RichardGibbons

I was actually curious if this was true--interpreting it as "social mobility is higher now than it used to be"--not quite the same thing, but in the same ballpark. My reading, based on this and a couple other search results, is that post-war, there was a large surge in absolute mobility, caused by the structure of the workforce changing (people naturally moving into more valuable jobs), but the relative social mobility--the chance that two people in different classes ending up in different class destinations than the rest of their class--was small. So, I interpret that as--people in general are richer on average because a tide has lifted all boats. However, the chance of them becoming rich isn't actually any easier relative to what it used to be. I find that super surprising. Though I'd also say, I'm not that confident (in my expert 5-minute investigation ;)) that they truly have the historical data to be confident in their conclusions.

Yeah, I guess it really shows to you how inaccurate your own anecdotal experiences are compared to the real world, solid statistics, doesn't it? By degree? I guess by that you mean, in America, you can have people are so poor that they die from bad luck because they can't afford health insurance, and sometimes incredibly poor people becomes multi-billionaires--though an absolutely infinitesimal number of them. Whereas in Western Europe, you don't have many people who die from bad luck because the have no health insurance, but they also have a much better chance of becoming millionaires, but not billionaires. I guess that would be a difference of degrees, sure. By attempting to reduce the impact of bad luck, left wing programs result a lower standard deviation of net worth, and this is, in fact, one of their purposes.

Yeah, except you missed the second part of what I said. If you don't have reasonable income mobility, you don't have justice. Why would anyone believe the system is just if it's basically impossible for the poor to become rich?

I know. It makes me want to weep. In the past, you've implied that humanity needs to evolve socially to reach a better place for everyone, and I'm right there with you. Human nature is broken. We need to get beyond the "us" and the "them".

Just keep on whacking that straw man. Nobody's wanted equality since Lenin. What people want is low enough inequality that the poor don't rise up and shoot the rich, but instead have the income mobility to rise up and become the rich.

Let me help you with this. Electing an openly racist and sexist president matters. It changes the culture of the nation. That might not impact white males, but it can make a real difference in the day-to-day life of minorities and women. This twitter feed has a few (well, fifty), examples. To me, this is very worrisome.

I'm curious about what you mean by this. Like, are you suggesting that Trump and the Republican Congress and Senate will reverse this inequality? Or that they'll mess up so badly that a Bernie Sanders socialist type will be elected (making the pendulum swing way too far to the left)? Or do you mean it in more of a hand-wavy way, like "This election shows the people are furious, and something going to change. I'm not sure how it will happen, but it will." Just curious what was in your head as you were writing this. (I think I mostly agree, but I'm in the hand-wavy camp. I don't see an easy path from where we are now to what you suggest, and that worries me greatly.)

Aside from the gratuitous ad-hominem (bullying and insulting Democrats for being bullying and insulting), I think you're actually right about the general concept. Both candidates were unpopular and controversial, so many people didn't want to deal with the BS they might have to go through if they admitted that they liked a candidate. Hence, the high number of undecided, and potentially a lot of people lying to pollsters. (And really, it doesn't even have to be that high. The swing states often had a sub three percentage point difference. So if you're polling the typical 1000 people, that's only 30 people lying to you during a really controversial campaign.) Plus, the other thing is that I think by the end Nate Silver gave Trump just under a 1 in 3 chance of winning based on the data from the polls. So, has anyone here ever rolled a die and had it come up 1 or 2? Did you think that die was rigged? What about rolling a 7 with a pair of dice? If you believe the polls, that's all that had to happen for Trump to win.

The great thing about tonight has actually been the election coverage in Canada. I've never seen an election team on CBC be so bitterly honest about their fears. Almost always, they try to hedge and present a balanced view. Tonight, they're not even trying. It's like they're drunk, or so exhausted that all of their normal wariness and self-censorship has vanished. It's clear they're angry, terrified, and totally freaked out. Peter Mansbridge is actually starting to lose it. He got some of the swing state stories wrong and is now asking his commentators whether they think Trump reads.... :) I've never seen that for him. (Maybe part of it is just because these guys have no teleprompter, but still....)

LOL, no argument from me. When I say, high income mobility, you know I'm Canadian, and talking about Canada and some of the European nations, right? Interesting black and white perspective, very different than mine. I think if I were parachuted into Somalia, one of the countries with the least government, I'd have a really, really hard time trying to establish the lifestyle I have now. Maybe you wouldn't, or maybe you're just naïve, and don't really understand how hard it would be. To give a specific example, when I had a young family, I founded a company I later sold for millions. But I couldn't have done that if I didn't live in a country with single-payer healthcare--I wouldn't be able to afford a health crisis. To risk bankrupting myself or losing a family member to some random disease because I wanted to tilt at windmills would've been the height of irresponsibility. So, without that government help, there's a good chance I wouldn't have been as successful. Maybe I would have--it's hard to know exactly how alternative futures would've worked out. But it's unlikely. So yeah, I'm brainwashed. Just a zombie. "Grr. Argh. Brains." Wow, you sound so confident. You should absolutely bet on this. 20 or 25% of your portfolio in options on hyperinflation happening in the next five years. You'll make millions. Hundreds of millions! LOL, yeah. Just assert it doesn't. Ignore income mobility stats, happiness stats, really almost anything. Funny thing is, I'm in a country far more socialist than yours, yet it has lower debt to GDP, better income mobility, and equivalent healthcare at a far lower price. Yet you'd rather just wave your hands and scream "Socialism is evil!" than actually analyse the situation and figure out what works. Socialism works well in some situations, and capitalism works well in some situations, and it is possible to combine them in productive ways. (I mean, I know you don't really care about how reality works, but why don't you think about what metrics you care about, and then look at the countries that have excelled in those metrics, rather than just mindlessly bleating ideology?)

Thanks Tim, for your thoughtful response. It is an interesting conundrum for me, because if you hire a hit man to kill someone, I think you can equally be charged with murder, not just the hit man. And I think you should be. To me, this question might be problematic to the anti-choicers in the same way as "can you abort a baby while the mom is labor, about to deliver it?" is to the pro-choicers. The pro-choice counter-argument is that such a scenario basically never occurs outside life-threatening scenarios. But that's still intellectually unsatisfying, even if it is a practical position to take. Just as "charge the doctor, not the woman" is a practical anti-choice solution, but still intellectually unsatisfying. (You can pay a person to kill someone for you, and not be charged? And what if the woman goes at herself with a coat hook so she's the doctor and the patient?) I think the big problem is the main milestones in development that people understand are conception and birth. If technology adds a couple other milestones like "ability to think" (don't ask me to define that, because I don't know), it might make some of these answers easier. (For instance, we already consider death to be cessation of brain functions, so a loose parallel is already there.)

Just out of curiosity, if you feel this way, would you have the courts throw women who have abortions into prison for first degree murder? (Like, if you think abortion is the deliberate killing of people then it's murder. And it's clearly premeditated, which makes it first degree.) I saw a video where they asked some anti-choice protestors that, and only one suggested prison was the right punishment, which seemed odd to me. So I'm curious if that's where your beliefs lead you, to first degree murder charges. Or do you just say fetuses are people who deserve to be protected, but are different somehow so it would be a lesser charge than first degree murder? Or something else?

That said, it is interesting to think about where I'd be in a different political system. I suspect that with the same parents in a much more libertarian system, if brains were helpful in getting you ahead, I'd have a good chance of being ahead of most people. If other factors like EQ, brawn, or connections were more important, I think I'd probably be behind the average person. I think Buffett has basically expressed the same sentiments. In almost all reasonable scenarios, I suspect I'd be way behind where I am now--my country is designed rather nicely for me to get ahead in a low-risk way. In almost any libertarian system, I think connections to the wealthy and powerful would be more important than anything, except maybe parents, so I'd fail horribly. It is an interesting thought though. It really makes you appreciate a system where a person has a reasonable chance to better their position in the world (i.e. high income mobility).

A huge part of what I accomplished was because of the education system and the support of my government. So, by missing school, you've missed out on reading comprehension and the scientific reasoning. Any other big gaps? Do you know what algebra is?

Oh, you've got an anecdote. I didn't realize that. Consider your point proven--your ironclad evidence refutes anything I could possibly say.

One really interesting thing about this election is that there's really good evidence that Trump lies about pretty well everything, sexually assaults people, scams workers, discriminates based on gender, race, and disability, insults war heroes, says he loves war, thinks nukes are a good way to solve problems, encourages war crimes, encourages the beating of up journalists and anyone who disagrees with him, and wants to start wars based on minor slights. The other candidate has been under constant examination for twenty-five years, with the right looking for any possible way to discredit her. In all that time, the best thing they could come up with was that she sent emails from a private server, just like many of the high-ranking Republicans have done. She hasn't been convicted of anything in all that time. The conclusion? HRC is corrupt but incredibly good at hiding it, and has done so successfully because the media is kind to her, the justice system is completely corrupt, and everyone in power is following her lead. Therefore, Trump is the better candidate. Not a thought is spared on the idea that HRC is a human, better than many, who has dedicated much of her life to public service, and, though she's messed up a couple times, hasn't messed up any more than any other human would be likely to do so in her position. Instead, of taking a slightly flawed human who tries, they'll vote for the known maniac. (And really, anyone who actually believe HRC is the great Satan must be really impressed with her abilities, getting every powerful person in the nation to buckle under her fist, and keeping them in line for 25 years. Like, really? Really?) To me, it shows the true power ideology combined with Fox's 25 year propaganda campaign, repeating the same message every day for decades. It's pretty amazing, really.

Not me, a fellow Motley Fool writer. :) A huge part of what I accomplished was because of the education system and the support of my government. I wouldn't be even close to where I am without those two things. Thanks goodness those things are there, because pretty well everyone in my country would be so much worse off if they weren't. Richard (the amply brainwashed)

Ah, right. Like healthcare. Everyone wants their family to have reasonable healthcare at a reasonable cost, and not have people they love die or be bankrupted because they caught some random disease. That's why the market has provided low cost healthcare to everyone who needs it. Oh wait. It didn't. I mean, you can assert that all these things would exist without government--and maybe some of them would--but generally, that argument completely falls apart with even a modicum of thought. For some reason, your comment reminds me of a critique of the Trump supporters John Scalzi made today in the LA Times:

Another alternative--which actually seems more likely to me--is that Pandora has figured out that people who listen to Pandora (and possibly even your particularly playlist) are more likely to vote Democrat. And, they might also believe that an appeal by Obama is more likely to sway a Democrat. Thus, a Democratic president telling a group of mostly Democrats to vote might not be evidence that they don't care who you vote for, but rather that they're pretty good at targeted advertising. (To test this, one strategy might be to create an account with a bunch of country music, and see if these appeals go away, or switch to something that would be more appealing to Republicans. Might not matter though, since younger demographics are more likely to be Democrats and Pandora users are more likely to be younger. It depends on how smart they are with their market segmenting.)

Here's corruption and lies metric: Which candidate currently has three open investigations for fraud, including one going to trial on November 28, and has a lawsuit going to trial in December for raping a 13-year-old child? Clinton ...... NO Trump ...... YES But you're right--Clinton's way worse. She used her own computer server. Hard to imagine anything more evil! Seth Meyers summarizes the situation nicely, showing how malevolent Clinton is compared to Trump:

Her husband. The Underwoods, eh, I mean Clintons have always been a two for one kind of deal. Putting WJC back in the White House isn't exactly going to make one feel better about themselves if voting against Trump is solely based off of contempt for his outrageous lack of control around the ladies. They are both world class poon hounds. Ah, I see where you're coming from. Like you shouldn't vote for Trump because Melania isn't smart enough to know that plagiarizing a convention speech is a bad idea, and we don't want someone that stupid in the oval office. There is a fairly rational case that one shouldn't vote for either Trump or Clinton. But implying that Melania Trump will have even a fraction of the power/authority WJC would in the same situation is pretty outlandish. Okay, and the situation we were discussing is whether Hillary Clinton was a sexual predator, and now your assertion is that Bill was, and he'll have lots of influence over his wife. So you think him being a sexual predator will influence her in what way, exactly? Turn her into a sexual predator? Make her sign all the pro-sexual predator laws that are delivered to her by congress? To me, this isn't really a partisan argument. Rather, you're making a nonsensical argument that doesn't hold up to the slightest examination. If it were actually a reasoned case you were making, I wouldn't have bothered. (That said, you are almost certainly right that Melania would have less influence over Trump than Bill over Hillary. Trump clearly doesn't listen to anyone, and probably shouldn't be listening to Melania regardless. Hillary does listen, and both her and Bill are smart, thoughtful people. So, like you, I'd expect him to have more influence on her. But even with that influence, I don't see how he's going to turn her into a sexual predator.)

Her husband. The Underwoods, eh, I mean Clintons have always been a two for one kind of deal. Putting WJC back in the White House isn't exactly going to make one feel better about themselves if voting against Trump is solely based off of contempt for his outrageous lack of control around the ladies. They are both world class poon hounds. Ah, I see where you're coming from. Like you shouldn't vote for Trump because Melania isn't smart enough to know that plagiarizing a convention speech is a bad idea, and we don't want someone that stupid in the oval office.

Hillary Clinton is a sexual predator? Just out of curiosity, what are you referencing here?

I absolutely agree. I feel like this is the one bipartisan accord still in existence. In an way, it's very embarrassing that politicians have (or at least sell) such a distorted view of the President's results. On the other hand, everyone seems to do it, and people in general seem to actually buy it, so maybe it's no less than you'd expect from the politicians.

And this is how you describe Clinton's likely outcomes: So McCain was worse than this, and you seem pretty confident with each election cycle that we're teetering on the edge of a nuclear apocalypse. It makes sense to me now why you're a such a devout libertarian, viewing government as nothing but a problem, if you assess the probabilities of the end of civilization this way. Have you ever considered that you're particular sensitive on this war issue, and might not be so good at estimating the odds of an apocalypse? It sounds really stressful living in your head.