dave12352432.bsky.social
14 posts
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Yeah I read that and my first thought was I'd bet good money he's got the correlation the wrong way round.
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Here's research on the cost effectiveness of removing the 2 child cap on child poverty.
ifs.org.uk/news/abolish...
As Sam says there's much research on the impact of reducing child poverty.
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Why do you think the benefits are uncertain? They seem about as solid as you can from an observational study to me? We should fund both, it's only £5bn. Last month we found out we spent 15bn more than we expected and it was talked about for about a day and the markets didn't react at all...
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Do you think all conspiracy theories are inherently implausible?
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The french wealth tax raised over €5 bn in 2017. I'd call that significant.
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On material wealth you're probably right, covid data artifacts and generally cautiousness make me hesitant to commit... Anyway this has been a pleasant disagreement!
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And because I don't want to be accusing of arguing just about semantics this obviously has a direct impact on how you address these problems. Do you say "what we did works, we'll continue with that" or do you say "we did a lot in terrible conditions but theres so much more to do".
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So I remain unconvinced of how much of this affect is due to social media and how much is due to people real life situations. But I don't particularly object to this framing, what I object to about Stancils posts is the "you've never had it so good, there's nothing to complain about" framing.
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Its plausible. To contradict myself it's maybe even probable social media has an impact. I find it unlikely that it is able to do so except by highlighting or playing on real issues. You're the wealthiest country in the world yet 13% live in poverty, theres massive wealth inequality etc.
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Fair comment. Change unhappiness to "feel worse off" in my comment and I stand by it.
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I chose 2019 as the post covid year since obviously covid had a large impact. I'm not claiming its historically bad but it got worse, people don't like their conditions getting worse even if they aren't at historical lows.
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Evidence that Americans are on average getting richer is very weak evidence that any unhappiness must therefore be due to the media. There are other explanations.
Eg. Inequality, removal of post covid safety net, greater awareness of oligarchy, poverty increasing, people living beyond their means.
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Also the spm poverty rate rose in 2023 and was higher in 2023 than 2019 and significantly higher than in 2020.
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Because the idea that what people hear on the media outweighs what they experience in day to day life seems very unintuitive. Of course many unintuitive things are true, but more unintuitive things are false, so without strong evidence it seems reasonable to stick with intuition.