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Stanford historian uncovers a grim correlation between violence and inequality

280 points by chmaynard 10y ago

netman21 10y ago
So the last decade's decline in violence in the US indicates a decline in inequality?
- clouddrover 10y ago
  Crime in general may be declining due to the reduction of lead in the environment: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27067615 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27067615
  - dragonwriter 10y ago
    Yeah,that and demographic shifts out of the age group whose predominance seems to drive crime rates seem to more-than-explain the drop in crime, violent and otherwise, more than offsetting any effect from rising inequality.
- nabla9 10y ago
  What if we count all violence, including exported violence? Saudi Arabia has extreme inequality, but it has remained stable while exporting violence to the rest of the world. Maybe war against terror provides release for this violence in US too.
  - jpttsn 10y ago
    There are always so many wonderful things we can start counting, when the original data doesn't seem sound.
harscoat 10y ago
cf. Peter Turchin http://energyskeptic.com/2016/peter-turchin-violence-and-social-unrest-in-the-u-s-and-europe-likely-by-2020/ http://energyskeptic.com/2016/peter-turchin-violence-and-soc...
golemotron 10y ago
In the past few weeks the idea of 'legitimatizing violence' has been circulating heavily. On my Facebook feed most of it has centered on the idea that it is "okay" to punch neo-nazis now. The people saying this are people I'd never expect to. Twitter is similar. I wish I had stats on whether the legitimatization meme is really rising. To me, it looks like the fake news meme. Suddenly it's everywhere.
- whyileft 10y ago
  Not sure if you are old enough to remember that far leftist ideological organizations were often violent up until the last quarter of the 20th century. This period of peacefulness is a recent phenomenon. One of the big pacifiers of democracy is that people accept the result because the majority voted for it. When you have a situation when 46% of the population is pushing an agenda that at least 48% of the population is strongly against. That group often starts to look for alternative ways to flex its majority power. Especially when you realize that in large urban areas we are looking at 25% to 70% type splits in some cases.
  - AlexB138 10y ago
    >When you have a situation when 46% of the population is pushing an agenda that at least 48% of the population is strongly against. That group often starts to look for alternative ways to flex its majority power. 46% and 48% of voters, not of the population. Neither voting block are a majority of the population. I would argue this particular part of our current political climate is largely pushed by a minority, and is as much about them believing their own propaganda as it is about the fact that they lost the election. Keep in mind there was quite a bit of violence coming from the left long before the election was over (attacking people at Trump rallies, fire bombing a GOP headquarters). They genuinely believe the sky is falling, so to speak. It's unfortunate, because it makes it difficult for the rest of us to have a discussion about where we've actually gone wrong.
    - whyileft 10y ago
      The state of California which has one of the largest economies in the world was 62% to 32% against Donald Trump. Is it really that surprising there is a fair amount of visible decent?
VMG 10y ago
> It is almost universally true that violence has been necessary to ensure the redistribution of wealth at any point in time Strictly speaking, you don't need to redistribute wealth to lower inequality. Destroying wealth is sufficient. Violence and war is pretty good at that.
- gm-conspiracy 10y ago
  War does not seem to destroy wealth, but redistribute it?
  - rmchugh 10y ago
    the argument is that increased taxation to fund a war effort plus increased industrial output to produce weapons of war leads to redistribution of wealth from the wealthy (who are disproportionately taxed) to the working class (who work in the factories and related industries to produce the armaments).
    - mtanski 10y ago
      I'm not sure that holds up in practice post WW2. At least here in the US. As long as we're running wars or never ending wars, wealth gets redistributed from all tax payers to owners of factories building war machines or war services (defense contractors). These owners can be direct or "indirect" stock owners. Sure the people who work in that industry get a "cut" but owners get the most and pay the lest to fund it as taxation on cap gains is lower then earned income.
  - jellicle 10y ago
    When a bomb destroys a building, to whom is the value of the building redistributed to?
    - JBReefer 10y ago
      Moloch
    - 10y ago
perrick 10y ago
Louis Chauvel, a french sociology professor, made a similar argument using a Prey-Predatory model with trade union membership and income inequality over the last 100 years : "This article shows empirically how trade union membership and income inequality are mutually related in twelve countries over more than 100 years. While past research has shown that high income inequality occurs alongside low trade union membership, we show that past income inequality actually increases trade union membership with a time lag, as trade unions recruit more members after inequality has been high. But we also show that strengthened trade unions then fight inequality, thereby destroying what helped them to recruit new members in the past. As trade union density decreases, inequality increases and eventually re-incentivises workers to join unions again. By showing this empirically, we reconceptualise the relationship between inequality and union density as a prey and predator model, where predators eat prey – unions destroy inequality, but thereby also destroy their own basis for survival. By empirically showing that trade union density and social inequality influence each other in this way over long periods, this article contributes to a dynamic approach on how social problems and social movements interact." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/kykl.12128/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/kykl.12128/full
- jasim 10y ago
  Here's another reason for unions to become defunct over time, as explained by Steve Bruce in his book Sociology: A Very Short Introduction. "Any kind of group activity requires organization. But as soon as one starts to organize one creates a division within the movement between the organized and the organizers, between ordinary members and officials. The latter quickly acquire knowledge and expertise that set them apart and give them power over ordinary members. The officials begin to derive personal satisfaction from their place in the organization and seek ways of consolidating it. They acquire an interest in the continued prosperity of the organization. For ordinary trade unionists, their union is just one interest in which they have a small stake. But for the paid officials the union is their employer. Preserving the organization becomes more important than helping it achieve its goals. As radical action may bring government repression, the apparatchiks moderate."
  - 10y ago
tanto 10y ago
How about we take away everything down to 10^6$ from the 0.0001% richest and redistribute it to everyone. We repeat this with the 0.0001% of the richest every year from there on. Every time someone is chosen for this honour they get a medal.
- baq 10y ago
  that's exactly what the article is talking about. there's nobody rich who'll willingly do it so there usually is violence involved and given the rich have resources to defend themselves, there's a lot of it. it's why the bolshevik revolutions of 1917 resulted in their outcomes.
- donquichotte 10y ago
  That's how communism was supposed to work, and the guys in charge of redistribution took the lion's share for themselves.
  - Ygg2 10y ago
    There are ways to making this work. Sadly, none applies to dollar. One solution. Make dollars worthless, unless they have been stamped with a stamp, for the current month. Basically force people to pay taxes on money. Say you have to pay 10% of the value. Got 2bil, congrats. You are paying $200 million each month.
    - ant6n 10y ago
      A simpler way would be to print more money and cause more inflation. 10% wealth destruction per month matches the hyper inflation of Germany in the 20s.Of course the rich who store their assets in non liquid form weren't as affected as the poor who didn't know how to pay for bread.
      - visarga 10y ago
        There is another way, without issuing money. Create a new currency, dedicated for paying UBI to people. Then require that companies pay part of their taxes in this currency, in order to make it valuable. It should cycle itself back and there would be no need to issue new UBI money. The deeper problem is that companies have a conflict of short term / long term interest. In the short term, they would prefer to sell their products with as little taxes as possible, and hire as few people as possible. But in the long term, their interest is to have a thriving population and a robust market. If companies don't act responsibly towards society, there is a pressing need to organize self-reliance. We need to create a new economy based on unemployed people. With good management, they could cover a part of their needs without external help, maybe even be self sufficient. In a sense, we could employ the mass of jobless to work for their needs, thus finding employment and solving their problems directly.
bloomca 10y ago
I don't really think that their conclusions are very honest. They provide only extraordinary situations, which are not usual by any measure. Masses during (and some time after, for like ~1 generation) such events are much less demanding, and they unite to survive (I can think that a lot of damaged countries after WWII built very successful industries, sometimes from scratch). What I think can really affect violence, is a level of income for lower-class people. For example, in a lot of ex-USSR countries it is quite a problem – people are pretty violent just in everyday life, and we don't see positive trend in Russia, for instance. So, while super big difference between income of top and low classes contributes to the violence, the ability to have decent life, I think, will decrease violence drastically. Of course, it is oversimplification, there are tons of other factors, but I feel it this way, because violence is mostly done by people with the lowest income (and I don't think it is mandatory to be low relative to the highest, it is relative to the good level of life).
- timthelion 10y ago
  I don't know if you are correct about the violence being done mostly by the poorest. The most violent person I have ever met was the "cousin?" of a Kyrgyzstani diplomat. Hardly a poor person. He had a gang of fellow Kyrgystaners who beat a lot of people up at a school I went to, and they never got punished due to his political relations. They even ruptured the testicle of one man, which meant serious time in the hospital and potential infertility! My feeling is that this was not caused by poverty, but rather by a macho culture which saw violence as being something to be proud of. I think that there is a similar thing in the US, with gun toting "pro-rancher" types being very violent people, despite them not being poor. I do however, think that there is a correlation between poverty and risky violence. Poor people are more likely to commit a crime that could get them sent to jail. So the gun toting pro-rancher type might torture an animal, or spray it with bullets from a machine gun, they won't kill humans as often, because they don't want to lose their wealth. A black guy from the hood, however, who is no more violent and probably much less evil than the gun toting rancher, might commit a crime with a gun that could get him sent to prison for life because he has so much less to lose.
Inconel 10y ago
That was an interesting read, it definitely makes me want to read the book for a more detailed analysis. I've increasingly been wondering about the links between violence/social unrest and inequality, particularly as we enter a period of time were globalization and automation have the potential to be hugely disruptive to the existing work force, even more so than they already have been. This is only tangentially related, but I've been curious about the link between violent crime in the US and general societal health. Based on much of what I've read, and I could be mistaken here, I've seen a number of stats cited showing that factors like income inequality, purchasing power and very worryingly to me, social mobility, are all on a downward trend in the US. Even harder to quantify areas, like asking parents if they think their kids will be better off than they were, result in answers that skew unfavorably. At the same time, it is both rather easy to own firearms or other forms of weapons and there are plenty already in circulation, and yet, unless I'm mistaken, violent crime has been on a steady downward trend in the US for the last 30+ years. I would assume, perhaps niavely, that as social markers such as decreased mobility, inequality, pessimism about the future and distrust of the government and politicians grew, we would see a corresponding rise in violence. But it appears we aren't seeing that. What could be behind this? Are we simply getting better at controlling people? Are we distracting them? Are we incarcerating them? Are they simply killing themselves? I know suicide rates for certain demographics have been increasing. Or are things not really as bad as they sometimes seem? I'm definitely not advocating for violence, but I do feel that violence acts as a kind of societal last resort when a population believes they have exhausted all other options. Again, this could be a misguided interpretation of the situation on my part, but I would assume that violence in society would closely follow decreases in the kind of quality of life metrics we're seeing. I'd love to hear other posters' thoughts or if there are any good sources exploring the topic.
- thedataslinger 10y ago
  I think your questions suggest an answer which may or may not be true: a lack of class consciousness.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_consciousness
- CM30 10y ago
  Probably an insane thought, but perhaps the 'us vs them' attitudes in current political parties and stances may be having an effect? Maybe people are too distracted by the whole theism vs atheism/religion vs religion arguments, the complaints about sexism/racism/transphobia/etc or general debates about whether things like abortion should be legal or not. Maybe people are being sidetracked too much by party politics and internet debates to actually do anything about income inequality. Or maybe as said before, the various other changes have decreased crime rates so much that even an increase in it due to this inequality is barely noticeable. If exposure to lead was really tied to crime rates, perhaps the huge drop off there simply masked everything else.
husgfdsr3y 10y ago
Singapore has one of the highest income inequalities in the world. It has one of the lowest violence rates in the world. You can say the same about China too and many other countries in Asia.
- kbart 10y ago
  I don't know about Singapore, but China is known for its unofficial millionaire/billionaire corrupt bureaucrats and party members. Also, when government has a complete control over the media, crime statistics tends to get underreported.
- digi_owl 10y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland_with_the_Death_Penalty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland_with_the_Death_Pena...
- colanderman 10y ago
  I think that supports the article's thesis? My understanding of TFA is that inequality remains until a violent event. If Singapore has had no such violent events, then by TFA's thesis, inequality has been free to increase.
- intended 10y ago
  It's also Singapore, A city state.
RoutinePlayer 10y ago
I would love to see Prof. Steven Pinker review this. He wrote "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...
snappyTertle 10y ago
Inequality is not inherently a bad thing. People should be compensated for the value they produce. Profits are a signal of how much people value what is produced. For example, people love iPhones, it no surprise that Apple is the most valuable company in the world. What causes resentment between classes is lack of mobility. This, IMO, is caused by government regulations and a banking system that hurts the middle class and below and benefits the people at the top. We have a banking system where the federal reserve can make money out of thin air and inject it into banks. This shifts purchasing power to people in finance. Regulations like minimum wage and higher taxes on larger income make it hard to hire the next marginal employee. Minimum wage prices out low skilled workers, who would like to work and obtain on the job experience needed to climb the ladder. High taxes makes it more expensive for business owners to hire someone. I'm not talking about large businesses like Walmart (they actually support minimum wage). Small businesses are going out of business, or are just not able to start with increased costs of doing business. This is a vicious cycle where government intervention leads to rich getting richer, and the poor being more dependent on government programs and finding it harder to move up the ladder. So to fix this people beg for more government intervention, which worsens the problem...and on and on it goes.
- neap24 10y ago
  The mobility discussion is distressingly absent from the inequality debates.
  - dsfyu404ed 10y ago
    Agreed.
- sshumaker 10y ago
  While it's certainly true that there are some interaction effects between government regulation and the market that cause inequality, its naive to draw the conclusion that this is true for all or even a majority of regulation. If you read the OP, a primary counterexample is mass mobilization (e.g. government efforts to support WW2) which are a great leveler. Any engineer who has built systems should understand how complexity increases non-linearly with scale and that interaction effects are complicated to reason about. Debugging the performance of a large system is often really unintuitive. So it is surprising when these same people think there is a simple black and white diagnosis that explains away our socioeconomic challenges, which is a more complicated system than anything we've engineered.
gresh 10y ago
the pitchforks are coming!
known 10y ago
AKA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority AND http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1118373109 http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1118373109
known 10y ago
Any type of hegemony will have awkward repercussions and collateral damage;
sigmaprimus 10y ago
I love reading the comments on stories like this and consider these comments to be a bellwether as to the current state of inequality in our society. Unfortunately I tend to consider myself one who exists on the lower part of the wealth distribution logarithm within the western world, globally it's a different story. Just as anyone tweeting on their smart phone or tablet claiming to be part of the 99% might want to rethink that in a global context, most of us in the west are global 1% ers. Could it be that the rise in terror incedents recently may in fact be caused by this inequality and not just radical religious zealots? Even if this is not the case we may want to make sure that our empathy does not diminish to the point where we suggest that the starving people of the world eat cake if there is no bread.
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  Maybe not - globally, the 1% own just over half of everything. The 99% includes almost everybody everywhere. Even working-class Americans.
  - sigmaprimus 10y ago
    Fair enough maybe not 1% but the metric you are using does not exclude us from the 1%, keep in mind that 2.7 billion people are trying to survive on less than 2 dollars a day. Eg, there are 1000 people in a group, one of which has 1 million dollars, 9 others have 100 dollars each and the rest only have 1 dollar each there are still 10 people in the top 1%.
    - otalp 10y ago
      >2.7 billion people are trying to survive on less than 2 dollars a day 2 dollars a day isn't all that little in places like say, India. Sure, they're not going to be living a life of luxury, but it's very different from $2 a day in the US, and you shouldn't have trouble feeding yourself and having shelter with $2 a day in India, which amounts to about Rs.50,000 a year. In fact even though inequality is increasing, a number of studies have confirmed that poverty and extreme poverty have drastically reduced over the past few decades. It still exists of course, but much better than what it used to be.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
andrewclunn 10y ago
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure." - Thomas Jefferson
theptip 10y ago
Sounds like the other half of the thesis presented in "Forged Through Fire" [1][2], in that case arguing that wars are directly responsible for democracy, by virtue of reducing inequality. (Note, I've not read that text yet, just the WSJ book review, so please correct me if I'm off-target with that summary). The obvious follow-on question is whether inequality is actually bad in itself, and is what produces the war. Or is inequality usually associated with societies where the upper classes keep the lion's share of the growth, and that is what triggers these wars? [1]: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B016APOCZM/ref=kinw_myk_ro_title https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B016APOCZM/ref=kinw_myk_... [2]: http://www.wsj.com/articles/democracy-is-dependent-on-war-1483741787 http://www.wsj.com/articles/democracy-is-dependent-on-war-14...
edblarney 10y ago
"wars, pandemics, civil unrest; only violent shocks like these have substantially reduced inequality over the millennia." No. The history of Anglo culture has been as violent as any other - but not in revolutionary terms. Same thing for Scandinavian cultures. UK/Australia/Canada/NZ have relatively reasonable rates of inequality and there has been no revolution. Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland - have likely the highest degree of 'equality' and yet - there has been no revolution. Their Monarchies and State Churches remain intact to this day. The American revolution - though important in terms of world history - was a pretty minor affair - the colonies were small and sparse at the time. It's also very difficult to consider 'revolution' before recorded history as there were no 'social movements' as we understand them, granted, studying revolution before the common are would be worth an academic exercise.
berry_sortoro 10y ago
What a surprise.
openasocket 10y ago
He seems to be talking about rapid changes to inequality. But inequality has been in steady decline for centuries (the last few decades in the US are a blip in comparison to the overall downward trend). These general downward trends that occur at the pace of decades or centuries can't be directly attributed to warfare, can it?
- munificent 10y ago
  We have certainly had no shortage of wars in the past couple of centuries. Just in the past two hundred years, in order of largest death tolls[1], I see: * World War II * Taiping Rebellion * Second Sino-Japanese War * World War I/Great War * Dungan Revolt * Chinese Civil War * Russian Civil War and Foreign Intervention * Napoleonic Wars * Second Congo War/Great War of Africa * Shaka's conquests * Vietnam War/Second Indochina War * Biafra War * Mexican Revolution * Soviet war in Afghanistan * Korean War * Iran–Iraq War/First Persian Gulf War * American Civil War * Spanish American Wars of Independence * Angolan Civil War * Ethiopian Civil War * Spanish Civil War All told, those are something like a couple hundred million dead. Them for each of those human bodies, consider how many living are profoundly affected by their death. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll
  - openasocket 10y ago
    But the trend is generally downward, not a bunch of sharp decreases that would indicate being caused by a specific short-term event. Also many of these wars were pretty localized, so we should see the drops and inequality in the immediate area and a reduced effect elsewhere.
    - munificent 10y ago
      > But the trend is generally downward, not a bunch of sharp decreases that would indicate being caused by a specific short-term event. Many of these are not short term events. You have a several years-long war, with a rise in conflict before it and a gradual repair and rebuild afterwards. There are enough of them that I wouldn't be surprised if the overall graph was smooth. > Also many of these wars were pretty localized, so we should see the drops and inequality in the immediate area and a reduced effect elsewhere. In the modern world, few things are truly localized.
Girlang 10y ago
So here's the thing: What if the only people who can fix "inequality" are those who fall into the "have not" category? What if they have less because of their own fault?
dforrestwilson1 10y ago
Peter Turchin has done similar work. This book is a great read! https://www.amazon.com/War-Peace-Rise-Fall-Empires/dp/0452288193 https://www.amazon.com/War-Peace-Rise-Fall-Empires/dp/045228...
it 10y ago
The title is a bit misleading. He uncovered a correlation between violence and equality.
lstroud 10y ago
I haven't read the book, but this seems like the classic case of a solution looking for a problem.
Proven 10y ago
Socialist nonsense. If he had some common sense instead of PhD, he would have "uncovered" the grim truth that the State is the source of most violence and inequality.
Nomentatus 10y ago
I've previously thought that wars OR the threat of wars, particularly of mass armies; meant you had to treat the 99% pretty well, or they wouldn't care to die for you. So this article makes me suspect that as drones do more of the fighting, and then finally all of the fighting, there will in future be no practical reason whatsoever to treat the 99% well. Drones stamping on the human face forever...

280 points by chmaynard 10y ago

netman21 10y ago

So the last decade's decline in violence in the US indicates a decline in inequality?

clouddrover 10y ago
Crime in general may be declining due to the reduction of lead in the environment: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27067615 http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27067615
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  Yeah,that and demographic shifts out of the age group whose predominance seems to drive crime rates seem to more-than-explain the drop in crime, violent and otherwise, more than offsetting any effect from rising inequality.
nabla9 10y ago
What if we count all violence, including exported violence? Saudi Arabia has extreme inequality, but it has remained stable while exporting violence to the rest of the world. Maybe war against terror provides release for this violence in US too.
- jpttsn 10y ago
  There are always so many wonderful things we can start counting, when the original data doesn't seem sound.

harscoat 10y ago

cf. Peter Turchin http://energyskeptic.com/2016/peter-turchin-violence-and-social-unrest-in-the-u-s-and-europe-likely-by-2020/ http://energyskeptic.com/2016/peter-turchin-violence-and-soc...

golemotron 10y ago

In the past few weeks the idea of 'legitimatizing violence' has been circulating heavily. On my Facebook feed most of it has centered on the idea that it is "okay" to punch neo-nazis now. The people saying this are people I'd never expect to. Twitter is similar. I wish I had stats on whether the legitimatization meme is really rising. To me, it looks like the fake news meme. Suddenly it's everywhere.

whyileft 10y ago
Not sure if you are old enough to remember that far leftist ideological organizations were often violent up until the last quarter of the 20th century. This period of peacefulness is a recent phenomenon. One of the big pacifiers of democracy is that people accept the result because the majority voted for it. When you have a situation when 46% of the population is pushing an agenda that at least 48% of the population is strongly against. That group often starts to look for alternative ways to flex its majority power. Especially when you realize that in large urban areas we are looking at 25% to 70% type splits in some cases.
- AlexB138 10y ago
  >When you have a situation when 46% of the population is pushing an agenda that at least 48% of the population is strongly against. That group often starts to look for alternative ways to flex its majority power. 46% and 48% of voters, not of the population. Neither voting block are a majority of the population. I would argue this particular part of our current political climate is largely pushed by a minority, and is as much about them believing their own propaganda as it is about the fact that they lost the election. Keep in mind there was quite a bit of violence coming from the left long before the election was over (attacking people at Trump rallies, fire bombing a GOP headquarters). They genuinely believe the sky is falling, so to speak. It's unfortunate, because it makes it difficult for the rest of us to have a discussion about where we've actually gone wrong.
  - whyileft 10y ago
    The state of California which has one of the largest economies in the world was 62% to 32% against Donald Trump. Is it really that surprising there is a fair amount of visible decent?

VMG 10y ago

> It is almost universally true that violence has been necessary to ensure the redistribution of wealth at any point in time Strictly speaking, you don't need to redistribute wealth to lower inequality. Destroying wealth is sufficient. Violence and war is pretty good at that.

gm-conspiracy 10y ago
War does not seem to destroy wealth, but redistribute it?
- rmchugh 10y ago
  the argument is that increased taxation to fund a war effort plus increased industrial output to produce weapons of war leads to redistribution of wealth from the wealthy (who are disproportionately taxed) to the working class (who work in the factories and related industries to produce the armaments).
  - mtanski 10y ago
    I'm not sure that holds up in practice post WW2. At least here in the US. As long as we're running wars or never ending wars, wealth gets redistributed from all tax payers to owners of factories building war machines or war services (defense contractors). These owners can be direct or "indirect" stock owners. Sure the people who work in that industry get a "cut" but owners get the most and pay the lest to fund it as taxation on cap gains is lower then earned income.
- jellicle 10y ago
  When a bomb destroys a building, to whom is the value of the building redistributed to?
  - JBReefer 10y ago
    Moloch
  - 10y ago

perrick 10y ago

Louis Chauvel, a french sociology professor, made a similar argument using a Prey-Predatory model with trade union membership and income inequality over the last 100 years : "This article shows empirically how trade union membership and income inequality are mutually related in twelve countries over more than 100 years. While past research has shown that high income inequality occurs alongside low trade union membership, we show that past income inequality actually increases trade union membership with a time lag, as trade unions recruit more members after inequality has been high. But we also show that strengthened trade unions then fight inequality, thereby destroying what helped them to recruit new members in the past. As trade union density decreases, inequality increases and eventually re-incentivises workers to join unions again. By showing this empirically, we reconceptualise the relationship between inequality and union density as a prey and predator model, where predators eat prey – unions destroy inequality, but thereby also destroy their own basis for survival. By empirically showing that trade union density and social inequality influence each other in this way over long periods, this article contributes to a dynamic approach on how social problems and social movements interact." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/kykl.12128/full http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/kykl.12128/full

jasim 10y ago
Here's another reason for unions to become defunct over time, as explained by Steve Bruce in his book Sociology: A Very Short Introduction. "Any kind of group activity requires organization. But as soon as one starts to organize one creates a division within the movement between the organized and the organizers, between ordinary members and officials. The latter quickly acquire knowledge and expertise that set them apart and give them power over ordinary members. The officials begin to derive personal satisfaction from their place in the organization and seek ways of consolidating it. They acquire an interest in the continued prosperity of the organization. For ordinary trade unionists, their union is just one interest in which they have a small stake. But for the paid officials the union is their employer. Preserving the organization becomes more important than helping it achieve its goals. As radical action may bring government repression, the apparatchiks moderate."
- 10y ago

tanto 10y ago

How about we take away everything down to 10^6$ from the 0.0001% richest and redistribute it to everyone. We repeat this with the 0.0001% of the richest every year from there on. Every time someone is chosen for this honour they get a medal.

baq 10y ago
that's exactly what the article is talking about. there's nobody rich who'll willingly do it so there usually is violence involved and given the rich have resources to defend themselves, there's a lot of it. it's why the bolshevik revolutions of 1917 resulted in their outcomes.
donquichotte 10y ago
That's how communism was supposed to work, and the guys in charge of redistribution took the lion's share for themselves.
- Ygg2 10y ago
  There are ways to making this work. Sadly, none applies to dollar. One solution. Make dollars worthless, unless they have been stamped with a stamp, for the current month. Basically force people to pay taxes on money. Say you have to pay 10% of the value. Got 2bil, congrats. You are paying $200 million each month.
  - ant6n 10y ago
    A simpler way would be to print more money and cause more inflation. 10% wealth destruction per month matches the hyper inflation of Germany in the 20s.Of course the rich who store their assets in non liquid form weren't as affected as the poor who didn't know how to pay for bread.
    - visarga 10y ago
      There is another way, without issuing money. Create a new currency, dedicated for paying UBI to people. Then require that companies pay part of their taxes in this currency, in order to make it valuable. It should cycle itself back and there would be no need to issue new UBI money. The deeper problem is that companies have a conflict of short term / long term interest. In the short term, they would prefer to sell their products with as little taxes as possible, and hire as few people as possible. But in the long term, their interest is to have a thriving population and a robust market. If companies don't act responsibly towards society, there is a pressing need to organize self-reliance. We need to create a new economy based on unemployed people. With good management, they could cover a part of their needs without external help, maybe even be self sufficient. In a sense, we could employ the mass of jobless to work for their needs, thus finding employment and solving their problems directly.

bloomca 10y ago

I don't really think that their conclusions are very honest. They provide only extraordinary situations, which are not usual by any measure. Masses during (and some time after, for like ~1 generation) such events are much less demanding, and they unite to survive (I can think that a lot of damaged countries after WWII built very successful industries, sometimes from scratch). What I think can really affect violence, is a level of income for lower-class people. For example, in a lot of ex-USSR countries it is quite a problem – people are pretty violent just in everyday life, and we don't see positive trend in Russia, for instance. So, while super big difference between income of top and low classes contributes to the violence, the ability to have decent life, I think, will decrease violence drastically. Of course, it is oversimplification, there are tons of other factors, but I feel it this way, because violence is mostly done by people with the lowest income (and I don't think it is mandatory to be low relative to the highest, it is relative to the good level of life).

timthelion 10y ago
I don't know if you are correct about the violence being done mostly by the poorest. The most violent person I have ever met was the "cousin?" of a Kyrgyzstani diplomat. Hardly a poor person. He had a gang of fellow Kyrgystaners who beat a lot of people up at a school I went to, and they never got punished due to his political relations. They even ruptured the testicle of one man, which meant serious time in the hospital and potential infertility! My feeling is that this was not caused by poverty, but rather by a macho culture which saw violence as being something to be proud of. I think that there is a similar thing in the US, with gun toting "pro-rancher" types being very violent people, despite them not being poor. I do however, think that there is a correlation between poverty and risky violence. Poor people are more likely to commit a crime that could get them sent to jail. So the gun toting pro-rancher type might torture an animal, or spray it with bullets from a machine gun, they won't kill humans as often, because they don't want to lose their wealth. A black guy from the hood, however, who is no more violent and probably much less evil than the gun toting rancher, might commit a crime with a gun that could get him sent to prison for life because he has so much less to lose.

Inconel 10y ago

That was an interesting read, it definitely makes me want to read the book for a more detailed analysis. I've increasingly been wondering about the links between violence/social unrest and inequality, particularly as we enter a period of time were globalization and automation have the potential to be hugely disruptive to the existing work force, even more so than they already have been. This is only tangentially related, but I've been curious about the link between violent crime in the US and general societal health. Based on much of what I've read, and I could be mistaken here, I've seen a number of stats cited showing that factors like income inequality, purchasing power and very worryingly to me, social mobility, are all on a downward trend in the US. Even harder to quantify areas, like asking parents if they think their kids will be better off than they were, result in answers that skew unfavorably. At the same time, it is both rather easy to own firearms or other forms of weapons and there are plenty already in circulation, and yet, unless I'm mistaken, violent crime has been on a steady downward trend in the US for the last 30+ years. I would assume, perhaps niavely, that as social markers such as decreased mobility, inequality, pessimism about the future and distrust of the government and politicians grew, we would see a corresponding rise in violence. But it appears we aren't seeing that. What could be behind this? Are we simply getting better at controlling people? Are we distracting them? Are we incarcerating them? Are they simply killing themselves? I know suicide rates for certain demographics have been increasing. Or are things not really as bad as they sometimes seem? I'm definitely not advocating for violence, but I do feel that violence acts as a kind of societal last resort when a population believes they have exhausted all other options. Again, this could be a misguided interpretation of the situation on my part, but I would assume that violence in society would closely follow decreases in the kind of quality of life metrics we're seeing. I'd love to hear other posters' thoughts or if there are any good sources exploring the topic.

thedataslinger 10y ago
I think your questions suggest an answer which may or may not be true: a lack of class consciousness.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_consciousness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Class_consciousness
CM30 10y ago
Probably an insane thought, but perhaps the 'us vs them' attitudes in current political parties and stances may be having an effect? Maybe people are too distracted by the whole theism vs atheism/religion vs religion arguments, the complaints about sexism/racism/transphobia/etc or general debates about whether things like abortion should be legal or not. Maybe people are being sidetracked too much by party politics and internet debates to actually do anything about income inequality. Or maybe as said before, the various other changes have decreased crime rates so much that even an increase in it due to this inequality is barely noticeable. If exposure to lead was really tied to crime rates, perhaps the huge drop off there simply masked everything else.

husgfdsr3y 10y ago

Singapore has one of the highest income inequalities in the world. It has one of the lowest violence rates in the world. You can say the same about China too and many other countries in Asia.

kbart 10y ago
I don't know about Singapore, but China is known for its unofficial millionaire/billionaire corrupt bureaucrats and party members. Also, when government has a complete control over the media, crime statistics tends to get underreported.
digi_owl 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland_with_the_Death_Penalty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyland_with_the_Death_Pena...
colanderman 10y ago
I think that supports the article's thesis? My understanding of TFA is that inequality remains until a violent event. If Singapore has had no such violent events, then by TFA's thesis, inequality has been free to increase.
intended 10y ago
It's also Singapore, A city state.

RoutinePlayer 10y ago

I would love to see Prof. Steven Pinker review this. He wrote "The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...

snappyTertle 10y ago

Inequality is not inherently a bad thing. People should be compensated for the value they produce. Profits are a signal of how much people value what is produced. For example, people love iPhones, it no surprise that Apple is the most valuable company in the world. What causes resentment between classes is lack of mobility. This, IMO, is caused by government regulations and a banking system that hurts the middle class and below and benefits the people at the top. We have a banking system where the federal reserve can make money out of thin air and inject it into banks. This shifts purchasing power to people in finance. Regulations like minimum wage and higher taxes on larger income make it hard to hire the next marginal employee. Minimum wage prices out low skilled workers, who would like to work and obtain on the job experience needed to climb the ladder. High taxes makes it more expensive for business owners to hire someone. I'm not talking about large businesses like Walmart (they actually support minimum wage). Small businesses are going out of business, or are just not able to start with increased costs of doing business. This is a vicious cycle where government intervention leads to rich getting richer, and the poor being more dependent on government programs and finding it harder to move up the ladder. So to fix this people beg for more government intervention, which worsens the problem...and on and on it goes.

neap24 10y ago
The mobility discussion is distressingly absent from the inequality debates.
- dsfyu404ed 10y ago
  Agreed.
sshumaker 10y ago
While it's certainly true that there are some interaction effects between government regulation and the market that cause inequality, its naive to draw the conclusion that this is true for all or even a majority of regulation. If you read the OP, a primary counterexample is mass mobilization (e.g. government efforts to support WW2) which are a great leveler. Any engineer who has built systems should understand how complexity increases non-linearly with scale and that interaction effects are complicated to reason about. Debugging the performance of a large system is often really unintuitive. So it is surprising when these same people think there is a simple black and white diagnosis that explains away our socioeconomic challenges, which is a more complicated system than anything we've engineered.

gresh 10y ago

the pitchforks are coming!

known 10y ago

AKA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominant_minority AND http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1118373109 http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1118373109

known 10y ago

Any type of hegemony will have awkward repercussions and collateral damage;

sigmaprimus 10y ago

I love reading the comments on stories like this and consider these comments to be a bellwether as to the current state of inequality in our society. Unfortunately I tend to consider myself one who exists on the lower part of the wealth distribution logarithm within the western world, globally it's a different story. Just as anyone tweeting on their smart phone or tablet claiming to be part of the 99% might want to rethink that in a global context, most of us in the west are global 1% ers. Could it be that the rise in terror incedents recently may in fact be caused by this inequality and not just radical religious zealots? Even if this is not the case we may want to make sure that our empathy does not diminish to the point where we suggest that the starving people of the world eat cake if there is no bread.

JoeAltmaier 10y ago
Maybe not - globally, the 1% own just over half of everything. The 99% includes almost everybody everywhere. Even working-class Americans.
- sigmaprimus 10y ago
  Fair enough maybe not 1% but the metric you are using does not exclude us from the 1%, keep in mind that 2.7 billion people are trying to survive on less than 2 dollars a day. Eg, there are 1000 people in a group, one of which has 1 million dollars, 9 others have 100 dollars each and the rest only have 1 dollar each there are still 10 people in the top 1%.
  - otalp 10y ago
    >2.7 billion people are trying to survive on less than 2 dollars a day 2 dollars a day isn't all that little in places like say, India. Sure, they're not going to be living a life of luxury, but it's very different from $2 a day in the US, and you shouldn't have trouble feeding yourself and having shelter with $2 a day in India, which amounts to about Rs.50,000 a year. In fact even though inequality is increasing, a number of studies have confirmed that poverty and extreme poverty have drastically reduced over the past few decades. It still exists of course, but much better than what it used to be.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

andrewclunn 10y ago

"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it's natural manure." - Thomas Jefferson

theptip 10y ago

Sounds like the other half of the thesis presented in "Forged Through Fire" [1][2], in that case arguing that wars are directly responsible for democracy, by virtue of reducing inequality. (Note, I've not read that text yet, just the WSJ book review, so please correct me if I'm off-target with that summary). The obvious follow-on question is whether inequality is actually bad in itself, and is what produces the war. Or is inequality usually associated with societies where the upper classes keep the lion's share of the growth, and that is what triggers these wars? [1]: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B016APOCZM/ref=kinw_myk_ro_title https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B016APOCZM/ref=kinw_myk_... [2]: http://www.wsj.com/articles/democracy-is-dependent-on-war-1483741787 http://www.wsj.com/articles/democracy-is-dependent-on-war-14...

edblarney 10y ago

"wars, pandemics, civil unrest; only violent shocks like these have substantially reduced inequality over the millennia." No. The history of Anglo culture has been as violent as any other - but not in revolutionary terms. Same thing for Scandinavian cultures. UK/Australia/Canada/NZ have relatively reasonable rates of inequality and there has been no revolution. Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland - have likely the highest degree of 'equality' and yet - there has been no revolution. Their Monarchies and State Churches remain intact to this day. The American revolution - though important in terms of world history - was a pretty minor affair - the colonies were small and sparse at the time. It's also very difficult to consider 'revolution' before recorded history as there were no 'social movements' as we understand them, granted, studying revolution before the common are would be worth an academic exercise.

berry_sortoro 10y ago

What a surprise.

openasocket 10y ago

He seems to be talking about rapid changes to inequality. But inequality has been in steady decline for centuries (the last few decades in the US are a blip in comparison to the overall downward trend). These general downward trends that occur at the pace of decades or centuries can't be directly attributed to warfare, can it?

munificent 10y ago
We have certainly had no shortage of wars in the past couple of centuries. Just in the past two hundred years, in order of largest death tolls[1], I see: * World War II * Taiping Rebellion * Second Sino-Japanese War * World War I/Great War * Dungan Revolt * Chinese Civil War * Russian Civil War and Foreign Intervention * Napoleonic Wars * Second Congo War/Great War of Africa * Shaka's conquests * Vietnam War/Second Indochina War * Biafra War * Mexican Revolution * Soviet war in Afghanistan * Korean War * Iran–Iraq War/First Persian Gulf War * American Civil War * Spanish American Wars of Independence * Angolan Civil War * Ethiopian Civil War * Spanish Civil War All told, those are something like a couple hundred million dead. Them for each of those human bodies, consider how many living are profoundly affected by their death. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll
- openasocket 10y ago
  But the trend is generally downward, not a bunch of sharp decreases that would indicate being caused by a specific short-term event. Also many of these wars were pretty localized, so we should see the drops and inequality in the immediate area and a reduced effect elsewhere.
  - munificent 10y ago
    > But the trend is generally downward, not a bunch of sharp decreases that would indicate being caused by a specific short-term event. Many of these are not short term events. You have a several years-long war, with a rise in conflict before it and a gradual repair and rebuild afterwards. There are enough of them that I wouldn't be surprised if the overall graph was smooth. > Also many of these wars were pretty localized, so we should see the drops and inequality in the immediate area and a reduced effect elsewhere. In the modern world, few things are truly localized.

Girlang 10y ago

So here's the thing: What if the only people who can fix "inequality" are those who fall into the "have not" category? What if they have less because of their own fault?

dforrestwilson1 10y ago

Peter Turchin has done similar work. This book is a great read! https://www.amazon.com/War-Peace-Rise-Fall-Empires/dp/0452288193 https://www.amazon.com/War-Peace-Rise-Fall-Empires/dp/045228...

it 10y ago

The title is a bit misleading. He uncovered a correlation between violence and equality.

lstroud 10y ago

I haven't read the book, but this seems like the classic case of a solution looking for a problem.

Proven 10y ago

Socialist nonsense. If he had some common sense instead of PhD, he would have "uncovered" the grim truth that the State is the source of most violence and inequality.

Nomentatus 10y ago

I've previously thought that wars OR the threat of wars, particularly of mass armies; meant you had to treat the 99% pretty well, or they wouldn't care to die for you. So this article makes me suspect that as drones do more of the fighting, and then finally all of the fighting, there will in future be no practical reason whatsoever to treat the 99% well. Drones stamping on the human face forever...