The divide between left and right on this forum and in public discourse can by summed up between maternal and paternal perspectives battling it out. I can go in to more detail about maternal vs paternal but it gets kind of tedious. Anyways, both are equal and valid perspectives. I believe its the dialogue and battle between the two perspectives that synthesizes thinking on a societal level. People are actually terrible at thinking and thinking requires taking both sides seriously and having an internal battle to shape ones beliefs. People are terrible at thinking and blindly go with their temperamental biases. As social animals we are corrected/socialized by others. Less so when we operate in a bubble. People get very weird when isolated and don't get any social feedback

What I believe we are seeing now is the left moving further left (maternal) and the very vocal far left dominating the conversation. The problem with the core values in maternal and paternal behavior is that when they get off balance they become pathological and kind of spiral out of control. I think this is the state of a growing portion of the left. They are just way off balance with maternal values.

+14 to the entire lagtight list.

But modern politics isn't played as a macro game. We're constantly squabbling over edge cases and drawing lines in the sand only to wash them away when it suits us or if the person on the right team is the one crossing them.

I feel like as a society we've risen to the level of our own incompetence. Traditional conservative values don't work as well if you don't have sufficient levels of self-motivation and determination to be the master of your own destiny. Too many people have gotten used to being taken care of and are just waiting for someone else to solve all of their problems for them.

Inso0, any comment on this chart with regard to point #9?

If the country were truly a meritocracy, the points wouldn't line up so nicely, would they?

I'm devout and diverse despite being an atheist (calling yourself agnostic because you're 99% sure there's no god instead of 100% sure there's no god is a cop out imo)

From the source:



We are not special snowflakes beyond the slope being higher. Canada/Denmark data points seemed a little wonky and likely created using median figures there instead of averages like the USA one. I went looking for the original source and found this for the Denmark data:

http://www.columbia.edu/~wk2110/bin/WealthAcrossGen.pdf



The best we can do is provide people the individual freedom to exert as much influence on their own outcome as they're willing to put in the effort for. That's been the legacy of the United States since the start, but we're moving away from it.


Edit: Sorry, I grabbed the wealth graph instead of the income graph. Income one is found on page 18 and mirrors the USA one with how linear it is. Bottom line: this is not unique to the USA.

Well, to be somewhat nitpicky, I didn't say how rich someone was determined the votes...but how much in taxes they paid. Since they are the ones paying all the bills, it seems my "on-its-face laughaable proposal" would have some sort of merit.

If me and you decided to open a business together, selling widgets, and I put in 5% of the money, and you put in 95%....you better believe you are going to be the one making all the calls. If I said we should go 1 person, 1 vote....you'd think it was pretty dang laughable all right. But what if I said you pay 95% and get 1 vote, I pay 5% and get 1 vote, and we give 300 million other people a vote...you'd think the world had lost it's mind.

As for your 2 year old not getting a vote because he's 2...That is my point. You wouldn't let them decide for you key decisions, and you'd think it was basically insanity if someone did. What is the cutoff? When does your kid every bit as much power to tell you and the wife how to spend your money?

You realise that the most relevant part of those graphs is the gradient of the slope right? A completely flat line would mean everyone attained the same income regardless of parental income. The fact that the US is significantly steeper than the others is what is important, not that there's a linear trend. That tells us that it's harder for people with poor parents to do well in the US than it is in Canada/Denmark, and it's also easier for people with rich parents to stay rich. Although eyebooger mentioned the correlation rather than gradient, this is actually the exact point he was making.

Edit: @Inso0

For those who seem to think that I only call out fallacious arguments when liberals make them, I will refute that by saying this is astoundingly fallacious reasoning as regards the subject at hand.

You say you're not talking about how rich people are but how much tax they pay, but the top 3% pay more than 50% of taxes and the top 0.001% pay as much as the bottom 50%. Under this system government would literally only cater to the rich, as getting their votes would be may orders of magnitude more important. At that point it's no longer democracy it's plutocracy. There's a decent argument that the US is already getting closer and closer to a plutocracy as it is and we want to be getting away from that, not taking a leap head first into it.

Your analogies are all awful as well - the goal of government isn't to make a profit, it's to provide the infrastructure for all of society to benefit from. And the less said about the household analogy the better - I mean, you are essentially saying poor people don't deserve a vote because they are comparatively as worthy of making decisions compared to rich people as a 2 year old is compared to their parent...

The slopes weren't that wildly different.

Still, the OP talked about personal success and happiness. Mo' money mo' problems.

The slope is twice as steep (gradient of 0.34 vs 0.17 and 0.18), that's a pretty huge difference.

I don't think this point is lost on Indynirish. He is arguing that this is how the system should work.

This is a dumb analogy since taxpayers are not shareholders in the same sense. If you're going to insist on using a business analogy the taxpayers are more like customers than shareholders. D-, re-write is due next week.

what about the agnostics who believe in god?

That nugget aside. the 'agnostic 'position is about a lack of belief in whether god(s) exist or not. it isn't being not quite sure that god(s) doesn't exist.

You're overthinking this.

The income slope was actually .2, since I accidentally grabbed the wrong graph, and even that doesn't ultimately matter because trends are just that, trends. You're not doomed to be in the 30th percentile just because that's where you started.

Income scales differently in Denmark than it does the USA. Of course they're going to be more bunched up and thus have a lower slope. They're one of the most tightly packed groups on the planet. Good for Denmark and their relatively small population. Still, their averages shows that children tend to stick with the parents along that more shallow sloping line.

The parental safety nets are undoubtedly stronger for those at the top so it's harder to crash, but people still do it. Conversely, your parents aren't going to be able to write checks to overcome your weaknesses or cultivate your strengths when you start in the bottom quintile, but that doesn't stop people from climbing the socio-economic ladder.

We're not arguing the same thing. I think eyebooger was complaining about overall income inequality and then trying to get me to admit that USA#1 does a poor job of letting people do better/worse than their parents. I disagree, but not because his graph is necessarily incorrect. The extremes of the income curve are more sticky than they should be in the USA, in that the tippity top tends to stay there generation after generation, as does the very lowest, but everyone else enjoys quite a bit of mobility, whether good or bad. That's what lagtight's OP alluded to, I think. That's one of America's strengths, but we're losing sight of that as people continue to demonize the rich.

Firstly the gradients I used are from the income graphs here, page 84. I wasn't taking anything from the wealth graph you posted.

More relevantly we are arguing about the same thing. I'm pointing out that as far as the bolded goes, the US is one of the worst developed countries in the world. It's obviously not impossible to climb the economic/social ladder but the point is that it is harder to do that in the US than it is elsewhere.

I was assuming that he was just unaware of the magnitudes of difference rather than openly arguing to roll back democracy by over 100 years but maybe I was giving him too much credit.

Your ability to do something and your willingness are two different concepts.

You can lead a horse to water but you cannot make it drink. It's never been easier to bring yourself up from the bottom income quintile to the top in terms of raw access. We're bending over backward to throw resources at people who want to make the effort.

Spend a few weeks in any inner city classroom of your choice and then come back and tell the rest of us why you think US economic mobility is lagging behind.

It's probably because Americans don't compress market income and Americans don't have a big enough welfare state and probably not because low income Americans are more dumb dumb than the low income Nordics.

Differences in educational attainment account for most of the difference in slope. Other factors not immediately obvious but are important drivers: birth rate (lower = more persistence) and savings rates (higher=more persistence.)

I have pointed this out before but this observation really needs repeating. Black Americans dramatically underperform every other identifiable ethnic group (even Native Americans, though not as dramatically) in income mobility and most of the difference is tied to differences in educational attainment.

Once out of the bottom 20/30% or so, black Americans basically do as well as everyone else but for reasons not fully understood (yes, racism is definitely one of the reasons), black Americans have a much harder time getting out of the bottom rung of the social-economic ladder.

Why don't you save us a few weeks and tell us why you think US economic mobility is lagging behind.

Most households are also left-authoritarian, in the political-compass sense. When you had colic as a baby you didn't have to get a job down at the acid mines to pay for your treatment. Likewise, when you were laid off from your job down at the acid mines you didn't go hungry because you couldn't afford food. Who paid for your baby shoes so the acid didn't burn your baby toes?

It's been a long time since you people even attempted this minefield of an analogy.

This country was founded as a white ethnostate specifically to take care of personified Dunning-Kruger studies such as yourself.

The Blacks? It's gotta be The Blacks, right?

When you put it that way it sounds like conservatism.