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When you have to compare item by item and not the total economic output - you have already lost the argument. It's like when Belarus brags about producing 120,000 tractors a year. Try something like this - what the median person actually receives, accounting not only for income from wages and salaries but also the various benefits and social transfers they receive, minus taxes👇
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We dirty capitalists actually come up with a way of putting a value on people's lives.
Just ask them and they’ll tell you. "What would you be willing to pay for a 0.001% reduction in your individual risk of dying?" You can, also, infer it directly from behavior: from the wage-safety trade-offs workers make, the price-safety trade-offs customers make, etc.
This is called the Value of a Statistical Life (VSL).
I just asked Claude to run a regression of VSL against economic freedom (a proxy for capitalism, security of property rights, etc.).
And guess what? The more capitalist a country is, the more people value their lives there!
Capitalism has inverted our values by conditioning us to believe that property is sacred while life is disposable
There is another, better way
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This guy is literally a Nigerian prince, facilitating violent revolution in Western countries, where people have incomes 50 to 100 TIMES higher than in his own country.
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I said it before, leftists don't hate the rich — they hate the market. They hate @elonmusk, or even the boy selling lemonade on the street, much more than they hate a Nigerian billionaire heir. 👇
True, but it’s not just that they hate the rich—they hate market (which is the ultimate democracy) outcomes. They hate @elonmusk (and even a kid selling lemonade on the street) far more than, for ex., the Saudi royal family or some rich heir snorting cocaine on a yacht all day.
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The evidence aligns closely with the theory. Sibling comparisons in Sweden and Finland show the income-crime link vanishes once family factors are controlled. Swedish lottery data finds no reduction in convictions from sudden wealth gains. Recessions raised poverty without raising crime, and self-control plus cognitive traits predict offending far better than bank balances. Correlation exists, but the main drivers appear to be what is shared within families, not cash itself.
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Bohumilo retweeted
So a good way to reduce crime is eugenic. Let richest smartest men breed.
But leftists will think it's immoral
Many leftists’ morality can be explained as arising from spite. If we follow conventional moral logic, we end up with absurd explanations.
Why do pro-choice people want to eliminate women’s choice to be impregnated by the richest men offering the most money? The usual answer—that children are not to be traded because they are human beings—is absurd. The children would also receive more money, and the women agreed. Moreover, this is not an economic explanation. It is not science. It is not a testable hypothesis.
By contrast, the view that women hate other women and want to prevent win-win relationships between attractive women and rich men makes sense. When a transaction is win-win, the economically optimal solution is a Coasean trade with minimal transaction costs. Spiteful women want to ban exactly that.
This also explains why child support, palimony, and alimony are all proportional to men’s income: the goal is to scare off the richest men, who are the most willing to offer more money, and thereby remove that option from women’s choices.
In short, spiteful radical feminists want sex and reproduction to be as risky and expensive as possible for the richest men. Doing so removes those richest men—those offering the most money—from women’s choices.
False rape accusations are not bugs; they are features. Ambiguous consent standards, under which women can later cry rape, are not bugs; they are features.
More leftists are outraged by the Cornell 7 case than by classic, real rapes committed by large numbers of poor refugees and immigrants. What radical feminists are outraged by is women having consensual, win-win sex and reproduction with top men. Such relationships produce “privileged” children that many ugly, fat women cannot have.
Those men must be destroyed. It does not matter if she says yes; they are more outraged. Such consensual, win-win deals must be made risky.
This is a coherent economic explanation. One can construct a hypothetical utility function in which women prefer to prevent other women from having rich, smart children. That preference also helps explain the voting behavior of leftists, and of some conservatives as well.
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Where you are on the political spectrum is irrelevant: leftists ALWAYS want more entropy than that.
Cultural Revolution was a revolution within communism.
In 1968, leftists were pushing im France against capitalism, but in communist Yugoslavia, against “red bourgeoisie”.
France has FREE health care, paid parental leave, paid family leave, FREE child care, FREE preschool, 5 weeks paid vacation, a 35 hour work week, generous unemployment and housing benefits, and heavily subsidized higher education.
Everything the left says they want AND THEY'RE STILL PROTESTING AND BURNING SHIT DOWN.
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This is hilarious!
He didn't even try to prove or show what he promised: that “if @elonmusk really wants to help the American people, he should pay more taxes”.
To demonstrate that, he would have to show that the consumer surplus Americans (and everyone else around the world) would lose by not getting the products Elon would have produced had he not been taxed is smaller than the benefit they would receive from his tax dollars.
He doesn't even attempt to show that. He doesn't even try to demonstrate that Elon's tax dollars would produce a net positive benefit at all, let alone outweigh the loss of consumer surplus. He just whines about wealth inequality, never even attempting to explain why IT is bad.
Hi @elonmusk , we’ve conducted the most comprehensive study to date on tax unfairness in the United States.
We found that you, like your fellow billionaires, pay a lower effective tax rate than the average American.
So if you really want to help the American people, I have a better suggestion than charity: pay more taxes. 🧵
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There is also great paper on Swedish lottery winners (perfect natural experiment), which found out that randomly increasing a person’s income does not reduce their crime rate - i.e. people don't steal BECAUSE they are poor.
There is negative correlation between income and crime, but it's not causal - it's just that third factors (like lower IQ, executive function/self-control, high impulsivity, aggressiveness, etc.) cause both criminal behaviour and lower income.
"You reduce crime by eliminating poverty."
This is one of the greatest intellectual confusions of our century. It sounds compassionate. It feels obvious. And the moment you actually test it, it falls apart.
Let's look at the data.
First, the correlation is real. Nobody serious denies that poorer areas have more crime. In Sweden, kids from the poorest 20% of families are about 7 times more likely to be convicted of a violent crime than kids from the richest 20%.
But correlation is not causation. So Swedish researchers did something brilliant: they compared siblings. Same parents, same home, same upbringing, but different family income at different points in their childhood, because parents' income moves over time.
Result, on more than 500,000 children (Sariaslan et al., British Journal of Psychiatry, 2014): once you account for what's shared inside the family, the effect of income on violent crime goes from 7x to nothing. The hazard ratio drops to 0.95. No effect.
Finland ran the same test on 650,000 people. Same result: the income-crime link disappears when you compare siblings.
What predicts crime isn't the bank balance. It's what travels inside families.
Second test: what happens when poverty spikes for everyone at once? 2008. US unemployment doubled from 5% to nearly 10%. 15% of Americans officially poor. If poverty creates crime, crime should have exploded. Instead it fell. Year after year. Robbery, the most "economic" crime of all, dropped 10% in 2010 alone. Criminologists literally said they were stumped. Same story in the Great Depression: 25% unemployment, and crime went down in many cities.
Third test: take families out of poverty and see. The US government ran a randomized lottery called Moving to Opportunity. Thousands of families in public housing got vouchers to move to low-poverty neighborhoods. For boys, violent arrests dropped at first, property crime arrests went up, and over time the effects faded. New zip code. Same behavior.
Fourth: the claim that police don't matter. This one is just false. Chalfin et al. (American Economic Review: Insights, 2022): each additional police officer prevents about 0.1 homicides. And per capita, the lives saved are twice as many among Black victims as among white victims. The people who suffer most from "police don't matter" are the poorest neighborhoods.
So what does predict crime? The Dunedin study followed 1,000 children from birth to age 32. Self-control measured between ages 3 and 11 predicted adult criminal convictions, even after controlling for social class and IQ (Moffitt et al., PNAS, 2011). Cognitive ability matters too: across 700,000 Swedish men, lower cognitive scores at 18 track with violent convictions, and the link barely moves when you control for childhood socioeconomic status (Frisell et al., 2012).
And here's the part nobody quotes: in Dunedin, kids whose self-control improved over time did better than predicted. Behavior can change. Which means responsibility is real.
Why does this matter? Because "poverty creates crime" isn't just wrong. It's toxic.
It turns criminals into victims. The man who robbed you becomes a symptom of "the system," and you, the real victim, become a footnote in someone else's narrative.
It merges two completely different things. "You're poor, we'll help you" is one policy. "You're poor and you committed a crime, so we'll excuse you" is another. Fusing them insults the millions of poor people who work, raise their kids, and never hurt anyone. The vast majority of poor people are not criminals. That alone kills the theory.
It removes responsibility. Build a political system on "your circumstances made you do it" and you destroy the one thing that actually changes behavior: the certainty that you own your choices. Every excuse the state manufactures is an incentive.
And it feeds the state forever. If every crime is a social failure, every crime justifies a new program, a new budget, a new agency. Crime becomes the business model of bureaucracy.
The alternative is simple and old.
A lighter state that protects instead of explains. The same rules for everyone, from the projects or from a gated community. Certain, swift punishment for anyone who commits a crime. And never, ever telling someone their crime was written in their social condition.
Treating someone as responsible is respecting them. Excusing someone because they're poor is the most condescending thing you can do to them.
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This is probably the saddest thing I've seen from France. (Even though he has the perfect weapon right in his hands,) He's not even thinking about fighting back for a second. Total defeat, humiliation, and submission.
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And Hamas. And BLM. And National Liberation Army of Algeria. And Democratic Party of the US. And Communist Party of Cuba. And...
There is no third world shithole country that didn't have a National Liberation Front (usually armed by Moscow and supported and inspired by Western progressivism).
Just check out this example, this random NYT piece on malaria in Africa, and especially, I invite you to meditate on the last sentence.
As for “independence,” it's enough to say that they dubbed Elon Musk a “murderer” when he cut off food and medicine supplies to these “independent actors and esteemed UN members”...
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True, but not just that. There's another reason why cancer incidence would rise as the prospects of curing it improve, ceteris paribus: incentives. People would smoke more, exercise less, pay less attention to what they eat, etc.
People unfamiliar with economics don't believe this. They think nobody would consciously choose to smoke more because they have a better chance of curing lung cancer. But it's as sure as the day will turn into night.
That's because we're not choosing between being smokers and not having cancer. We're deciding on the margin. Whether to have another cigar in exchange for a slight increase in the probability of dying from cancer. As the next cigarette becomes cheaper in terms of the probability of dying from cancer, you buy more.
Introducing laws requiring people to wear seat belts increased the number of car accidents (and deaths among pedestrians and cyclists) because people drove a little more carelessly.
No, the exact same amount of people who developed cancer before will continue to develop cancer in the future.
Actually in fact MORE people will, because people will live longer which actually increases the chances of multiple cancer attacks.
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Where you are (as a society) on the political spectrum is completely irrelevant. Leftists always want more entropy than that.
The Cultural Revolution was a revolution within communism.
In 1968, leftists were pushing further left everywhere—in France, against capitalism, and in communist Yugoslavia, against the “red bourgeoisie”.
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There's even crazier stuff there...
(2/5) Once a company has 50 employees, management must create 3 worker councils, introduce profit sharing and submit restructuring plans to the councils if the company decides to fire workers. Who would guess that distribution of companies by No of employees would look like this
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“For myself, I do not have any romantic associations with the term ‘revolution.’ To me, it connotes lying, theft and murder, so I would prefer not to be known as a revolutionary.”
The French Revolution was violent. The American revolution was violent. The Russian Revolution was violent. Freedom has never been won peacefully.
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Read his post carefully. Read the first reply where he "condemns violence". Then tell me with straight face that @RoKhanna is not burning France. You can't.
From the high schools of France to the streets of Madrid to the universities of Tirana, young people are telling their governments the same thing: in an age of massive wealth inequality, they want a future they can believe in.
In France, students and teachers are asking for safe schools, enough teachers and smaller classes.
In Spain, for affordable rent and housing.
In Albania, for good jobs and an end to corruption.
@JDVance says this is what happens when a nation lets in too many immigrants from the global south.
He is not just morally wrong, but misreading the moment.
The is what happens when nations let wealth and power accumulate in the hands of a few.
This is what happens when young people lose hope in their future.
In America, let us listen to our young.
We need an economic and political transformation.
America's Next New Deal.
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