For me it doesn't really raise any interesting questions at all: things are statistically not 'bad' per se, besides, you could trade your democracy for an autocracy or a dictatorship and end up 'safe' from small crime but meanwhile have your whole country looted.
Maybe some people prefer that but I would rather have garden variety criminals and a trustworthy government fighting them than some kind of re-invention of the USSR, which didn't really bother with collecting crime statistics, and where crime was - so they claimed - very low (this really wasn't the case, especially not if you consider the behavior of lots of highly placed individuals, who could get away with just about anything, except of course stealing from their bosses).
Democracy gets traded for dictatorship because someone shows up and says "I might not be perfect but I'm a hell of a lot better than these schmucks who've been ruining things". And when that person saying that stuff shows up at a point in time when the people who have been in charge of things have run the country into the ground with wars, debts and policies that give people no hope that things will get better, it's a pretty compelling message.
It would be, if it were true. But the premise isn't true and the solution isn't true either. It just sounds good and people tend to respond from fear and other emotions rather than rationality.
> I would rather have garden variety criminals and a trustworthy government fighting them
What do you count as garden variety here and what makes you say the government is trustworthy? I think law enforcement has become extremely bureaucratic and that generally lawyers, but especially DC lawyers, view the criminal justice system as racist so they made it much less punitive and much more bureaucratic. The end result is more crime. Trump saw an opportunity and he is exploiting it even though it's stupid to fight crime this way. I would bet the worst that comes from this is we run an expensive experiment in seeing if NG patrols reduce crime. In a few months, this will be forgotten about. If I am wrong and this turns into a coup d'état or autocratic takeover, you can collect $100 from me.
All of them. In the context of a political appointment, "merit" reflects ability to carry out the President's political agenda. Trump's appointees have been phenomenally effective at doing what Trump promised to do.
“Merit” can mean different things depending on the nature of the job. Juilliard using auditions instead of SATs is still merit-based admissions. But “merit” never means someone’s race or ethnicity.
Put differently, DEI is when you have double standards based on race. Colleges do think test scores = merit, because that’s the primary criterion for selecting among within the group of whites/asians. It’s DEI when they use other factors to try and achieve desired racial balancing.
1) DEI can be done badly, of course, and in an ideal world would be unnecessary, I think anyone on either side of any spectrum wants merit over anything else, but for various historical, systemic, as well as unconscious bias [1], this has not been the case, statistically. DEI on the ~interviewer~ side, not the interviewee side can and has addressed [1]. I fail to see the downside. The only way to claim it's unfair would be to confess that [1] is real, meaning some solution is needed, meaning DEI has done ~some~ good [2].
I agree that quotas are certainly bad in principle, and many times in practice, but I have seen no credible claim where the status quo is a meritocracy, leading to the blatant showing in the current admin.
2) Posit a merit-based test where any appointees of this administration would score better than their corresponding appointee of the previous (or any previous) administration.
It’s not only unnecessary, it’s illegal. If you think historic discrimination had negative effects, just target the negative effects among all people similarly situated.
> Posit a merit-based test where any appointees of this administration would score better than their corresponding appointee of the previous administration
Aggressively pursuing the President’s agenda: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform. Political appointees are just that—political. The relevant standard of merit isn’t who is the best nerd, but who will best carry out the agenda the President campaigned on. The whole point is that voters can change the direction of the executive branch through electing the President, who in turn appoints like-minded cabinet secretaries.
> Speaking in an NPR interview in November, Kennedy said Trump had given him three “instructions”: to remove “corruption” from health agencies, to return these bodies to “evidence-based science and medicine”, and “to end the chronic disease epidemic”.
Do you believe political agenda to be a suitable merit here as opposed to education and field work?
It doesn’t matter what I “believe,” what matters is what kind of job the constitution creates. The appointment of department heads is an exercise in democratic and political accountability. The point is for people to vote for a president who will staff the administration with people who will carry out his agenda. The Supreme Court explained this function of the Appointments Clause in the Arthrex case: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-1434_ancf.pdf (see pp. 6-8 in particular).
Here, “education and field work” matter only to the extent voters care about those things. Obama voters cared about those things, so Obama appointing the best nerds is consistent with the constitutional design. But if voters have lost faith in Harvard Medical School, then education is actually contrary to “merit.”
In this context, RFK is the most qualified HHS Secretary in recent history. He campaigned with Trump talking about his kooky ideas and then people voted for the ticket. People voted for the guy who promised to do something different because they had lost faith in the nerds. The whole point of the constitution is for people to be able to do that. Trump moreso than any recent President got on stage with the people who was going to help run the country if you voted for him. That’s the constitutional design! That’s democracy!
> The whole point of the constitution is for people to be able to do that. Trump moreso than any recent President got on stage with the people who was going to help run the country if you voted for him. That’s the constitutional design! That’s democracy!
No one has argued differently. My argument stemmed only from your, to me previously unfamiliar, definition of merit.
> But if voters have lost faith in Harvard Medical School, then education is actually contrary to “merit.”
> In this context, RFK is the most qualified HHS Secretary in recent history
I take this to mean we agree that the current cabinet is the polar opposite of the previously historically stable definition of meritorious, but are wholly merited appointments under your clarified definition.
Though to be nit-picky, RFK Jr would not be the most qualified HHS Secretary in recent history, but rather ranked based on either voting results or approval rating as merit is then simply a function of the elected representative appointing them.
What distinction would you make between the terms democracy and meritocracy? Are they functionally the same under your definition of merit?
> My argument stemmed only from your, to me previously unfamiliar, definition of merit...
> What distinction would you make between the terms democracy and meritocracy? Are they functionally the same under your definition of merit?
I don't think I'm using "merit" in an unusual way. I think you'd agree that the specific criteria that constitutes "merit" depends on the nature of the job. You use different criteria for NFL players versus college professors.
I think the problem is that we're talking about political appointees, which because of the nature of democracy are very different from other kinds of jobs. In the political context, "merit" is a meta concept that depends on what the voters prioritize. In some contexts, voters want a traditionally credentialed person. This is true even in the Trump administration: Scott Bessent is a Yale graduate hedge fund manager. But in other areas, Trump voters have grown to distrust the institutions, like the medical establishment and the intelligence services, and "merit" in that context means someone that will upend those agencies.
Actually answering the question you quoted would inform whether or not you're using "merit" in an unusual way. How does "meritocracy" exist as a term when "democracy" already encapsulates the political representation of merit you describe?
That is not the definition of merit that I'm familiar with. You are welcome to your own set of definitions, of course.
The only thing the Trump appointees (including the supreme court ones) have been phenomenally effective at is deconstructing the USA. And they're not done yet.
Trump is systematically engaging in performative actions to distract from the simple fact that the USA has elected a conman, criminal and serial abuser of women to the highest office. And you are cheering him on.
The only change I would make there is the "to" in "to distract".
On the basis of his behaviour in courts, I recon there's a common cause for performative behaviour and him being a convicted criminal, rather than it being an instrumental behaviour intended to distract. He doesn't behave as if he has a mental model for the difference between "I did a bad thing and should be ashamed" vs. "I am having power struggle and must fight dirty", nor any concept of a lie beyond observing that "liar" is an insult.
This isn't really an improvement, and other people may be playing him in this way for their own power games.
The criminal justice system is racist. The solution to crime is more complicated than “let all the criminals go” but sending in the National Guard is definitely not the solution. Also, given the current state of affairs, this will be forgotten about — because Trump will do something even more outrageously authoritarian. And your $100 won’t help when the regime kidnaps me out of my home.
I beg to differ mostly. The criminal justice system is heavily staffed by people of all colors and ethnicities, including many, many blacks, who in some cities predominate among the police (and general population, at least in some neighborhoods). Despite this, it's often just as bad towards civilians and minority civilians as a mostly-white police force.
More specifically, the criminal justice system is classist, and that minorities are often part of the poor and underclass in many cities makes them much more targets than their coincidental skin color, though it sometimes seems to serve as a useful visual marker for police to who it's easier to target on sight. The idea of so many police officers and other law enforcement officials who are themselves black or some other visibly non-white ethnic group nonethless targeting civilians who are of the same color, for race reasons, doesn't really make sense from a racism perspective, but it does make sense from a class perspective.
If the classism is indistinguishable from racism and often manifests in results where one race is particularly disadvantaged, then it's also racist.
Racism and classism feed each other. We've known that since even before the civil war. Claiming classism doesn't make racism - poof - disappear. It actually reinforces it.
I wont argue that the racist aspect of the justice system isn't entwined with it, and with wider society in certain ways, but I still stand by it being more classict by far than simply racist. To claim only racism doesn't entirely address certain problems that could maybe be fixed, and it also runs the risk of ignoring when certain racial groups that don't fit into most ideas of racism are also heavily harmed by police and the entire apparatus above them. As I said, there are cities in the U.S. where police, prosecutors, judges and many other criminal justice officals are largely black or of some visible minority, and in these cities, the civilian victims of their procedures and biases, suffer no less, despite often being of the exact same ethnic makeup. I don't see how one can reconcile that with just racism unless one also discusses the issue of tremendous classicm, and I'd argue, also bureaucratic/police self-exceptionalism, with strong authoritarian tendencies, regardless of race.
Spreading the net a bit wider, you can also look at the recent and massive ICE crackdowns on illegal migrants (and sometimes US citizens along the way). Just by looking at photos of these incidents, you quickly note that many ICE agents are themselves black, Latino, Asian, etc, enforcing draconian crackdowns against other visible minorities. That's not simply something you can label under racism and be done with defining it. Other systemic factors are at work there.
> many ICE agents are themselves black, Latino, Asian, etc,
That's because there's two types of racism: individual, and systemic or institutional.
Individual racism is the low-brow obvious type of stuff. Slurs, clutching your handbag walking next to a black person, that type of thing.
Institutional or systemic racism is more abstract, but also much more harmful as a whole.
Take, for example, the DEA. Marijuana is a schedule 1 drug despite not being nearly as harmful as even most schedule 3 drugs. That's not a coincidence.
That reflects the widespread institutional racism of the DEA. Marijuana was chosen to be scheduled 1 because of its association with black Americans, deliberating inflicting more widespread harm onto them.
Okay, so why does this matter? Because within racist institutions, you yourself are forced to be racist. Even just existing in the institution is an act of racism, similarly to how working for a military contractor is itself an act of support of War.
These institutions have a culture and set of expectations and rules, and to exist within them you must comply.
For example, you cannot be a police officer and simply choose not to criminal marijuana and instead criminal white drugs like cocaine. You have rules, and you must follow them.
You being black does not override that. You being Asian doesn't override that.
So, the big picture. ICE, as an institution, is racist and has goals to particularly harm specific racial minorites. It mobilizes on these goals via its policy, it's expectations, and even it's culture.
Being a brown ICE worker does not detect from those goals, and just by existing in ICE and doing their bidding you are implicitly racist. Because the institution is racist, and you support it. And their goals are racist, and you're a big part of making their goals a reality.
As a side note, this is also why "I have a black friend" arguments don't work. That's a refutation of individual racism, not institutional racism.
For more examples of systemic racism throughout US history, please see: redlining, gerrymandering, Jim Crow, segregation, the FBI, and the CIA
You refute that violent crime is a large factor that caused authoritarianism in El Salvador? The post I was responding to made it seem like democracy and violent crime can somehow coexist or that they aren't in strong tension with one another. When it's pretty clear that they are. I was not saying it's the only cause of authoritarianism, or the most relevant cause in the current US moment.
> Dude, no it’s not. Everyone is parroting the “crime dropped from 2023” line, but nobody mentions that the 2023 spike pushed DC’s murder rate to as high as Haiti. Not Haiti normally, but the recent events in Haiti where gangs took over the country, causing the homicide rate go spike from about 10 per 100k normally (safer than DC has ever been) to about as bad as DC in 2023.
Why use 2023, rather than say 1991 as your baseline? And 2024 as the year to use for reference (it is the last year for which complete data is available, after all).
And as for NYC, that wasn't dealt with on the Federal level but on the state and city level. And it left a power vacuum in the crime world that was soon taken up by others, which should have been dealt with rather than ignored. Who knew that policing cities of millions of individuals over decades is hard? Especially in countries where there are lots of weapons afloat.
As for the comparison with Haiti you make (and not to mention Iraq, as you did elsewhere in this thread): countries, especially countries at war and places like Haiti do not excel in record keeping. As such you probably should take the numbers reported from those countries as somewhat polished before being presented.
> Why use 2023, rather than say 1991 as your baseline?
Because numerous people in this thread have been parroting the line that homicides dropped since 2023. I'm pointing out that this is cherry picking, since homicides spiked to record highs in 2023.
1991 isn't a good baseline because policing trends started reversing in the 2000s. We did mass incarceration from 1980 until the early 2000s, and homicides dropped dramatically. El Salvador recently proved that you can more or less solve homicides by just putting a small fraction of the population in prison.
> Especially in countries where there are lots of weapons afloat.
That's just untrue. Puerto Rico has very few guns, and is an island so it's hard to get guns, but has a very high homicide rate. Meanwhile, half the people in Idaho have a gun, and Boise is has a homicide rate comparable to Toronto.
So, your answer to cherry picking - by your claim - is more cherry picking?
> El Salvador recently proved that you can more or less solve homicides by just putting a small fraction of the population in prison.
Right, and Washington DC is just like El Salvador? You've got to be joking.
> That's just untrue. Puerto Rico has very few guns, and is an island so it's hard to get guns, but has a very high homicide rate. Meanwhile, half the people in Idaho have a gun, and Boise is has a homicide rate comparable to Toronto.
Puerto Rico, in spite of the name, is poor and has a huge divide between poor and rich. It's not quite Johannesburg but - and I've been there - the divide is massive and in places like that you get a lot of crime, and some of those crimes will involve homicide. The way to address this is to reduce that gap.
Incidentally, the United States also has a massive wealth gap and this is set to further increase. Of course, as an affluent person you'd end up being scared of the unwashed homeless masses so the solution is to put the blame on them, forcibly incarcerate them (and never mind due process) or to simply get rid of them.
'Putting a small fraction of the population in prison' -> that, historically speaking never ended the way it was intended, unless it was done with all of the rules of due process in place. If you propose to abolish those think about how bizarre it is what you are suggesting here. We can solve all homicides (except the ones in prison, I guess) by putting everybody in lockup. So all we have to do is find the line between 'good' and 'bad' people so that there never will be any more first offenders. Problem solved!
Poverty does not cause crime. Instead, poverty and criminality are linked by common behavioral causes (high time preference, low impulse control, etc.). You cannot reduce crime by reducing the gap between the rich and the poor, because the poor are not committing crime to escape poverty.
Intelligent people are very bad at modeling the minds of people like this. It's a blind spot I see fairly often.
You keep making the weirdest comparisons. What does your dad's village in Bangladesh have to do with crime rates in DC or any other city in the United States? This is just absurd, you're pulling in utterly unrelated factoids - which are anecdata at best and which we are going to have to believe at face value - to supposedly support your point, which if we generously assume that they are true still would not do so.
I assumed the person asserting that poverty causes crime was generally familiar with the crime statistics for poor countries in asia and africa (Bangladesh being an archetypal poor country in Asia). Specifically, the homicide statistics, which are the most reliable proxy for crime because homicides are well reported even in developing countries.
And if you aren’t familiar with the homicide statistics in asia and africa, how can you have an opinion on poverty and crime?
That's fine to say when there is another cause you can identify. For social statistics, most of the time it's people attributing two things together when the underlying cause is money.
In this case that's just a rationalization for what you want to be true.
This paper is literally just authors coming up with some model and simulating it, without any real world evidence whatsoever. It’s an argument from fictional evidence. Is this the best you can do?
There is a huge wealth of research on this topic, even if you want to reject it. Do you need a third, fourth, hundredth paper? Try reading past the abstract (and comprehending it)
Again, this paper just looks at the correlations, and does not touch causation at all. You can run a hundred studies, each of them finding high correlation between wet streets and having rained recently, but you cannot conclude from that that the wet streets caused the rain to fall.
Hi, all causation can be doubted- that's a key aspect of skepticism, and in general, is important for philosophical development. In this case, it's clear that it is not a substantive objection to these papers or others. It is clear that you have set out this discussion with prior belief and are trying to reject that wealth disparity drives crime. You're not acting in the spirit of skepticism (and only are applying skepticism selectively here, because you think it sounds smart).
Read the papers. Apply your logic evenhandedly. Follow the leads and research on your own. It may be scary- you may discover things that force you to change your life (or you may learn something about yourself you dislike).
> Finding the line between “good” and “bad” people is pretty easy
Who is going to draw that line? You? Should we just divide the population up now and make the bad people wear a little badge? People are complex and not intrinsically good or intrinsically bad. Just the idea that there are wholly good people and wholly bad people is kind of disgusting, and I would not want someone in charge who believed in this wild oversimplification. There are good people who commit crimes, and bad people who don't. Let's not be so quick to "easily" judge and label them.
> Should we just divide the population up now and make the bad people wear a little badge? People are complex and not intrinsically good or intrinsically bad.
That was tried at some point, but it didn't quite have the effect that the proponents of that scheme hoped for. Unfortunately we didn't learn a thing, or so it seems.
> People are complex and not intrinsically good or intrinsically bad. Just the idea that there are wholly good people and wholly bad people is kind of disgusting
This seems like a religious belief. I’m not going to argue religion with you, but the data shows that 2/3 of all crime is committed by just 1% of people: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3969807 (“The majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of persistent violent offenders, typically males, characterized by early onset of violent criminality, substance abuse, personality disorders, and nonviolent criminality.”).
El Salvador dropped the homicide rate by a factor of 50 in a decade by imprisoning just 2% of the population. Let’s say we can’t go that fast because we have due process and whatnot. But once someone is convicted of a violent crime, why can’t we just double the sentences to keep them off the streets longer?
I’d even be willing to make the prisons nice, like in Norway. The point is to get them off the streets.
Puerto Rico (I've lived here since 2018...) is basically awash in guns for criminals. Since 2020, it's gotten a lot easier to buy/carry guns as a normal person (previously you had to appear before a judge for a ccw, now it's a 1h class and $100 for 5 years). It's the only non-warzone I've lived in where the default criminal gun is fully automatic (usually glocks with switches, but a few other things too). Absolute guns per capita isn't really what matters, it's gun accessibility to criminals.
(And the bigger crime issues in PR are due to dysfunctional/bankrupt government, specific kinds of poverty/culture, drugs (both local and transshipment), gangs, etc. Also really high domestic violence rate. The crime is largely contained to housing projects, inter-gang fighting, etc., and it feels like less petty property crime (at least in the areas where I go) than I remember of SF 2016+, but I'd rather have someone break my car's window than have to shoot people breaking into my home at night.)
As with the parent, I prefer civil liberties and small amounts of crime to any alternative.
Which is why the playbook for authoritarianism traditionally starts with lying about how much crime there actually is, thus justifying a crackdown.
If Trump wants to cite excessive crime as his reasoning, then he should provide statistics, not the unsubstantiated off-the-cuff insults he has thus far.
Maybe some people prefer that but I would rather have garden variety criminals and a trustworthy government fighting them than some kind of re-invention of the USSR, which didn't really bother with collecting crime statistics, and where crime was - so they claimed - very low (this really wasn't the case, especially not if you consider the behavior of lots of highly placed individuals, who could get away with just about anything, except of course stealing from their bosses).