Some solutions. Remnantnursing.org where healthcare cost $30 a month. The belief that a pediatrician is required is an insurance industry fabrication. I had 13 siblings and none of us went to a doctor and were taken care of by our chiropractor father. We were healthy and unvaccinated. There are other doctors and nurses now offering a subscription service. Don’t live with fear that an emergency must be hedged against. It was not the case in the 50’s and 60’s. Why now? Second: find a homeschooling group. Schools have become untenable in their indoctrination over academics. Third grow a garden and involve the children. However it can be done because being totally reliant on someone else esp government is a bad place to be. Make anything you can rather than purchase it premade. It is amazing how easy this is to do and pass this learning on.
I just reread your article and there is one more point I’d like to briefly address. You argue that, whatever our relative position, it is banks and the debt fueled boom/bust economy that is holding the great middle and the poorer from success regardless of effort.
I actually think the banks are mostly reacting to something much deeper—gross and rising economic inequality that current generations are born into. Banks rationally respond to creditworthiness, and creditworthiness is a function of inequality. As inequality grows because of increasingly massive wage disparities (which when I was a child in the 60s were nowhere near as bad), as well as lopsided returns to the owners of capital versus returns to labor, fewer and fewer people have access to credit that would enable them to start or grow their own business.
This is a vicious cycle that is hitting crisis proportions. But instead of addressing class disparities as it used to, the New Left is stupidly engaging in pointless and divisive identitarian wars over race and gender.
Jeff Bezos is laughing all the way to the bank while his rainbow workforce is toiling in surveilled semi poverty. And corporate America is distracting people from the fact that the CEO makes 600 times more than the workforce while happily hosting DEI seminars.
Elizabeth Warren? Who is she? Unequality is the curse of our era and nobody is paying attention.
There are many examples of where DEI initiatives don't address root causes. Some examples:
Huge unregulated costs of medical care such as hospital "facility charges" that dramatically run up the cost of healthcare. Regulatory efforts could be focused on reducing excessive medical charges such as "facility changes", but no one seems to pay much attention to it.
San Francisco public school teacher's union contract terms that cause teachers lower on the seniority totem pole to be laid off first. Because less experienced teachers in San Francisco work in schools with more socioeconomic challenges, it is these schools that more frequently lose their teachers. This could be fixed by changing the terms of the teacher's union labor contract, but no one talks about that.
Black female minors (girls) in California are more than 5 times more likely than other populations to be trafficked for sex as a minor. As well, California has one of the highest rates of sex trafficking in the nation. This is a brutal crime. For over a year now, California state senator Shannon Grove has been trying to pass legislation to make sex trafficking a serious crime:
San Francisco currently has a very high rate of serious drug addiction. While there are voluntary treatment programs available, care is fragmented. An addict can take many years to break their addiction. Their care needs are not well met by the fragmented voluntary treatment programs available. I've seen drugs destroy middle class families right on my street more than once. No one can say that they care about diversity and equity while turning a blind eye to the impact that drug addiction has on families and children.
I could go on.
It is interesting to me that there seems to be more upward mobility in parts of California where there is a military base, such as in Fairfield, California, and the least upward mobility where there is an "elite" university, such as in Palo Alto, California.
Yes, I know it is pretty much hopeless. At the same time, I have neighbors who are former teachers, who constantly plug the latest trend in DEI initiatives, yet ignore the fact that schools within walking distance of our neighborhood repeatedly lose their teachers.
I can't change the teacher's union. But when one of these blind followers of SFUSD teacher's union initiatives plugs the latest DEI trend, I try to quietly remind them of underlying policies in San Franciso the undermine equity initiatives.
Really well reasoned and supported. I think the crux of the matter is distinguishing between "crates" bestowed as a result of privilege versus those earned as a result of effort. I'm fine with penalizing the former, but penalizing the latter is unbelievably corrosive.
The hard part is how to tell the difference. The reason why it's so hard is because there are profound differences in both nature and nurture. On the nature side, there is a Progressive myth that everyone is somehow born with the same set of gifts; that it is only circumstance that puts people at separate starting blocks. The work of geneticists like Kathryn Paige Harden and others has shown that to be a myth, and also that there is much more variability within racial and ethnic groups than there is between them. So that is one confounding factor. The other is circumstance, environment and upbringing. There is no question that some have had it better than others.
So how do you tease out effort from advantage? The Progressives tend to erase effort and attribute everything to advantage. Ibram X Kendi's univariate outcome-based definition of racism is an extreme example. This is utterly destructive of human agency. Not good. The Right, on the other hand, tends to let advantage play out in a laissez faire way without regard to its inherent unfairness. Also, not good.
So how do we as a society set the rules? The worst thing we can do is to blame measuring sticks. Or to let people off the hook for their own selves through glorification of victimhood. I think most people can reliably identify sources of genuine opportunistic disadvantage. And it is just to disproportionately direct resources to address them. And I think it is possible to do so without penalizing the truly gifted whose talents are essential if we are to grow the pie.
But it will require brutal honesty, which sadly is not in fashion right now.
I think you have hit on one key element, Miguelitro. I'm going to follow this thread of thought further; I'm doing my own extension, not disagreeing with what you have said.
The kickoff of the whole explosion of "privilege" being a central concept of social justice was Peggy Macintosh's 1989 essay on white privilege, in which took the "privilege" concept from her feminist community's "male privilege" narrative, and applied it to race to create "white privilege". Others then took the obvious step of extending that perspective to every other oppressed/oppressor axis one can think of.
The opposite of privileged (in CSJ) is oppressed, and the opposite of oppressed is oppressor. "Privileged" often serves as a mott and bailey surrogate for "oppressor" in the CSJ narratives.
But Peggy's concept was that "privilege = unearned advantage". That "unearned" qualifier fell away as activists honed the weaponization of the privilege narrative.
Conflating earned and unearned advantage was a big mistake, however satisfying for some.
I have actually come to doubt that the privilege narrative itself is a productive tool for bettering society. I think it's looking at the wrong end of the telescope. It's not that I'm saying there is no unearned advantage, but that I am questioning whether focusing on that story weaving turns out to be functional in improving the world.
But that's for another day, let's return to teasing out earned versus unearned, tentatively accepting the crate worldview.
Let's leave aside the easy (and statistically uncommon) case of great family wealth, where the kids never have to work unless they want to, etc. Let's talk about ordinary (and statistically more common) people.
(1) How do we handle a situation where a family starting from modest means works hard and applies themselves and sacrifices in order to move to a relatively low crime area with decent schools, and then pays a lot of attention to their kids, raising healthy, educated, socially skilled children. Notice that I did not speak of any big monetary inheritance (tho some of that might exist) - the kids in this case might mainly benefit from a better and safer environment and from having two involved functional parents - all unearned.
We can say the parents earned their benefits and can enjoy them, but the kids did not - so should their kids be bussed back to the old school district or refused piano lessons or follow some other "penalize unearned advantages" policy? But sacrificing and providing for the kids is a huge motivator for people and likely a significant civilizing force for society, harnessing human energies towards overall pro-social ends. Policies which intentionally or unintentionally make that into a sucker's game without payoff would not likely produce a better society overall.
Yes, in an ideal world every child might have exactly equal opportunities and support, but that has never been a part of human experience and I have doubts we will ever reach that perfection, even if we make great strides. The closest we might come is by taking infants away from parents and raising them in stringently standardized government creches by robots, so no child has any familial advantages. Is that a brave new world we want to pursue?
I completely support efforts to make opportunities relatively more equal by improving the conditions for disadvantaged parents and children (not so much by removing support from others). But we can only go so far in that regard before the unintended consequences outweigh the benefits.
(2) Even the government creche program doesn't remove advantages from the genetic lottery - which is as unearned as one can get. I'm now seeing people complain that it's not fair that some people get more rewards in society just because they were born with better genes than other people. Even somebody's grit and hard work, or positive attitude, may be genetically influenced to a surprising degree. Yes, you studied hard for years to earn your skills - but it was your genes which enabled you to pull that off (or even to want to do so).
Here we enter Harrison Bergeron (Kurt Vonnegut' short story) territory if we want to "penalize the crates bestowed as an advantage of unearned advantage" (paraphrasing your first paragraph).
It turns out to be far easier to pull down the gifted students, than to bring up the less gifted through enrichment programs, if equal opportunity in this broad sense of removing unearned advantages (much less equal outcomes) is the goal.
So should we have a helpful bureaucracy to sort all this out, and (coercively) assure a relatively equal opportunity to all? I'm sure that would work out well.
As you likely know, California K12 schools have eliminated, indeed reversed, the funding difference from local school taxes; the most marginalized districts now get substantially more funding per student than the medium and high income districts. So far, the scholastic results have barely budged. Funding appears not to have been a major driver after all. I dearly wish it was as simple as those blaming funding promised us.
So while I think that distinguishing earned from unearned advantage is a good and necessary step, it still leaves us some dilemmas which are hard to untangle in the real world - if we are ready to "penalize" unearned advantages.
This is getting too long, so I'll sketch the rest. I think we need to bring in meritocracy, which some think of as society rewarding the talented because of a false belief that they are more worthwhile than other humans. This creates resentment and a desire to take away those undeserved benefits - like to those who won the genetic lottery (unearned advantage).
I perceive the role of a proper meritocracy as a system of relatively higher correlation between contribution and rewards, intended to motivate everybody - at whatever level of talent or ability, earned or unearned - to develop themselves and contribute more to the common good. No human society will ever have a 1.0 correlation, and none can survive with a 0.0 correlation - but there is a spectrum between these two. People don't earn money or status just for having a high IQ or untapped musical talent - the rewards only come if one develops and applies those abilities in ways that society appreciates.
If we see providing differential rewards for those of ability (earned and unearned alike) as aimed at benefitting all of us (providing science and industry and jobs and opportunities), rather than fanning resentment, the conflicts described above become at least slightly less knotty.
Meanwhile, we can still also focus on boosting the opportunities of those with fewer advantages (earned or unearned), again benefitting all of us. And we can continue to improve the meritocratic element - better aligning rewarded contribution to general benefit (ward off those gaming the system), and keeping the differential rewards down to the functional level (rather than having some rewards absurdly disproportionate).
In short, the "equity game" often focuses mainly on redistribution of rewards, without sufficiently including in the balance sheet the indirect benefits of stimulating contributions. And it badly confuses enhancing the functionality of a system, with morality or "what we deserve in some abstract universe inside our subjective minds".
Well that was a feast for thought! Not sure these little comment blurbs are adequate for us.
As you so well sketched out, addressing problems of privilege and disadvantage gets really fraught very quickly.
First, overall point. The worst thing we can do as a society is hold back or disincentive the most gifted and hard working among us. That is a recipe for absolute disaster in a competitive world and guarantees immiseration in a few generations. We want to be the best place for our own best and remain attractive to the world’s best. Nothing I say below detracts from this absolute imperative.
Second, taxing privilege is less socially urgent than addressing disadvantage but still necessary, primarily as a source of resources for the development of the disadvantaged. Progressive taxation makes sense in 21st Century capitalism because of the “winner take all” phenomenon created by global integration. It also helps legitimize the system of rewarding effort by addressing excess. But taking away true competition for top class education spots and eliminating gifted programs is economic suicide. People aren’t equal and no amount of wishful thinking will erase that fact. So let’s use it for the benefit of all through non punitive progressive taxation. And for gods sake get rid of the lower tax rate on capital gains!!!!
Third, addressing disadvantage is all-important and incredibly difficult to do well. Your California example shows why just throwing money at a problem never works. You have to work with incentives. One of greatest drivers of disadvantage in 21st Century America is the disintegration of family structures. Read “The Two-Parent Privilege” by economist Melissa Kearney. The data is absolutely compelling that wealthy educated people disproportionately marry then have children as they hypocritically lecture people about “alternative” families that utterly fail in most cases to give what kids need. Substacker Rob Henderson calls such elite liberal attitudes “luxury beliefs. Rob Henderson (himself a foster child) also says that kids need stability more than money. Henderson’s book “Troubled” comes out on Feb 20. Read it. Dalrymple makes the same point.
I know these are not “progressive” attitudes or opinions. But they are entirely consistent with my brand of liberalism.
I have really been enjoying our conversation as well. I feel a vibrant, active, unblinkered mind on the other end, often writing ideas or syntheses of ideas new to me, which I find exciting. (Sadly, too much of internet communication doesn't have much local "value added" in terms of original thought, and seems to mostly echo a poorly curated selection of the popular ideas of some ideological tribe. Well that's a bit harsh but I suspect you know what I mean.)
I also enjoy the craftsmanship of your writing.
I'm involved with a local chapter of Braver Angels (an organization trying to address the political polarization in the US). I've really enjoyed getting to know the local core team, comprised of people of mixed politics with whom one can have a real conversation. If one states something the other person disagrees with, they are likely to say something "I have a different perspective on that which I can share, but first I'm curious what causes you to think that way, tell me more" rather than "OMG, did you just commit a microaggression on me?". It's like a breath of fresh air and helps keep me sane. But typing with you goes a step further still, you have a great mind and way of expressing yourself.
Back to the content.
I agree with all three of your well stated points.
One item you mentioned caused me to finally check on something which had never made it to the top of my list - "what is the rationale for a lower tax rate on capital gains?". So I asked copilot (Microsoft/Bing's customized version of ChatGPT4) exactly that and got a decent answer. (Understand the reason a fence we built before tearing it down, eh?). Dang, once again things are complicated and it's not as simple as rich people feathering their own nests as I might have hoped, so I can't just have a simple take on it, sigh. :-) It's nice once in a while to discover a simple villain or hero, which one can just support or oppose without needing the cognitive load of extensive nuancing, but I'm afraid that for me I basically learned that I need to understand in more the superficial detail before I have an opinion.
Just like it's great to have a problem which actually can be mostly resolved by just supplying more money. Doesn't happen often tho.
I'll keep your book recco's in mind for sure, tho my list is far longer than my expected remaining lifetime and things move up and down on it for mysterious reasons.
I have a lot of bones to pick with Critical Social Justice ideology, and your third point brings up what is at stake. How to wisely deal with disadvantage is a core issue of our society which absolutely needs our best thinking if we are to have any chance of sufficiently resolving it to avoid collapse, and the CSJ framing makes that clear thinking near impossible. I believe that CSJ accepts as axiomatic (dare I say sacred) some ideas and framings which corrode the critical thinking needed, hijacking it with emotional arguments and bad logic which, alas, have a lot of traction on the human psyches of the population. Ideologies based on guilt and resentment can have powerful appeals, alas, compared to the comparatively austere realms of freely exploring ideas and comparing them to reality.
Thanks for being a companion on the journey, Miguelitro.
Thank you for the nice words. The sentiment is mutual.
I have a visceral repellent reaction to any sort of dogma, CSJ included. To add another author to your list, if you want to understand the theoretical underpinnings of my approach to politics, read Michael Oakeshott.
Here is one of my very favorite Oakeshott essays from 1956:
It is only 13 single spaced pages. It is very carefully structured and to properly understand it you need to read it thoroughly until the end. It is the basis for my belief in “radical tolerance.” Oakeshott is a masterful writer and you are the type of person to appreciate it.
As for the discounted capital gains tax rate, I am more than familiar with all the rationales for its existence and none of them withstands rigorous empirically based analytical scrutiny. I join Warren Buffet in wanting to kiss it goodbye—even though capital gains constitute the vast majority of my income. I will provide my arguments if you are interested. Maybe off this platform as it is not germane.
I was kind of hoping you might know a lot more about the pros and cons of Capital Gains; as I said, I had never taken the time to even look for the rationales. And yes, I would be very interested in your thoughts - albeit not right now just because I have to avoid too much diversion and there's lots of great stuff on my plate.
I take your recommendations very highly, though. I'm putting Oakeshott high on my list. I confess I had never heard of him.
Do you have any thoughts on a better platform? Email?
I live an hour north of San Francisco, just by the way. If you are ever in the area, I'd love to have an interactive conversation (and I'm sure my wife would too).
Some solutions. Remnantnursing.org where healthcare cost $30 a month. The belief that a pediatrician is required is an insurance industry fabrication. I had 13 siblings and none of us went to a doctor and were taken care of by our chiropractor father. We were healthy and unvaccinated. There are other doctors and nurses now offering a subscription service. Don’t live with fear that an emergency must be hedged against. It was not the case in the 50’s and 60’s. Why now? Second: find a homeschooling group. Schools have become untenable in their indoctrination over academics. Third grow a garden and involve the children. However it can be done because being totally reliant on someone else esp government is a bad place to be. Make anything you can rather than purchase it premade. It is amazing how easy this is to do and pass this learning on.
I just reread your article and there is one more point I’d like to briefly address. You argue that, whatever our relative position, it is banks and the debt fueled boom/bust economy that is holding the great middle and the poorer from success regardless of effort.
I actually think the banks are mostly reacting to something much deeper—gross and rising economic inequality that current generations are born into. Banks rationally respond to creditworthiness, and creditworthiness is a function of inequality. As inequality grows because of increasingly massive wage disparities (which when I was a child in the 60s were nowhere near as bad), as well as lopsided returns to the owners of capital versus returns to labor, fewer and fewer people have access to credit that would enable them to start or grow their own business.
This is a vicious cycle that is hitting crisis proportions. But instead of addressing class disparities as it used to, the New Left is stupidly engaging in pointless and divisive identitarian wars over race and gender.
Jeff Bezos is laughing all the way to the bank while his rainbow workforce is toiling in surveilled semi poverty. And corporate America is distracting people from the fact that the CEO makes 600 times more than the workforce while happily hosting DEI seminars.
Elizabeth Warren? Who is she? Unequality is the curse of our era and nobody is paying attention.
There are many examples of where DEI initiatives don't address root causes. Some examples:
Huge unregulated costs of medical care such as hospital "facility charges" that dramatically run up the cost of healthcare. Regulatory efforts could be focused on reducing excessive medical charges such as "facility changes", but no one seems to pay much attention to it.
San Francisco public school teacher's union contract terms that cause teachers lower on the seniority totem pole to be laid off first. Because less experienced teachers in San Francisco work in schools with more socioeconomic challenges, it is these schools that more frequently lose their teachers. This could be fixed by changing the terms of the teacher's union labor contract, but no one talks about that.
Black female minors (girls) in California are more than 5 times more likely than other populations to be trafficked for sex as a minor. As well, California has one of the highest rates of sex trafficking in the nation. This is a brutal crime. For over a year now, California state senator Shannon Grove has been trying to pass legislation to make sex trafficking a serious crime:
https://sr12.senate.ca.gov/sb14
This legislation is still not passed.
San Francisco currently has a very high rate of serious drug addiction. While there are voluntary treatment programs available, care is fragmented. An addict can take many years to break their addiction. Their care needs are not well met by the fragmented voluntary treatment programs available. I've seen drugs destroy middle class families right on my street more than once. No one can say that they care about diversity and equity while turning a blind eye to the impact that drug addiction has on families and children.
I could go on.
It is interesting to me that there seems to be more upward mobility in parts of California where there is a military base, such as in Fairfield, California, and the least upward mobility where there is an "elite" university, such as in Palo Alto, California.
That last paragraph requires some reflection.
Marnie: "This could be fixed by changing the terms of the teacher's union labor contract, but no one talks about that."
Good luck taking on public employee unions in California. You'll have better luck moving Mount Everest.
Yes, I know it is pretty much hopeless. At the same time, I have neighbors who are former teachers, who constantly plug the latest trend in DEI initiatives, yet ignore the fact that schools within walking distance of our neighborhood repeatedly lose their teachers.
I can't change the teacher's union. But when one of these blind followers of SFUSD teacher's union initiatives plugs the latest DEI trend, I try to quietly remind them of underlying policies in San Franciso the undermine equity initiatives.
Really well reasoned and supported. I think the crux of the matter is distinguishing between "crates" bestowed as a result of privilege versus those earned as a result of effort. I'm fine with penalizing the former, but penalizing the latter is unbelievably corrosive.
The hard part is how to tell the difference. The reason why it's so hard is because there are profound differences in both nature and nurture. On the nature side, there is a Progressive myth that everyone is somehow born with the same set of gifts; that it is only circumstance that puts people at separate starting blocks. The work of geneticists like Kathryn Paige Harden and others has shown that to be a myth, and also that there is much more variability within racial and ethnic groups than there is between them. So that is one confounding factor. The other is circumstance, environment and upbringing. There is no question that some have had it better than others.
So how do you tease out effort from advantage? The Progressives tend to erase effort and attribute everything to advantage. Ibram X Kendi's univariate outcome-based definition of racism is an extreme example. This is utterly destructive of human agency. Not good. The Right, on the other hand, tends to let advantage play out in a laissez faire way without regard to its inherent unfairness. Also, not good.
So how do we as a society set the rules? The worst thing we can do is to blame measuring sticks. Or to let people off the hook for their own selves through glorification of victimhood. I think most people can reliably identify sources of genuine opportunistic disadvantage. And it is just to disproportionately direct resources to address them. And I think it is possible to do so without penalizing the truly gifted whose talents are essential if we are to grow the pie.
But it will require brutal honesty, which sadly is not in fashion right now.
I love your writing, Monica
I think you have hit on one key element, Miguelitro. I'm going to follow this thread of thought further; I'm doing my own extension, not disagreeing with what you have said.
The kickoff of the whole explosion of "privilege" being a central concept of social justice was Peggy Macintosh's 1989 essay on white privilege, in which took the "privilege" concept from her feminist community's "male privilege" narrative, and applied it to race to create "white privilege". Others then took the obvious step of extending that perspective to every other oppressed/oppressor axis one can think of.
The opposite of privileged (in CSJ) is oppressed, and the opposite of oppressed is oppressor. "Privileged" often serves as a mott and bailey surrogate for "oppressor" in the CSJ narratives.
But Peggy's concept was that "privilege = unearned advantage". That "unearned" qualifier fell away as activists honed the weaponization of the privilege narrative.
Conflating earned and unearned advantage was a big mistake, however satisfying for some.
I have actually come to doubt that the privilege narrative itself is a productive tool for bettering society. I think it's looking at the wrong end of the telescope. It's not that I'm saying there is no unearned advantage, but that I am questioning whether focusing on that story weaving turns out to be functional in improving the world.
But that's for another day, let's return to teasing out earned versus unearned, tentatively accepting the crate worldview.
Let's leave aside the easy (and statistically uncommon) case of great family wealth, where the kids never have to work unless they want to, etc. Let's talk about ordinary (and statistically more common) people.
(1) How do we handle a situation where a family starting from modest means works hard and applies themselves and sacrifices in order to move to a relatively low crime area with decent schools, and then pays a lot of attention to their kids, raising healthy, educated, socially skilled children. Notice that I did not speak of any big monetary inheritance (tho some of that might exist) - the kids in this case might mainly benefit from a better and safer environment and from having two involved functional parents - all unearned.
We can say the parents earned their benefits and can enjoy them, but the kids did not - so should their kids be bussed back to the old school district or refused piano lessons or follow some other "penalize unearned advantages" policy? But sacrificing and providing for the kids is a huge motivator for people and likely a significant civilizing force for society, harnessing human energies towards overall pro-social ends. Policies which intentionally or unintentionally make that into a sucker's game without payoff would not likely produce a better society overall.
Yes, in an ideal world every child might have exactly equal opportunities and support, but that has never been a part of human experience and I have doubts we will ever reach that perfection, even if we make great strides. The closest we might come is by taking infants away from parents and raising them in stringently standardized government creches by robots, so no child has any familial advantages. Is that a brave new world we want to pursue?
I completely support efforts to make opportunities relatively more equal by improving the conditions for disadvantaged parents and children (not so much by removing support from others). But we can only go so far in that regard before the unintended consequences outweigh the benefits.
(2) Even the government creche program doesn't remove advantages from the genetic lottery - which is as unearned as one can get. I'm now seeing people complain that it's not fair that some people get more rewards in society just because they were born with better genes than other people. Even somebody's grit and hard work, or positive attitude, may be genetically influenced to a surprising degree. Yes, you studied hard for years to earn your skills - but it was your genes which enabled you to pull that off (or even to want to do so).
Here we enter Harrison Bergeron (Kurt Vonnegut' short story) territory if we want to "penalize the crates bestowed as an advantage of unearned advantage" (paraphrasing your first paragraph).
It turns out to be far easier to pull down the gifted students, than to bring up the less gifted through enrichment programs, if equal opportunity in this broad sense of removing unearned advantages (much less equal outcomes) is the goal.
So should we have a helpful bureaucracy to sort all this out, and (coercively) assure a relatively equal opportunity to all? I'm sure that would work out well.
As you likely know, California K12 schools have eliminated, indeed reversed, the funding difference from local school taxes; the most marginalized districts now get substantially more funding per student than the medium and high income districts. So far, the scholastic results have barely budged. Funding appears not to have been a major driver after all. I dearly wish it was as simple as those blaming funding promised us.
So while I think that distinguishing earned from unearned advantage is a good and necessary step, it still leaves us some dilemmas which are hard to untangle in the real world - if we are ready to "penalize" unearned advantages.
This is getting too long, so I'll sketch the rest. I think we need to bring in meritocracy, which some think of as society rewarding the talented because of a false belief that they are more worthwhile than other humans. This creates resentment and a desire to take away those undeserved benefits - like to those who won the genetic lottery (unearned advantage).
I perceive the role of a proper meritocracy as a system of relatively higher correlation between contribution and rewards, intended to motivate everybody - at whatever level of talent or ability, earned or unearned - to develop themselves and contribute more to the common good. No human society will ever have a 1.0 correlation, and none can survive with a 0.0 correlation - but there is a spectrum between these two. People don't earn money or status just for having a high IQ or untapped musical talent - the rewards only come if one develops and applies those abilities in ways that society appreciates.
If we see providing differential rewards for those of ability (earned and unearned alike) as aimed at benefitting all of us (providing science and industry and jobs and opportunities), rather than fanning resentment, the conflicts described above become at least slightly less knotty.
Meanwhile, we can still also focus on boosting the opportunities of those with fewer advantages (earned or unearned), again benefitting all of us. And we can continue to improve the meritocratic element - better aligning rewarded contribution to general benefit (ward off those gaming the system), and keeping the differential rewards down to the functional level (rather than having some rewards absurdly disproportionate).
In short, the "equity game" often focuses mainly on redistribution of rewards, without sufficiently including in the balance sheet the indirect benefits of stimulating contributions. And it badly confuses enhancing the functionality of a system, with morality or "what we deserve in some abstract universe inside our subjective minds".
Well that was a feast for thought! Not sure these little comment blurbs are adequate for us.
As you so well sketched out, addressing problems of privilege and disadvantage gets really fraught very quickly.
First, overall point. The worst thing we can do as a society is hold back or disincentive the most gifted and hard working among us. That is a recipe for absolute disaster in a competitive world and guarantees immiseration in a few generations. We want to be the best place for our own best and remain attractive to the world’s best. Nothing I say below detracts from this absolute imperative.
Second, taxing privilege is less socially urgent than addressing disadvantage but still necessary, primarily as a source of resources for the development of the disadvantaged. Progressive taxation makes sense in 21st Century capitalism because of the “winner take all” phenomenon created by global integration. It also helps legitimize the system of rewarding effort by addressing excess. But taking away true competition for top class education spots and eliminating gifted programs is economic suicide. People aren’t equal and no amount of wishful thinking will erase that fact. So let’s use it for the benefit of all through non punitive progressive taxation. And for gods sake get rid of the lower tax rate on capital gains!!!!
Third, addressing disadvantage is all-important and incredibly difficult to do well. Your California example shows why just throwing money at a problem never works. You have to work with incentives. One of greatest drivers of disadvantage in 21st Century America is the disintegration of family structures. Read “The Two-Parent Privilege” by economist Melissa Kearney. The data is absolutely compelling that wealthy educated people disproportionately marry then have children as they hypocritically lecture people about “alternative” families that utterly fail in most cases to give what kids need. Substacker Rob Henderson calls such elite liberal attitudes “luxury beliefs. Rob Henderson (himself a foster child) also says that kids need stability more than money. Henderson’s book “Troubled” comes out on Feb 20. Read it. Dalrymple makes the same point.
I know these are not “progressive” attitudes or opinions. But they are entirely consistent with my brand of liberalism.
I truly enjoy our conversation
(PS: Still open to suggestions re next Dalrymple to read)
I have really been enjoying our conversation as well. I feel a vibrant, active, unblinkered mind on the other end, often writing ideas or syntheses of ideas new to me, which I find exciting. (Sadly, too much of internet communication doesn't have much local "value added" in terms of original thought, and seems to mostly echo a poorly curated selection of the popular ideas of some ideological tribe. Well that's a bit harsh but I suspect you know what I mean.)
I also enjoy the craftsmanship of your writing.
I'm involved with a local chapter of Braver Angels (an organization trying to address the political polarization in the US). I've really enjoyed getting to know the local core team, comprised of people of mixed politics with whom one can have a real conversation. If one states something the other person disagrees with, they are likely to say something "I have a different perspective on that which I can share, but first I'm curious what causes you to think that way, tell me more" rather than "OMG, did you just commit a microaggression on me?". It's like a breath of fresh air and helps keep me sane. But typing with you goes a step further still, you have a great mind and way of expressing yourself.
Back to the content.
I agree with all three of your well stated points.
One item you mentioned caused me to finally check on something which had never made it to the top of my list - "what is the rationale for a lower tax rate on capital gains?". So I asked copilot (Microsoft/Bing's customized version of ChatGPT4) exactly that and got a decent answer. (Understand the reason a fence we built before tearing it down, eh?). Dang, once again things are complicated and it's not as simple as rich people feathering their own nests as I might have hoped, so I can't just have a simple take on it, sigh. :-) It's nice once in a while to discover a simple villain or hero, which one can just support or oppose without needing the cognitive load of extensive nuancing, but I'm afraid that for me I basically learned that I need to understand in more the superficial detail before I have an opinion.
Just like it's great to have a problem which actually can be mostly resolved by just supplying more money. Doesn't happen often tho.
I'll keep your book recco's in mind for sure, tho my list is far longer than my expected remaining lifetime and things move up and down on it for mysterious reasons.
I have a lot of bones to pick with Critical Social Justice ideology, and your third point brings up what is at stake. How to wisely deal with disadvantage is a core issue of our society which absolutely needs our best thinking if we are to have any chance of sufficiently resolving it to avoid collapse, and the CSJ framing makes that clear thinking near impossible. I believe that CSJ accepts as axiomatic (dare I say sacred) some ideas and framings which corrode the critical thinking needed, hijacking it with emotional arguments and bad logic which, alas, have a lot of traction on the human psyches of the population. Ideologies based on guilt and resentment can have powerful appeals, alas, compared to the comparatively austere realms of freely exploring ideas and comparing them to reality.
Thanks for being a companion on the journey, Miguelitro.
Thank you for the nice words. The sentiment is mutual.
I have a visceral repellent reaction to any sort of dogma, CSJ included. To add another author to your list, if you want to understand the theoretical underpinnings of my approach to politics, read Michael Oakeshott.
Here is one of my very favorite Oakeshott essays from 1956:
https://wp.aleteia.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/02/on_being_conservative.pdf
It is only 13 single spaced pages. It is very carefully structured and to properly understand it you need to read it thoroughly until the end. It is the basis for my belief in “radical tolerance.” Oakeshott is a masterful writer and you are the type of person to appreciate it.
As for the discounted capital gains tax rate, I am more than familiar with all the rationales for its existence and none of them withstands rigorous empirically based analytical scrutiny. I join Warren Buffet in wanting to kiss it goodbye—even though capital gains constitute the vast majority of my income. I will provide my arguments if you are interested. Maybe off this platform as it is not germane.
Let’s keep the conversation going
I was kind of hoping you might know a lot more about the pros and cons of Capital Gains; as I said, I had never taken the time to even look for the rationales. And yes, I would be very interested in your thoughts - albeit not right now just because I have to avoid too much diversion and there's lots of great stuff on my plate.
I take your recommendations very highly, though. I'm putting Oakeshott high on my list. I confess I had never heard of him.
Do you have any thoughts on a better platform? Email?
I live an hour north of San Francisco, just by the way. If you are ever in the area, I'd love to have an interactive conversation (and I'm sure my wife would too).