wanted to point out that there are usually different reasons for poverty(I believe in almost all cases) than squandered opportunities and personal flaws.

There are a lot of good, thought-provoking, points being made here. However I do have to take exception to this claim that government handouts or welfare or whatever you call them make the disenfranchised feel "worthless." Sorry, I was unemployed for months (in a boom period too) and relied on the pittance handed out by the state to keep me in food and cheap beer. It didn't make me feel fantastic about my prospects but I was f**king grateful for it. If you took away welfare, desperate people wouldn't think "Oh, no, my spirit-crushing, patronising handout is gone. What will I do? I know, I'll try and apply myself more." No, they're more likely to become more desperate and rob some corner shop or burgle some house.

This idea that welfare "patronises" people sounds like some desperate ideological struggle to marry a basically selfish "neo-liberalism" with some kind of pretence to care. I don't buy it.

Zagreb: I think it's important to draw distinctions between welfare and unemployment:

- Unemployment is a form of insurance, which one pays while employed, then collects unemployed. It is a form of investment, managed by the state. Welfare is not paid for by its recipients.

- Unemployment is a temporary condition, and the recipient can be emotionally reinforced by good job prospects, updating resumes, filling out applications, etc. The welfare recipient generally does not have any immediate hopes to change their station.

Incidentally, I've been first-hand witness to the motivating power of need recently. A certain somebody's mother was living off her child, until that child achieved unmitigated financial ruin. The child's romantic relationship was nearly destroyed as well, and so this person was forced to cut the mother off completely. Less than a week later, that deadbeat mother, who couldn't find a job for several months, was suddenly gainfully employed.

This same mother then borrowed that child's car in order to make it to that job, and the child was forced to depend on others. Then, a couple months later, the child's primary transportation failed, and was forced to reclaim the vehicle. Two days later, the mother had her own car.

That child was my girlfriend. I still hate her mom, but that's beside the point. The point is, her mom was content to live off of the fruits of others, but as soon as that support was withdrawn, she found a way to take care of herself.

"Necessity is the mother of invention"

> "the motivating power of need"

Oh, I agree with that. It motivates many people to become drug dealers, prostitutes, petty thieves... Another cliche would be "desperate times call for desperate measures" - desperate, and often illegal.

> "Lucinda: In this case, the reaction would depend on how much the tax rate hikes affect people"

I already said that redistribution was all I wanted the state to do, and very little else. So you'd find that the tax burden would stay the same, or perhaps even fall some. More than under pure libertarianism, of course, but comparable to the present system.

And yes, you'd probably have to make sure some of the citizen's income was in 'voucher' form for education, health insurance, and anything else that people need to be co-erced into spending money on. Again, that's something the government does already and doesn't screw up *too* badly...

Great. It's not enough that the company I work for pays me a lower wage than every one else, and that they lie to me on a regualar basis, but now their connection to the net is stealing my posts.

Re: The Tax burden

I think one of the best way to deal with the tax burden would be to stop government using public money for private reasons. Examples of this include holidays, private vehicles, redecorating, dinner parties et al.

In the UK, other good ways would be to dispose of the UK's nuclear weapons (3 billion a year for missiles that, let's be honest, would never be fired without permission from Washington) and the scaling down or (my favourite) disestablishment of the monarchy - a massive waste of public money as well as a gang of snobs.

Zagreb

"> "the motivating power of need"
Oh, I agree with that. It motivates many people to become drug dealers, prostitutes, petty thieves... Another cliche would be "desperate times call for desperate measures" - desperate, and often illegal."

People resort to illegal activities mostly because they're so easy. Sell crack? No problem!

Libertarians would legalize soft drugs, and decriminalize hard ones (meaning possession or use would not be punished, but trafficking and production would), so there goes your drug dealers, out of business. As for prostitution... a victimless crime, wouldn't you say? So now we're down to petty theft. If petty theft is the worst crime problem in your society, you're doing *very* well. And with all the minor drug possession people out of jail, we suddenly have room for petty thieves, and more.

If all the state does is move around money, who fixes the roads? Who runs the schools? Who pays the police? What do we do about national defense? The tax burden can only increase with a redistribution of wealth. The difference is that a portion of the population will receive more than they paid. A rare few will see no or little change. The vast majority will face an increased burden. That's the reality.

As for 'vouchers', I don't know how successful this sort of thing is in the UK, but in the US, welfare recipients are using government food stamps to buy drugs, alcohol, or whatever.

GT has pretty much spell out the underlying issue, and any attempt from me to comment futher on this reality would be inferior. I do agree that handouts breed the idea that there will be more handouts to follow. On the wall at our local highschool a murel reads:

"If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime."

Sadly, if you had given one-close-to-me-who-will-remain-nameless a fish eight years ago, she would have hocked it off for crack (and your most of your wealth redistribution would have ended up in the hands of the drug cartels, funding terrorism). She was given no handouts, and now she has been taught to fish and is gainfully employed, and showing her children that the most effective way out of poverty is hard work. Her only incentive is her own desire to better herself and the opportunity for her children. Many do not even have the desire part of it all.

We need to make the children aware that there are no handouts, that they are in control of their earning potential. Unfortunately, public school does a horrific job of this (the murel was the only real hint I got from high school), mostly because it lacks one important incentive: the desire to learn. Basically public schools hand feed not knowledge, but distasteful memorization lessons, which tend to drive the bright (and often poor) students to drop out. The Montessori model is the way to instill a real yearning for knowledge. Yet again, private school brings us back to the Great Economic Divide. I dont know the Libertarian stance on public vs. private, but it is clear to me that all public should be built on the Montessori model.

In belated reply to Col. Sellers' last post, I'd suggest that private companies can run the schools perfectly well, as they do the universities (in USA), and redistribution would allow poor people to afford the cheaper ones. They can also run healthcare reasonably well.

Justice, defence, probably roads, obviously need to be state-run, sure. That's a lot less that what we're currently doing...

Incidentally, why would drug cartels fund terrorism? I can't imagine terrorism offers a very good return on investment...

"I can't imagine terrorism offers a very good return on investment..."


I'll bet it does if you also own stock in the mass media!


No, I suspect the connection is that the drug money is flowing back to the terrorists overseas who are harboured by the same governments that refuse to crack down on drug production and export, or something like that. In short, terrorists make their money by selling drugs. But I'm not sure whether you were really asking, or being funny...

Fair enough. The Taliban made money from opium after all. I just figured that if you put your money into Al-Qaeda bonds, you'd see your savings go up in smoke.

I wonder if the govts of Saudi Arabia complain about the UK refusing to crack down on alcohol and tobacco production?