Blagsta
Minimum cage, maximum cage
I think you know a few of the names. It would be more interesting if you paid special attention to the names on the left of the political spectrum when attempting to poison the well.
Who has it been contested by?
Is there any validity in the "Men's Movement"?
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Who has it been contested by?
cesare
shady's dreams ♥
Here's some of the contesting, and the response of the authors: http://www.equalitytrust.org.uk/res...espond-questions-about-spirit-levels-analysis
cesare
shady's dreams ♥
No worries. There's also this (which I haven't finished reading yet): http://www.environnement.ens.fr/IMG...reading of The Spirit Level_Milos Simic-2.pdf
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Doctor Carrot
Marxist Henchman
Oh yeah the book written by a tobacco lobbyist. I'm sure it's gonna be a completely fair analysis.
I actually gave him a one star review on Amazon just to wind him up and he really threw his toys out the pram
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Good work.Oh yeah the book written by a tobacco lobbyist. I'm sure it's gonna be a completely fair analysis.
I actually gave him a one star review on Amazon just to wind him up and he really threw his toys out the pram
dylanredefined
Not a house elf a tiger
I often felt when we had discussions about this. Everything I did or believed is wrong just by being a heterosexual male.
8ball
Maximum Facepalm
Oh yeah the book written by a tobacco lobbyist. I'm sure it's gonna be a completely fair analysis.
I actually gave him a one star review on Amazon just to wind him up and he really threw his toys out the pram
What did you think of the book?
(as a declaration of interest, I haven't read it, nor have I read the Spirit Level)
And apologies to Blagsta who I mixed up with another poster and got a little narky with.
Doctor Carrot
Marxist Henchman
What did you think of the book?
(as a declaration of interest, I haven't read it, nor have I read the Spirit Level)
And apologies to Blagsta who I mixed up with another poster and got a little narky with.
I didn't read it I was winding him up! I did read the spirit level though, few years ago now though so can't remember fully but it seems pretty convincing evidence that inequality is a large factor, not the only factor though, in a whole host of social ills. It's hardly surprising that this is the case really.
The books that really gave me my political views were anthropological books rather than political/social theory, all of them showed, quite convincingly, that the more equal and egalitarian a society is the better it functions. This seems to be true from hunter gatherer societies right up to advance modern industrial ones. The books I read were about hunter gatherer societies. The Spirit Level more or less reached the same conclusions as those books but focused on advanced industrial societies. It's not some lefty conspiracy, as Snowden claims it to be, it's repeatable and observable phenomena.
8ball
Maximum Facepalm
That's a prety big claim. Which books in particular?
toggle
wobbly
I'm going to guess he's a tad less qualified to comment than the people he's criticising, but his main audience will support him because he's not an academic, and academia is a leftie conspiracy?
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
There is pretty convincing data around showing that humans (and specifically men) are far less likely to die a violent death at the hands of other humans today than ever before, and certainly less likely than humans in most hunter-gatherer societies (maybe not killed by someone from their group, but that's little consolation). Steven Pinker has written about it - and I don't like bringing him up as he often imo talks a load of shit, but he's collated the data. I think it was a TED talk by him that I saw on it.
8ball
Maximum Facepalm
I think, from having read around for a couple of hours (so obviously I'm pretty unqualified tbf) that there are two fairly distinct strands to the criticism.
The first is basically 'IT'S MY MONEY, ALL MINE - WAHH WAAAH WAAAAAHHHH!!!!' and is easily discounted as a kind of immune response by what we might in shorthand call 'the system'. The main thrust seems to be to accuse the authors of cherry-picking data by using mahoosively cherry-picked data.
The other is a little more nuanced and takes forms varying from asking why certain indicators that statisticians like to use were not considered or used to questioning the conclusions, which to a large degree appear to take the approach that inequality is an independent variable so I think that's a valid criticism.
I was looking at one of the better ones earlier at work (I WAS ON A BREAK!!
), and can't find the link now but will try and find it again...
Update: still haven't found it, though I now know a lot more about these than I knew yesterday.
The first is basically 'IT'S MY MONEY, ALL MINE - WAHH WAAAH WAAAAAHHHH!!!!' and is easily discounted as a kind of immune response by what we might in shorthand call 'the system'. The main thrust seems to be to accuse the authors of cherry-picking data by using mahoosively cherry-picked data.
The other is a little more nuanced and takes forms varying from asking why certain indicators that statisticians like to use were not considered or used to questioning the conclusions, which to a large degree appear to take the approach that inequality is an independent variable so I think that's a valid criticism.
I was looking at one of the better ones earlier at work (I WAS ON A BREAK!!
), and can't find the link now but will try and find it again...Update: still haven't found it, though I now know a lot more about these than I knew yesterday.
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Doctor Carrot
Marxist Henchman
It's more my opinion that I've taken from reading these books. I read them when I did anthropology in an access course! I think about and remember them more than anything I read in university.
The Dobe Ju/'hoansi An ethnographic study conducted over a forty year period that caught a hunter gatherer society towards the end of its traditional way of life. That's the main one for me.
The Forest People Similar type of study.
The Mountain People By the same author as The Forest People and it's a pretty gruesome account of when egalitarianism breaks down completely.
Now of course studying a few different groups in isolation doesn't prove 100% that equality is the best thing all round but when I take those books into account, and The Spirit Level, it is enough to convince me that higher equality and egalitarianism means a society functions more effectively. Those books point towards a universal truism, IMO.
Edit: No idea why the first one's bold! It's not that I really, really want you to read it, it just came out that way!
The Dobe Ju/'hoansi An ethnographic study conducted over a forty year period that caught a hunter gatherer society towards the end of its traditional way of life. That's the main one for me.
The Forest People Similar type of study.
The Mountain People By the same author as The Forest People and it's a pretty gruesome account of when egalitarianism breaks down completely.
Now of course studying a few different groups in isolation doesn't prove 100% that equality is the best thing all round but when I take those books into account, and The Spirit Level, it is enough to convince me that higher equality and egalitarianism means a society functions more effectively. Those books point towards a universal truism, IMO.
Edit: No idea why the first one's bold! It's not that I really, really want you to read it, it just came out that way!
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
The link I gave was definitely to someone doing that. Plus a really weak argument that Japan's really unequal because of their deferential culture.
Doctor Carrot
Marxist Henchman
Yeah people are on dodgy ground when they make arguments like that. Like the criticisms levelled at The Spirit Level that said 'States with more black people have higher crime rates because there's more black people in them.' Nothing racist about that is there?
8ball
Maximum Facepalm
If you've already decided on a position it's very easy to a back it up with ropey yet convincing-looking statistics.
8ball
Maximum Facepalm
Yeah people are on dodgy ground when they make arguments like that. Like the criticisms levelled at The Spirit Level that said 'States with more black people have higher crime rates because there's more black people in them.' Nothing racist about that is there?
I think a lot of the attempted shooting down of that one is pretty disingenuous. If you take account of the two demographic strata and find more of the difference in social problems is explained by differences in size of those groups rather than differences in inequality then you're likely just seeing the result of racism.
If racism had no effect in the places where they took that data from I think it might be more surprising.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
General note of caution, I like reading ethnographic studies and have read quite a few, but we have to be really careful about drawing wider conclusions from them as they are so limited in both space and time. It's an easy trap to fall into, one that I've fallen into in the past.
Doctor Carrot
Marxist Henchman
Indeed and that's why I said it doesn't prove it 100%. To me those studies form the foundation of my view of human society really, obviously not the only thing but certainly central to it. What I find so interesting about the Dobe book is he managed to study them at the end of their traditional life and how the encroachment of modern life affected them. For example it's difficult to ignore the introduction of booze leading to increase in violence. But I remember several incidents, in a film rather than a book, that showed how outside influences upset the balance. One particular woman was given more gifts by tourists than any other member of the group and this caused a lot of trouble and disharmony within the group, not just against her but within the group as a whole. Again this doesn't prove inequality causes ructions as it's only a snapshot really but it's an interesting observation how the notion of one person getting more than the rest of the group can cause such disharmony.
The mountain people book really shows the grim consequences of unchecked individual self interest.
brixtonscot
Well-Known Member
Maybe that could be to do with identifying too much with the ideological identity associated with heterosexual masculinity - as opposed to just fancying people who happen to be women - and there is all sorts of social and cultural connotations connected to that as well.
Heterosexual - homosexual identities only matter because of homophobic prejudice...... IF there was no prejudice , it would not matter who fancies who....... people would just fancy people
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Yes.
Hence working towards the general good is generally good. It addresses a lot of things all at once, depression being one of them. Social justice, and even just the belief that social justice might be possible (hope), are really important.
(I cling to hope with my fingernails.)
Social justice means different things to different people, though, so belief in it may be focused on different purposes to those you perceive.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Or maybe people are complex beings capable of being happy and unhappy about different things at the same time?
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
Malnutrition is not a unitary effect of a single particular cause, so it's hardly "re-defining" anything to mention a cause as one of many. One can manifest malnutrition while eating a perfectly "normal" diet or a poor diet. We tend to forget that stuff like pellagra and rickets are effects of malnutrition (both of which are resurgent in "the west"), instead seeing them as "one-off" manifestations of individual malabsorption issues.
8ball
Maximum Facepalm
True, but people have a subjective sense of whether they are generally happy or not. They do enough surveys on this sort of thing.
8ball
Maximum Facepalm
Think you need to read ahead of that comment of mine a little.
The older definitions of malutrition used to define malnutrition as a deficit of one or other thing in the diet, with obesity per se being considered an instance of 'overnutrition' of one group and other overabundances being considered a form of poisoning.
ViolentPanda
Hardly getting over it.
The medical definition hasn't, but somewhere around the mid-eighties a lot of people started fixating on it meaning "lack of calories", possibly due to the massively-wide publicity given to the famine in the Horn of Africa, and the excessive use by reporters of "malnutrition" as a weasel word to mean "starvation".So, the normative meaning, the "common-sense" meaning, has definitely changed.
8ball
Maximum Facepalm
I was talking about the medical definition when I was in Uni, which didn't include overnutrition of individual factors as part of the definition.
I agree with you about the popular conflation with 'starvation'.
edit: Merriam-Webster still uses the older definition. I suspect the newer definition is a response to the problems with diet in the richer world (though they are spreading as has been reported widely).
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