Widespread Misperceptions of Long-Term Attitude Change

Widespread misperceptions of long-term attitude change

Mondragon and Socialism

To me it seems silly for a socialist to cite Mondragon. When Mondragon partners vote they do not primarily have the good of society in mind but their own good. They do not hire all the worst workers just because they are earning below 50% of median Spanish Basque income, they hire good workers and contributors.

They are like unions/mercantilists; they would not balk at decreasing supply to increase their own income.  

They are  just as voters in that regard, voters are not always on the side of what is right and just. Take homeowners in San Francisco who think driving a few marginal people into homelessness is an acceptable price to pay to retain the character of their neighborhoods and keep their home values rising. Unions keep their income up and often become exclusive to the point where a job seeker needs pull to get a union job. Business owners will do the same when they have a chance, I'm sure that real-estate companies mainly in the business of owning rental properties vote with home owners to restrict building but they are few and they are counterbalanced by builders who want to build more. It is diversity that is a big benefit of economic freedom. 

The Kind of Racism I See

This is a response to David Henderson's blog post here:

Is Nikole Hannah-Jones Right?

This is kind of racism that I think really exists. Another example is the rate that young black men are being murdered in St Louis is very high and if the victims (and perps) were white we would be doing more about it.

Another little thing, I watch some basketball and track videos on youtube and youtube seems to offer a disproportionate amount of Larry Byrd, Pete Maravich, Matthew Boling, even Mac McClung (he's done little to earn that notoriety so far). The idea of a great white hope lives.

So people seem to think in racial lines, and if they are white like to see a white guy do well.

Part of it might be an underdog effect, like my mother told me her family loved to see Joe Lewis do well, seeing a poor black man beat the supposedly superior race. If there are no or few black doing well in a field people might cheer more for them.

How destructive the above racism is another question.

The Strong Desire to Blame a Human

The strong desire to blame a human is something to be resisted. 

This applies to:

• Opioids Purdue Pharma the Sackler family.
• White USAers blacks, black USAers whites
• Jobs immigrants
• Fentanyl China
• Covid also China
• Medical care insurance companies/drug companies

And of course much more.

Medical Things that Blacks Outperform Whites On

According to the CDC here (See table 2 page 9), at 31 weeks or less gestation black infant mortality is lower than for whites so it might be hard to change. The difference in infant mortality between Blacks and whites looks like it is not due to systemic racism in the healthcare system but due to accidents and practices in the home see links below.

Look at table 103 at ages of 90 and up. Black Americans 90 year and older have greater life expectancy than white Americans of the same age, so it looks like the difference in Black white life expectancy is mostly due to accidents and homicides and not due to systemic racism in the healthcare system or due to differences in overall health.   

And of course there is skin cancer.

Links:

The U.S. Is Failing in Infant Mortality, Starting at One Month Old

Record set for the earliest premature baby he is a black American baby born in Alabama

Sudden infant death and sleep practices in the Black community

/nvsr69/NVSR-69-7-508.pdf

https:/

/nvsr69/NVSR-69-7-508.pdf

Crime is too high in the USA

From How to Get Tough On Crime

Robbing someone on the street is not something that will appear sensible to someone whose alternative is to be an office worker making $70/hr.

Even more so if you have possibilities in the very high paying NBA or NFL, yet from what I've read, people in that position have about the same rate of crime as the age/gender/race demographic that they come from.

We have a huge crime problem (see below) and so we could afford to spend quite a but to address it and still be ahead, but we must think clearly at is and look coldly at the data:

Using standard demographic lifetable techniques, and assuming that recent incarceration rates remain unchanged, an estimated 1 of every 20 persons (5%) can be expected to serve time in prison during their lifetime. The lifetime chances of a person going to prison are higher for men (9%) than for women (1%) and higher for blacks (16%) and Hispanics (9%) than for whites (2%). At current levels of incarceration newborn black males in this country have a greater than a 1 in 4 chance of going to prison during their lifetimes, while Hispanic males have a 1 in 6 chance, and white males have a 1 in 23 chance of serving time.

I think legalizing all drugs without a prescription might help.

Up to and including murders among gang members which are considered “mutual-combat” in certain sub cultures. Which I’m sure sounds ridiculous to an upper class Yanqui, but was recently cited as a reason to drop charges by a prosecutor in Chicago.

That is an interesting point. I've said similar things. We'll not condemn Russian soldiers for killing Ukrainian combatants after the war in Ukraine is over so why go hard on such offences.
On the other hand cities that allow that to go on should be condemned. We give Gov the monopoly on force to Government to minimize such, if they aren't doing that they are failures and should be replaced.

Interesting Policy Poll

Interesting Policy Poll results here 

Great Article: Your Opponents Don't Agree with You

Your Opponents Don't Agree with You

Example people will say:

Pro-lifers don’t really think abortion is like murder. They just want to prohibit abortion because they hate women. (Seen on the internet.)

He says, no they really do think abortion is murder.

Repost of: Angus Deaton Deaths of Despair

 Angus Deaton Deaths of Despair

New Hampshire was the highest earning state in 2016 and number 2 in opioid OD deaths.

Dear Angus Deaton with all due respect you might consider reassessing your deaths of despair theory. It never made much sense to me, there is in fact some evidence that people drink and drug more when they have more income and therefore access to booze and drugs, which is BTW a problem for my advocacy of legalization but I think the positives would out weigh the negatives.

Related: Health Insurance Might not be Good for Everyone

Added 2018-01-08  see here

In the preferred estimates, changes in economic conditions account for less than one-tenth of the rise in drug and opioid-involved mortality rates. The contribution of economic factors is even less when accounting for plausible selection on unobservables, with even a small amount of remaining confounding factors being sufficient to entirely eliminate the relationship. 

Added 2022-10-19

Some people seem to miss that variance among people means that prosperity can lead some people to engage more in behaviors that people like Angus Deaton and me consider destructive. This is from Freakonomics post called Retirement Kills.

Josef ZWEIMULLER: I mean, actually, what we find in our study is that among blue-collar workers, we see that workers who retire earlier have higher mortality rates. And these effects are pretty large.

            ... 

Mo WANG: Working actually gives you a way to structure life and that’s very important. Usually, it’s interesting you see people travel right after they retire, but then after like one or two years, people just sit at home watching TV.

This relates to opioid deaths in that fentanyl has made opioids cheaper and more accessible, which is a wealth effect, and so we should expect more use among those who like opioids.

Also this tweet from Robin Hanson seems applicable:

I missed this when it out a year ago, but this article pointed me to this key result: Per capita US drug deaths have steadily doubled every decade 4 times in a row, R^2=0.99! Even as particular drug death rates far from steady. 

This graph from here https://takimag.com/article/white_privilege_vs_white_death_steve_sailer/ makes it seem like the trend started with cohorts born after 1945. Which suggest the trend has actually been going for ~55 years, which suggests it will continue for another ~3 decades, after which mortality will be ~8x higher!

The trend looks much more a result of growing prosperity than of Despair. Shout it form the house tops.

From the MR Comments on Texas History

From comments on MarginalRevolution.com:

Luka 2021-12-01 00:48:42

I'm going to defend Texas, something I rarely get to do. Texas is extremely old, it's history goes back centuries. The name is Spanish and it was at one point part of the Spanish Empire and then independent Mexico. The indigenous people of the region were dominated by the fairly violent Comanches who were a persistent thorn in the side of both the Spanish and the Mexicans. Conflict between whites and natives long predates 1836. Some of the land confiscated seems to have been done before independent Texas.

When Mexico became independent they encouraged "Anglo" migration in part for economic reasons but also to counter the Comanches. Indeed, for as much as you may decry American treatment of indigenous peoples, of which there is much to decry, Mexico was fighting them until the 1930s when the American Indian wars were in effect closed by about 1890(a few minor raids happened after, but historians generally say the war was over in 1890). I've never really understood how the nations of Latin America have seemingly gotten a pass on their treatment of natives and land rights but my guess is that populations are just much more mixed so blame is harder to pinpoint.

On the issue of land and how it was acquired it should be acknowledged that while some land was taken via conquest or illegally seized in defiance of treaties from natives, an enormous amount of the American West and even colonial lands were simply purchased at prices natives willingly accepted absent military threat. I've read that about $800 million was spent by the Federal government alone from independence until around the end of the 19th century. Thats quit a bit more than was spent on Louisiana($15 million), Alaska($7.2 million), Gadsden ($10 million), Florida($5 million) and Mexico(even after the War the USA still paid them $15 million) combined.

From the column. "The book proudly defends the broader sweep of Texas history, including the taking of Texas from Mexico and then the absorption of Texas into the United States"

Thats a strange way of saying "Texas declared independence, later to voluntarily join the USA". Mexico under Santa Anna was headed toward military dictatorship and in many ways was already there. A number of other Mexican states were also in open rebellion under his rule. In the long run the history of Mexico makes it clear that leaving was the best route for Texas both economically and politically. The Mexican revolution(1 million+ dead) was perhaps more deadly than the American Civil War(~750K dead) and that was just one of many internal military conflicts they suffered, to say nothing of their lack of true democracy until 2000.

I think Texas has an interesting history, perhaps they need to tone it down with their state pride, they share many of the serious issues both the nation had in general, and the CSA in particular. Overall, not a bad column, I guess. Its just always surprising to see someone like Tyler, who is generally libertarian and usually pro-America embrace the more critical and revisionist historical take on the USA. Self reflection is good, but it has gotten to the point of self hatred in too many quarters.