All Hollowed Out: The lonely poverty of America’s white working class

Re:All Hollowed Out: The lonely poverty of America’s white w... by lmm on Tuesday January 19, 2016 @06:51AM (#10930088)

I suspect I'd be sadder, though certainly there's some ratio at which my happiness at our gain in overall wealth would outweigh my sadness at our increased inequality.

Let me suggest one of those data-driven analyses you like: for a set of equal-population regions or some such (ideally not just countries, although that might be the only way data is available), plot a happiness measure against mean wealth (income might be easier to get figures for) and Gini coefficient, and do a linear regression or similar. That should give a formula for how efficient wealth redistribution policies need to be (i.e. how much they need to lower the Gini per dollar-per-capita expended[1]) to be worthwhile in terms of increasing overall happiness.

[1] Of course actually redistributed dollars aren't expended and don't change average wealth at all. But the redistribution programme would involve a certain amount of labour that could otherwise be used productively being redirected to administration, court battles, police etc. and the value of that labour is expended.

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Re:All Hollowed Out: The lonely poverty of America’s white w... by yummyfajitas on Tuesday January 19, 2016 @07:28AM (#10930228)

Suppose I ran the same analysis, but put "% black people" on the x-axis. Suppose that this gives me a better fit than your proposed analysis. Would you then accept that as a formula for how efficient re-segregation would be?

Or in this case, would you recognize that correlation isn't causation?

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Re:All Hollowed Out: The lonely poverty of America’s white w... by lmm on Tuesday January 19, 2016 @07:38AM (#10930282)

> Suppose I ran the same analysis, but put "% black people" on the x-axis. Suppose that this gives me a better fit than your proposed analysis. Would you then accept that as a formula for how efficient re-segregation would be?

Yes, although surely segregation just moves people around and can't change the average percentage, and so the net effect would always be zero.

> Or in this case, would you recognize that correlation isn't causation?

Do you think the causal factors are different then? I think inequality directly causes unhappiness in and of itself. That matches my subjective experience and the rhetoric I hear from many others.

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