It really shouldn’t be the FEMAs job to weigh disasters based on political impact; that’s not their mandate. Their job is to help with disasters, and with hurricanes being so common they should focus their efforts there.
It reminds me of a quote by Milton Friedman: "Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest?"
In other words, it's only "undeniably true" in a direct democracy, where the people vote to decide on everything. Otherwise, you have the same centralization of power (a representative by definition has more power than their constituent), and you have to hope that they will act in the public good. I'm not sure that you can reasonably claim that every person in Congress today is virtuous.
> economic self-interest is fundamentally alienating
That's for sure a popular claim, but it's not really backed by any evidence other than the way a handful of people feel. And that's largely driven by ideology rather than mass empirical evidence. The entire developed/industrialized world largely operates on economic self-interest, and life in the 21st century is, by pretty much all measures, better than life at any other time in the past.
Direct democracy doesn't mean that everyone votes on everything, and I never claimed that the US is democratic enough to fulfill that criteria. The US is at the very best a flawed democracy, and there can be as well as are much better system.
>That's for sure a popular claim, but it's not really backed by any evidence other than the way a handful of people feel. And that's largely driven by ideology rather than mass empirical evidence. The entire developed/industrialized world largely operates on economic self-interest, and life in the 21st century is, by pretty much all measures, better than life at any other time in the past.
The entire point of the claim is how people feel, because that's literally how you measure alienation and well being. There is no point living in a society with amazing material plenitude if the rest prevents your well-being. How good life is is measured solely through subjective and social measures, not by the quantity of consumption, which is almost irrelevant. There is tons of data behind this, the marginal happiness brought by greater material wealth goes to almost zero after you hit a ccertain threshold, and that threshold largely corresponds to ensuring baseline needs, then material security and finally freedom and social status related to material consumption in our society. Nowhere is there any study that seems to indicate that happiness and well-being are related beyond basic needs to absolute (and not relative) economic output.
Therefore, your argument bears no solid relation to your claim. Furthermore, there have been tons of analysis and studies of why economic self-interest is fundamentally alienating, and it boils down to the fact that in a competitive system pursuance of economic self-interest necessarily requires loss of agency.
I’m not just talking about the US. I called out every single developed/industrialized nation
> The entire point of the claim is how people feel
Sure, and the majority of people in the world just don’t feel that way. It’s just a small group of Marxist ideologues.
Your point about measures of happiness and freedom and social status and security etc etc are well and good...except the countries that rank the highest on those metrics are the ones that enjoy the greatest economic freedom. They are overwhelmingly societies which run on economic self-interest, per my earlier point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_economic_...
As for the the vast majority of people not thinking that well-being and quality of life depends on your subjective experience and feelings, I think you have a wildly distorted idea of how people think. As in, completely ridiculous and disconnected with reality. Go and talk with people in real life, ask them what makes them happy and what is the cause of their sorrows, and you'll find that unless their name is "Scrooge McDuck" their answer won't be material wealth. And calling that Marxism is the most absurd thing I've heard all day. Apparently mentally well-adjusted people are all Marxists now, let's unfurl the red banners!
Relative wealth has an effect on well-being, for obvious social reasons, which is why you can see that correlation in the link you sent. There is absolutely no data indicating that marginal absolute wealth does anything for well-being.
Finally,
>I’m not just talking about the US. I called out every single developed/industrialized nation
You're going to have to back up that claim. Specifically, find data so that every industrialized nation has a political system that diverges significantly from the will of the common man (moreso than average will weighted by dollar of wealth), and that this is in no case due to the economic self-interest of some. Good luck!
You can’t just declare “the data doesn’t support your claim” without providing any. Repeating it again and again doesn’t make it true.
On my part, I literally just provided you with a list of the most economically free countries. They include (in order): Singapore, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, Ireland, the UK, Denmark, Canada, and the Netherlands, among many others. They correlate strongly with most accepted lists of so-called “happiest countries”. This directly refutes your claim that “we can witness countless examples of economic freedom increasing while happiness decreases”. If you’d like it directly spelled out for you, here’s the research that not only observes the same correlation, but attempts to even prove the causation.
https://www.shs-conferences.org/articles/shsconf/pdf/2016/06...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-016-9770-9
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/coep.12190
https://www.yorktonthisweek.com/2.5111/people-in-countries-w...
> You’re going to have to back up that claim
I already did, multiple times. Every single liberal industrialized nation is structured around economic markets, where the means of production are privately owned. By definition this means that the majority of the industrialized world is driven by economic self interest. There are of course variations here and there: you have the Anglo-Saxon model[1], the German Model[2] the Rhine model[3], etc. All just slightly varying accoutrements sprinkled over the same fundamental structure: how best to channel economic self-interest for the public good.
It is, in fact, you who needs to back up your claims. “Good luck!”
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_model
That is almost entirely orthogonal to your claim that there are no truly democratic industrialized nations.
>On my part, I literally just provided you with a list of the most economically free countries. They include (in order): Singapore, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Australia, Switzerland, Ireland, the UK, Denmark, Canada, and the Netherlands, among many others. They correlate strongly with most accepted lists of so-called “happiest countries”. This directly refutes your claim that “we can witness countless examples of economic freedom increasing while happiness decreases”. If you’d like it directly spelled out for you, here’s the research that not only observes the same correlation, but attempts to even prove the causation.
I have not made claims about economic freedom, but material wealth. The best example is the US, where economic output has grown but happiness and life-satisfaction has decreased. As I said, this must be analyzed over a time series, your comparisons are useless for hundreds of reasons. So is your equivocation of economic output and economic freedom. There have been many cases in time-series of economic freedom increasing and happiness/life satisfaction decreasing, too. In fact, one of your studies even points that out, if you've read them in their entirety: hat is, shrinking the size of the government (i.e., reducing the tax burden on citizens) seems to be negatively related to subjective well-being.
Furthermore, it is trivially true that economic output and happiness are not causative, for the simple reason that in the last 30 years or so happiness and well-being have been decreasing while economic output has been skyrocketing.
It is also trivially true that aggregate economic freedom can increase while economic output can decrease.
Finally, I've never even made the claim that we should reduce economic freedom, or that markets are bad, or anything like that. I've made two claims - that the political self-interest of the masses is essentially different from their economic self-interest in that it can suit the goals of the individual better, and that well-being and happiness is only tangentially correlated to material wealth. From these premises I draw the conclusion that we should only pursue material wealth insofar as it actually benefits our well-being, and that government involvement in the economy can be good as long as the government is actually following the will of the people and that it is the best way to do so. So far you've been attacking a bizarre strawman, and have failed to back up your claims.
No, my original claim was that political self-interest isn't any nobler than economic self-interest. Your original claim was that "economic self-interest is fundamentally alienating", but there's very little evidence to back that up, and as I showed, there is ample evidence to the contrary.
> I have not made claims about economic freedom, but material wealth
This is your own quote:
"Sure, and time wise we can witness countless examples of economic freedom increasing and material wealth while happiness decreases. The data doesn't support your claim, almost every study done on the subject doesn't support your claims."
It is demonstrably incorrect.
> So is your equivocation of economic output and economic freedom.
I'm happy to play that game too. If economic freedom is an inadequate proxy, and your point appears to be that economic output doesn't correlate with happiness, then why is it that the nations with the highest GDP (PPP) per capita (modulo oil kingdoms) are also the happiest? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PP...
> The best example is the US, where economic output has grown but happiness and life-satisfaction has decreased.
The US is only one data-point. It's not "the best example", it's the "only example". Economic output has grown around the entire western (and increasingly East Asian[1]) world. Happiness and life-satisfaction has not decreased around the economically liberalized world, as I showed you in the numerous linked research. You're trying to extrapolate off of just one data point. In fact, to use this single data point as an example to make the case that economic self-interest is "fundamentally alienating", would be like me pointing to the USSR or Cuba or North Korea to make the case that political self-interest is "fundamentally alienating". It's simplistic and reductive, and ignores like 30 other dependent variables.
If you want to play the "let's cite the best single data point" game, then I can just as easily point to Switzerland, which is top 3 GDP per capita (economic output), top 3 economic freedom, top 3 median wealth per adult (material wealth), among the lowest taxes in the developed world, among the lowest government spending as a % of GDP among OECD countries, and yet is...top 5 by "happiness index".
Also, it's debatable if it even makes sense to consider the US one datapoint, because it's in reality a collection of 50 data points, since each State has its own socioeconomic policies, and happiness levels. You'll find that there's considerable variance in happiness among the States: https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings, and a large handful of States are among the happiest in the world.
The US is also an odd data-point to cite, because the size of its government has been increasing over time, not decreasing. Inflation adjusted federal spending is the highest it's ever been, and federal receipts as a percentage of GDP have been basically flat since WW2: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
In just about every way, it's not the best mascot for your case.
> From these premises I draw the conclusion that we should only pursue material wealth insofar as it actually benefits our well-being, and that government involvement in the economy can be good as long as the government is actually following the will of the people and that it is the best way to do so.
But this is tautological. Nobody actually disagrees with this, that's not where the contention lies.
The contention is 1) whether "government involvement in the economy" necessarily follows the "will of the people" and 2) whether economic incentives do not. The debate is that government involvement does not always do that, especially given a heterogenous polity where you can pit factions against each other. A similar debate is that economic incentives not only do not ignore the will of the people, the two are often positively correlated, because you need to make consumers happy to win their business. There are obviously exceptions to both the former and the latter, but on average, the world's societies have largely converged around systems that maximize economic self-interest and only incorporating political self-interest insofar as economic self-interest yields sub-optimal outcomes, and in fact using political self-interest to channel economic self-interest in socially optimal ways.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_model_of_capitalism
And the moment a terrorist act happens that FEMA is unprepared for because they prioritized hurricanes, everyone at FEMA will be replaced with those that do prioritize terrorist attacks because at the end of the day people will demand that.
You can't just blame those in power when the general populace will demand the same decision.
That's debatable.
This is a nonsense statement. Power is an inherently valuable resource. It is axiomatic. If you're a leaf in the wind you dont do anyone any good, or do anything at all by definition. Everything ever done in any capacity was done by someone with power.
The problem is also not self-interest, although its closer - the problem is alignment of incentives. Public agencies like FEMA do not receive feedback from the systems they manage (apartments dont tweet when they are saved from hurricanes) and they do not get rewarded for doing a good job. Public agencies result in a lowest-common-denominator of everyone doing what they can to not get yelled at and fired. A natural thought for such an agency would be to ignore/minimize the public's power so the employees are free to do good, but this obviously frees them to do not-good as well.
I have been ruminating on this paradox of democracy. How do we stop ourselves from ruining ourselves if thats what we want? (Representative) democracy is clearly not universally appropriate, but it is pretty good. Free markets dont serve well where people arent actively involved to properly create the market need, so thats probably out.
Can i interest anyone in a politics as a service think tank?
This is one of those claims where the only reasonable answer is... "do they?" Bad disaster responses can make administrations look pretty bad.
Only bad disaster responses make administrations look pretty bad.
As a side note, I wonder if there's also a bias that human minds are more easily controlled than forces of nature. That may also come into play here.
Unfortunately, our society's attention span for weather tragedy is short and it is very unlikely any federally funded memorials will be built for victims of wildfires, floodings or hurricanes.
Whether disaster responses are considered good or bad depends largely on which narrative the media select.
Without doing the math with dates, do you intuitively remember what administration was in power during 9/11? How about Katrina? Benghazi? Hurricane Andrew?
W Bush, Also W Bush, Obama, and...Clinton?
Pretty close on the last one. It was the end of HW Bush's term in '92.
Even Donald Trump, though people polled think he handled the pandemic poorly, his 538 approval on Jan 1st was 42.6% and his approval now is 42.2%.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/trackers/boris-johnson-...
That along with overall impact upon society and fiscal impact. Does get down to hurricanes you can't prevent, only clean-up and terrorism you have a better chance of preventing - also when people die from the later - they are more inclined to place anger at the government/administration over hurricane victims.
Terrorism - case of dammed if nothing happened and you spend money, and dammed if something does happen irrespective of how much money spent.
Certainly - would people feel better if the government spent less on terrorism and just put it down to something people have to just accept could happen and part and parcel of living in a city! That won't traction well with many people I'd say. Yet the people have that mentality towards hurricanes - they accept they will happen, unlike terrorist acts and that kinda see's why budgets are the other way.
I bet FEMA's credibility suffers more from a badly handled natural disaster.