"Roma criminality"... "they have no self-love"... Sorry, but this is xenophobia, and Europeans are better than Americans at it. The systematic exclusion of groups from the mainstream creates extra-legal behaviors (or "culture", as you say) to make ends meet. Plus, Europeans love a scapegoat; it's part of a long, illiberal tradition on the continent.
This might prove unpopular but why can we never call a spade a spade?
In the area I lived in London for 15 years there were numerous traveller communities. Out of the 50+ I met in person over that time period how many do you think were pleasant? About 4. The rest tried to rob us, intimidate us, bully us, outright harm us, usually all for no reason except, "we are not them". They near literally destroy whatever area they decide to live in. The youngest person to pull a knife on a group of us was an 8yo traveller child. They just don't give a fuck in any sense.
I agree that they behave like this, in part, because they do not feel included as part of "normal" society. But I have to ask: Why in hell would anyone want these people in their society when they behave like this? And so continues the endless circle of crime against society and societies hate against them (which really... is justified?).
So we have this endless circle. To me the question is: Why don't they break this circle? Society offers them help, education, support in varying amounts which is there. They refuse to take it, because they do not appear to want to live under societies rules.
Then you have others come along and say "Well you're Xenophobic". Really? I'm Xenophobic, despite working alongside people of all races, religions, creeds with no problem at all? All because I don't want to be harmed and have my home life made a misery by a shitty person who feels the law and societies rules do not apply to them in any way?
If anything, isn't it they who are xenophobic? As they outright refuse to assimilate into the society they live in in any way, shape or form.
I'll never automatically hate a person because of their birth, that's incredibly stupid. But certain groups I'll be wary of, until they prove which direction (good/bad) they lean, because past experience of that group has taught me to be (and isn't that their fault?). To not be wary seems blind and itself... incredibly stupid.
Well, I think you have to look at these cases individually. The same thing you write here echos what is written by conservative commentators about poor African American communities in the US. Of course, such commentary conveniently excludes the way poverty and unemployment is structural to the US economy and that there are systematic forms of racism embedded in the US legal code. These empirical realities force communities of color to take part in extra-legal activities and the violence that comes along with those activities. All of a sudden, "normal" society - as you put it - looks like a society of oppressors and "these people" - as you put it - look more like the oppressed than a bunch of ne'er do wells.
I assume you're referring to Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature, which has faced a number of criticisms, including his analysis of the data and what - in his mind - constitutes "violence".
I also think expanded notions of violence are appropriate, though excluded from Pinker's analysis. For example, if a rich country COULD provide equal, high-quality health care to all its citizens, but doesn't because the health care industry (hospitals, insurers, physician groups, pharma) lobbies against such outcomes, and excess morbidity and mortality result, that is a kind of violence, though one that Pinker is not interested in.
Or North Korea (or to a lesser extent China), which maintains relatively low levels of violence, but is simultaneously committing abuses against its population.
The idea that fewer people (or a smaller proportion of people) are smashing their neighbor's head in with a rock doesn't necessarily constitute absolute "progress" to me (though it would be a nice development... provided it was true... which it might not be).
I don't disagree with those very insightful criticisms. I also recognize that Pinker is making a very sweeping argument in his book, one that he likely can't fully back up.
But it feels like we're expecting a lot from Pinker. Basically a full analysis of all types of coercion that can possibly occur. That seems a basically impossible task to undertake. Drawing the line somewhere does not seem unfair.
Pinker takes a strong normative position on what constitutes violence and what does not. I think if he had said, 'this is how I'm defining violence, and here's why, but if you were to define it another way, you might reach different conclusions', I'd feel less critical of his claims. To me, his argument is too unambiguous and he ultimately overreaches. (And - further - what does and does not constitute coercion or violence in the 21st century is the truly interesting question.)
If his conclusion had been, maybe we're seeing a drop in a particular form of violence and we're not entirely sure why but here are my thoughts (ahem, development of the atom bomb perhaps?), I would have agreed with him, but he wouldn't have sold all those books...
What this article doesn't mention, and which hasn't been mentioned below, is that Chile's president, Michelle Bachelet, is a socialist. I am 100% in favor of eliminating fees for public universities by increasing state and federal funding. But this means voting for people who have socialist views. You won't get this from the democrats or the republicans, who are both in the pockets of the wealthy, who do not want to be taxed to pay for education for the middle and lower classes. Unless you're willing to say, "I believe in socialist principles, and I believe education should be without direct fees as a matter of principle or human rights, and it should be payed for through progressive income taxes", you won't see this reality in the US. We are far too neoliberal/laissez faire/anti-welfare state to collectively support an initiative like this, and that is a problem, IMO.
Reagan slashed the top marginal income tax rate, we tax capital at a higher rate than labor, and the wealthy have numerous mechanisms for reducing their tax burden through loopholes in the code. Until this is changed, there are a number of policies that sound nice, but which we can't pay for. But at present, the republicans won't go for it, and the democrats won't fight for it.
Most people do not take care of their family because they think it's in their best interests. They often take care of their family for myriad reasons--e.g. a moral call to selflessness, sociocultural norms, a sense of familial duty, love, etc. The language of "best interests" really doesn't fit here.
Taking care of an ailing parent is in no way connected to maximizing one's returns on anything (except maybe fulfilling a sense of what you "ought" to do).
You're missing his point. "Interests" is a technical term in economics which means something different from the common usage. In short, it means things you consciously seek for their own value. Love, being moral, fulfilling duties; all of these are interests in the sense economists use the term.
NB: Economists largely study specifically monetary interest because it's something they can measure. A number of criticisms can be made about this, but there isn't a good alternative.
> Economists largely study specifically monetary interest because it's something they can measure.
A principle assumption of many of the models underlying economic theories (including, but not limited to, rational choice theory) is that there is a unidimensional quantity, "utility", that aggregates a persons preferences and which individual decisions increase or decrease by definable amounts. Because money is widely fungible, and utility cannot be measured directly, money (e.g., the money people are willing to pay to get something they want, or the money they demand to do or give up something) is often used as a proxy for utility by economists, with the idea that all decisions have an (potentially zero) utility impact, and that utility impact can be stated in monetary terms.
I'm familiar with utility functions, although I think they don't accurately reflect people's values; I think people's values more closely resemble a poset. But even assuming a cardinal utility function, we run into the problem that money isn't all that widely fungible. I cannot buy friends, family, love, legal or social reform, etc., all of which must weigh heavily in many people's utility functions.
> I cannot buy friends, family, love, legal or social reform, etc., all of which must weigh heavily in many people's utility functions.
The concept is that while you can't do so directly, the degree to which you value these things can in principle be quantified monetarily by the monetary value of the things you can buy with money that you are willing to forego in order to attain the things that cannot be bought with money, allowing money to be used as a tool to quantify utility even for things which it can't buy directly.
I don't think that is consistent with preference being transitive, but I guess that's not a necessary assumption for most economic theory, only that it is cycle-free. If you model my preferences as a directed graph (say an edge A -> B exists if I can and will trade A for B), then in order to be able to use money as a proxy, every node must have a parent and a child which are both amounts of money. This seems unlikely to me.
> I don't think that is consistent with preference being transitive
Its certainly consistent with preference being transitive (since it is intimately tied in with cardinal utility, which is a much stronger position which includes transitive preference.) Transitive preferences in a poset aren't sufficient to support money-as-general-utility-scorecard, however.
Brain fart on my part, I was thinking about a different comment.
I meant that it isn't consistent with people's observed preferences being transitive; if they are, then there is no need to make the inferences you suggest. But of course you were talking about things that can't be traded for money, not things that people refuse to because they value them more, so ignore my criticism.
Actually, that makes me realize that I need to change the edge criterion in my previous comment.
> "Interests" is a technical term in economics which means something different from the common usage. In short, it means things you consciously seek for their own value. Love, being moral, fulfilling duties; all of these are interests in the sense economists use the term.
So what is the "utility" (sorry, I couldn't resist) of this term? It seems to be a tautology - what else could people pursue besides their "interests"? It seems circular - by definition anything people consciously do is an "interest", because humans are rational, because they pursue their interests...
The core significance "rational interests" is that they are consistent. For example, if you like A more than B and B more than C, you should like A more than C. The important part is the internal consistency, not the actual preferences. You could aim at nothing more than helping your fellow man and behave perfectly rationally, as long as you're consistent about it.
It's not a perfect model because people's preferences are not necessarily totally ordered, and people are not always consistent, and preferences change in interesting but sometimes inconsistent (and often predictable) ways. But it's pretty good.
I think it's a great way to think about things because it makes no judgements about what your actual goals are. After all, people have different preferences and interests, and that's fine. More importantly, this also means you could reuse the same ideas perfectly happily for corporations, organizations, societies or event AIs and still draw interesting conclusions. It also lets us create systems that can successfully cater to agents with wildly different interests and get them all to cooperate willingly—that's one of the most important features of our market system and capitalism.
Most of my actions do not achieve goals in themselves. Example: I don't work for its own sake, nor do I work for the sake of money. I work because it is one in a chain of actions I take to satisfy my actual values.
The problem with the concept of "utility" as introduced by economists is that it is commonly used in a bait-and-switch.
You can either use utility as a technical and unassailable term, taking it as axiomatic that humans are utility-maximizers. As a consequence, the term becomes vacuous, because whatever any human does at any point in time, well, it must have been because she or he had some unobservable notion of utility that was maximized by whatever they happened to be doing at the time. So you end up with a "scientific theory" that does not actually allow you to make any predictions, which makes it totally worthless.
Furthermore, facts that seemingly contradict utility-maximization are easily argued away: For example, the fact that humans' behaviour does not appear consistent over time is explained by utility functions change over time.[1]
Once you accept the notion of utility based on this technically unassailable approach to it, however, people have a tendency to subtly shift what they mean by utility, sneaking a hidden value judgement into their argument that might be hard to catch (of course, that value judgement always tends to boil down to: the utility that should be maximized is somewhat equivalent to monetary value). [2]
Yes, there may be a small number of genuinely well-meaning academic economists who do this. However, public discourse has very few well-meaning economists[3], and even fewer academic ones. Given the difficulties of the term, it would be a pragmatic move to eliminate it.
Frankly, I think the main reason that eliminating the notion of utility is so difficult is that eliminating that term leaves a vacuum that is difficult to fill. Explaining human nature is an extremely tough problem, which we are basically unable to solve today. Rather than acknowledge that they are unable to do it, economists worship their variant of the "god of the gaps".
[1] Actually, this is very reminiscent of discussions with people who believe in the existence of a god. Whatever fact one points out that either contradicts or does not fit the existing (non-)evidence well, believers just tend to retreat to a technically unassailable definition of god that ends up making the statement "god exists" pretty vacuous.
[2] Again, this is very reminiscent of discussions with people who believe in the existence of a god. Once one concedes that yes, a god whose existence is so vacuous might well exist, they will at some point switch their definition of god back to one which implies that their god can affect the physical world.
Interests and utility are different concepts. Many economists assume that interests can be modeled by a utility function, assigning a number to interests or at least enforcing an ordering, but there are some who do not. I have a lot of problems with the concept of utility functions, which I've scattered throughout replies to other comments in this tree.
> Most people do not take care of their family because they think it's in their best interests. They often take care of their family for myriad reasons--e.g. a moral call to selflessness, sociocultural norms, a sense of familial duty, love, etc. The language of "best interests" really doesn't fit here.
I disagree, and would almost go so far as to say making other excuses, like following a "moral call to selflessness" or following "sociocultural norms" is more sociopathic.
I value my family, so I'd take care of them if they needed it. No other reason than I value them being around.
Breaking it down and saying, "I need to make it look like I follow sociocultural norms, so I'm going to do this, just to fit in," seems more sociopathic, IMO.
> Taking care of an ailing parent is in no way connected to maximizing one's returns on anything (except maybe fulfilling a sense of what you "ought" to do).
Unless that act teaches your own children how to treat you later in life.
I know it is a semantics argument, but there's a difference between "X ends up acting in alignment with self interest" and "X's actions are motivated/guided by self interest".
Motives aren't really relevant here. Reciprocation or replication by others does happen, regardless of motive, so caring for family and friends (or strangers for that matter) is very much in one's self interest. I took issue only with the idea that it's not.
