Judge Posner has some interesting and, I think, accurate thoughts on the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Briefly, he suggests that the movement was sparked by imitation of the “Arab Spring” movements facilitated by the advent of low cost organization tools provided by social media and fueled by economic anxiety arising out of the 2008 depression. He figures the police made a tactical mistake by busting heads; without that, the encampments would have died on the vine as winter set in and conditions deteriorated.
The grievances he identifies as income inequality, lack of jobs, and (perceived anyway) baleful influence of financiers. He concludes:
Railing against income inequality, job loss, and banking abuses is thus understandable, but it doesn’t do any good. The “Occupiers” are anarchic and disruptive, and the solid middle of American society, which rejects the Tea Party because of its goofy ideas, is likely to reject the Occupy movement because of its style, while broadly sympathetic to its antipathies. But if the movement attracts charismatic leaders amidst a stagnant or worsening economy, it may become a force in American politics.
I think I disagree with Judge Posner in the sense that OWS shifts the parameters of the “national conversation.” If you don’t have a left edge (even a disagreeable one) talking loudly about economic inequality, the centrist “common wisdom” will fall ever further to the right on such issues.
But of course if you have a “left edge” then last Saturday night’s Newt Gingrich says you’re the downfall of civilization as we know it, tells you that you haven’t helped pay for the park you’re in (or anything else), need to get a job and of course, take a bath. All while he balances his Tiffany accounts and teaches history to Fannie and Freddie for a few pennies.
Gingrich is one of those grifters engaged in what Galbraith told us was one of “the oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” Telling wealthy people what they want to hear probably isn’t the world’s oldest profession, but it bears some resemblance.
And today, he’s the “frontrunner”.
So let me change my tack and ask, what evidence would it take for you to change your mind and admit that poor people are poor because they don’t work hard enough?
You’d have to get rid of huge chunks of Africa and Asia, for starters as they provide billions of examples that hard work and wealth are not closely correlated.
We’re not talking about African and Asian poor people, we are talking about American poor people. I repeat my question: what evidence would it take for you to change your mind and admit that poor people are poor because they don’t work hard enough?
I also did not ask you for counterevidence against my position.
I’m serious. Relating it back to your other post about how deeply divided this country is politically, I remind you that I said the division is because there are topics that, if people are honest with themselves, there is no amount of evidence that could persuade them from their position.
That’s why there is no compromise anymore.
They’re not. It’s mostly luck.
You’d have to provide me with evidence that shows why America is different from Asia and Africa such that hard working people are poor there but hard working people don’t stay poor here.
Because the masses of Asians and Africans show me that the connection between work and wealth is anything but inevitable. Your premise is that something exceptional about the U.S. makes wealth an inevitable product of hard work here where it’s not elsewhere. My premise is that such exceptionalism is more myth than reality. I think our economy (like most economies) is structured such that it’s possible for one person to capture the profit from the wealth generated by the hard work of another.
And, Buzzcut, I don’t want to minimize the value of hard work. I try to practice it; and I intend to instill it in my kids. A lot of people who are poor are that way because they are lazy or don’t defer gratification. But, hard work isn’t magic; it’s not necessary and it’s not sufficient – some folks are poor in spite of it, and some folks are wealthy without it.
You don’t have to believe in American exceptionalism to understand that a person in a first world country has a huge advantage over someone in the third world, especially if they are poor.
I can’t think of the economic term for this phenomenon right this second (it will come to me as soon as I post this), but the idea is that if you add up the value of all the land and capital in the US, it is but a small fraction of the overall economy’s value. The value of the American economy is much more the knowledge and customs of Americans. It is the “Dark Matter” of economics. This is why an uneducated rural Mexican can come to this country and make lots more money and have a lot more productivity here than he can in Mexico (this is a very strong argument for open borders, by the way).
I think our economy (like most economies) is structured such that it’s possible for one person to capture the profit from the wealth generated by the hard work of another.
Are you reading the Half Sigma blog?
So my statistical work showing that households with lower income have fewer income earners, less education, and WORK LESS doesn’t convince you?
BTW, I have gotten substantive criticism of my work from people who know vastly more about statistics than I ever will. The funny thing is that when I challenged them to rerun the numbers while fixing my “mistakes”, they came to the same conclusions I did.
But, hard work isn’t magic; it’s not necessary and it’s not sufficient – some folks are poor in spite of it, and some folks are wealthy without it.
You’re such a Presbyterian. It’s in your genetic code or something. Seriously, and you don’t even know it.
You’re talking about “Grace”, right? “The Elect”?
I don’t know all the ins and out of protestantism, but it seems to me that your forefathers believed something like that, that to get to heaven you didn’t just have to believe and perform good works, but you also had to be one of God’s select few, and that success was evidence of being one of the few.
Of course, that belief was/ is preposterous, as is your more modern view. Of course hard work and education are not in and of themselves sufficient to not be poor, but very few people who work and are educated are poor. You seem to be saying that if 100% of the hard working are not poor, the system doesn’t work, and of course that is preposterous.
Some people are unlucky, particularly people who get sick and can’t work. They can be poor through no fault of their own, and they are worthy of charity. But that is a very small percentage of the poor.
BTW, to answer my own question, if somebody could show me statistics showing that the poor worked harder than everyone else, then I would be persuaded that the poor work harder than everyone else! But that’s not what the statistic show.
And, yes, the statistics also show that the rich work more than everybody else. They’re averages, yes, but that’s what they show.
What about the lady who cleans my office or the guy Washing dishes at Denny’s? Where are these working poor in the statistics? Are they invisible to Buzzcut too? I personally know many hardworkers who live in poverty. I often wonder if Buzzcut and I live in the same universe much less the same state.
Anecdotes are not data.
How about we flip your argument around and ask you: Prove that rich people are rich because they work so hard. Prime example – Paris Hilton. Explain where all the hard work is she put in to become rich? Brittney Spears? just about any Hollywood actor? Please describe the hardships that they have suffered through and endured on their way to getting filthy rich and how that compares to the poor slob mopping floors for minimum wage to feed his family.
“Work more”? Is that hours put in at the office? Or, is that something else, like statistical data on widgets/hour?
Theoretically, one could be putting in “time” at the office utilizing that nifty putting green that little Muffy gave for Xmas. Or sitting around playing on e*trade from the office PC (it all belongs to me anyway). Or sitting interminable hours at “meetings” where little, if anything, gets accomplished. I could go on, but please, take a turn and show me your data. And don’t be so quick to dismiss anecdotes. The master of spin, the late (unlamented) Joe, used anecdotal information to devastating effect.
1) Paris HIlton is a good example of someone who became rich the old-fashioned way—she inherited her money. Wasn’t it great-grand-daddy who built the empire? An uncle married Liz Taylor. That might be considered a labor in itself. But Paris (does the Hilton chain have a location in Paris?) is anecdotal and anecdotes are not data, as Buzzcut correctly points out. Data, however, constitutes only one facet of evidence for a position in thi argument.
2) If we go to data, Lori makes a good point about the working poor. There are stats on the average wage in the country. There are stats on the numbers of people who occupy—whoops, I’ll use a different verb—labor in those jobs. There are stats on total unemployed. There are stats on jobs available. I will go over those numbers, but I think it is safe to say the overwhelming number of the poor are not lazy.
3) Newt Gingrich is rich because he gives access as an “historian” to those in power. $30K/month from the Chamber of Commerce to have half-a-dozen dinners with them each year. I presume the Chamber picks up the tab. Judging from his belt-line, the Chamber has a nice dessert cart.
4) And now for anecdotes. They involve places like Lake Forest, classmates from DePauw, the 1970s, and—well, never mind. The details, some of them fuzzy, are also somewhat sordid. A lot of the really rich people got their money the same way as Paris Hilton: inheritance. Those are the silent one percent. Was it the Coleman Report that determined the two factors in determining success in later life are the socioeconomic class into which one is born and luck?
Sorry to post two in a row. I just noticed Buzz’s link to the Census data.
I know numbers and statistics are an alluring (read easy) way to explain reality, but in my own opinion, that must be tempered with some critical thinking about the “why” questions. Sometimes this gets attention, but in situations like these when one is trying to make a political point, the critical thinking part gets left out (usually unintentionally) because it’s much more difficult to accomplish.
Take for example the proposition that one “works harder” because one works 50 or more weeks a year. Think about that for a moment. Could that be true for all persons who “work” that many weeks a year? Or, could there be a range of actual productive behaviors by the individuals captured in the Census numbers?
How about educational attainment? Ph.ds tend to make more money than those with bachelor degrees. But, is it because such individuals work harder, or are smarter than those without? Not necessarily. There is even a range for those who have chosen different concentrations. Who says that a Folklore Ph.d necessarily makes more money than a Chemistry major with a bachelor’s degree?
My point is that there is too much generalizing when one uses aggregate data, and not enough thinking. It’s too easy to arrive at some set of criteria, apply some basic numbers analysis upon it and reach a preordained conclusion. ‘See?!? I was right.’
As with anecdotal stories, less than thoughtful statistics is almost entirely worthless. Sure, you get the results you are looking for, but is that by truth, or by inadvertent manipulation of one’s theoretical start point?
Literally, your argument is unconvincing to me. Why? Because you use your numbers anecdotally, in my opinion, to bolster your own opinions. You can say that you are successful because you are better educated and work harder than the janitor downstairs, but that is anecdotal in and of itself. It may be true for you, but your situation may, or may not, apply universally across the data set. Yet, you do so apply it that way (or at least it appears that you do).
So, while you have so easily convinced yourself of your opinion, please don’t take anyone to task for not following your own statistical forays. Some, don’t think that they are so very robust.
The people I know that make under $30,000 work MUCH harder than those I know that make over $100,000. I do know people in both groups.
I also know that the under $30k group does work that is indisputably productive. When their day is over, there is a pile of product, a group of people with new haircuts, or a lawn trimmed.
The $100k group has a harder time showing the results of their work. Maybe the marketer I know increased the brand awareness some that day, and maybe that means that there will be more sales later. Or, maybe not. Maybe the executive I know made progress on a huge deal, or maybe he just cost the company thousands on a wrong decision.
Apparently, the OWS protesters are some sort of ubermenschen, because an individual I spoke with a little while ago called them both “anarchists” and “big-government liberals” in the course of the same conversation.
So most folks’ response to my “anecdotes are not data” comment is… more anecdotes.
And varangianguard’s response is one typical of many liberals when they come across me and my arguments: they put their hands over their ears and chant, “I can’t hear you, la, la, la, I can’t hear you…”
If we’re going to argue over the definition of “hard”, or even “work”, well, I guess you guys are pretty much proving my point about folks who are not persuadable.
I can hear you, Buzz. Truly. But, your arguments are L-A-M-E. Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough? You seem bright enough?
You don’t perform critical thinking as a step of your research. You just count and conclude that your initial assumptions are true because your cherry-picked methodology and data attributes “fit” your theory. Your assumptions aren’t even all that innovative. Your conclusions are anecdotal themselves, because they are solely based upon your assumptions, not any cogent argumentation or comprehensive thinking processes. Methinks you’re the one covering his ears here. Like many of your stripe, you “know what’s right” and arguments to the contrary be damned.
Everyone have a Happy Thanksgiving!
You don’t perform critical thinking as a step of your research. You just count and conclude that your initial assumptions are true because your cherry-picked methodology and data attributes “fit” your theory. Your assumptions aren’t even all that innovative. Your conclusions are anecdotal themselves, because they are solely based upon your assumptions, not any cogent argumentation or comprehensive thinking processes. Methinks you’re the one covering his ears here. Like many of your stripe, you “know what’s right” and arguments to the contrary be damned.
Do this for me: download the same data I did (which I link to), perform your own analysis, and post your results on Google Docs just as I did.
I assert that, any way you slice that data, you will come to similar conclusions that I did.
“I assert that, any way you slice that data, you will come to similar conclusions that I did.”
And that, in a nutshell, is the problem I’m having here. “Data” isn’t an end-all, be-all. I’m sure if I performed the very same analysis that you did, the results would surely be the same (it’s math, after all). But, I would be falling for the same misconceptions if I simply replicated your model. When anecdotal “evidence” to the contrary is so very easy to come by (and in quantity), there is an indication that no matter what some facile Excel-based regression “statistics” might indicate, presumably as a function of confirmation bias, there is actually something more complicated at play.
You dismiss anecdotal “evidence” that doesn’t “fit” your theory, but that isn’t the way it works. When there is a large amount of conflicting evidence, anecdotal or otherwise, one must convincingly argue why one’s model doesn’t “fit”. You don’t, you dismiss it out of hand.
Correct me if I’ve mistaken your position, but essentially it equates to any household where all potential wage earners who aren’t outside the home working long hours after completing some kind of post-high school education is comprised of lazy, ignornant societal blood-suckers. If that is even close to what you mean, then you have overlooked the most obvious piece of data, that being “choice”. have you accounted for choice in your model? I don’t think so. Housewives/husbands? Lazy and ignorant. Folklore majors? Lazy and ignorant. At least by your model.
Now, it’s likely that “choice” is either more difficult to ascertain, or completely missing from Census data. Too often, important variables cannot be found, but one has to realize that the attempt to replicate reality via a regression model is conceptually weaker than it would be had other variables been available for modelling. Or, one has to try and account for it. So? So, one has to temper one’s conclusions, if one even realizes that their model is flimsy to begin with.
In the end, I criticize because I think your modelling is weak. I don’t think that it robustly describes what might be found in reality. And, I think you are so completely blinded by your preconceptions that you have not considered that there might be more complexity at work than you ascribe to.
You’re right. I’m taking a dry, statistical result (that households that earn more money consist of more income earners, who work more hours, who have more education) and making a value judgment from it. And I make an uncomfortable conclusion: that the poor need to work more, get more education, and get married (I’m sure that really gets your shackles up).
Is this the case in every poor household? Absolutely not. But it is the case in the median and average poor household, and certainly true at the margin.
Remember, the most shocking thing in the data is that the median household in the lowest income quintile has NO INCOME EARNERS! So all the anecdotes about people working at Denny’s don’t really apply to those folks, do they?
You say that I’m starting with preconceived notions. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have not manipulated the data one iota. I took it as it was, and graphed it and whatnot without predjudice. The graphs are the graphs, the regressions are the regressions. Interpret it as you will, by all means my interpretation has no special weight.
Perhaps you will dismiss my source, but I found the following on Wikipedia.
“Garbage in, garbage out” has morphed into “garbage in, gospel out”.
This infers that too many users run bunches of numbers through a computer and voila!, “truths” emerge from the other end. Just because one has found out how to input numbers into Excel for regression, doesn’t mean that anything “robust”, analytically speaking, comes of the exercise. Don’t feel too bad. You’re in the majority where quantitative methods outweigh qualitative methods in research (which is a discussion for another day). The problem is, if one completely ignores the qualitative approach when considering a problem, then the quantitative results may simply have no practical significance, no matter what the statistical results prove to be.
I missed the “getting married” part, I guess. Where does that “fit” in again?
On another note, a humorous (for me) find.
“Liberals have more gray matter in a part of the brain associated with understanding complexity, while the conservative brain is bigger in the section related to processing fear, said the study on Thursday in Current Biology.”
Your cognitive intransigence sol-ved.
V, it’s all speculation on your part. I agree with your Wikipedia quote, by the way, much research is exactly that.
The difference between your quote and my analysis is that I made the data source as well as my analysis available for anyone to look at and manipulate. If I am wrong, by all means redo the analysis and show me.
I’ve had folks redo my work, because they didn’t feel that linear regression was an appropriate analysis, they asserted that the data autoregressed, yada, yada, yada. I challenged them to “do it right”… and they came to the same conclusion that I did (the dry, statistical part, not the value judgment).
A lot of what drives poverty is single parenthood. If you have a household that has no or only one income earner, but a large household size, which would be the case with a single parent, you are much more likely to be poor. This is not even taking into account that men (still) make more than women do, and I would speculate that a household led by a male income earner probably makes more than one lead by a female income earner (I’m going to have to see if this data is complete enough to show if this is true or not).
So one very effective way to mitigate poverty is to encourage people to marry.
Two more things just occurred to me.
First up, in the “scientific method”, the first step is to develop a hypothesis, to which you do experiments to prove or disprove that hypothesis. So your critique that “I reached a preordained conclusion” is actually bogus.
Next up, look at how Google and others are actually throwing out the scientific method because of the availability of huge amounts of data. They do exactly what I did, applying statistics to datasets to see what shakes out.
One more thing. Doug’s assertion that “the rich” are transferring value to themselves from others has been disproven. At least with regard to CEOs, I can’t say for sure about Paris Hilton.
Although, it seems to me that Paris works hard for the money. Ever seen that tape? Ever seen her “reality” show?
Since we appear to be going in circles, let me try a different slant. Like most research, I class yours the same as a “the sky is blue” research project. That researcher has decided to prove (quantitatively) that the sky is blue. So, he (or she) sits down and makes up a schedule for a series of observations of the daytime sky for use as “data” in his (or her) modelling.
Now, this researcher is still in college and likes to party a bit, so getting up too early isn’t either doable or preferable. So, 10 AM is marked down for the start time for any observations. Likewise, said partying mode must be prepared for in a satisfactory manner, so 4 PM is marked down for the stop time for observations.
So, the observations proceed during clear days over the next month. Blue, blue, blue and blue is the only notation to be found on any of the observation charts. At the end of the month, the researcher duly proceeds to plug all of the observational data into his (or her) Excel program and voila!, the statistical analysis shows that the sky is blue according to the observed data.
So, what can you conclude about this bit of research?
I conclude that the experiment would need to be replicated. But it would make a nice academic paper, and would certainly get published. ;)
Look, you are making points that are applicable to all research. The points that you are making are true of all of it. In fact, I could say the same thing about, say global warming climate data, or even that paper you referenced about how conservatives’ brains are scared and liberals brains are openminded (Buzzcut saying #13: beware research papers that compliment liberals at the expense of conservatives, it’s probably junk science riddled with confirmation bias).
Again, you can say, or that, or the other thing, but until you go into the data and make a quantitative criticism of how I did it or what the data is, you’re just making stuff up.
See? You missed my point. There are problems with the data. The execution was flawed because the premise was flawed, and so too was the data.
In effect, the data in the example was biased, only you didn’t recognize that fact.
How so, one might ask? Offhand, in three major ways. First, the study excluded the night sky. Depending upon one’s time zone and season that makes a big difference upon how much observed data is missed (and it’s arguable what color the night sky actually is). Second, the study excluded sunrise and sunset. While only somewhere around 16 percent of the daily total, still one has omitted two important periods of observation where the sky is often “not blue” (shades of pink, purple, orange, yellow or red). Third, the study omitted any variations of blue. Azure, royal, slate, sky and other shades might have some significance to such a study. Poof, excluded. So, a whole month’s worth of observations are set within a biased framework.
When one is researching what appears to be a self-evident “truth” (which frankly, most research does), there are qualitative issues that more often than not are excluded from the conceptualization of the study’s methodology and execution. One must either account for all the data, or temper one’s conclusions considering the limitations of the data used.
This is my criticism of your exercise. You have just thoughtlessly plugged in some numbers to test your theory and when the numbers came out the way you expected, you were done. Mission accomplished. I don’t think you spent much (or any) time actually thinking about what those numbers might represent, or moreso what their potential limitations might be. And, until you do, I stand by my assertation that your analysis is only worth the paper it’s printed on.
I don’t think you spent much (or any) time actually thinking about what those numbers might represent, or moreso what their potential limitations might be.
Au contraire. You mistake my terse style of writing for brashness, but I have put a lot of time into thinking about the numbers, and the limitations of the data (including the data in your example).
The bottom line is that my analysis is pretty clear. In particular, the graphs showing income vs. hours worked and years of education are pretty damn clear, and you can argue them however you like.
I think any honest person is going to interpret them as I have, that households with higher incomes have more education, work more, and have more people working than those with lower incomes. I do not expect most people to take the next step that I have taken, that this shows that the poor need to work more, but that is my argument.
I understand why people don’t like to make value judgments, but I think that we do the poor a disservice when we don’t.
Buzz, thanks for patiently having this conversation with me. Blogs aren’t exactly the forum for long-winded, in-depth discussions, but I think I understand your position much better now.
I wasn’t so much criticizing your results as (what I perceived to be) your conceptualiztion (or lack thereof). Now, I understand that better. too.
Have a great day.
Call me crazy, but that is by far my favorite post I have done on my blog (out of literally thousands). It was completely off topic for my blog, but I thought it was fascinating, as well as an innovative use of that particular dataset.
It would make an excellent master’s thesis in economics (with a LOT more work, of course, and my terseness replaced with verbacity).