DISQUS

Blar · 4 years ago

What if individuals in rich Western countries were a little bit more rational (assuming leisure contributes more than wealth to what people want, at least on the margin)? Would you want to institute policies that would encourage people to work more, so that the poor people in other countries would benefit? Why aren't you already arguing for policies to encourage even more work in the West? Is your failure to do so repugnantly nationalist and anti-cosmopolitan?

Will Wilkinson · 4 years ago

I AM arguing for policies to encourage more work in the West. Down with France's maximimum hour laws! Down with minimum wage laws that price workers out of the labor market! Down with America's 12% payroll tax!

Blar · 4 years ago

I mean government policies that would actively encourage people to work, not just policies that remove disincentives to potential workers and employers like minimum and maximum requirements. This problem would be more salient if many highly productive people decided "I can live comfortably enough on 20 hours of work per week, so that's all I'll do."

Matt Cline · 4 years ago

"policies that actively encourage people to work"
"policies that remove disincentives to workers"

These are effectively the same thing.

The market provides incentives to work: money, satisfaction, what-have-you.

In the absence of gov't policy, people collectively *do* generally act rationally. If they value a week of vacation more than they value a week's pay, then they'll take vacation.

It's a mistake to assume that "liesure contributes more than wealth to what people want". More than a mistake, it's begging the question.

John Emerson · 4 years ago

"Lower growth in England means more hungry, sick and dying babies in China."

This wild assertion needs support.

"Despicable" is far too strong a word, too. Your argument would apply just as well to individuals choosing a low-consumption lifestyle -- they are now guilty of causing Chinese babies to starve (though actually, China is not one of the places where babies starve anyway). When liberals talk about this weird kind of collective guilt, y'all laugh at them.

"Ask not who killed the Kennedys, it was you and me." "Society is to blame". You're in that ball park.

odograph · 4 years ago

You may not want another iPod ... but think of the starving kids in China!

I guess these guys are the real heros:

"According to CardWeb.com, the average credit card debt per household reached a record $9,312 in 2004 — up 116 percent over the past 10 years."

http://www.theleafchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051108/LIFESTYLE/511080305/1024

R. Light · 4 years ago

Economic competitiveness=WAR in minds of socialists/pacifists/liberals. (Or at least according to a passel of well-appointed socialists/pacifists/liberals). So: it's actually NOT JUST the case that competitive, free-market economies in the advanced West constitute a zero-plus "game" visa-vis the ever impoverishing detriment of the third world. Rather, the rub is, if you can get people -- everywhere -- into accepting ever greater dependency upon social welfare (i.e. ever approximate, as closely as possible, THE essence of all "big government": the banishment of ALL RISK associated w/ being human*) you can, thus, pacify the populace's anxieties and nullify that society's "institutional violence" (large discrepancies between poor and rich). See paper by E. Moerk (brilliant psycholinguist and political psychologist and prominent critic of Chomskian/nativist theories language learning), "Socialism and Pacifism" (_Peace and Conflict_ [Journal], 1997. Volume: 3. Issue: 1. Available through Questia.com). The history of the last 35 years demonstrates that Republicans are FAR more likely to go to war than Democrats -- and this is owing, in fine, to the GOP's love of competitive economics. And if that's true (but if true then surely an Exhibit A case of the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy), then Republicans are objectively evil and essentially have no right to exist.

Some excerpts:

"As is perhaps best known from Latin America, socialist and communist groups in these countries have repeatedly advocated armed struggle, here referred to as physical violence, to bring about social change and they have also engaged in it. Short-term revolutionary armed violence, in lowering the disparity between rich and poor and producing more social well-being, could lower the sum of violence, that is, the number of untimely deaths, over a longer time period. It is hoped to result in lasting positive peace."

"The term socialism has been used to refer to very different sociopolitical systems. Here socialism will be conceptualized predominantly in its original Western European form, that is, as Democratic Socialism in developed societies or as Social Democracy. The institutions of labor parties and trade unions reflect similar values and can be considered ideologically equivalent. Authoritarian socialism, as it was practiced under Stalin's tyranny and in the so-called socialist systems, proclaimed in many developing countries as a pretext for one-man dictatorships, is far from the central ideals of the founders of 19th century socialism. In many of these countries, the label served mainly as a facade designed to hide political repression and the rapacity of the dictator, not as an expression of the real functioning of the governments. These latter governmental systems are expressly excluded from the present consideration because they do not reflect the goals and mentalities of socialism. On the other hand, parties and goals, as found in the United States under the label Democrat, will be included on the Socialist-Social Democrat-Democrat side and opposed to the Conservative, Republican (in the United States), Tory (in Britain), side of the dimension."

from paper's abstract:

"It is argued on the basis of historical phenomena of the 19th and the 20th centuries that peaceful tendencies and pacifistic movements are predominantly related to a political orientation that is best labeled Democratic Socialist or Social Democracy and is also reflected in labor parties and trade unions. The socialist values stand in contrast to capitalist Social Darwinism, which emphasizes competition and success at all costs, a value system that increases structural violence and subsequently behavioral violence, including state violence. A causal model and supportive evidence are presented that reflect the connections between socialist mentality and socialist leadership as independent variables, social well-being through economic security as a mediating variable, and low intrastate as well as interstate violence as outcome variables. If socialism should be in a cyclic decline and capitalism should become the dominant ideology, as it appears to be happening at present, then the logic of the last 200 years of history suggests that violent competition and warfare might again become predominant in Western civilization."