Wealth, Health, and Child Development: Evidence from Administrative Data on Swedish Lottery Players - "We use administrative data on Swedish lottery players to estimate the causal impact of substantial wealth shocks on players’ own health and their children’s health and developmental outcomes. Our estimation sample is large, virtually free of attrition, and allows us to control for the factors conditional on which the prizes were randomly assigned. In adults, we find no evidence that wealth impacts mortality or health care utilization, with the possible exception of a small reduction in the consumption of mental health drugs. Our estimates allow us to rule out effects on 10-year mortality one sixth as large as the cross-sectional wealth-mortality gradient. In our intergenerational analyses, we find that wealth increases children’s health care utilization in the years following the lottery and may also reduce obesity risk. The effects on most other child outcomes, including drug consumption, scholastic performance, and skills, can usually be bounded to a tight interval around zero. Overall, our findings suggest that in affluent countries with extensive social safety nets, causal effects of wealth are not a major source of the wealth-mortality gradients, nor of the observed relationships between child developmental outcomes and household income."
The Nature and Nurture of Economic Outcomes - "This paper uses data on adopted children to examine the relative importance of biology and environment in determining educational and labor market outcomes. I employ three long-term panel data sets which contain information on adopted children, their adoptive parents, and their biological parents. In at least two of the three data sets, the mechanism for assigning children to adoptive parents is fairly random and does not match children to adoptive parents based on health, race, or ability. I find that adoptive parents' education and income have a modest impact on child test scores but a large impact on college attendance, marital status, and earnings. In contrast with existing work on IQ scores, I do not find that the influence of adoptive parents declines with child age."
The inheritance of social status: England, 1600 to 2022 - "A lineage of 422,374 English people (1600 to 2022) contains correlations in social outcomes among relatives as distant as 4th cousins. These correlations show striking patterns. The first is the strong persistence of social status across family trees. Correlations decline by a factor of only 0.79 across each generation. Even fourth cousins, with a common ancestor only five generations earlier, show significant status correlations. The second remarkable feature is that the decline in correlation with genetic distance in the lineage is unchanged from 1600 to 2022. Vast social changes in England between 1600 and 2022 would have been expected to increase social mobility. Yet people in 2022 remain correlated in outcomes with their lineage relatives in exactly the same way as in preindustrial England. The third surprising feature is that the correlations parallel those of a simple model of additive genetic determination of status, with a genetic correlation in marriage of 0.57."
Slavery and the Intergenerational Transmission of Human Capital - "How much do sins visited upon one generation harm that generation's future sons, daughters, grandsons and granddaughters? I study this question by comparing outcomes for former slaves and their children and grandchildren to outcomes for free blacks (pre-1865), and their children and grandchildren. The outcome measures include literacy, whether a child attends school, whether a child lives in a female headed household, and two measures of adult occupation. Using a variety of different comparisons, (e.g. within versus across regions) I find that it took roughly two generations for the descendants of slaves to catch up' to the descendants of free black men and women. This finding is consistent with modern estimates and interpretations of father-son correlations in income and socioeconomic status. The data used are from the 1880 and 1920 1 percent (IPUMS) samples, a 100 percent sample of the 1880 Census and a smaller data set in which I link families in the 1920 IPUMS back to the father's family in a 100% sample of the 1880 Census. These latter data sets are derived from an electronic version of the 1880 Census recently compiled and released by the Mormon Church with assistance from the Minnesota Population Center."
Weird. We are told that the inherited trauma of slavery has permanently and irreversibly set blacks back for over a century and a half. Of course, the cope will be that descendants of non-slaves also inherit the harms of slaves (even though outcomes between former slaves and free blacks, as well as their descendants quickly equalise)
The Intergenerational Effects of a Large Wealth Shock: White Southerners after the Civil War - "The nullification of slave wealth after the US Civil War (1861–1865) was one of the largest episodes of wealth compression in history. We document that White Southern households that owned more slaves in 1860 lost substantially more wealth by 1870, relative to Southern households that had been equally wealthy before the war. Yet, their sons almost entirely recovered from this wealth shock by 1900, and their grandsons completely converged by 1940. Marriage networks and connections to other elite families may have aided in recovery, whereas transmission of entrepreneurship and skills appear less central."
This does correct for genetic confounding
Shocking Behavior: Random Wealth in Antebellum Georgia and Human Capital Across Generations - "Does the lack of wealth constrain parents’ investments in the human capital of their descendants? We conduct a nearly fifty-year followup of an episode in which such constraints would have been plausibly relaxed by a random allocation of substantial wealth to families. We track descendants of participants in Georgia’s Cherokee Land Lottery of 1832, in which nearly every adult white male in Georgia took part. Winners received close to the median level of wealth – a large financial windfall orthogonal to participants’ underlying characteristics that might have also affected their children’s human capital. Although winners had slightly more children than non-winners, they did not send them to school more. Sons of winners have no better adult outcomes (wealth, income, literacy) than the sons of non-winners, and winners’ grandchildren do not have higher literacy or school attendance than non-winners’ grandchildren. This suggests only a limited role for family financial resources in the formation of human capital in the next generations in this environment and a potentially more important role for other factors that persist through family lines."
Obviously, this is because they weren't given enough money
Heritability of Lifetime Income - "Using 15 years of data on Finnish twins, we find that 24% (54%) of the variance of women’s (men’s) lifetime income is due to genetic factors and that the contribution of the shared environment is negligible. We link these figures to policy by showing that controlling for education reduces the variance share of genetics by 5-8 percentage points; by demonstrating that income uncertainty has a genetic component half the size of its variance share in lifetime income; and by exploring how the genetic heritability of lifetime income is related to the macroeconomic environment, as measured by GDP growth and the Gini-coefficient of income inequality."
Migration, Population Composition and Long Run Economic Development: Evidence from Settlements in the Pampas - "This article analyses the impact of population composition on long run economic development, by studying European migration to Argentina during the Age of Mass Migration (1850–1914). I use an instrumental variables (IV) approach that assigns immigrants to counties by interacting two sources of variation: the availability of land for settlement and the arrival of Europeans over time. Counties with historically higher shares of European population in 1914 have higher per capita GDP 80 years later. I show that this long run effect is linked to the higher level of human capital that immigrants brought to Argentina. I show that Europeans raised literacy rates in the receiving counties, and that high-skilled Europeans played an important role in the onset of industrialisation, owned most of the industrial establishments, and provided the majority of the industrial labour force."
All you need is wealth
The inheritance of social status: England, 1600 to 2022 - "A lineage of 422,374 English people (1600 to 2022) contains correlations in social outcomes among relatives as distant as 4th cousins. These correlations show striking patterns. The first is the strong persistence of social status across family trees. Correlations decline by a factor of only 0.79 across each generation. Even fourth cousins, with a common ancestor only five generations earlier, show significant status correlations. The second remarkable feature is that the decline in correlation with genetic distance in the lineage is unchanged from 1600 to 2022. Vast social changes in England between 1600 and 2022 would have been expected to increase social mobility. Yet people in 2022 remain correlated in outcomes with their lineage relatives in exactly the same way as in preindustrial England. The third surprising feature is that the correlations parallel those of a simple model of additive genetic determination of status, with a genetic correlation in marriage of 0.57."
So much for "富不过三代"
Heritability of class: Implications for theory and research on class attainment - "Most individual-level outcomes of interest to sociologists are indirectly influenced by genetics, including socioeconomic outcomes like education, income, wealth, and occupational status. Despite this knowledge, an integration of sociological theories of class with the research literature on genetic heritability is largely lacking, and no previous studies have investigated the role of genetics for class attainment – a central concept in sociological theory and research. To amend this, we estimate how much variation in class positions can be attributed to genetic and environmental factors in roughly 5000 Norwegian twin pairs. The results suggest that the variability in class attainment is genetic to a non-negligible degree, while shared environmental factors play a (modest) role as well. This is in line with previous findings using genetically informed designs to study other socioeconomic outcomes. Our study suggests that in addition to social environments, class outcomes can be partly explained by genetics."
Damn SES giving the rich an unfair advantage!
A top researcher says it's time to rethink our entire approach to pre-K - "a study that lasted more than a decade. It included 2,990 low-income children in Tennessee who applied to free, public prekindergarten programs. Some were admitted by lottery, and the others were rejected, creating the closest thing you can get in the real world to a randomized, controlled trial — the gold standard in showing causality in science. Farran and her co-authors at Vanderbilt University followed both groups of children all the way through sixth grade. At the end of their first year, the kids who went to pre-K scored higher on school readiness — as expected. But after third grade, they were doing worse than the control group. And at the end of sixth grade, they were doing even worse. They had lower test scores, were more likely to be in special education, and were more likely to get into trouble in school, including serious trouble like suspensions. "Whereas in third grade we saw negative effects on one of the three state achievement tests, in sixth grade we saw it on all three — math, science and reading," says Farran. "In third grade, where we had seen effects on one type of suspension, which is minor violations, by sixth grade we're seeing it on both types of suspensions, both major and minor." That's right. A statewide public pre-K program, taught by licensed teachers, housed in public schools, had a measurable and statistically significant negative effect on the children in this study. "
Obviously the problem is they don't spend enough money
Meme - "AFTER THE APOCALYPSE RICH PEOPLE WILL HIDE IN THEIR BUNKERS IT'LL BE SOMEONE'S JOB TO SEAL THEIR AIR VENTS WITH CEMENT"
They just hate rich people. The left embody all seven deadly sins, after all
Meme - Papa J @72MichiganPapa: ""If work were good for you, the rich would leave none for the poor." -Haitian proverb"
This definitely has nothing to do with the state of the Haitian economy
Also: lump of labour fallacy
Letters: End of school board taxing means province must fund classrooms - "I reflected on the incredible speed, efficiency and professionalism of the fire department in responding to what could have been a major fire. This public service — funded by our tax dollars — deserves credit and support and saves lives and infrastructure at no individual cost to us. Common complaints about the taxes we pay seem irresponsible and short-sighted when one experiences an actual event where public services provide protection, safety and prevent loss. We should all remember this in the context of the present disagreement between our teachers and the government , resulting in a teachers’ walkout because of an intransigent, irresponsible government...
Canada should continue to attract highly educated immigrants. Unfortunately, not all children are educated in their home countries. Our government is committed to building a world where every young person grows up with access to proper nutrition, health care and quality education. The reality, however, is that Canada has also ended key foreign schooling programs. We need to reinvest in the Charlevoix Education Initiative to ensure that children around the world can access education and have the opportunity to forge a new future — hopefully here in Canada."
Clearly, you can never question how your tax money is spent, and the only alternatives are saying yes to all union & left wing demands and having no government services at all
Obviously sending money for education to the rest of the world is an efficient way of improving education in your own when your country has under 0.5% of the world's population
Meme - "Saw this shared by an attorney. I asked how much above market wages she paid her staff and got unfriended."
Andrea Junker @Swandjunker: "I need someone to explain to me why it's always "if you can't pay rent, buy fewer lattes and avocado toasts" and not "if you can't pay your employees a living wage, buy fewer yachts, rockets and spacecraft". Explain it to me like I'm in kindergarten."
Left wingers think all employers are rich, and think billionaires can give a million people a million dollars each and still be rich
Meme - "I always thought Norway was super expensive but the locals made enough so that it was balanced, it was only expensive for visitors. I'm here now and it's first time I've been in about 10 years. It's more now expensive than I remember, but even if someone was on 670,000 NOK, with a couple of kids that must still be struggle. How do you all survive day to day on these prices? Is it a national concern or do you just differently and it fits your means?"
"I think the simplest answer to this is that being a middle-class (and above) earner in Norway isn't really as great as most immigrants think. I've had quite a few colleagues from both within and outside Europe claiming that they could afford more of what we here consider "everyday luxuries" in their home countries within their field of work. The Norwegian compromise is income equality and overall fair wages. To achieve that we've essentially given up affordable food, goods and services. Nowhere can you both have your cake and eat it too, and Norway is no exception. The solution is to do what most Norwegians do; avoid expensive stuff. You either get used to it or you move (and yes, a lot of people do move from Norway for these reasons)."
The left wingers are going to be very upset
Meme - "THE BILLIONAIRES"
Women: "cringe! EAT THE RICH!"
"Taylor Swift reaches billionaire status"
Women: "OMG YASS!! SLAY KWEEN"
Steven Cotterill on X - "My wife and I left graduate school 23 years ago with a combined total of $70,000 debt. Since then we've made $500 monthly payments for 23 years ($120,000+). Today, we still owe $60,000. Explain to me again why student loan debt shouldn't be cancelled."
Lukas (computer) 🐂 on X - "Pretty sure the reason the Bible bans interest is because it's impossible for more than 50% of the human population to understand it at a conceptual level It winds up being inherently exploitational just as a consequence of IQ distribution curves"
Red Pocket Aces 紅口袋王牌 on X - "So with 2 graduate degrees the two of you would have pulled in a lot of money but decided to only contribute $250 per person per month payment towards your student loan debt?"
Peter on X - "I went to a State School for Engineering. I paid off my student loans in 2 years. What do I get for being financially responsible? Oh, I get to pay for some over priced degree so a socialist can indoctrinate my children without the burden of consequences for his poor decisions."
Jason Bradley on X - "“I made poor life choices, someone please explain to me why you shouldn’t have to pay for my mistakes”"
In the comments a lot of people were demonstrating how they didn't understand how loans worked
So much for the libertarians claiming letting people do whatever they want will lead to optimal outcomes
Meme - Comrade Sisko @Pinko69420: "I BEAT CANCER ... If they suddenly find a cure for cancer I'm gonna be so mad. This comic is about student loans pretty much everything that reactionaries get pissed of about"
wanye @wanyeburkett: "It's actually good to pay your debts. A debt isn't a punishment or a random cosmically-generated affliction. It's not an accident of your biology. It doesn't kill you. You borrowed the money voluntarily, benefited from its deployment, and gave your word you'd to pay it back. And that debt was, in fact, a favor by the American taxpayer. You were loaned money in a sum no private entity would've approved you for, at interest rates unavailable for any other consumer product, with such outrageously generous terms that it's possible to just stop paying for long periods of time for basically any or no reason, and you were allowed to borrow that money against a service that cannot be repossessed. To compare that to cancer is so unbelievably selfish and solipsistic and confused about the world that, quite honestly, anybody who liked this comic should have their student debt immediately doubled by act of Congress."
Meme - wanye @wanyeburkett: "The other thing you should notice about this particular “trolley problem” is that in this instance we have the ability also to make whole anybody who paid off their student loans in the past and not doing that is simply a choice. It’s not actually like being run over by a trolley or dying of cancer or anything else that can’t be undone. So in this case, yeah, actually, just purely as a matter of fairness as that term has been understood by normal people for millennia, it would indeed be *unfair* to for some fucked up reason ise taxpayer money to eliminate only the debts outstanding at this exact moment in space and time, while telling anybody who sent a lump sum payoff 10 seconds ago to get fucked."
OnionPizza @OnionPizza68693: "Would it be fair to the people the trolley has already killed to divert it"
The left think that covid showed that you can just print money to finance social spending indefinitely so the fact that we don't do it shows that the neoliberal state hates poor people
LILLEY: Not just taxes going up -- Mayor Chow looks to get a big pay hike - "Cutting police, cutting the integrity commissioner, but increasing the salaries of the mayor and her senior staff seems out of touch. This is especially true given the affordability crisis that residents are dealing with. With her existing salary of just over $200,000, plus her pension as an MP, Chow is already in the top 2% of income if not edging towards being in the 1%. She was elected by people who are nowhere near that income bracket and are struggling at the moment. This is a wage hike she doesn’t need and given the state of the city’s finances, she should refuse, as should her senior staff. While rejecting the pay increase would mostly be symbolic, it’s also the right thing to do. There is also precedent for this at City Hall. In 2011, councillors rejected a scheduled pay increase that was tied to the rate of inflation, citing the fiscal pressures the city was facing. In 2020, Mayor John Tory proposed a motion which council adopted that froze salaries for the mayor and council as the impact of COVID-19 was ravaging the city’s finances. Asking residents to pay a 16.5% tax hike and then proposing a salary increase is offensive."
The left wingers were cheering the tax hike, because they like her. And they were condemning police spending, because they hate the police (but they love most protests, which raise the policing budget). Naturally they didn't mind her getting a pay hike, and condemned those raising the issue - but good luck if a conservative politician does the same
LILLEY: Voicing opposition to Toronto's massive tax hike time well spent - "We all know there is waste to be found at City Hall; just look at the plan to rename Yonge-Dundas Square. It’s not needed, it’s a waste of money and almost two-thirds of residents oppose the move, while more than two-thirds are opposed to the proposed new name of “Sankofa Square.” We could point to the waste at City Hall in big and small ways. In the summer, council voted to follow the provincial lead and allow the consumption of alcohol in public parks. But rather than just drop the bylaw and let people be adults, council and staff decided there had to be a program and, of course, a study. Giant, obnoxious signs, each costing thousands of dollars, were put up at the parks where booze would be allowed. When residents complained, the big signs were taken away and smaller ones were put up in their place, again a move costing thousands per sign. There was no need for this other than council and staff like to spend money. We can all point to programs that are redundant or inefficient and before the city looks to dip into our pockets, they should be looking for those savings... In all of your interactions with council or staff, you should be respect, provide them with your story and some facts. Don’t badger or berate people or anything you say will be discounted or dismissed. The progressives who want tax hikes, who believe that tax-and-spend is the way to go, will ensure that their message is heard at all of these meetings. As Oscar Wilde famously said, “The trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings.” What he meant was that socialists are constantly meeting and organizing, plotting and pushing their agenda."
Left wingers support massive tax hikes, because most of them are renters. Then when their rent rises, they will hate "greedy" landlords even more
Anthony Furey: Olivia Chow's tax hike would be unnecessary and destructive - "It would be one thing if Chow was bringing in this big ticket tax increase as a measure of last resort. But she has made no meaningful attempt at finding savings and efficiencies or performing any sort of spending or service review. In fact, Mayor Chow and Budget Chief Shelley Carroll actually voted against a service review a few months ago. This is a shame. Toronto is long overdue for a full and proper budget inspection. The City of Toronto’s operating budget has almost doubled in the past decade. It went from $9.6 billion in 2014 to the current $17 billion. Last year it was $16 billion, but Chow has added $1 billion right out of the gate. People already feel like they aren’t getting good value for money. Given the state of congestion and infrastructure in this city, it feels like we’re receiving less, not more, when it comes to municipal services. When it comes to policing, we definitely are getting less. Crime and public safety is one of the top concerns voiced by residents and yet we have several hundred fewer frontline officers than we did a decade ago, and that’s to serve a much larger population. Now, we will pay even more but still get less. Keep in mind, this massive tax hike comes after Chow struck a recent deal with Ontario Premier Doug Ford that saw the province contribute an extra $400 million for the year. Instead of using this money to balance the books, Chow appears to have put it towards her $1 billion spending splurge. “The City has done its part to address opening pressures of $1.776 billion,” the budget documents proclaim. They don’t offer any evidence to back the statement up though. And now, Chow is passing the buck to the taxpayers to insist that they do her job of balancing the books... The people of Toronto deserve better and there are so many tools in the budget toolkit that can still be used. A meaningful line-by-line review is the most obvious. But we can also make use of attrition, to reduce the public service headcount without laying anyone off. We can institute a non-core services hiring freeze. We can separate programs into “need to haves” versus “nice to haves” and allocate resources accordingly. The list goes on. Nobody said managing the city budget would be easy. But jacking up people’s taxes like this? Now that’s taking the easy way out. This double digit tax increase will be remembered for a long time to come, especially by those struggling to pay the bills."
Mayor Chow should cut the fat before hiking taxes on homeowners: Lau - "Start with construction spending: According to a report published by the Cardus think-tank, last year an estimated $1.65 billion in infrastructure construction in Toronto was subject to “closed tendering,” meaning only certain unionized companies could bid for that work. This uncompetitive process meant taxpayers overpaid for construction by an estimated $347 million. Another big-ticket budget item is transit, which brings in some revenue, but is heavily subsidized by taxpayers. One proven way to reduce the burden on taxpayers, while increasing service and increasing safety — now a major concern for riders — is privatization. This model has been proven successful in Hong Kong, London, Melbourne and other cities. Turning spaces over to private management to improve service and increase safety applies not only to transit but to parks, too, as shown most famously in New York. Next, the city should reduce recreation spending. Take golf, for example. There’s no good reason for taxpayers to subsidize golf, but they do it now because city-owned golf courses lose money. “Including overhead expenses,” a city report noted in 2017, “golf operations incur a net loss on an annual basis.” A consultant’s report done for the city in 2021 similarly found that from 2013-20, the city’s golf courses experienced net losses in five of those years, before capital expenditures of $6.4 million. City staff salaries, if not across the board, then likely almost everywhere in municipal operations, are also ripe for reductions. A study by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) estimated municipal government staff in Toronto were paid salaries 11.2% above private-sector market rates, and 25.9% higher after accounting for benefits such as pensions and working hours... a Fraser Institute study in 2023 found government (federal, provincial and municipal) workers in Ontario were compensated 10.9% better than comparable private-sector workers, alongside better pensions and job security."
The left love unions and government and hate the private sector, so good luck with this
Federal government offers $5M to help Toronto shelter asylum seekers at Exhibition Place - "Chow's office said the city requires $200 million for 2023 to cover the cost of sheltering about 4,000 refugees currently in the city's shelter system and $240 million for 2024... "The City of Toronto is formally requesting that the Fort York Armoury and Moss Park Armoury are urgently operationalized, resourced, and funded by the federal government to provide shelter for refugee claimants for the duration of the crisis."... The Department of National Defence (DND), meanwhile, said in an Nov. 10 email to CBC Toronto that Moss Park Armoury was damaged in 2018 when it was used as a makeshift homeless shelter. "One hundred shelter beds were provided at Moss Park Armoury in January 2018 for three weeks, and yes the facilities were damaged," Andrée-Anne Poulin, media relations for DND, said in the email."
All her supporters would rather the money be spent on refugees (probably asylum seekers) than the police. And this is just shelter costs
Clearly it's the military's fault the homeless people damaged the Armoury