Where does the money go

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want

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ave > >>> a lot more money than average.

ies > >>> - only Portugal comes close, and it isn't all that advanced.

or

we

_Almost_Always_Do_Better

ts a > > lot of evidence that the US is a lot more unequal than other advan ced

ore > > unequal than China at 0.47, where most advanced industrial countrie s

can > > get a feel for the flavour of the book by noting that they replica te each

een > > the 50 US states. The spread of inequality between US states isn't as large > > as it is between countries, but the correlations come out as m uch the same.

uite > > a few, as you could see from the wikipedia entry.

What I see is more important is that the society should offer more nearly p erfect equality of opportunity. In the USA, at present, income is more heri table than height. More equal societies offer much high inter-generational social mobility. The particular sticking point in the USA is that higher ed ucation is less state-subsidised than it is in other advanced industrial, b ut there's also a problem with the US system of primary and secondary educa tion which can be much poorer in poorer neighbourhoods than it is in richer ones.

Energetic and motivated immigrants do that everywhere. The problem with the US is that it takes more energy and motivation to achieve the same result than it does - say - in Germany or Sweden, or even the UK.

Motivation is important. The statistics suggest that they need more motivat ion - and talent - to do well in the USA than they seem to in most other ad vanced industrial countries, because fewer end up doing well.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

_Almost_Always_Do_Better

A Leveller would not see a high level of inter-generational social mobility as a good thing.

Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett are all for good people getting the e ducation and training that lets them - and society - take maximum advantage of their talents, and for them getting all kinds of advantages from exerci sing those talents.

Scarcely the Leveller philosophy.

Only by right-wing nitwits. The rest of the world appreciates that it was a very substantial piece of work. The Tea Party hates it because it demolish es pretty much all of the arguments put forward by the Social Darwinists.

It was positively reviewed when it was first published, and the leaders of both the major UK political parties - David Cameron of the Conservatives an d Ed Milliband of Labour have both taken it as gospel in major speeches. Th is about as far from being a "load of manure" as you can get.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

The book was written by a couple of British epidemiologists, and

Hence they're Neo-Levellers.

Say hello to my little friend:

The Tea Party is a Populist reaction to a perceived failure of the elites. It was enabled to spread by failures in monetary policy. It's much like the Know-Nothings in the 19th Century US.

There are vanishingly few actual Social Darwinists around. Nobody even knows who Spencer was.

The dominant strain of radical libertarianism is Anarchist, not Social Darwinist. A few honest people understand the principle of consumer surplus as it applies, but the majority of rich-people-worship is simply celebrfity.

So you damn it with very faint praise.

--
Les Cargill

Actually, non-Levellers.

The original Levellers were libelled by the name, which "suggested that the "Levellers" aimed to bring all down to the lowest common level."

It wasn't true of the original Levellers, and certainly isn't true of Wilki nson and Pickett. They are perfectly happy with a society where different p eople have different incomes, but point out that making the differential to o wide has unfortunate consequences. Nobody would call the most equal count ries - Japan and the Scandinavian countries - socially undifferentiated.

It may be that reducing social and economic difference even more than they have been reduced in Japan and the Scandinavian countries gets you to a poi nt where nobody can be bothered to get out of bed, but nobody is advocating going that far - they largely confine themselves to pointing out that that the US - and to a lesser extent - the UK have allowed themselves to get ra ther further from equality than is good for them.

And this is relevant because?

But the mind-set lingers on. Anybody who knows enough to know what Social D arwinism is, knows that it's rubbish, but the underlying assumptions are bu ilt into right-wing non-thinking.

Not - sadly - Anarcho-Syndicalist, as favoured by George Orwell and Noam Ch omsky.

I doubt if the Tea Party is reliably radical libertarian. The Tea Party doe s attract fruitcakes, but radical libertarians are sufficiently seriously i nsane for even the Tea Party to notice. I read Ayn Rand as a teenager, when I read science fiction fairly indiscriminately, but rejected her stuff as requiring more suspension of disbelief than was worth the effort.

Pointing out that the leaders of both the UK political parties mentioned it positively is - in fact - quite strong praise. Since it is pointing out th at the US is right at the wrong end of the distribution, no American politi cian is going to endorse it. Obama has said nice things about Joseph E Stig litz, whose "Price of Inequality" beats the same drum without actually must ering all that much evidence - his book was published some years later than "The Spirit Level" and - while clearly influenced by it, is more aimed at US politics.

tz-review

I'm afraid that you are starting to sound like krw. James Arthur may be as right-wing as you are, but he's less out of touch with reality.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Nope. Your model dehumanizes the common man, and concentrates wealth in the hands of a few government-favored giant corporations at his expense.

That's happened under Obama in spades. Just look at insurance companies (Obamacarp's "stuffed their mouths with gold"), banks (the worst malefactors bailed out, and bigger than ever), Buffett's railroad acquisition (transporting oil meant for the banned Keystone pipeline), GE, GM, etc.

Your model, an imperious, imperial model, also creates barriers to competition from small enterprises like Mike's--formerly the principal path to wealth for millions of Americans--and dims both hope and ambition.

Last, your model assumes big government knows better (which it doesn't), and treats ordinary people like incapable, dehumanized pawns, unable to make basic choices on their own. Your model inherently presumes a class-ist society comprising a governed class, and a (uber-wealthy) privileged class that imagines itself fit to govern them.

I just think people do better when they're free, when their creativity is unleashed, and when they're respected as the equals they rightly are.

Cheers, James Arthur

I've stewed on it quite a bit, and I'm quite convinced medical care could cost a lot less if we simply opened it to the usual processes that ensure that.

These guys, libertarians, are doing that.

They're offering the same services (with the same surgeons!) who charge

5x or 6x for the same procedures when done at the hospital down the street. And they make money at it.

What we need are more people like them, to compete with *them* and drive the efficiency even higher.

If the government guaranteed everyone a Ferrari on a cost-plus basis plus subsidies--like Obamacare--that does nothing to reduce the cost of Ferraris, and everything to make them cost more.

Our federal government itself is driving up the cost of basic needs. That's not what it's for, micromanaging this stuff is not what it's good at, and it shouldn't be doing that.

Cheers, James Arthur

you are so frustrated about all this. Not because it is the way I want it and not the way you want it... because, believe me, this is not the way I w ant it really. But when I find someone who thinks in such twisted ways, wa ys that are mean and malevolent, I guess I just feel it is a bit of poetic justice. Maybe this is what your own personal hell would be like...

rs

Since that's exactly the existing situation, which you seem to support, I c an't quite see any logical basis for your objection.

At the moment the US electoral system can only elect candidates who have en ough financial support to pay for massive television advertising, so the co mmon man is effectively disenfranchised. Within the legislature, the intere sts of the common man are reliably trumped by those of corporation who can afford massive expenditure of lobbyists, which further compounds the proble m.

If you were to pay any attention to the way things work in Scandinavia and Germany, you'd find that the common man hasn't been dehumanised to any dete ctable extent, and the legislatures are rather more inclined to legislate i n their favour, rather than those of of the German and Scandinavian corpora tions - who seem to be doing fine. Governments who spend serious money on k eeping the work-force well fed, well housed and well-educated are probably being more helpful to their corporations than the US government, which is m ore inclined to devote it's efforts to letting them off-shore production to places where they can exploit low-paid unskilled labour, thus putting off the day when they have to invest in automating their processes and raising the productivity of more highly skilled workers.

After all, there are only a finite number of low paid workers left to explo it, as there is only a finite amount of fossil carbon left in the ground, a nd once either resource has been exploited you have find cleverer solutions .

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney 
>  
>  
>  
> That's happened under Obama in spades.  Just look at insurance companies 
>  
> (Obamacarp's "stuffed their mouths with gold"), banks (the worst 
>  
> malefactors bailed out, and bigger than ever), Buffett's railroad 
>  
> acquisition (transporting oil meant for the banned Keystone pipeline), 
>  
> GE, GM, etc. 
>  
>  
>  
> Your model, an imperious, imperial model, also creates barriers to 
>  
> competition from small enterprises like Mike's--formerly the principal 
>  
> path to wealth for millions of Americans--and dims both hope and ambition 
. 
>  
>  
>  
> Last, your model assumes big government knows better (which it doesn't), 
>  
> and treats ordinary people like incapable, dehumanized pawns, unable to 
>  
> make basic choices on their own.  Your model inherently presumes a 
>  
> class-ist society comprising a governed class, and a (uber-wealthy) 
>  
> privileged class that imagines itself fit to govern them. 
>  
>  
>  
> I just think people do better when they're free, when their creativity is 
>  
> unleashed, and when they're respected as the equals they rightly are. 
>  
>  
>  
> Cheers, 
>  
> James Arthur

ice

ith

0%

he

Not exactly true. You've decided what a free market in health care ought to look like, and - based on your irrational conviction that the free market is the perfect solution for every problem - have decided, despite all the e vidence to the contrary - that the problem with the US health care system i s that it isn't as free a market as you think that it ought to be.

Sort of "four legs good", "six legs better".

t.>

Sadly, surgery isn't like fixing cars. You need to do a lot of diagnostic w ork to determine whether surgery is appropriate, and no two patients are id entical, so once the surgeon has got the patient opened up the operation ca n turn out to be rather more complicated and expensive than the original di agnosis had suggested.

Surgeons are optimistic interventionists - otherwise they would be diagnost icians rather than surgeons - so they do tend to downplay this aspect of re ality.

Universal health care - even in France and Germany - isn't offering people Ferraris. Up-market health care doesn't go further than making hospital car e as attentive to the patient's wishes as a regular hotel would be, which r eally doesn't take much in the way of extra staff.

Around the world, Government regulated health care comes out cheaper per he ad than the US "free market" system. Even the relatively expensive French a nd German systems only cost two thirds of the price per head. Government re gulation isn't micromanagement, but whatever it is, you government would cl early save money by doing more of it.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney