Recent research shows that many human factors and traits are affected by the effects of poverty-induced stressors, so all other things being equal, regardless of initial IQ at birth, we stack the deck against poor people. An argument for greater distributional equality.

On a par with Senator Graham claiming that people who work for a living at shrinking wages aren't saving money because they are spending it on wine, women and song (I suppose the women are spending it on wine, men and song, but in Graham's world, there are no women except those who can be bought).

Yes, having done scientific research AND studies economics as an undergrad. I found out that mainstream economics ignores tons of reality-based evidence (they pick their paradigms); and science ignores results that don't confirm the current paradigm (in the publish or perish world).

Gosh, who would have thought that a proto-Trump "fever" in GB would have brought out a proto-Trump? Vote in haste, repent at leisure

Of course! Cut foreign aid! Cut services for the poor! Twaddle and stupidity all around. Why not cut spending on defense? Or in the case of the UK, all the egregious spending on the aristocracy? Why not raise taxes? Instead of the stupid "there's not enough money for this tiny expenditure because we want to lavish it all on the rich" mind set, how about we do some real analysis. Let's look at the ROI on building enough hospitals, schools and other projects in terms of increased well-being and health. Of course, if you like to think that it would be better by far to have decreased health and well being in the middle and lower classes, you need to state this as a premise. For instance: all money spent in health care except for big insurance plans for the wealthy is a waste, since poor people just are basically obnoxious and if they die off, all the better. All money spent on roads that don't lead to manors is wasted because poor and middle class people can figure out how to dodge potholes. Etc etc. Of course, to say this out loud is "not done". So it is said between the lines while the rich mouth piously about the poor always being with us blah blah blah

I hope you meant "unconvincing" in your 2nd note.

Potemkin BLS and jobs How to run a country a la Putin

C-suite execs are also regarded as competent: they tell everyone the stories everyone expects to hear, so they must be true

Only in people's fevered dreams are managers more productive. If their underlings are vanishing, who is doing the underling's highly productive work? No one. The managers are doing the poor job they have always done plus they are swamped by little tasks that their underlings used to do (streamlining doesn't mean better, it just means fewer hands to the task). Then the managers' productivity falls off since they can't concentrate on what they are supposed to produce and productivity falls off

Matt: economic life is all about coercion. What voluntary trade? Take this job and kiss up to the boss and maybe he won't cut your wages or benefits to "compete" in the global economy. Right wingers would like people to work or starve, and would prefer to have slaves rather than employees, Their behavior and the capitalist drive to "efficiency" and robotics show this. Politics is an effort to control the nastiness and venality of the economic world. That we elevate nastiness and venality to power is a reflection of our lack of understanding of how coercive economic laws actually demean human beings

Stuart: "We can be confident that most small businesses supported Brexit." Please explain with some sort of data.

I think you deliberately present only the most superficial of measurements of achievement. Freedom is not the sine qua non of happiness. If the majority of people are in fear of losing their jobs, how free are they? If opportunity shrinks and humans work just to survive, even if the survival is relatively better than before, how free are they? If the rewards of their work largely goes to the upper classes, are they not still psychologically enslaved? A longer life won't help if the financial means to do what we want aren't there.

Productivity is usually assumed to be high for those who get highly paid, a fallacy of course, since at best a CEO leverages other people's productivity, at worst a CEO merely prances about talking while others produce. A "meritocratic" star uses other people's work to bolster his/her product. The president of a university certainly isn't productive unless (here in the USA)you count the ability to hornswoggle donors into paying big bucks for the football stadium, which is of dubious value for the university in general. And so on.

Give everyone including the rich a basic income (you didn't spell this out in your article). Make sure taxes are progressive enough that no one has a cliff effect where all of the sudden all BI disappears. It should disappear at some comfortable (food, shelter, medical care) level. The BI, of course, is the entrepreneur society allowance. Remove fear of losing subsistence and you release people's ability to vote with their feet, away from dead end stupid jobs into new creative enterprises.

If you read Dillow's blog, you incessantly see people claiming that the wealthy MUST be smarter, better and everything than the rest of us. We need only cast our gaze at the Romney family, where one smart guy unleashed a family of self-congratulating non-entities on the world through the marvelous luck of inheritance (and that smart guy was not Mitt)to see why this may not be true. If upward mobility is decreasing, it means that the wealthy are ipso facto less and less deserving. In fact, the very smallness of upward mobility and its quiet demise argues against merit and for luck. However, people are blinded by the Horatio Alger myth, thinking at some point they too will be wealthy and all it takes is some great idea on their part. The world is full of great ideas, and mediocre ones too.

"Seriously doubt" as in "I Don't Know But Will Make a Bigoted Statement and Will Do Nothing to Verify the Truth of It". Don't do research or let facts get in your way. Why would poor parents in the US be worse parents than in the UK? Trust me, they must be otherwise whatever I believe would not be a fact.

Steve Jobs made his own luck: he luckily made himself get adopted into a well-to-do family. He luckily made himself acquainted with the brilliant Wozniak. He luckily lied about his work and others luckily awarded him with bounties for lying. He luckily made a fortune off the misfortune of people overseas. Yep, he made his own luck.

So, Luis, we should simply ignore unemployment, increasing poverty etc? And the fact that 30 year mortgages will get more and more expensive relative to their original costs? You are bizarre.

The great difficulty here is that we have to create a better world, drag people kicking and screaming into it (voir all the social revolutions,the "end" of slavery, women's rights etc) and once there, the people never know how they got there, so they assume that this new world is the norm. Until a new norm comes up and the process is repeated.

This article is the latest horrible iteration of the materialistic notion of productivity. This is the sort of thinking that created unions, where squeezing the worker as much as possible finally leads to worker rebellion. Productivity is not really a very useful measurement in our world anymore, although that is what is monetized. At some point we will need to reward creativity and ingenuity, so that we can continue to survive on this planet, instead of rewarding ant-like behavior and giving the queen ants all the stuff we produce and grovelling thankfully for the privilege of handing over the fruits of our labor.

We can discuss economics and politics all we want. but the real answer is: the super rich are hoarders. They are mentally ill. if they hoarded cats or newspapers, we would force them to clean up their mess. Hoarding causes health and other issues. There are tons of externalities involved in hoarding, and the rich should pay for that. let's list a few externalities: money hoarding gives them disproportionate power to corrupt governments and individuals, creating governmental dysfunction and the destruction of trust in government works; money hoarding drives the rich to policies that destroy the environment in order to allow the rich a few more dollars to hoard; money hoarding creates a desire to avoid paying for common facilities (police, armies, roads, etc) which either don't get paid for or get privatized to further the hoarding, thus creating an unsafe environment for the rest of the citizens surrounding the hoarders; and I could go on. Let's call them sick and work on fixing the disease.

Justifiably cranky....it's like they never saw what deficit reduction has done

Exactly

This is what happens when you make corporations and money into human beings. Then you can compare rounding up tax dollars by the IRS the same as rounding up Jews by the Gestapo

Of course, neither the minimum wage nor the EITC address things as elegantly as a guaranteed income with aggressively progressive taxation would: everyone gets a basic living, the rich have it taxed away, small businesses could afford to hire people for what they could/would pay (I am sure some unionism would be desirable here), no one could say that they were deprived (a la middle class whining about they pay taxes and poor people get the benefits). There would be more people willing and able to do some adventurous businesses, because they wouldn't be terrified of starving if they fail. Children wouldn't be punished for their parents lack of earning capacity. God would be in heaven and all would be well on earth.