Results for “child abuse” 53 found
Does the NYT not recognize child abuse?
“I have one partner now with three kids. He is transmasc, and he’s radical about the way he raises them. They’re radically home-schooled. They’re 17 and nonbinary, 6 and 5. They know everything in age-appropriate ways. They’ve seen their mommy undergo the transmasc experience, seen their mom become who they really are.”
5 and 6! Here is their latest polyamory story, the tone of the story, including the treatment of the children, seems to be entirely normal or possibly positive? (I have nothing against polyamory per se.) Is no one at the NYT made uncomfortable by this? Is it permissible to speak up internally on such issues? Or not? The stronger left-wing take would be that this is one of the better arguments for public education, namely that parent-dominated cults can truly harm children, most of all when they control their education.
Why is child abuse not opposed more passionately on the Right
From an email from Paul Foster:
From my perch, there are two primary reasons the right doesn’t more passionately oppose child abuse. The first has to do with parents’ rights. The general conservative view of the child welfare system is of a group of liberal ladies who think they know better than parents and who are especially skeptical of religious parenting, especially conservative Christian parenting. (The NYT op-ed opposing home schooling was an almost-too-perfect totem in that regard.) As a result, while many on the right will say “sure, flat-out abuse is bad,” they’ll assume that “abuse” will be defined eventually to include homeschooling, imparting religious views (especially on traditional gender roles), and the like. The early 20th-century attempt to eradicate the German language and culture through the public schools is often pointed to, as is (at least among the hipper conservatives (I swear we exist!)) that one Simpsons episode where a social worker gives demerits to Marge and Homer’s household for “toilet paper hung in improper overhand fashion.”
The second reason–and this is probably true for both the right and the left–is that you can’t even think of a solution by reasoning from your political views. “Adults shouldn’t beat kids” is universally accepted, but your views on taxes or your reading of Ayn Rand or that latest anti-Pelosi meme doesn’t give you anything helpful in actually stopping adults from beating kids. Without a political solution, it tends to fall by the political wayside.
Here are my previous recent posts on related questions concerning child abuse.
Why the low status of opposition to child abuse?
Michael Kaan emails me:
Hi Tyler, I’m a healthcare professional in Canada and a long-time reader of your blog. For the past couple of years, observing the culture wars and various elections, I’ve noticed that child abuse is an extremely rare topic among the cultural left: the highly visible progressive segment that drives wokeness, is culturally powerful, etc. You know what their dominant concerns are. (On the right it’s basically non-existent.)
While there’s nothing obviously wrong with their attention to sexual and racial discrimination, the energy put into it is disproportionate to the massive social cost of child abuse. Rates vary around the world, but in general it looks like about 30% of all children globally suffer some sort of serious maltreatment each year, often many times a year, repeated over multiple years.So one can easily estimate that billions of people have experienced this. In other words, more people have been abused as children than have experienced war, famine, or epidemics.
The impact and costs of this have been measured (low academic achievement, health problems, low earnings, drug and alcohol use, etc.), and child abuse is sometimes lethal. What puzzles me is why it has no legs politically. Among the woke crowd, if child abuse is mentioned it’s usually in terms of discrimination against girls or sexual minorities. But there are really no prominent voices actively campaigning to mitigate child abuse generally.Why is this? Is it overly complex? Is the phenomenon too widely dispersed demographically, so that an evil agent group isn’t easily identified? Does its persistence foreground chronic failures of the welfare state (if that’s the case)? Is it boring?
For a start, I would note that virtually everyone is again child abuse, so opposing it doesn’t make anyone significant look worse. But I am sure there is much more to it than that.
The Lost Eden of Childhood. Not Lost. Not Eden.
Jim Manzi warms to Paul Krugman’s nostalgia:
It’s difficult to convey the almost unbearable sweetness of this kind of American childhood to anybody who didn’t live it. The safety and freedom that Krugman describe are rare now even for the wealthiest Americans – by age 9, I would typically leave the house on a Saturday morning on my bike, tell my parents I was “going out to play,” and not return until dinner; at age 10, would go down to the ocean to swim with friends without supervision all day; and at age 11 would play flashlight tag across dozens of yards for hours after dark. And the sense of equality was real, too. Some people definitely had bigger houses and more things than others, but our lives were remarkably similar. We all went to the same schools together, played on the same teams together, and watched the same TV shows. The idea of having, or being, “help” seemed like something from old movies about another time.
Who doesn’t look upon their childhood with wistfulness for what has been lost? Exile from Eden is one of the oldest stories on record. But don’t mistake personal narrative for reality. When Manzi says “we all went to the same schools together, played on the same teams together, and watched the same TV shows.” He isn’t talking about African Americans. And was the idea of having or being help, really “from a different time”? Again, not for African Americans. In 1950 more than 40% of African American women in the labor force were domestic servants. (Moreover, given these numbers a back of the envelope calculation suggests proportionately fewer homes with maids today.) See also Megan McArdle on Manzi’s vision and women staying at home.
Growing up in Northern Virginia, my children experience far more ethnic, cultural, racial and sexual diversity and equality than just about any child growing up outside of a commune did in the 1950s and 1960s.
Has childhood freedom been lost? No. Childhood freedom hasn’t been “lost,” it has been taken away by parents. As a child, I too was free to play in the woods but then again my parents didn’t buckle me up in the car, either.
Has safety decreased? It is true that one of the most horrible things we can imagine, homicide, is up. For kids aged 5-14 homicide mortality went from 0.5 per 100,000 in 1950 to 0.8 per 100,000 in 2005. Overall, however, kids are much safer today than in the 1950s. Accident mortality, for example, is down from 22.7 per 100,000 in 1950 to 6.2 per 100,000 in 2005 (see Caplan’s Selfish Reasons for more details). Maybe buckling up and ocean supervision isn’t so bad. Maybe parents today worry too much. Probably some of both.
There have been big improvements in accident risk since even my childhood years. I remember those idyllic summers of the 1970s earning a few extra dollars mowing lawns–80,000 amputated fingers, hands and mangled toes and feet every year back then and just 6,000 today. Would I even let me kid use a mower from the 1970s? Disease mortality is also way down, from 36.6 per 100,000 in 1950 to 8.6 per 100,000 in 2005. For good or for ill, parental fears have increased even as risks overall have fallen.
There is nothing wrong with a bit of personal nostalgia but when nostalgia is taken for reality it biases our thinking in counter-productive ways. One wonders, for example, what those who look back longingly at the freedom of their childhood would say about Lenore Skenazy and her free-range kids. Skenazy let her fourth-grader take the NYC subway home alone. Would Manzi applaud Skenazy for giving her kids the same freedoms he had? Or would he denounce her, as many parents did, for something tantamount to child-abuse?
From the Comments
The context is that human challenge trials were “ethically fraught” but, Sure writes:
…I think we had more than a few instances in history where restricting movement, shuttering houses of worship, and stratifying the economy into favored and disfavored sectors was considered ethically fraught.
I mean we know that limiting visitation to old folks shortens their lives. We know that child abuse becomes harder to find the fewer the number of folks who lay eyes on them each day. We know that initimate partner violence increases when the housing market gets frozen. And we know that suicides crest when businesses go under.
Yet no such epistemic humility and wariness followed with public health recommendations to be tried on a scale reserved hitherto for literal wars and genocides. And we blindly went ahead full speed.
Or consider even the better defined but wildly more mundane issue: proof of vaccination. For decades health ethicists told us that merely revealing a patient’s name, let alone which medications they have taken, was an unconscionable ethical violation. One which we instituted balkanized medical systems to manage and where the cost has been literal lives lost as we have had untold numbers of patients fall through the cracks thanks to duplicate profiles, failure of providers to communicate, and of course scads and scads of useful data locked away from effective statistical analysis that could spot patterns of medical error.
Yet when the powers that be decided that we needed vaccine passports so we could enjoy dining again? Well, every waiter in the country becomes a safe repository of PHI.
No formal study. No deliberations. Precious little if any publications.
And even then, it went only for what was the most expedient option for the enlightened. No ability to get an antibody titer card for medical equivalence. No ability to substitute PCR results with a physician evaluation of recent disease recovery.
Professional medical ethics are bogus. There is no consistency and the entire profession serves to pander to the prejudices of the educated.
Tyrone joins…that group…
Many of you ask me for reports of my evil twin brother Tyrone, but of course I demur because I am too embarrassed to pass along his doings. They get worse and worse. Nonetheless, Tyrone said he was going public with this one, so I thought the damage was done in any case. The sad news is that Tyrone is now an active proponent of QAnon. How can he fall for such fallacies and stupidities? He sent me this letter to explain his decision:
Dear Tyler:
You have yourself blogged about the import of child abuse, and asked why it is not condemned more widely, most of all among elites. You even wrote that the right wing ignored the issue — I thought it is time to remedy that! We needed a right-wing movement to protect the world’s most vulnerable citizens, and it turned out that looked like QAnon. Besides, who is more of an elite than I am?
To be sure, the QAnon movement has its excesses, but do not all social movements? At least it attacks criminals rather than defending them. The key question is whether social movements shine a light on abusive practices that need further scrutiny, and there QAnon passes with flying colors.
QAnon truly has attracted attention — just look at all the complaints about Facebook enabling it. In this world you haven’t arrived until someone can turn a criticism of you into a criticism of Facebook.
Jeffrey Epstein was convicted of…stuff…and the world’s elites continued to treat him as normal and to take his money and fly on his plane. He wasn’t cancelled.
Roman Polanski had a successful and feted career after repeatedly doing very bad…stuff.
The sexual abuse of children has turned out to be rampant in the Catholic Church and also in Hollywood.
I saw the new HBO documentary Showbiz Kids: “In my experience, I know a lot of kids that grew up in the industry. And what surprised me when I got older was finding out that pretty much all of the young men were abused in some way, sexually.”
French intellectuals — and was there ever more of an elite than them? — petitioned to repeal age of consent laws so they can do…bad stuff…with less fear of the consequences. (See? Petitions really are wrong!)
By the way, Berlin authorities placed children with pedophiles for thirty years. And that is in Germany, a country with relatively responsible governance.
This is all so sickening I can’t go on any further, and we haven’t even discussed all that goes on over the internet.
There is in fact an epidemic of child abuse, it ruins or seriously damages many millions of lives, and elites are complicit in covering it up and refusing to address the preconditions that generate so much of it. These same elites often downplay or discourage the elevation of social conservatism, one of the few possible regulatory mechanisms society might have. In the very worst situations, these elites are directly complicit in covering up the abuse of children. Many of the elites partake in it themselves.
Which group has done more to publicize these failings than QAnon, the worthy successor to The Jerry Springer Show?
Yes, Yes I know. I do not endorse all of their hypotheses concerning political economy. Maybe Donald Trump will not in fact set all things straight, and perhaps the apocalypse is not around the corner. No, the molesters do not worship Satan, but given their behavior they might as well. Should we lock up all those journalists? I don’t know. Comet Ping Pong was never as good as Pupatella anyway. But look — this is what you get when you build a mass movement. The message does get dumbed down and the crazies climb on board, just as we have Antifa and some other weird groups and demands connected to what are otherwise valuable social marches. Tyler — you have to get used to this new world of internet communications! Walter Cronkite is gone. Either compete or give up, and I’m not willing to do the latter.
For whatever structural reason, elite media seem less obsessed with child abuse as an issue than is “non-elite media.” That is simply a reality we need to work with, and our unwillingness to discard traditional canons of journalism has led to the perpetuation of these abuses for centuries, indeed dating back to the very founding of the American nation.
Haven’t you read Marcuse on repressive tolerance?
And come on, this very serious guy just wrote this, but not about QAnon:
“But actually diving into the sea of trash that is social science gives you a more tangible perspective, a more visceral revulsion, and perhaps even a sense of Lovecraftian awe at the sheer magnitude of it all: a vast landfill—a great agglomeration of garbage extending as far as the eye can see, effluvious waves crashing and throwing up a foul foam of p=0.049 papers. As you walk up to the diving platform, the deformed attendant hands you a pair of flippers. Noticing your reticence, he gives a subtle nod as if to say: “come on then, jump in”.”
The rot runs much deeper than the fallacies of QAnon.
Besides, it seems that the guy behind QAPPANON (don’t ask) is “
And Tyler, I know your criticize me for following these conspiracy theories. But you yourself have written of the need to imagine a future very different from the present and then bring it about? Is that not what a conspiracy tries to do? Do we not need to counter these evil conspiracies with some more benevolent plans?
Most of all, when it comes to evaluating social movements, you can only elevate so many victims at once. Isn’t the notion of children as the true victims the most universal and indeed the only vision that can unify this great nation? People complain about the truth-stretching in QAnon, and OK I get that, but isn’t their real worry the revolutionary re-appropriation of which groups in society can be granted true, #1 victimhood status? Just as Christianity accomplished a similar revaluation way back when? (And look at some of the wacky stuff that they believe — ever read The Book of Revelation Tyler?)
I don’t want QAnon to be in charge, but what other tool do we have to force elites to deal with this issue? Aren’t these just Saul Alinsky tactics? QAnon isn’t going to control Congress anyway.
Besides, is not apophenia one of the roots of creativity? Have not Millenarian movements played key and sometimes beneficial roles in Western history? Is not Christianity itself a Millenarian movement? How about all that weird ass shit on the back of your dollar bill?
Child abuse is the #1 issue in society right now so…pick your side! If you don’t like it, stop your silly blogging and come up with a better anti-child abuse movement.
TC again: See? This is why Tyrone doesn’t appear much on this blog any more. It used to be a funny or sometimes even thought-provoking schtick, but these days things are so out of control you’ve got to stick with message discipline. You can’t just let one speculation lead to the next, because we have so many crazies with major league internet platforms.
Rationalism. Fact-checking. Only one family member at a time (sorry sis!).
Please return tomorrow, or perhaps later in the day, for a proper analysis of the incidence of property tax reform in eastern Colorado. And perhaps there will be some new service sector jobs as well — you can apply! In the meantime, let’s hope that Tyrone’s QAnon fandom isn’t one of them.
And no, I’m not going to try to reenter the Philippines.
From my email, on QAnon
This is perhaps a bit whacky, but along similar-ish lines to the uniqueness theory, I have been wondering whether QAnon’s big differentiator is it’s comparative defensibility, powered by its complexity.
If you accept that social movements need their legitimacy-granting myths and “narratives” to hold up for at least as long as they are niche or otherwise unacceptable to the mainstream, and that one of the large effects of TV and the internet is to ease (and encourage) the voicing and wide dissemination of counter-narratives, then perhaps you should expect the best performing movements which do emerge to have key memes which cluster at either end of the “vague -> precise” axis.
Sitting at one of the two extremes is a great way to survive in an ideologically adversarial environment: vagueness gives converts a way to dismiss attacks out of hand (at the cost of rate of growth and cohesiveness, perhaps. Crypto might be an example), while highly detailed and well defined concepts (especially when hard to access) makes it too expensive for outsiders to build a case which will feel coherent and convincing to insiders.
QAnon is quite the cocktail, with its anonymous founder (can’t attack the credibility of an anonymous poster with no accessible history!), highly detailed yet easy to wield lore transmitted through word of mouth on semi-private Facebook groups or in person, no easy experiments which raise internal contradictions (the downfall of flatearthers), and the highly emotionally potent mix of corruption and child abuse.
Are there really any competing groups which offer anything remotely as attractive, all encompassing, and seemingly (to insiders) unassailable?
Will be interesting to see if it loses strength over time. I suspect there will be enough events which can be interpreted as confirming key points over the next 10 years for it to keep growing. Its rate of conversion is also pretty incredible, compared to previous cults/religions.
That is from Arnaud.
Wednesday assorted links and non-links
2. Secular stagnation vs. technological lull?
3. Dan Klein on Covid and Coase.
5. NYT covers Sweden. In my view we still don’t know how well the Swedish experiment is working out, but a continuing verdict of “we still don’t know” does in fact favor Sweden relative to priors. And Thomas Friedman (NYT) on Sweden. And update on some Swedish numbers.
6. A reader email on why child abuse is not opposed more passionately: “Basically, I think it comes down to the problem of agency vs structure. The left (including myself) wants to emphasize that problems have large structural components so we need to change the system. However individual heinous acts don’t fit neatly into that paradigm. Plus, child abuse is pervasive enough that it is sort of structural itself, and talking about it can sound like blaming a community or demographic, or hitting close to racism. No idea why the right doesn’t emphasize it more other than the idea that it’s somehow “traditional”?”
7. Mel Baggs, disability advocate, RIP (NYT). Formerly known as Amanda Baggs.
8. Quarantine stereotypes (video, funny, some of it).
9. Will colleges lose twenty percent of their student body this year? Solve for the equilibrium.
10. Jason Furman: “If you had told me we would have a massive pandemic I would have predicted an increase in health spending. Shows why you shouldn’t listen to me. Health spending down 4.9% in Q1 (not annualized). Responsible for nearly 1/2 of the overall GDP decline. Likely down much more in Q2.” Correctly or not, that makes me feel better about the observed gdp decline. I am not minimizing the import of the non-Covid extra death toll (which is what exactly? Is it net even positive?), but I already felt bad about that.
Dalrymple on Aleppo
The history of Aleppo is terrible stuff; a long succession of massacres and sieges disappearing into the mists of Syrian pre-history. First held by the Hittites, it was captured in turn by the Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Persians (again), Byzantines, Arabs, Mongols and Ottomans, each of whom vied to outdo the carnage of their predecessors. The Assyrians were the most imaginatively sadistic: they impaled the town’s menfolk on their spears and feasted for two days while their victims groaned to a slow death.
In between invasions Aleppo was ruled by a succession of aristocratic thugs who exacted outrageous taxes and perfected ingenious ways of bankrupting their burghers.
In all the town’s history there are only two cheering anecdotes. The first tells of the Arabs who captured Aleppo by dressing up as goats and nibbling their way into the city; the second concerns Abraham, who is supposed to have milked his cow on the citadel’s summit. It is not much in ten thousand years of history, especially when the one story ends in a massacre…and the other is a legend, and untrue. It is the result of a misunderstood derivation of the town’s (Arabic) name Haleb, which comes not from the Arabic for milk (halib) but a much older word, possibly Assyrian, connected with the mechanics of child abuse.
From William Dalrymple’s In Xanadu written in 1989…things have not since improved.
Sunday assorted links
1. The culture that is Bethesda, Maryland.
2. Chile’s pension scheme under fire.
3. Child abuse in China: a neglected issue. The statute of limitations should be longer than two years. That’s two from The Economist, the current issue is their best of the year to my mind. Of course you should subscribe.
4. The Mayan-language Ixcanul is perhaps the best movie of the year so far, trailer here, the full movie is here but without subtitles, so brush up on your Mayan or see it on the big screen.
5. This piece illustrates Cowen’s Second Law, yes I know that is a refereed journal and the paper is based on real data but still it is best forgotten or better yet never viewed in the first place. They needed eleven (!) authors for that one, three of them women it would seem, and four on the team chanted that correlation is not causation. I wonder how the IRB discussion went. Less sexually charged is the game of “Diving chess.”
6. “Most of the world’s mathematicians fall into just 24 scientific ‘families’, one of which dates back to the fifteenth century. The insight comes from an analysis of the Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP), which aims to connect all mathematicians, living and dead, into family trees on the basis of teacher–pupil lineages, in particular who an individual’s doctoral adviser was.” Link here.
What I’ve been reading
1. Lavinia Greenlaw, A Double Sorrow. A deeply sad but very affecting poem, based loosely on Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida. Here is a useful review of the work, and unlike many poems it is very easy to read.
2. Gillen D’Arcy Wood, Tambora: The Eruption that Changed the World. This 1815 volcanic eruption in Indonesia had a bigger impact on global history than you might think. Be afraid, be very afraid.
3. Lillian Faderman, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle. A good, readable, even-tempered treatment of what the title promises. I learned a good deal about the 1940s and 50s most of all, recommended. It is 816 pp. but never a drag. I am surprised it is not being reviewed more prominently.
4. Andrew Wender Cohen, Contraband: Smuggling and the Birth of the American Century. A good look at how America really ran its nineteenth century trade policies, full of good anecdotes and examples.
5. Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, it is out already in the UK, which was my source. My main objection to this book is the overselling in the subtitle. It is a nice, readable account of Silk Road history and the importance of Eastern land transport for global economic history. I liked it, but didn’t feel it revised my worldview in any big way or even tried to. The material on the twentieth century struck me as too familiar. Here is one useful review.
I read about thirty pages of the new Salman Rushdie. While it was better than expected, I didn’t feel compelled to continue; it is odd to tell a rationalist story through magical realist means. Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is turning out to be one of the year’s sensations. I’ve read about one hundred pages and seems to be of high quality but its themes don’t grab me (New York City, child abuse), and it is taking too long to become conceptual. And for another recent novel on child abuse themes, don’t forget the new Rafael Yglesias.
Minority Report for Kiwi youths?
In 2012 economists at the University of Auckland published research establishing clear correlations between family circumstances and incidents of child abuse or neglect. “No one realized we were sitting on such rich data in terms of its predictive power,” says Rhema Vaithianathan, who led the research. “We can find children who are at considerably elevated risk, and we can find them at birth.”
And:
Using data from welfare, education, employment, and housing agencies and the courts, the government identified the most expensive welfare beneficiaries—kids who have at least one close adult relative who’s previously been reported to child safety authorities, been to prison, and spent substantial time on welfare. “There are million-dollar kids in those families,” English says. “By the time they are 10, their likelihood of incarceration is 70 percent. You’ve got to do something about that.”
Moving closer to home:
Jennie Feria, who oversees risk assessment for L.A.’s Department of Children and Family Services, says one idea is to rate families, giving them a number that could be used to identify who’s most at risk in the way lenders rely on credit scores to determine creditworthiness. “The way we may use it, it’s going to be like it’s a FICO score,” Feria says. The information, she says, could be used both to prioritize cases and to figure out who needs extra services. “It’s at the very early stages, because we don’t know how we’re going to use it yet exactly.”
It will be interesting to see how that one develops. The article is by Josh Eidelson.
Practical gradualism vs. moral absolutism, for immigration and revolution
After reading Alex’s post I was a bit worried I would wake up this morning and find the blog retitled, maybe with a new subtitle too. Just a few quick points:
1. There is a clear utilitarian case against open borders, namely that it will — in some but not all cases — lower the quality of governance and destroy the goose that lays the golden eggs. The world’s poor would end up worse off too. I wonder if Alex will apply his absolutist idea on fully open borders to say Taiwan.
2. Alex’s examples don’t support his case as much as he suggests. The American Revolution compromised drastically on slavery, among other matters. (And does Alex even favor that revolution? Should he? Can you be a moral absolutist on both that revolution and on slavery?) American slavery ended through a brutal war, not through the persuasiveness of moral absolutists per se. The British abolished slavery for off-shore islands, but they were very slow to dismantle colonialism, and would have been slower yet if not for two World Wars and fiscal collapse. Should the British anti-slavery movement have insisted that all oppressive British colonialism be ended at the same time? You may argue this one as you wish, but the point is one of empirics, not that the morally absolutist position is generally better.
3. Gay marriage is like “open borders for Canadians.” I’m for both, but I don’t see many people succeeding with the “let’s privatize marriage” or “let’s allow any consensual marriage” arguments, no matter what their moral or practical merits may be. Gay marriage advocates were wise to stick with the more practical case, again choosing an interior solution. Often the crusades which succeed are those which feel morally absolute to their advocates and which also seem like practically-minded compromises to moderates and the undecided.
4. Large numbers of important changes have come quite gradually, including women’s rights, protection against child abuse, and environmentalism, among others. I don’t for instance think parents should ever hit their children, but trying to make further progress on children’s rights by stressing this principle is probably a big mistake and counterproductive.
5. The strength of tribalist intuitions suggests that the moral arguments for fully open borders will have a tough time succeeding or even gaining basic traction in a world where tribalist sentiments have very often been injected into the level of national politics and where, nationalism, at least in the wealthier countries, is perceived as working pretty well. The EU is by far the biggest pro-immigration step we’ve seen, which is great, but we’re seeing the limits of how far that can be pushed. My original post gave some good evidence that a number of countries — though not the United States — are pretty close to the point of backlash from further immigration. Rather than engaging such evidence, I see many open boarders supporters moving further away from it.
6. In the blogosphere, is moralizing really that which needs to be raised in relative status?
Addendum: Robin Hanson adds comment.
And: Alex responds in the comments:
Some good points but only point number #5 actually addresses my argument. I argued that strong, principled moral arguments are most likely to succeed. Point #5 rests on mood affiliation. I know because having a different mood I read the facts in that point in entirely the opposite way. Namely that it’s amazing that although our moral instincts were built on the tribe we have managed to expand the moral circle far beyond the tribe. Having come so far I see no reason why we can’t continue to expand the moral circle to include all human beings. The open borders of the EU is indeed a triumph. Let’s create the same thing with Canada and then lets join with the EU.
Do not make the mistake (as in point #2) of thinking that the moral argument only succeeds when we make fully moral choices. It also succeeds by pushing people to move in the right direction when other arguments would not do that at all.
Social Security, Savings and Stagnation
Here is Evans, Kotlikoff, and Phillips making the case that transfers to the elderly, such as Social Security and Medicare, have dramatically lowered the US savings rate, the investment rate and real wage growth:
In the lifecycle model, the young, because they have longer remaining lifespans than the old, have much lower propensities to consume out of their remaining lifetime resources. This prediction is strongly confirmed for the US by Gokhale et al (1996).
Hence, in taking from young savers and giving to old spenders, which Uncle Sam has spent six decades doing on a massive scale, the lifecycle model predicts a major decline in US net national saving associated with a major rise in the absolute and relative consumption of the elderly. This is precisely what the data show.
In 1965, the US net national saving was 15.6% of net national income. Last year, it was just 0.9%. And, according to Gokhale et al (1996) and Lee and Mason (2012), the secular demise in US saving has coincided with a spectacular rise in the consumption of older Americans relative to that of younger Americans.
As Feldstein and Horioka (1980) document, US net domestic saving tracks US net national saving. Hence, postwar intergenerational redistribution has not only lowered net national saving; it has also reduced net domestic investment, from 14.0% of national income in 1965 to just 3.6% in 2011. This decline in the rate of net domestic investment is, no doubt, playing a major role in the slow growth in US wages. Indeed, the level of private-sector average real earnings per hour, exclusive of fringe benefits, is lower today than it was 40 years ago.
We call this America’s “fiscal child abuse”. If it continues, it will no doubt shortly drive the national saving rate, which was negative 1.2% in 2009, into permanent negative territory and further reduce net domestic investment and prospects for real wage growth.
The Patrick Melrose novels
I usually find “derelict fiction” unappealing (I don’t for instance enjoy Trainspotting, although I admit its aesthetic merits, nor did I like Drugstore Cowboy; someone should write an essay on the merits and demerits of drug-based fiction), but these books are for me compulsively readable and the prose is more vital than almost anything else being written. They are by Edward St. Aubyn and you can buy the first four of them here, the final one here. By no means should you let these novels be defined by their excerpts, but here are a few:
How could he ever hope to give up drugs? They filled him with such intense emotion. The sense of power they gave him was, admittedly, rather subjective (ruling the world from under the bedcovers, until the milkman arrived and you thought he was a platoon of stormtroopers come to steal your drugs and splatter your brains across the wall), but then again life was so subjective.
And:
If he got her he would give up drugs forever, or at least have someone really attractive to take them with. He giggled wildly, wrapping a towel around himself and striking back into his bedroom with renewed vigour.
And:
Fergus took me to the coast and forced me to go snorkeling. All I can say is that the Great Barrier Reef is the most vulgar thing I’ve ever seen. It’s one’s worst nightmare, full of frightful loud colours, peacock blues, and impossible oranges all higgledy-piggledy while one’s mask floods.
If you are wondering, drug addiction is a central theme in only some of these books, no more than half actually. There are also scenes of child abuse, family, and Australia.