quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a rolling new york times thread

I think if someone wants to live their life eating crappy foods and understands the health consequences I can't see why they shouldn't be allowed to. no different from legalizing drugs or w/e

I think it's pointless and sorta in bad taste to judge people for not being more like you (exception: buying tons of records)

self-destructive is in the eye of the beholder. I'm sure you can find some responsible fried chicken eaters or drug users on ilx. I think it's pointless and sorta in bad taste to judge people for not being more like you (exception: not owning car). instead it makes sense to talk about what the best policies would be to achieve the best outcomes (vegetables should be subsidized, etc.) xp

― iatee, Sunday, January 29, 2012 11:34 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

yeah - I agree with the larger push, but unfortunately it's easy ammo to point out ways in which benefactors of government assistance don't use that assistance in acceptable ways. and going back to my original point, if the goal is to write a piece that tries to strip away the stigma of government assistance, you shouldn't leave landmines in your article for the other side to point out. or at least do more to defuse them (maybe, as you suggested, by pointing out that access to fresh and/or organic produce should not be a luxury good.)

I think if someone wants to live their life eating crappy foods and understands the health consequences I can't see why they shouldn't be allowed to. no different from legalizing drugs or w/e

― iatee, Sunday, January 29, 2012 11:39 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

this is where I diverge - I'm paternalistic, prescriptivist, and probably fascist in this sense!

the big problem in this sentence is the 'understands the health consequences' part - which means changing the culture. which is a hard thing to do! I don't think people fully understand the harm associated with going to 7-11 every day. (hi markers!)

this is like, Asia vs America, man

I find this interesting but Jennifer is getting mad at me cause she wants to leave the house so I gtg

my overall point is that people should be allowed to do whatever they want to do within their given constraints. a good way to argue w/ this is by pointing out that 'whatever they want to do' is partially an illusion and people are easily influenced etc etc

I can't imagine how huge the supporting-old-ppl problem would get in 30 years (not that it isn't going to hasten the End, anyhoo) if so many of u fuckers weren't still killing yourselves with smoking. Flame on!

heh yeah - secretly I think that people will follow the shiny piece of tinfoil, the red laser light on the walls. even if that means jumping off a cliff. and that's easy to do in america. I refrain from making that argument because it makes me seem like a giant cynic and misanthrope*. which I guess I just revealed myself to be. oh well!

*NB I also kind of believe that a good way to guard against this is by establishing good habits at a young age - an issue of culture, or of 'hygiene' - like in the same way that people are taught that taking a shower every day or brushing your teeth is good for you, so should people be taught from a young age that there is other good food besides mcdonalds. the problem is I think more young kids are being taught the value of brushing their teeth than the value of not going to mcdonalds. oh well!

I think if someone wants to live their life eating crappy foods and understands the health consequences I can't see why they shouldn't be allowed to. no different from legalizing drugs or w/e

― iatee, Sunday, January 29, 2012

What about the effect on what we are all paying and will be paying for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security disability and health insurance

yeah that is true. some 'self-destructive' behaviors like playing video games all day have relatively few external effects, some like a habit of poor eating directly put a load on other services of society.

"I think it's pointless and sorta in bad taste to judge people for not being more like you (exception: not owning car)"

still catching up but this is one of the dumbest things I've ever read on ILX

guys plz cultivate rekkanizing winks btwn the lines on the intranets

I do believe that everybody should be more like me and I will judge you for not doing so

haha I don't see any winking there, besides the car bit, unless iatee is just trolling, in which case there's no further point in engaging here.

i don't think it's misanthropic to say that people will follow the laser light off a cliff if the laser light is really spectacular and sophisticated and physically addictive. you can only expect so much from us. and it's a tricky question, what to do with our natural impulse to allow people choice when over time the machine built to provide choice starts to remove it. after a few decades of success selling people food pumped full of stuff they like, when it turns out that the mere physical presence of this food in a neighborhood or town helps destroy nearby attempts to sell food without the benefits of a global distribution network or a vast advertising budget or a system of obscene hyperefficient mechanized deathcamps for chickens or a whole lot of pandering to humans' most basic fat/salt pleasure+addiction centers, and when it turns out that hey pace how you feel when you're eating it this food is not actually that good for you, the companies selling it quite reasonably point out that it is of course Your Choice to eat it! we didn't make you eat it. we just loaded it with pleasurable chemicals, and made it cheaper and easier than everything else, and spammed your towns and cities with it, and hired anthropologists to help us convince your children to eat it, and came into your homes every day to smile at you and play music and tell you how delicious and cheap it was, and watched as all the other available options gradually became less available -- but we didn't put it in your mouth and make you chew. you did that! we're only here because you want us to be. you made us, with your wanting! and if you -- as a species thrown in the space of less than a century into a world where friendly machines who won't leave or shut up are constantly offering to satisfy your immediate sensual desires -- find it kind of difficult to make successful choices about what is actually best for you, or worry that the bodies and minds that evolved for scarcity and hardship aren't very good at dealing with abundance and ambient manipulation... well, we can't be responsible for your personal failings. and we know you certainly wouldn't want any kind of authority to restrict your choice, because your entire culture is designed around that never happening unless you're gay or a girl! so idk. seems like you are in kind of a predicament? collective prisoners of your ids or something? go ahead and let us know if you've decided what should be done; we'll just be over here making money.

i know you guys already know all that though

lol @ eis taking car joke seriously

iatee, you should think of cheap fried and salty and fatty food as being like cheap gasoline

;)

tho I'm not trolling when I say that judging poor people on how they spend their money is prob 'a bad thing' xps

According to George Orwell, the British poor used to live on little more than strong tea and bread with margarine.

that's just bullshit paternalism of its own kind, iatee: "those people are poor so we shouldn't judge them".

alternately, it's bullshit relativism: "don't judge anyone"

iatee, you should think of cheap fried and salty and fatty food as being like cheap gasoline

;)
--dayo

sure, which is why they should be treated in a similar manner (made more expensive)

when driving to mcdonalds becomes more difficult and expensive than walking to a food co-op, peoples' preferences will change.

taxes aren't the only way of solving things, iatee!

if judging people is paternalism and not judging people is paternalism I'm not sure how you avoid paternalism, Euler

and in a lot of these places, people aren't driving to the mcdonalds, they're walking! dictating people's behavior through taxes is its own form of prescriptivist paternalism

I'm a paternalist for everyone, not just for the poor.

Taxes are only one way to raise costs/influence people's buying. The first other thing that comes to mind would be legislation that internalized costs that are now externalized. Which is basically the same thing as subsidization.

and in a lot of these places, people aren't driving to the mcdonalds, they're walking! dictating people's behavior through taxes is its own form of prescriptivist paternalism
--dayo

you're not dictating behavior, you're changing the environment in which they make whatever decisions they want. if someone wants to pay $5 for a coke, they can pay $5 for a coke. there are points in my life where I'd be willing to pay $5 for a coke, tho I'd certainly buy fewer overall. I don't accept that the only reason I like sugar and caffeine is cause I've been brainwashed.

laurel otm also

coke's are really expensive these days, damn inflation

xp

There must be a way to distinguish between paternalism and using power to propagate what is good. The alternatives would be either to define doing good as being invariably bad, or (god forbid) to allow that paternalism can often be a source of good in the world.

On a slightly more serious note, the raps against paternalism would seem to be twofold, that it can result in unintended consequence (which failing applies to any attempt to do anything) and more damningly that it can only operate in a relationship of unequal power and therefore contains the seeds of such evils as serfdom and tyranny.

The very existance of power and the predictable fact that power does not exist in absolute equality (which would also amount to perfect entropy) clearly means you're never going to solve either of those problems of paternalism. But it doesn't stop there. Those problems are potential in every form of government, every manner of society and in anarchy as well.

My conclusion is that just labelling something as 'paternalism' or as 'prescriptive' says nothing about its moral or practical value. It is an empty criticism, or what Dr. Johnson would have called "cant".

why does morality have to even play a role here? I don't think eating kale is a morally good or bad thing. it's prob good for our overall social welfare to have fewer people in the hospital and more people eating vegetables will contribute to that so we should do what we can to create a world where vegetables seem cheap and appealing. beyond that, what's left? this whole debate started w/ a poor person who eats vegetables, just...the wrong ones? those he doesn't deserve as a poor person? how does this kinda thinking benefit us beyond feeling good about our own budgeting skills?

eating kale is morally good, is the thing - proven by kant!

please read the critique of cruciferous vegetables

When someone dismisses a proposal on the grounds that it is paternalism, they usually aren't making a critique of its practical value, but castigating it as morally wrong.

kale sux

i don't think it's misanthropic to say that people will follow the laser light off a cliff if the laser light is really spectacular and sophisticated and physically addictive. you can only expect so much from us. and it's a tricky question, what to do with our natural impulse to allow people choice when over time the machine built to provide choice starts to remove it. after a few decades of success selling people food pumped full of stuff they like, when it turns out that the mere physical presence of this food in a neighborhood or town helps destroy nearby attempts to sell food without the benefits of a global distribution network or a vast advertising budget or a system of obscene hyperefficient mechanized deathcamps for chickens or a whole lot of pandering to humans' most basic fat/salt pleasure+addiction centers, and when it turns out that hey /pace/ how you feel when you're eating it this food is not actually that good for you, the companies selling it quite reasonably point out that it is of course Your Choice to eat it! we didn't make you eat it. we just loaded it with pleasurable chemicals, and made it cheaper and easier than everything else, and spammed your towns and cities with it, and hired anthropologists to help us convince your children to eat it, and came into your homes every day to smile at you and play music and tell you how delicious and cheap it was, and watched as all the other available options gradually became less available -- but we didn't put it in your mouth and make you chew. you did that! we're only here because you want us to be. you made us, with your wanting! and if you -- as a species thrown in the space of less than a century into a world where friendly machines who won't leave or shut up are constantly offering to satisfy your immediate sensual desires -- find it kind of difficult to make successful choices about what is actually best for you, or worry that the bodies and minds that evolved for scarcity and hardship aren't very good at dealing with abundance and ambient manipulation... well, we can't be responsible for your personal failings. and we know you certainly wouldn't want any kind of authority to /restrict/ your choice, because your entire culture is designed around that never happening unless you're gay or a girl! so idk. seems like you are in kind of a predicament? collective prisoners of your ids or something? go ahead and let us know if you've decided what should be done; we'll just be over here making money.

I am saving this

BTW I also mentioned a detail that no one seems to have honed in on which is that the guy just got back from India -- this has to have cost at least a couple thousand dollars even if it was a short trip. Regardless of where you draw the line for food quality as a right, foreign travel?

I mean maybe I'm reading too much into his article but what I see is actually privilege masquerading as poverty -- a hip lifestyle, travel, non-lucrative but "interesting" work, inherited money from grandma (I don't know how much, but still) etc. Again, I don't really care whether he gets food stamps as a result or not, I just think he sounds like someone who actually DOES have other options and doesn't want them.

how else would he write this article though

I'm for the dude, but I don't really know what I think about the whole using aid $$$ to travel to foreign countries thing, which I've seen a few times in the past year or two

but whatever, usually I'm like, do you

maybe he went there to report

http://shareable.net/blog/indias-rural-commons-at-odds-with-surging-industrialization

I mean maybe I'm reading too much into his article but what I see is actually privilege masquerading as poverty -- a hip lifestyle, travel, non-lucrative but "interesting" work, inherited money from grandma (I don't know how much, but still) etc. Again, I don't really care whether he gets food stamps as a result or not, I just think he sounds like someone who actually DOES have other options and doesn't want them.

upper middle class people who get thousands of dollars in tax deductions because they bought a nice piece of american sprawl have 'other options and don't want them', they could very well decide not to take that tax deduction, which they might not actually 'need'. do you think those people write articles about how they're ashamed of the money the gov't gave them?

whether or not he 'really took advantage of every option he had' or whatever is pretty much irrelevant. do you really think that the less-than-five-bucks-a-day-of-food-money is going to induce more people into glamorous slacker freelance lifestyles? if not, then it basically *does not matter* why he is poor, food stamps are one of the single most socially advantageous ways of spending gov't money - even when they go to poor people w/ huge tvs and SUVs.

I'm opposed to the mortgage tax deduction fwiw. I don't really think food stamps are the cause of this guy's life choices, I just think he is whining about sleeping in the bed he made. I'm all for extending food stamps too, even though I don't buy into the keynesian multiplier effect.

you have a hard time believing that money that can only be spent at local businesses to buy mostly-american-made products that would not have otherwise been bought would have a high keynesian multiplier?

dude iatee your conflation of economic measures & moral assertions (intentional or not, I dunno) makes this frustrating! like, The_Economy isn't something we should obey independently of our moral judgments about how things ought to work.

like, those economic measures only measure relative to a background framework which contains an implicit moral stance

(though I gotta say I think concerns about food stamps are misplaced, b/c they're so paltry & food is such an important right)

outside of the keynesian multiplier stuff most of what I'm talking about has nothing to do w/ The Economy outside of economics being a useful framework for efficiently allocating money to poor people and achieving social goals that deal w/ consumption habits. I don't think gdp growth is the one and only goal for society but when it can be achieved by giving money to poor people, sure, I'll bring it up.

I think you need to look at this from a national policy perspective - that's where moral assertions inevitable come in. once you've decided how much poverty is morally acceptable in america, how much money the american gov't should give to africa etc. etc. then you have to look at what the most efficient policy for achieving those goals would be - and that's where economics does come in. it doesn't matter if you think that someone w/ a SUV and big screen TV 'does not deserve food stamps' - from a policy perspective it doesn't make that much sense to turn social workers into professional judgers-of-human-decision-making

moral assertions inevitably* come in

find it kinda tragic that I even have to argue w/ nominally left-wing americans about the fact that no, the american welfare state is not too generous