From a commenter.

Homelessness is easy to solve.

A) Universal basic dorms for the poor but otherwise normal adults of sound mind.

B) Mandatory institutionalization for adults with severe mental health issues who are found living on the street.

Crime is easy to reduce.

A) Mandatory long sentences for serious crimes, particularly violent crime.

B) Penalties and prosecution for even small offenses, like shoplifting and graffiti, though not incarceration. Fines, public shaming, long periods of community service, etc.

C) Readjust the welfare system to favor nuclear families with fathers.

D) Decriminalize most drugs, with penalties for public use while driving while using, rather than manufacture & distribution. In essence, you can buy heroin at your local pharmacy, but if you shoot it up in the park, you get a citation and a $500 fine.

Inequality isn’t a huge issue and it’s really not solvable. If you raise the minimum wage to $20/hr and eliminate 99% of Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth, there’s still a crazy amount of inequality between him and the minimum wage worker.

Rather than focus on inequality, focus on three issues:

1) Ensure that there’s a decent minimum beneath which you cannot easily fall (universal basic dorms, employer of last resort jobs).

2) Ensure that men in particular can get a decent living so as to be attractive to women, allowing them to get married and have families. This is a hard one, outside of direct subsidies to men, the only thing I can think of is state owned enterprises that employ men specifically at good salaries.

3) Reduce the power of the oligarchs to set and guide policy. A lot can be done here, though it’s hard to say what would be best.

Unrealistic, of course. But it would be nice if somehow the Overton Window would move in this general direction, instead of the other way.

I would note that the fact that inequality is not solvable makes it the ultimate backstop for the left. If everything else is going well with capitalism, you can always complain about inequality and insist that it’s a crisis for government to solve.

Joel Kotkin writes,

Gotham’s one percent earns a third of the entire city’s personal income. That’s almost twice the proportion for the rest of the country. But such class disparity is becoming the norm; in the tech haven of San Francisco, which has the worst levels of inequality in California, the top 5% of households earn an average of $808,105 annually, compared with $16,184 for the lowest 20%.

Where will immigrants settle? The stereotypical pattern was that hard-working immigrants would come to the major metro areas, live in tenements, and then climb the economic ladder. It seems as though that might be more difficult today.

Phil Gramm and John Early write,

if you count all government transfers (minus administrative costs) as income to the recipient household, reduce household income by taxes paid, and correct for two major discontinuities in the time-series data on income inequality that were caused solely by changes in Census Bureau data-collection methods, the claim that income inequality is growing on a secular basis collapses. Not only is income inequality in America not growing, it is lower today than it was 50 years ago.

On a pre-tax basis, income inequality has increased. But if their claim is correct, then the U.S. addresses income inequality the same way that Denmark does–with taxes and transfers.

James J. Heckman and Rasmus Landerso write,

family influence on many child outcomes in Denmark is comparable to that in the U.S. Common forces are at work in both countries that are not easily mitigated by welfare state policies. Denmark achieves lower income inequality and greater intergenerational income mobility primarily through its tax and transfer programs and not by building the skills of children across generations and promoting their human potential more effectively.

At Yuval Levin’s suggestion, I read Boomers, by Helen Andrews. One of the accusations she makes is that Boomers are responsible for an economy based on servitude. She writes,

The fastest-growing jobs in America are in “wealth work,” that is, the servant class for the metropolitan elite. The only thing worse than spending your adult life as a yoga instructor or dog groomer is living in a city with no one to be yoga instructors and dog groomers for.

She refers to a piece by Marc Muro and Jacob Whitin in July of 2019.

many American cities are brimming with an explosion of low-end employment that has brought some three million workers into mostly low-paid, often-precarious service arrangements helping the well-off walk the dog, clean the house, cook dinner, manage money, and stay fit.

They have the statistics to back up these claims. They credit the term “wealth work” to economics journalist Cristopher Rugaber and MIT economist David Autor. Note that in 2020 the virus undermined the viability of many personal services (although not all–consider home delivery).

In 2011, I wrote,

In an economy where some folks are very rich and many folks are unemployed, why are there not more personal servants? Why don’t Sergey Brin and Bill Gates have hundreds of people on personal retainer?

It turns out that I was on the right track. When the economy finally returned to full employment, it was with a large number of personal service workers.

The workers who produced the Model T could afford to buy what they produced. In a wealth-work economy, the people who can afford the personal services and the people who provide them belong to different classes.

One of my intellectual influences was The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson. He depicts a future world in which there are “Vickies,” who work hard (at white-collar jobs) and consume custom products, and “Thetes,” who rarely work and consume cheap, generic goods and services. I have interpreted recent economic evolution through that lens. I could have titled this post “What I believe now: Vickies and Thetes.”

But wealth-work is an emergent phenomenon. The Boomers did not design our current economy. I will have more to say about the Andrews book in a subsequent post.

All relating to interventions with young children. Here, here, and here.