Social Justice – Page 25 – Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

Will the post-plague world be a better place for rich people?

April 30, 2020April 30, 2020 by philg

A year ago I went to Disney World with a rich friend (post). He paid up $8,000 for two days of a VIP guide who enabled us to cut the lines. It still wasn’t that nice, however, due to the Times Square-ish crowds everywhere when we weren’t on a ride. I proposed the idea of a “crowd hater day” at each park each week where the ticket price would be 2X so that there would be some breathing room.

Every aspect of our Disney experience was ideal for spreading coronavirus. Even with the VIP guide we were jammed into crowds periodically. Dining was a mob scene. Shopping was mobbed.

I wonder if the parks will reopen with a capacity set by the tyrannical government at some level that seems unlikely to set off the next epidemic. If so, the most logical method for rationing the remaining tickets will be price. And Disney will have to raise the prices to get a similar level of revenue (since their overall expenses will be similar). So the parks will actually become a lot nicer for anyone who can afford $300/person for a ticket.

How about restaurants? If they have to cut capacity to 25 or 50 percent, as some of the reopened ones in various states are being ordered to do, again it seems as though though they’ll have to raise prices. So rich people will experience a negligible (to them) price penalty and a huge bonus in terms of peace and quiet for conversation, reduced waiting times for a table, etc. (Coincidentally, just as this post went live, a former student posted to Facebook a picture of herself eating wagyu steak in a Taipei restaurant’s private room. Their party of 4 was nicely spread out at a table that, in former times, would have easily held 8-12. As with most MIT students, she was born with an off-the-charts intellectual ability and then she has worked hard for 20 years. (She’s not “white” nor does she identify as “male” so you can’t say this is due to “white male privilege”!))

Getting to Disney? I am dreaming that airlines won’t ever be able to sell the middle seats anymore! As long as they bump prices by 50 percent, though, they can still have the same revenue with somewhat richer customers. Spirit prices are essentially $0 from the perspective of a rich American. It shouldn’t be a problem to pay 1.5 * $0.

Readers: What do you think? If everything has to be de-crowded and prices consequently raised, isn’t that actually a good thing from the perspective of the richest 5-10 percent of Americans?

the unfortunate flip side… “Millions Had Risen Out of Poverty. Coronavirus Is Pulling Them Back.” (nytimes): Experts say that for the first time since 1998, global poverty will increase. At least a half a billion people could slip into destitution by the end of the year.

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If All Lives Have Equal Value, why does Bill Gates support shutting down the U.S. economy?

March 28, 2020April 15, 2023 by philg

The Gates Foundation‘s main message is “All Lives Have Equal Value” (secondary message: send $billions in Microsoft profits over to Africa without it ever being taxed!).

Bill Gates is a righteous opponent of Donald Trump’s hopes to reopen the U.S. economy. From The Hill:

Asked about suggestions being floated in the U.S. about relaxing social distancing measures to avoid severe economic damage, Gates said there is “no middle ground” between the virus and the cost to businesses.

Gates, who did not mention Trump in the interview, said that “it’s very irresponsible for somebody to suggest that we can have the best of both worlds.”

Are these positions consistent? If some of the most pessimistic epidemiologists are correct, shutting down the U.S. economy might save a few hundred thousand American lives. For this to be true, the virus has to thrive in hot/humid weather, the Army Corps of Engineers has to be incompetent at setting up field hospitals, all drug therapy attempts have to fail, etc. But maybe all of those worst-case assumptions will be correct.

For every saved American, though, aren’t we guaranteed to cause more than one death in a poor country? The U.S. is 15 percent of the world economy. Our shutdown is going to make us poorer so we’ll buy less from the world’s poorest countries. People in those poorest of countries who were at a subsistence standard of living in 2019 are going to be without sufficient funds for food, shelter, and medicine in 2020. Even citizens of medium-income countries, e.g., those who work in industries that are tied to trade with the U.S., might be unable to afford previously affordable life-saving medical interventions.

So if Bill Gates actually believes that All Lives Have Equal Value, shouldn’t he be saying “keep the the U.S. economy open, sweep up any dead bodies, and keep buying stuff from countries where they desperately need the cash”?

[Update, 4/9: I have supplied this post to friends on Facebook who are most zealous regarding “saving lives” via a U.S. economic shutdown. Although in pre-plague times these same people were generally huge advocates for “thinking globally” and advocating for the vulnerable anywhere on Earth, they are hostile and confused when told that their shutdown might be an inconvenience or worse for someone in another country. It has proven to be an interesting window into the logic of the American Righteous. Planet Earth is exquisitely interconnected such that bringing a reusable shopping bag to the Columbus Circle Whole Foods will stop global warming and thus keep the seas from inundating Jakarta. On the other hand, we can stop trading with a country where people are living on $2/day and there will be no adverse consequences for those people.]

Preston curve (Wikipedia): the poorer the country, the shorter the life (effect is dramatically larger for poor countries)
“For life expectancy, money matters” (Harvard Gazette) says that we might not need to look at poor countries to find a counterbalancing burden of shutdown-related mortality. “The only thing [life expectancy] seems to be correlated with is how educated and affluent the area is” (i.e., by shutting down schools that will result in young people having less education and by shutting down the economy that will result in the country having less affluence, life expectancy for Americans without serious COVID-19 problems will fall)
The Empirical Relationship Between Lifetime Earnings and Mortality (Congressional Budget Office, 2007)
“Global economic downturn linked with at least 260,000 excess cancer deaths” (Harvard School of Public Health): even in rich countries, an economic slowdown will kill a ton of people via disease
“Researchers Link Deaths to Social Ills” (New York Times, 2011): For 2000, the study attributed 176,000 deaths to racial segregation and 133,000 to individual poverty. The numbers are substantial. For example, looking at direct causes of death, 119,000 people in the United States die from accidents each year, and 156,000 from lung cancer. … “In some ways,” Dr. Galea added, “the question is not ‘Why should we think of poverty as a cause of death?’ but rather ‘Why should we not think of poverty as a cause of death?’ ”
“Global Lockdowns Resulting In ‘Horrifying Surge’ In Domestic Violence, U.N. Warns” (NPR): survive coronavirus, but be killed by a family member? (on the plus side, family court judges might be more willing to accept uncorroborated tales of domestic violence set during the lockdown)
“‘Instead of Coronavirus, the Hunger Will Kill Us.’ A Global Food Crisis Looms.” (nytimes, April 22)
“The COVID-19 shutdown will cost Americans millions of years of life” (The Hill, May 25)

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Justin Trudeau can wear blackface 24/7 now

March 12, 2020 by philg

“Trudeau self-isolates at home as wife awaits coronavirus test results” (Politico):

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau entered self-isolation Thursday as his wife, Sophie, awaited test results on whether she contracted the coronavirus.

Every morning he can decide whether it is a brownface or blackface day!

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Book on the evils of settler colonialism…

March 7, 2020March 5, 2020 by philg

… offered for sale on land once owned by Native Americans who were dispossessed by settler colonialism. From the window of the Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, Massachusetts:

Where has the author, Rashid Khalidi, settled? Wikipedia says he’s a professor at Columbia, so presumably he is living on what was, until recently, Native American land (in case you want to argue that Manhattan was purchased, that’s also true of much land in present-day Israel).

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State of Emergency in San Francisco

February 26, 2020 by philg

“Local emergency declared in San Francisco amid coronavirus concerns”: It is just another day in utopia when driving one’s new Tesla past poor people living in tents on the sidewalk. It is an emergency when rich people sneeze.

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Wall Street billionaire thinks Hillary Clinton was going to deliver precisely the correct amount of social justice

February 18, 2020February 12, 2020 by philg

Lloyd Blankfein, who amassed a fortune of more than $1 billion while working at Goldman Sachs, was a supporter of Hillary Clinton, and therefore justice, back in 2016 (Business Insider). It made sense to Mr. Blankfein to have higher income tax rates, at least for individuals and corporations that did not push activities offshore (with help from Goldman?), to fund a larger welfare state.

If helping 50 percent of Americans with fatter government paychecks and welfare checks (Hillary) is good, then helping 80 percent (Bernie) has to be better, right?

Wrong! Apparently one can have too much social justice. “Bernie Sanders Would ‘Ruin Our Economy,’ Says Ex-Goldman Sachs Boss” (NYT, February 12):

Lloyd Blankfein warned on Twitter that Mr. Sanders was “just as polarizing” as President Trump.
Bernie Sanders has proposed a wealth tax on the richest Americans, blasted big businesses for turning huge profits while paying little in taxes and said he believed billionaires should not exist.
“If I’m Russian, I go with Sanders this time around,” he wrote, referencing that country’s efforts to support Mr. Trump in 2016.

(i.e., to discourage working class Americans from referring to The International Jew, a Wall Street billionaire Jew says that U.S. election outcomes are determined from a foreign capital; nobody would ever make the leap in reasoning from “The most important things in the U.S. are controlled by Putin and his buddies” to ” The most important things in the U.S. are controlled by international Jewish financiers”)

https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/09/08/how-to-steal-billions/ (Goldman pocketing 100X the usual fees in Malaysia while partying with Jho Low)
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2019/12/13/white-men-correctly-perceive-american-jews-as-their-enemies/ (let’s see if we can’t get working class whites to have a better opinion of Jews if Wall Street billionaire Jews put themselves at the center every election)
“The Happy-Go-Lucky Jewish Group That Connects Trump and Putin” (Politico, 2017)

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Middle class Californians pay for all Tesla owners’ electricity

February 16, 2020February 11, 2020 by philg

“Top Seventeen Surprises From The First Year Of Driving A Tesla EV” (Forbes):

I was amazed when my electricity bill went down after I got the car, rather than up. This is because in California, EV owners get access to a special electricity pricing plan that is much cheaper at night and more expensive in the afternoons. Charging the car at night is of course a win, but I also moved things like pumping the pool to the night, and so the overall bill dropped. And of course my gasoline bill went to zero for this car.

In other words, Californians who struggle to pay rising rents and afford a 10-year-old Ford Focus pay the rich guy’s electric bill, at least for his Tesla and also for part of the pool pump. What better way to fight inequality?

(In Massachusetts, no similar deal is available and thus it costs about the same to buy “fuel” for Tesla, per mile, as it does to fuel an efficient gasoline-powered car of the same size.)

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Our faith calls us to affirm Black Lives Matter…

January 29, 2020January 22, 2020 by philg

and also to hang a rainbow flag. (But first, our faith called us to move to a suburb with almost no black or LGBTQIA+ residents.)

Photos from the rich suburb of Lexington, Massachusetts:

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Brookline Public Schools approve a book about aviation

January 25, 2020January 22, 2020 by philg

Good news and bad news for a friend’s 12-year-old…

Bad: he was sentenced to read a book by his teachers in the Brookline (Massachusetts) Public Schools.

Good: One of the choices was on an aviation theme. Maybe this won’t be a painful distraction from video games and learning about technology. Perhaps it will be Fate is the Hunter?

Reality: the assigned book, Fly Girl, turns out to be more about skin color than aviation.

From the Amazon page:

All Ida Mae Jones wants to do is fly. Her daddy was a pilot, and years after his death she feels closest to him when she’s in the air. But as a young black woman in 1940s Louisiana, she knows the sky is off limits to her, until America enters World War II, and the Army forms the WASP-Women Airforce Service Pilots. Ida has a chance to fulfill her dream if she’s willing to use her light skin to pass as a white girl. She wants to fly more than anything, but Ida soon learns that denying one’s self and family is a heavy burden, and ultimately it’s not what you do but who you are that’s most important.

Bessie Coleman, a non-fictional pilot who identified as a black female

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Advocacy for women is a sign of racism?

January 20, 2020January 20, 2020 by philg

Emailed to me by the MIT Powers that Be… “Women in mathematics aim for an equal sign” (MIT School of Science news):

“It is crucial to recruit and attract more women at all levels in the department, but also that more of our women math majors consider going into graduate school in mathematics,” says Michel Goemans, department head and professor of mathematics. “Last year only 13 percent of our graduate applicants were women, and this is clearly not enough. The department is happy to support the activities of the MIT Women in Mathematics, and this group helps create a vibrant, supportive community in which more and more female students might pursue or continue a career in mathematics.”

[Let’s ignore the issue of whether this say-gooder is guilty of promoting gender binarism. Let’s also ignore the issue of why the say-gooder does not use MIT’s massive endowment to become a “do-gooder” and hire the women that he/she/ze/they says he/she/ze/they wants to hire.]

I wonder if the focus on female victimhood is a sign of antipathy toward mathematicians of color. Why not focus on the underrepresentation of black and Hispanic mathematicians, for example? Could the motivation be that the white/Asian mathematicians would rather share an office with a white woman from a wealthy family than share with an African-American from the ghetto?

Advocating for “women” is less likely to expose the advocate to ridicule for not having any friends or relatives who are in the featured victim class. Since even the most hidebound human who identifies as a “man” is likely to have a mother and/or sister, there won’t be the awkward search for a friend of color with whom to attend Black Panther and get a selfie.

The article is also fun for revealing the existence of gender traitors:

Staffilani recalls that when she invited female mathematicians to speak with MIT women, sometimes the offer was declined. Invited academics preferred to be seen as “mathematicians” rather than be singled out as “female mathematicians,” separate from men. It’s a dilemma Staffilani says she understands; gaining extra notice as a woman — or any underrepresented group in a particular field — doesn’t feel like “equality,” she says. … she was surprised when a female physicist asked the room, “Why do we want diversity?”

Speaker of diversity, let’s have a look at the folks MIT has selected to teach subjects featured on the “Women’s Studies” poster board in the Infinite Corridor (if you visit the teachers’ biographical pages, you’ll find them referred to using “her” and “she” as pronouns):