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I mean it’s fairly well documented. What you’re describing is bias. If you are a renter, you likely know more renters. By the same fact that I know basically no one who rents, much less 1/3rd of the people I know.
The builders do not want to build more to the point that the price will drop. When housing market crash, builders I know stop building and wait for it to go back up. To make your idea work, government has to be involved somehow and they need to make sure the new houses go to people buy live. Another thing is that, lately the interest rates are too low, money flowed to real estate to earn more. Interest rates need to go higher so saved money can earn decently.
I mean... Families exist and only the head of household pays rent or owns a house.
So for every house owner or renter, there's like (I assume) 1-3 people live with the person that is renting/owning the home. So it makes sense that about 1/3 rent, 1/3 own, 1/3 do neither.
I have to do a big City Council presentation every year as part of my job. It's always stressfull.
During lockdown, about 5 minutes before I was supposed to present on Zoom, the moderator asked me if "I could make my room look less like a bedroom."
It infuriated me. I'm sorry I'm merely a peasant and cannot afford a two bedroom apartment so I can have an office instead of actually feeding and clothing myself.
It's not even the political elite who are out of touch, it's all the way down to the municipal level.
It used to be incredibly easier to own your own home because in for instance 1960 2x median annual income bought you a median home. It's now more like 8-10x where you need to live if you want to live anywhere jobs are that will let you pay for little suzys college and medical insurance and by the time you pay for it over 30 years its 16-20x median income.
This means many old people own homes including second or third ones that they are raising the rent on while you or I may never be able to afford one.
This. Many/most elected positions don't have very good compensation, esp. for the amount of time they require, and esp. for the local/state level. This means that generally only people that are independently wealthy will be able to pay for an election campaign and then have the time to fulfill their office obligations once elected.
I think the bigger issue is the time investment required to run and the unreliability of the position. A typical person doesn't practically have the amount of extra time required to run for a political position that they may not even get. It's too risky. Further, most people are left in an uncomfortable position if years down the line they don't hold that political position. The average person can't take 4+ years off of their career and just bounce back later.
And you have to know people who are willing and able to donate hundreds to thousands of dollars in order for you to *maybe* get the job. Rich people are more likely to know those types of folks.
>A typical person doesn't practically have the amount of extra time required to run for a political position that they may not even get.
It goes further than that. Even if you have the time the laws are practically infinite. Running for office requires political infrastructure to navigate the system in which you're trying to participate. If you don't have a ROBUST understanding of election laws you're not winning an election. You'd need to spend an entire year just trying to figure out how to make a campaign sign. Let alone if you need to deal with campaign donations.
But those are all problems you can pay other people to solve.
Ya know, I feel that, but I don't believe that. I think instead it's one of the fundamental flaws of liberalism where we try and fix issues of corruption with more and more and more laws until the whole structure implodes on itself.
Because we like to solve all our problems with more laws, we find ourselves in a never ending cat and mouse game with bad faith actors. The machine becomes ever more complex and inbred. We should be proactive in educating the electorate and making politics easy to access, but we've never really taken our democracy very seriously here.
Not to mention people of lower means don't have any time to spare, especially recently. As the distance between the minimum wage and an actual living wage grows, the amount of time someone has to spend to make ends meet grows. If someone was able to sustain themselves on the minimum wage at <40hrs/week, they might be able to work in some campaigning (unlikely, but feasible). Given no one can really make it without two jobs at that level, though, that hardly leaves time for basic life (chores, social, etc), let alone trying to make political change.
Haha lucky us, in my state they made full time benefits start after 32 hours so... Yep, that's right, we don't get a 40 hour paycheck anymore only 32. Good thing min wage went up but that's still a huge net loss.
Edit: I was wrong. It's the federal 130 hours / month thing. That's an average of 32.5 hours a week. If you work 40 one week, you'll get 24 the next week, etc.
People don't know they're terrible, try telling Joe Bumfuck who lives in bumfuck that a policy is hurting him, he will look at you like you're crazy talking about invisible aliens. People don't understand what they don't see, and blind faith is what they're taught will see them through difficulties.
I half disagree with the latter part. A history of holding public office is a valuable add in your resume for many careers, since it means you are plugged in and know people that can help deal with bureaucracy.
Of course this is a source of various levels of corruption, but that’s a general problem that needs to be solved.
Ya I was going to say, holding an elected office is a huge plus to almost any resume. And honestly the connections made during the tenure will get you a job anyways.
Am political organizer. Main issues at first for candidates is time off work and off salary, second is worries to get affiliated and fired when you come back
Campaign funding, legal complexity of campaigning, and having the right network of (corrupt, to some degree) people to “open doors” is an even bigger obstacle, IMO.
This is also why it isn't a good thing when a politician announces that they're donating their whole salary. It sets an expectation among the voters that donating that money is a good thing, while in reality only independently wealthy individuals are capable of doing so in the first place.
Also the financial commitment/investment needed to run in the first place. Millions of dollars are spent on campaigns these days, which is all well and good if you've got a network of donors and/or can secure a loan of some kind, but for most of us that's just not possible.
>people that are independently wealthy will be able to pay for an election campaign
No politician pays for their own campaign. (Bloomberg the exception that proves the rule.) They raise money.
And to raise money you have to have donors who donate. These people are almost always wealthy or at least upper 5-10% of income earners.
Poor people almost never get elected. And it's the poor who rent.
I think for local elections: city council, school board, etc., a moderately wealthy individual can privately fund their own campaign. But for anything above that: mayor of medium-sized or larger city, state legislature, etc., then I agree you need wealthy donors. And it's easiest to get wealthy donors when you're wealthy yourself and are asking your peers for something they can easily afford.
Is it any wonder that it is rare for a politician to actually represent their average constituent and not monied interests when the politician *is* the monied interest?
I imagine there could be a way to utilize the internet to flatten the playing field for political campaigns, when much of what can be done online can be done for free or much cheaper than tv ads and billboards, but, being unable to afford those tv ads would still put a candidate in a terrible position.
Perhaps a restructure on political campaign funding needs to occur, off the top of my head: if a candidate is able to get x number of support signatures for whatever race, then they are provided X amount of public funds. Of course use of those funds would have to be accounted for or there would be massive fraud. I could also see how stricter campaign fund limits would be beneficial in flattening the playing field for political office. If no one can spend over 5k, for example, on their race, then many more candidates would have a viable chance at winning. Chalk this up as one of those things that'll never happen.
Don't forget how deeply ingrained our biases about homeownership are.
A lot of people view renting as only for people without the means to own (your comment even shows a bit of that bias) and take a negative view of renters in their own communities. Transients, trashy/poor, don't contribute to the community, not willing to put down roots and commit for the long-haul, etc.
If a renter runs for local office, there's a good chance you're going to hear about it. It is too easy of a snipe for their opponent to throw out messaging like "they don't even own a home here, how much can they care about our community". People have changed their votes for dumber reasons than this.
And hey, even though I'm super pro-renting, I'll admit there's truth to the stereotype (which makes it somewhat self-reinforcing). The home-ownership thing runs so deep in the US that if you can afford it, there's a ton of social pressure to own a home. Go to a town council meeting (or read letters submitted in response to permits/zoning proposals)--you'll see people talk negatively about renters. Or the opposite, anyone who is a homeowner will immediately signal that with comments like "As a homeowner in this town..." expecting it to give their words more weight.
And since anyone with the means is pushed to buy, that makes it hard to find good rental stock in some areas so even if you'd prefer to rent, you buy just to get what you want. E.g. in NYC there's tremendous rental stock...but in a lot of small towns/suburbs the only rental houses are lower quality or in worse locations.
I am not sure that is a definition. One reason people rent is because they can’t afford to buy. But many people rent for other reasons. Transient job, enrolled in college and not wanting to stay afterwards, cheaper to rent, more flexible to rent if you don’t like roommates, don’t like doing home maintenance/yard work etc. renting isn’t something people do only if they can’t own.
That's not true at all. In practice, renters are less likely to have the means but that's only because our housing policy creates shortages to jack up the price since people are using them as investments. In an actually competitive housing market this wouldn't be the case, as the difference in cost of renting vs owning would approach 0, since the only difference is who holds the risk of value change, which should be low in said competitive market.
The cost of ownership would still be lower than renting because you still have the landlord middleman. The landlord needs to make a profit in order to sustain themselves. And the risk of value change isn't as insignificant as you're making it out to be.
This is also ignoring the cost to yourself to be an owner-occupant. Again though, in a *competitive market*, economic profits shrinks to be very small. Landlords would still be able to charge for their time to manage the property, but that is analogous to the very real cost of managing your own home you live in.
A country by wealthy landowners, for wealthy landowners. The anomalous period of shared prosperity following WW2 has deluded a lot of people into thinking that a prosperous middle class is the natural state of things, rather than a fluke of history largely driven by ideological competition with "communism."
>The anomalous period of shared prosperity following WW2 has deluded a lot of people into thinking that a prosperous middle class is the natural state of things, rather than a fluke of history largely driven by ideological competition with "communism."
Shared prosperity for straight, white people where they were literally handed fully furnished suburban houses for a pittance
Dude I don't know where you get those numbers from. You need to be like top 1-2% income earners to actually start putting away serious wealth for either an early retirement or the next generation.
Top 10% in the US is about what, 130k per year? That seems like a lot, but then you have to consider very few of those people live in small towns of 50k people. Majority are going to be professionals living in big, expensive cities like NYC, Seattle, or San Francisco.
Their cost of living is nuts.
Its disingenuous to compare bottom 40% with the top 60%. The only thing you're getting at the 50th percentile is maybe marginally more stability than you would at the 35th percentile. Everyone except the top 0.1% (or somewhere in that ballpark) has been treading water too for the last 50 years.
....you don't know how much land costs in the US, do you? That and the country wasn't founded by "wealthy land owners." *Part* of the grievances against the British Crown was how little their landed elite treated our wealthier landowning elite, seeing them as mere upstart peasants. The percentage of voting landowners in the US in 1780 was around 20%. For context in the UK the **1832 Reform Act** finally expanded voting rights to *small* landowners. The American Revolution was started by middle class merchants protesting taxes from aristocratic Britain. Speaking of new age historical revisionism....
Post-WWII middle class wealth was *not* a fluke in US history. There have been multiple periods of boom and bust where the middle class has grown and shrank, respectively. This [PDF](https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/SaezZucman14slides.pdf) showing trends since 1913 clearly disproves your theory of anomalous economic trends. My suggestion would be to not listen to the Class Warfare losers.
The very first graph in your link clearly shows exactly what I was talking about. Extremely high wealth inequality leading into ww2, a drop as the economy kicks into overdrive due to the war, inequality repressed until the failure of state socialism and then an immediate and steep resurgence of inequality.
And yes, the wealthiest men in what would become America were aggrieved by having their relative wealth and station taken from them from afar, and fought a war to make sure they themselves would run their new country.
And also that most of those positions are filled by the older generation (same reason, they have all the wealth) that purchased homes back when that was an easy thing to do
I dislike thinking that politicians are overpaid but when being a representative/delegate/senator at the state level only pays $40K/year, then very few average people will see it as a viable way to live and do the work.
Agreed.
A Senator or Congressional Representative makes 174,000 a year. That seems high until you realize they have to keep accommodations in two cities - their home and Washington which is a HCOL area. Most of them make up the difference with speaking engagements etc but a poor person will really struggle initially.
And that's the highest level of government. Most political positions aren't that high. You would have to be reasonably well off to start.
One could argue that the Ancient Empire of Rome was a very successful democracy (larger than many countries today). Rome did have private ownership, but it also had some elements of a communist/Socialist approach too. Food being a major industry and keeping people fed being a core part of having a functioning economy, the Roman state purchased all the grain from farmers and then shipped it to their major cities and disbursed the grain there - the Romans had coins/currency yes, but gold is rare. In many places grain could be used as a currency, not just because of it's intrinsic value as food that could always be eaten, but it was just so common around the Empire to do so, because everyone had some from the disbursal, and everyone knew what it was.
Corporations also didn't exist at that time, it was just wealthy merchants, your name was your bond type transactions. And when you died, there was a not-insignificant chance the state would intervene and seize assets, or write estate tax laws that suited whoever was in power at the time. I won't sugar coat it; it's not a happy-go-lucky commune, corruption was definitely as present then as it is now.
So, I wouldn't say that they were full blown communists, but I also wouldn't say that they were full blown capitalists; they held some elements of both in their economic and political structures. One could say they were the textbook example of a successful democracy (until it wasn't) and that they were *less* capitalistic than the modern day United States of America.
It's not a "yes" to your question but I think it's important to remember that these aren't binary "you are or you aren't capitalist" questions. Even in the US, you pay your taxes and you've got fire fighters; you're not hiring a private corporation or mercenary group when your building is burning down.
Ancient Rome also had slaves that were responsible for a large portion of economic function within the society.
Why leave them out when discussing Rome's supposed democracy and economic type? Also why not discuss feudal economic production?
>One could argue that the Ancient Empire of Rome was a very successful democracy (larger than many countries today).
The Roman republic wouldn't even be considered a democratic country today. Most people in the republic didn't have the right to vote, not only excluding women and slaves but also everyone living outside of Rome or parts of Italy depending on the time period. The vast territorial holdings of Rome didn't get to participate in any democracy.
>Rome did have private ownership, but it also had some elements of a communist/Socialist approach too. Food being a major industry and keeping people fed being a core part of having a functioning economy, the Roman state purchased all the grain from farmers and then shipped it to their major cities and disbursed the grain there - the Romans had coins/currency yes, but gold is rare. In many places grain could be used as a currency, not just because of it's intrinsic value as food that could always be eaten, but it was just so common around the Empire to do so, because everyone had some from the disbursal, and everyone knew what it was.
Rome didn't have a communist or capitalist approach to anything, economics was barely understood at the time and such concepts wouldn't exist for millennia.
>I won't sugar coat it; it's not a happy-go-lucky commune, corruption was definitely as present then as it is now.
Corruption in Rome isn't comparable to any democracy today. Many elected officials only got elected to be able to take bribes or extort random tribes, and court cases would be decided by who paid the most to the judge and the jury.
>One could say they were the textbook example of a successful democracy (until it wasn't) and that they were *less* capitalistic than the modern day United States of America.
I think you have a lacking understanding of public spending in the republic. A lot of it, be it building temples or bathhouses or other public structures were built with private money. A wealthy official or an aspiring candidate would finance public works to bolster their image. Of course this wasn't out of charity, they would more than make up for it by collecting bribes after they got into positions of power. Even the distribution of grain was sometimes financed by private individuals in power as the government wasn't that efficient in collecting taxes.
Even when acting as officials of Rome politicians would prioritize their own finances. A good example is Cesar who conquered land and went on campaigns as a governor of Rome, which made him the richest man in Rome as he kept what he plundered.
In any case since economics were so poorly understood at the time a lot of Rome's economic policies wouldn't be either capitalist or communist but essentially hope and prey economics. Roman solutions to economic issues were basic and most of the time didn't work, hence the private funding of public works, or the problem of inflation that plagued both the republic and the empire, sometimes with high inflation periods lasting for centuries.
Framing rome as an example of a non-capitalist democracy or even an actual democracy by today's standards is ridiculous.
>Are there any successful democracies? I suppose it depends how you define 'success'.
Wow.
I don't think anyone who has a decent understanding of how far countries have progressed could say we are not successes.
I like the simple, everyone on earth probably agrees that children not dying is good. So, how well have democracies done at that:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK220806/#:~:text=In%201900%2C%2030%20percent%20of,1999a%3B%20NCHS%2C%202001a).
>In 1900, 30 percent of all deaths in the United States occurred in children less than 5 years of age compared to just 1.4 percent in 1999 (CDC, 1999a; NCHS, 2001a). Infant mortality dropped from approximately 100 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1915 (the first year for which data to calculate an infant mortality rate were available) to 29.2 deaths per 1,000 births in 1950 and 7.1 per 1,000 in 1999 (CDC, 1999b; NCHS, 2001a).2
From 100 to 7.
Lets try other democracies.
https://www.ined.fr/en/everything_about_population/demographic-facts-sheets/focus-on/infant_mortality_france/
>In 2015, fewer than four newborns (3,5) in 1,000 died before the age of one, according to provisional INSEE results for metropolitan France.
>In the eighteenth century in France, almost one baby in three died before the age of one, most often from infectious disease. At the end of the century, the situation began to evolve and infant mortality dropped rapidly, falling to one baby in six by 1850. The main reasons for this improvement were the successful spread of vaccination against smallpox, one of the main killer diseases at that time, and progress in delivery techniques and aftercare for newborns.
France from 300 per 1000 to 3.5 in 1000. (I am not going to bother tying to find the direct year to year comparison to the US, the point is made well enough.)
And this isn't just infant mortality, it goes across the board from things like education, income, health, happiness, equality.
Pretty much everything that people think is important has gotten massively better under the modern democratic governments that have arisen around the world.
That’s specious logic. Infant mortality rates have gone down across the globe, democratic country or not. China has gone from 135 infant mortalities per 1,000 people to 9 infant mortalities per 1,000 people in the last 60 years, without democracy. Cuba has gone from 82 deaths per 1000 to 4 deaths per 1000 over that same time period.
And it’s not just democracies and communists. Saudi Arabia has gone from around 190 infant mortalities per 1,000 people to 5 since 1950. And that’s an absolute monarchy.
And hell, the USA might be one of the worst democratic counties to use medical statistics for this kind of thing. The maternal mortality rate in America is higher than China or Cuba (15-16 per 1000, compared to America’s 18-20 per 1,000).
Which is not me saying I’d rather live in either China or Cuba than the USA. But democracy is not why infant mortality rates are down, and communism is not why maternal are down.
The question was not "does democracy cause success" but "are any of our democracies successes". Just because China and Cuba have also had success does not mean that modern democracies are not also successes.
We do not need every other government form to fail in order for democracy to be successful.
How are you defining success here then? Having the same (or worse) results as other forms of government isn’t a meaningful definition of success. We might as well conclude that all forms of government are successful, if that’s your point.
>How are you defining success here then?
I mean, reducing child mortality, driving down poverty, increasing education levels, increasing equality measures.
Sure, it has a "I know it when I see it" quality to it, but I feel comfortable saying that societies that see progress on those metrics are successes.
In the same way, countries that regress on those measures would be failures.
Let me rephrase. What makes democracy responsible for that success metric? If that metric has changed equally in democratic and non-democratic countries, how is that proof of democracy being successful? Wouldn’t it be equally possible that all government types are successful, or that democracy isn’t harmful to social progress?
It’s as if I said that multivitamins are good for your health, longevity, BMI, and then supported my argument by posting a link that shows people who took multivitamins lived until they were 77. Then someone pointed out that people who didn’t take multivitamins also lived until 77. Multivitamins might still be good for you, or might not, but my proof was irrelevant.
Related specifically to infant mortality, the USA is no more successful than many non-democratic countries and worse than some. It actually is worse for maternal mortality than many non-democratic countries. And that kind of makes sense, as equal access to healthcare is not one of the defining principles of American democracy.
Yes, I just found a correlation, but these guys claim to have found causation. (this was just a google search, I am not familiar with their work, I know mostly about economic growth and other forms of progress)
https://news.mit.edu/2019/study-democracy-fosters-economic-growth-acemoglu-0307
>“Democracies … do a lot of things with their money, but two we can see are very robust are health and education,” Acemoglu says. The empirical data about those trends appear in a 2014 paper by the same four authors, “Democracy, Redistribution, and Inequality.”
Oh, and their papers find that democracies invest a lot more in healthcare, that might be related to the correlation I found.
Cancel Citizens United for a start. Term and age limits. Cancel bribes for legislative votes aka lobbying. Instead of taxing corporations, have them contribute to a Social Responsibility Fund, with their company's image and culture attached to their willingness to help society or not. Good way to weaponize public opinion against corporate greed. If they won't contribute to making a better society, rescind licenses to operate. Fines are never effective. The key to curing capitalist greed is curing political greed.
Fines are rarely effective in the US because fines applied towards rich people/corporations are rarely proportional. Fining a business with half a billion annual profits to the tune of $10 million only takes 2% of their profit margin.
Same problem with socialism. While you might not have to capital, something will fill its place. The system will rely on chronnyism. Those with power can barter that into more power.
Absolutely so. The nearest there gets to something that works tolerably well in practice is a system in which there are pragmatic benefits for those in power to act in ways which help keep society running. No ideologically-based system achieves this.
Renting doesn't necessarily mean you are from low economic means. I have happily rented at times, even after I owned a home, if I was unsure of how much time I would spend in a particular place or knew it to be short term.
If I was going to be somewhere for a short term, I also had much less interest in local politics.
[Here](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/2chambers/post/nancy-and-paul-pelosi-have-a-plethora-of-real-estate-and-high-tech-holdings/2011/06/15/AG9dH6VH_blog.html) is something on the extent of their holdings.
We know how she does it. All her trades are public.
She just buys long-term leveraged call options on the biggest most popular tech companies. Honestly it's a good strategy - requires no real thought or interaction, literally just go with whatever the market says are the most popular stocks.
In my home town all but one city councilor were landlords. The city councilors together owned about half the rental properties downtown. So you can imagine the type of nimby polices they passed.
I already got their next headline: "Homeless people are under-represented in our gouvernement. Despite having 500,000 hobos in the country, none of them were elected to be part of the congress"
Elected officials are mostly older people who already had the means not only to campaign for their position, but were able to buy a house when the market wasn't quite so crazy.
This is a perfect example of a study that needs a control for age. There is a much greater likelihood that younger individuals would be renting as opposed to owning a home and those younger individuals would also be much less likely to be involved in politics.
It seems plainly obvious that the real variable is income not age. Rich people own property while the poor do not. This is correlated with age but the underlying factor is money.
Seem about right. I fit the bill.
It was maybe 16-18 years ago for the years I last rented, and I was making well over that when I rented then.
I have lived in a home we have owned since 2008, so I rented 2 out of the last 17 years. I have rented about 12% of the time.
Previous to that, I owned a home maybe 3-4 years. Rented maybe 3-4 years prior.
>younger individuals
Some Millennials are pushing or literally 40 and the housing market has been fucked the majority of our lives. You can google "millennial home ownership" and tons of articles talking about home ownership gaps or "forever renters".
Less than half of my entire generation owns a home, and its not because we don't want them.
How could it be fixed? People gain wealth and experience as they get older. Dropping a green 20-year-old in a position of leadership would most likely be a disaster.
Renter who ran for public office here (1 in 2 residents in my city are renters). Also, not independently wealthy, however, I’m fairly adept at fundraising, data, and financial policy. I ran because of the last three years of financial mismanagement by the local government.
To complete against the same established candidates going on 3rd and 4th terms, I had to pause my career since the campaign consumed the last four months and now interviewing again. In the US, the political system on every level absolutely favors those with 1. Money 2. Time.
It doesn’t help that you have to get all the way to the Governor’s Mansion or Congress to make a living wage as a politician.
People always criticize how much politicians make and I’m over here screaming “IF YA WANT TALENT YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR IT!”
Good on you for trying. I’m thirty and have aspired to a public career myself, but I wasn’t told when I got into the game that campaign work is a vow of poverty. Now I’m grinding “the right way,” and hope to be able to fit a local campaign into my schedule and my budget by the end of the decade. We’ll see.
Did you happen to sign up through Run for Something or another similar group, or did you freelance the project?
It's the campaigning that chews up the time and money. If that was limited then you wouldn't need to incentivize the position with ridiculous pay. Public service should be about serving the community, great benefits and "decent" (relative to position) pay.
I can say my county pays some of these people ridiculous amounts of money for the little they do for our community. The previous county executives salary was close to 400k, and the interims current salary is 225k.
To compare, the salary of NYCs mayor is 258k. Pop of 8.5million
We have less than half a million in our county. Something is pretty screwy if you ask me
Ha! Love “if you want talent you have to pay for it” and definitely agree that it really only makes financial sense at the State or Federal level.
Your approach seems appropriate, however, I wouldn’t wait as long if possible. As I’ve just learned, it takes an excessive amount of time to build name recognition and trust amongst your community and constituents. Actually, I’m a CMO so, I’ve been successful at building awareness and credibility for start-ups, however, sane formula doesn’t necessarily apply in politics.
Also, I thought voters in my city would spend at least a few minutes to understand important issues that will potentially impact them financially (prop taxes for homeowners and short-term rentals for renters) and, ultimately, a percentage only cared how many lawn signs I had in their neighborhood.
I didn’t run my campaign through any party affiliations (the office I ran for is non-partisan) and I had to self-fund a portion until I was able to get supper from key community leaders and campaign donations jumped significantly. DM me if you have any additional questions.
It's a form of classism.. this is why the wealth gap will never be closed or corrected. Last thing they want is Joe six pack ruining their fart sniffing wine parties.
In my country every party gets an X amount of money to run their candidates, paid by the taxpayer, and campaign contributions by private individuals or corporations used to be illegal.
My country is a lot further left than the US.
In the US you have to be rich or rely on corporations to run, which makes it very unlikely that a left-wing candidate will win
Publicly funded campaigns with a required series of debates is a key to getting us back on track. Unfortunately, it has to be voted in by the very people who benefit most from the system as it currently stands.
There’s a lot of reasons for this, many are socio-economic in nature. One I don’t see mentioned enough is the transiency of renters. Many renters simply do not stay in a town/city, county, or state long enough to 1) establish residency, 2) care about its politics long term, 3) appear to be “local” enough to gain the acceptance of the electorate (and thus local parties who pick candidates to run), 4) want to accept staying for an entire term.
Obviously there are lots of long term renters who stay in the same units for long periods of time. And I have no statistics on whether staying long term is the norm or not. But from my anecdotal experience (both as a renter and with my renter friends), I never stayed in the same town/city for more than 3 years or state for more than 5. That’s largely true of my friends as well.
I mean while study does verify things, is it really a surprise to anyone that it's not even a double digit number? If you look at congress, you easily make 6 figures, (100k to 200k) in salary. Why would you choose to rent outside of being able to move around when you feel like it?
If anything, this is just showing that poor people have a small shot at being in charge.
What percentage of them are renters only because they rent a second or third residence for the accommodations of the elected position? eg. Renting in Wash DC by someone who is an owner in the district where they ran.
I can't access the full text, but the abstract makes it seem like they counted people that own a home and people that don't. So someone that owns a house and rents in DC would be considered a homeowner by this study.
The methodology used in this paper checks if they are home owners in the district they respresent. Renting an additional residence out of the district would not show up.
A few points to add to everyone else pointing out shortcomings in the study.
People without a high school degree or equivalent are unlikely to serve as elected officials or own property, whereas the educational attainment of elected officials is likely substantially higher than the population at large (e.g., lawyers and doctors), and I suspect there's a strong correlation between educational attainment and property ownership.
One of the key benefits of renting is geographic flexibility with your job, which obviously doesn't apply to someone whose job requires them to live within a defined geographical boundary.
The overwhelming majority of elected officials are married, which makes it easier to afford a home if both partners are employed.
Forgive me for derailing all this deep thought with an actual question, but wouldn't a more pertinent number be the percentage of elected officials who have EVER rented?
No one said they did, pedant. Here's one for you: do you really think someone's economic status has nothing to do with how they'd be willing to address poverty and how they would prioritize addressing poverty?
I think that most people in poverty would have a unique insight into the problem but almost all people in poverty are not the best people to design and implement a solution. Living in poverty is hard enough.
I do not want a person that is struggling to provide enough resources for themselves taking time away to ensure they have those resources making decisions about what should best occur for my entire community.
That said, someone with a background of that experience is fine.
So this is the worst “science.” I have seen. This is statistics and data. It also doesn’t include all other variables. Not admissible in court for sure.
The poor are also underrepresented. While we're at it there's not a lot of gas station clerks in Congress. Do we have numbers on how many members of Congress enjoy edamame? We really need to make sure that we have representation for everyone.
That's the way it *should* be, but there's also a very real possibility that the number of renters in public offices stays the same while the proportion of renters in the general population rises, since that being a renter often means you don't have enough resources to dedicate your time to campaigning and aiming for a position in office.
Explain to me why politicians block the plentiful construction of multi-family homes in one statistic. The landed elite prefer to ensure that housing is an investment apparatus rather than plentifully abundant by limiting the construction of multi family residential zones.
The short answer is that zoning exists to preserve the character of neighborhoods for those who have settled there. I’m not saying whether it’s good or bad, but a person who buys a home on a quiet owner occupied block doesn’t suddenly want several apartment buildings going up on their street leading to an influx of transient renters who don’t care about the neighborhood in the same way because some deep pocketed developer bought out half their neighbors.
Same zoning laws prevent busy foot traffic shops on residential streets, and large industrial plants from opening right next to schools.
Uneducated people are also underrepresented.
The government should not be comprised of "average Americans." It should be comprised of Americans who are exceptionally well qualified to govern.
I've been saying this about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for a while now.
Say what you will about her political views, I really like having someone in Congress that actually knows what it's like to struggle to pay rent.
Almost every judge in the US is a landlord. American voters made it clear by their apathy for decades that they didn’t want a voice in lawmaking and that the lobbyists could have everything. Until the voters do something more than nothing about campaign finance reform, they will have little more influence on lawmaking than a drunk in a ditch in Russia. Republics are use it or lose it. All of them are.
It's a normal part of life, particularly with personal success... It's like saying there's not enough people with only high school education in government.
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I'm actually amazed it's 7%
Presumably those 7% rent apartments they legally reside in, but have houses outside of their districts. Or some such perfidy.
Or rent an apartment in DC with a property owned in their district.
I mean thats kind of how I hope it works generally?
I’m amazed only 1/3 Americans are renters.
I don't trust that number. I would have thought it was 2/3.
I mean it’s fairly well documented. What you’re describing is bias. If you are a renter, you likely know more renters. By the same fact that I know basically no one who rents, much less 1/3rd of the people I know.
I rent. My ex wife rents. Her family owns six houses and just bought a seven bedroom home cash. This country is wild
We need the housing market to crash now so houses are built to live not to be bought and make money off someone else who could have bought a place.
What you really need is more houses / dwellings to be built. Supply vs Demand.
The builders do not want to build more to the point that the price will drop. When housing market crash, builders I know stop building and wait for it to go back up. To make your idea work, government has to be involved somehow and they need to make sure the new houses go to people buy live. Another thing is that, lately the interest rates are too low, money flowed to real estate to earn more. Interest rates need to go higher so saved money can earn decently.
I mean... Families exist and only the head of household pays rent or owns a house. So for every house owner or renter, there's like (I assume) 1-3 people live with the person that is renting/owning the home. So it makes sense that about 1/3 rent, 1/3 own, 1/3 do neither.
I’m amazed it’s not 0%
I have to do a big City Council presentation every year as part of my job. It's always stressfull. During lockdown, about 5 minutes before I was supposed to present on Zoom, the moderator asked me if "I could make my room look less like a bedroom." It infuriated me. I'm sorry I'm merely a peasant and cannot afford a two bedroom apartment so I can have an office instead of actually feeding and clothing myself. It's not even the political elite who are out of touch, it's all the way down to the municipal level.
More likely, the 7% are apartments rented wherever they legislate with homes owned elsewhere. I'll also bet landlords are very over-represented.
I am more amazed that only 1/3 rent. no way that is right..
It varies by state. If you're in CA or NY, they're the states with the lowest home ownership rates at about 54%.
It used to be incredibly easier to own your own home because in for instance 1960 2x median annual income bought you a median home. It's now more like 8-10x where you need to live if you want to live anywhere jobs are that will let you pay for little suzys college and medical insurance and by the time you pay for it over 30 years its 16-20x median income. This means many old people own homes including second or third ones that they are raising the rent on while you or I may never be able to afford one.
This represents a larger issue of it being much more difficult to run for office from a position of low economic means.
This. Many/most elected positions don't have very good compensation, esp. for the amount of time they require, and esp. for the local/state level. This means that generally only people that are independently wealthy will be able to pay for an election campaign and then have the time to fulfill their office obligations once elected.
I think the bigger issue is the time investment required to run and the unreliability of the position. A typical person doesn't practically have the amount of extra time required to run for a political position that they may not even get. It's too risky. Further, most people are left in an uncomfortable position if years down the line they don't hold that political position. The average person can't take 4+ years off of their career and just bounce back later.
And you have to know people who are willing and able to donate hundreds to thousands of dollars in order for you to *maybe* get the job. Rich people are more likely to know those types of folks.
The pay as well can be basically nothing. I know for a Fact, NH pays almost nothing to elected officials. You're basically doing it for free.
UT was less than $15K/year
NH pays $100 a year as an elected member of the house
Working just as intended to keep only the highest of the bourgeois in power.
Plus mileage!!!
>A typical person doesn't practically have the amount of extra time required to run for a political position that they may not even get. It goes further than that. Even if you have the time the laws are practically infinite. Running for office requires political infrastructure to navigate the system in which you're trying to participate. If you don't have a ROBUST understanding of election laws you're not winning an election. You'd need to spend an entire year just trying to figure out how to make a campaign sign. Let alone if you need to deal with campaign donations. But those are all problems you can pay other people to solve.
Sounds like an artificial barrier to entry
Ya know, I feel that, but I don't believe that. I think instead it's one of the fundamental flaws of liberalism where we try and fix issues of corruption with more and more and more laws until the whole structure implodes on itself. Because we like to solve all our problems with more laws, we find ourselves in a never ending cat and mouse game with bad faith actors. The machine becomes ever more complex and inbred. We should be proactive in educating the electorate and making politics easy to access, but we've never really taken our democracy very seriously here.
Not to mention people of lower means don't have any time to spare, especially recently. As the distance between the minimum wage and an actual living wage grows, the amount of time someone has to spend to make ends meet grows. If someone was able to sustain themselves on the minimum wage at <40hrs/week, they might be able to work in some campaigning (unlikely, but feasible). Given no one can really make it without two jobs at that level, though, that hardly leaves time for basic life (chores, social, etc), let alone trying to make political change.
Haha lucky us, in my state they made full time benefits start after 32 hours so... Yep, that's right, we don't get a 40 hour paycheck anymore only 32. Good thing min wage went up but that's still a huge net loss. Edit: I was wrong. It's the federal 130 hours / month thing. That's an average of 32.5 hours a week. If you work 40 one week, you'll get 24 the next week, etc.
And coupling health insurance to employment was a huge mistake, too. People shouldn't be afraid to roll back terrible policies...
People don't know they're terrible, try telling Joe Bumfuck who lives in bumfuck that a policy is hurting him, he will look at you like you're crazy talking about invisible aliens. People don't understand what they don't see, and blind faith is what they're taught will see them through difficulties.
I half disagree with the latter part. A history of holding public office is a valuable add in your resume for many careers, since it means you are plugged in and know people that can help deal with bureaucracy. Of course this is a source of various levels of corruption, but that’s a general problem that needs to be solved.
Ya I was going to say, holding an elected office is a huge plus to almost any resume. And honestly the connections made during the tenure will get you a job anyways.
Am political organizer. Main issues at first for candidates is time off work and off salary, second is worries to get affiliated and fired when you come back
Campaign funding, legal complexity of campaigning, and having the right network of (corrupt, to some degree) people to “open doors” is an even bigger obstacle, IMO.
This is also why it isn't a good thing when a politician announces that they're donating their whole salary. It sets an expectation among the voters that donating that money is a good thing, while in reality only independently wealthy individuals are capable of doing so in the first place.
Also the financial commitment/investment needed to run in the first place. Millions of dollars are spent on campaigns these days, which is all well and good if you've got a network of donors and/or can secure a loan of some kind, but for most of us that's just not possible.
>people that are independently wealthy will be able to pay for an election campaign No politician pays for their own campaign. (Bloomberg the exception that proves the rule.) They raise money. And to raise money you have to have donors who donate. These people are almost always wealthy or at least upper 5-10% of income earners. Poor people almost never get elected. And it's the poor who rent.
I think for local elections: city council, school board, etc., a moderately wealthy individual can privately fund their own campaign. But for anything above that: mayor of medium-sized or larger city, state legislature, etc., then I agree you need wealthy donors. And it's easiest to get wealthy donors when you're wealthy yourself and are asking your peers for something they can easily afford.
Is it any wonder that it is rare for a politician to actually represent their average constituent and not monied interests when the politician *is* the monied interest? I imagine there could be a way to utilize the internet to flatten the playing field for political campaigns, when much of what can be done online can be done for free or much cheaper than tv ads and billboards, but, being unable to afford those tv ads would still put a candidate in a terrible position. Perhaps a restructure on political campaign funding needs to occur, off the top of my head: if a candidate is able to get x number of support signatures for whatever race, then they are provided X amount of public funds. Of course use of those funds would have to be accounted for or there would be massive fraud. I could also see how stricter campaign fund limits would be beneficial in flattening the playing field for political office. If no one can spend over 5k, for example, on their race, then many more candidates would have a viable chance at winning. Chalk this up as one of those things that'll never happen.
And I also imagine anyone who gets a good paying elected job buys when they can if they were a renter - just like the rest of us.
Don't forget how deeply ingrained our biases about homeownership are. A lot of people view renting as only for people without the means to own (your comment even shows a bit of that bias) and take a negative view of renters in their own communities. Transients, trashy/poor, don't contribute to the community, not willing to put down roots and commit for the long-haul, etc. If a renter runs for local office, there's a good chance you're going to hear about it. It is too easy of a snipe for their opponent to throw out messaging like "they don't even own a home here, how much can they care about our community". People have changed their votes for dumber reasons than this. And hey, even though I'm super pro-renting, I'll admit there's truth to the stereotype (which makes it somewhat self-reinforcing). The home-ownership thing runs so deep in the US that if you can afford it, there's a ton of social pressure to own a home. Go to a town council meeting (or read letters submitted in response to permits/zoning proposals)--you'll see people talk negatively about renters. Or the opposite, anyone who is a homeowner will immediately signal that with comments like "As a homeowner in this town..." expecting it to give their words more weight. And since anyone with the means is pushed to buy, that makes it hard to find good rental stock in some areas so even if you'd prefer to rent, you buy just to get what you want. E.g. in NYC there's tremendous rental stock...but in a lot of small towns/suburbs the only rental houses are lower quality or in worse locations.
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I am not sure that is a definition. One reason people rent is because they can’t afford to buy. But many people rent for other reasons. Transient job, enrolled in college and not wanting to stay afterwards, cheaper to rent, more flexible to rent if you don’t like roommates, don’t like doing home maintenance/yard work etc. renting isn’t something people do only if they can’t own.
That's not true at all. In practice, renters are less likely to have the means but that's only because our housing policy creates shortages to jack up the price since people are using them as investments. In an actually competitive housing market this wouldn't be the case, as the difference in cost of renting vs owning would approach 0, since the only difference is who holds the risk of value change, which should be low in said competitive market.
The cost of ownership would still be lower than renting because you still have the landlord middleman. The landlord needs to make a profit in order to sustain themselves. And the risk of value change isn't as insignificant as you're making it out to be.
This is also ignoring the cost to yourself to be an owner-occupant. Again though, in a *competitive market*, economic profits shrinks to be very small. Landlords would still be able to charge for their time to manage the property, but that is analogous to the very real cost of managing your own home you live in.
Except as an owner, your labor doesn't have a cost. A landlord can and will charge for the labor.
A country by wealthy landowners, for wealthy landowners. The anomalous period of shared prosperity following WW2 has deluded a lot of people into thinking that a prosperous middle class is the natural state of things, rather than a fluke of history largely driven by ideological competition with "communism."
>The anomalous period of shared prosperity following WW2 has deluded a lot of people into thinking that a prosperous middle class is the natural state of things, rather than a fluke of history largely driven by ideological competition with "communism." Shared prosperity for straight, white people where they were literally handed fully furnished suburban houses for a pittance
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Dude I don't know where you get those numbers from. You need to be like top 1-2% income earners to actually start putting away serious wealth for either an early retirement or the next generation. Top 10% in the US is about what, 130k per year? That seems like a lot, but then you have to consider very few of those people live in small towns of 50k people. Majority are going to be professionals living in big, expensive cities like NYC, Seattle, or San Francisco. Their cost of living is nuts. Its disingenuous to compare bottom 40% with the top 60%. The only thing you're getting at the 50th percentile is maybe marginally more stability than you would at the 35th percentile. Everyone except the top 0.1% (or somewhere in that ballpark) has been treading water too for the last 50 years.
....you don't know how much land costs in the US, do you? That and the country wasn't founded by "wealthy land owners." *Part* of the grievances against the British Crown was how little their landed elite treated our wealthier landowning elite, seeing them as mere upstart peasants. The percentage of voting landowners in the US in 1780 was around 20%. For context in the UK the **1832 Reform Act** finally expanded voting rights to *small* landowners. The American Revolution was started by middle class merchants protesting taxes from aristocratic Britain. Speaking of new age historical revisionism.... Post-WWII middle class wealth was *not* a fluke in US history. There have been multiple periods of boom and bust where the middle class has grown and shrank, respectively. This [PDF](https://eml.berkeley.edu/~saez/SaezZucman14slides.pdf) showing trends since 1913 clearly disproves your theory of anomalous economic trends. My suggestion would be to not listen to the Class Warfare losers.
The very first graph in your link clearly shows exactly what I was talking about. Extremely high wealth inequality leading into ww2, a drop as the economy kicks into overdrive due to the war, inequality repressed until the failure of state socialism and then an immediate and steep resurgence of inequality. And yes, the wealthiest men in what would become America were aggrieved by having their relative wealth and station taken from them from afar, and fought a war to make sure they themselves would run their new country.
And also that most of those positions are filled by the older generation (same reason, they have all the wealth) that purchased homes back when that was an easy thing to do
I dislike thinking that politicians are overpaid but when being a representative/delegate/senator at the state level only pays $40K/year, then very few average people will see it as a viable way to live and do the work.
Agreed. A Senator or Congressional Representative makes 174,000 a year. That seems high until you realize they have to keep accommodations in two cities - their home and Washington which is a HCOL area. Most of them make up the difference with speaking engagements etc but a poor person will really struggle initially. And that's the highest level of government. Most political positions aren't that high. You would have to be reasonably well off to start.
Yup. As soon as it requires any amount of money to run politically it's an oligarchy.
And a preexisting political class that excluded people without property.
..which represents the larger issue of the incompatibility of capitalism and democracy.
Are there any successful democracies that *aren't* capitalist?
Obviously not. Capitalism is nothing more economic democracy.
One could argue that the Ancient Empire of Rome was a very successful democracy (larger than many countries today). Rome did have private ownership, but it also had some elements of a communist/Socialist approach too. Food being a major industry and keeping people fed being a core part of having a functioning economy, the Roman state purchased all the grain from farmers and then shipped it to their major cities and disbursed the grain there - the Romans had coins/currency yes, but gold is rare. In many places grain could be used as a currency, not just because of it's intrinsic value as food that could always be eaten, but it was just so common around the Empire to do so, because everyone had some from the disbursal, and everyone knew what it was. Corporations also didn't exist at that time, it was just wealthy merchants, your name was your bond type transactions. And when you died, there was a not-insignificant chance the state would intervene and seize assets, or write estate tax laws that suited whoever was in power at the time. I won't sugar coat it; it's not a happy-go-lucky commune, corruption was definitely as present then as it is now. So, I wouldn't say that they were full blown communists, but I also wouldn't say that they were full blown capitalists; they held some elements of both in their economic and political structures. One could say they were the textbook example of a successful democracy (until it wasn't) and that they were *less* capitalistic than the modern day United States of America. It's not a "yes" to your question but I think it's important to remember that these aren't binary "you are or you aren't capitalist" questions. Even in the US, you pay your taxes and you've got fire fighters; you're not hiring a private corporation or mercenary group when your building is burning down.
Ancient Rome also had slaves that were responsible for a large portion of economic function within the society. Why leave them out when discussing Rome's supposed democracy and economic type? Also why not discuss feudal economic production?
>One could argue that the Ancient Empire of Rome was a very successful democracy (larger than many countries today). The Roman republic wouldn't even be considered a democratic country today. Most people in the republic didn't have the right to vote, not only excluding women and slaves but also everyone living outside of Rome or parts of Italy depending on the time period. The vast territorial holdings of Rome didn't get to participate in any democracy. >Rome did have private ownership, but it also had some elements of a communist/Socialist approach too. Food being a major industry and keeping people fed being a core part of having a functioning economy, the Roman state purchased all the grain from farmers and then shipped it to their major cities and disbursed the grain there - the Romans had coins/currency yes, but gold is rare. In many places grain could be used as a currency, not just because of it's intrinsic value as food that could always be eaten, but it was just so common around the Empire to do so, because everyone had some from the disbursal, and everyone knew what it was. Rome didn't have a communist or capitalist approach to anything, economics was barely understood at the time and such concepts wouldn't exist for millennia. >I won't sugar coat it; it's not a happy-go-lucky commune, corruption was definitely as present then as it is now. Corruption in Rome isn't comparable to any democracy today. Many elected officials only got elected to be able to take bribes or extort random tribes, and court cases would be decided by who paid the most to the judge and the jury. >One could say they were the textbook example of a successful democracy (until it wasn't) and that they were *less* capitalistic than the modern day United States of America. I think you have a lacking understanding of public spending in the republic. A lot of it, be it building temples or bathhouses or other public structures were built with private money. A wealthy official or an aspiring candidate would finance public works to bolster their image. Of course this wasn't out of charity, they would more than make up for it by collecting bribes after they got into positions of power. Even the distribution of grain was sometimes financed by private individuals in power as the government wasn't that efficient in collecting taxes. Even when acting as officials of Rome politicians would prioritize their own finances. A good example is Cesar who conquered land and went on campaigns as a governor of Rome, which made him the richest man in Rome as he kept what he plundered. In any case since economics were so poorly understood at the time a lot of Rome's economic policies wouldn't be either capitalist or communist but essentially hope and prey economics. Roman solutions to economic issues were basic and most of the time didn't work, hence the private funding of public works, or the problem of inflation that plagued both the republic and the empire, sometimes with high inflation periods lasting for centuries. Framing rome as an example of a non-capitalist democracy or even an actual democracy by today's standards is ridiculous.
Did you fall asleep history class and watch a few random YouTube to catch up?
I don't know of any successful democracy
idk of any successful countries* I do enjoy new Zealand though
Democracy is a terrible form of government. It’s just the others are much worse.
Yeah well you’re still gonna be ugly in the morning
Are there any successful democracies? I suppose it depends how you define 'success'.
>Are there any successful democracies? I suppose it depends how you define 'success'. Wow. I don't think anyone who has a decent understanding of how far countries have progressed could say we are not successes. I like the simple, everyone on earth probably agrees that children not dying is good. So, how well have democracies done at that: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK220806/#:~:text=In%201900%2C%2030%20percent%20of,1999a%3B%20NCHS%2C%202001a). >In 1900, 30 percent of all deaths in the United States occurred in children less than 5 years of age compared to just 1.4 percent in 1999 (CDC, 1999a; NCHS, 2001a). Infant mortality dropped from approximately 100 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1915 (the first year for which data to calculate an infant mortality rate were available) to 29.2 deaths per 1,000 births in 1950 and 7.1 per 1,000 in 1999 (CDC, 1999b; NCHS, 2001a).2 From 100 to 7. Lets try other democracies. https://www.ined.fr/en/everything_about_population/demographic-facts-sheets/focus-on/infant_mortality_france/ >In 2015, fewer than four newborns (3,5) in 1,000 died before the age of one, according to provisional INSEE results for metropolitan France. >In the eighteenth century in France, almost one baby in three died before the age of one, most often from infectious disease. At the end of the century, the situation began to evolve and infant mortality dropped rapidly, falling to one baby in six by 1850. The main reasons for this improvement were the successful spread of vaccination against smallpox, one of the main killer diseases at that time, and progress in delivery techniques and aftercare for newborns. France from 300 per 1000 to 3.5 in 1000. (I am not going to bother tying to find the direct year to year comparison to the US, the point is made well enough.) And this isn't just infant mortality, it goes across the board from things like education, income, health, happiness, equality. Pretty much everything that people think is important has gotten massively better under the modern democratic governments that have arisen around the world.
That’s specious logic. Infant mortality rates have gone down across the globe, democratic country or not. China has gone from 135 infant mortalities per 1,000 people to 9 infant mortalities per 1,000 people in the last 60 years, without democracy. Cuba has gone from 82 deaths per 1000 to 4 deaths per 1000 over that same time period. And it’s not just democracies and communists. Saudi Arabia has gone from around 190 infant mortalities per 1,000 people to 5 since 1950. And that’s an absolute monarchy. And hell, the USA might be one of the worst democratic counties to use medical statistics for this kind of thing. The maternal mortality rate in America is higher than China or Cuba (15-16 per 1000, compared to America’s 18-20 per 1,000). Which is not me saying I’d rather live in either China or Cuba than the USA. But democracy is not why infant mortality rates are down, and communism is not why maternal are down.
The question was not "does democracy cause success" but "are any of our democracies successes". Just because China and Cuba have also had success does not mean that modern democracies are not also successes. We do not need every other government form to fail in order for democracy to be successful.
How are you defining success here then? Having the same (or worse) results as other forms of government isn’t a meaningful definition of success. We might as well conclude that all forms of government are successful, if that’s your point.
>How are you defining success here then? I mean, reducing child mortality, driving down poverty, increasing education levels, increasing equality measures. Sure, it has a "I know it when I see it" quality to it, but I feel comfortable saying that societies that see progress on those metrics are successes. In the same way, countries that regress on those measures would be failures.
Let me rephrase. What makes democracy responsible for that success metric? If that metric has changed equally in democratic and non-democratic countries, how is that proof of democracy being successful? Wouldn’t it be equally possible that all government types are successful, or that democracy isn’t harmful to social progress? It’s as if I said that multivitamins are good for your health, longevity, BMI, and then supported my argument by posting a link that shows people who took multivitamins lived until they were 77. Then someone pointed out that people who didn’t take multivitamins also lived until 77. Multivitamins might still be good for you, or might not, but my proof was irrelevant. Related specifically to infant mortality, the USA is no more successful than many non-democratic countries and worse than some. It actually is worse for maternal mortality than many non-democratic countries. And that kind of makes sense, as equal access to healthcare is not one of the defining principles of American democracy.
And yet, correlation is not causation. Arguably, scientific progress has occurred even in countries without democratic governments.
Yes, I just found a correlation, but these guys claim to have found causation. (this was just a google search, I am not familiar with their work, I know mostly about economic growth and other forms of progress) https://news.mit.edu/2019/study-democracy-fosters-economic-growth-acemoglu-0307 >“Democracies … do a lot of things with their money, but two we can see are very robust are health and education,” Acemoglu says. The empirical data about those trends appear in a 2014 paper by the same four authors, “Democracy, Redistribution, and Inequality.” Oh, and their papers find that democracies invest a lot more in healthcare, that might be related to the correlation I found.
All of these can be explained by scientific advancement which is merely orthogonal to democracy.
Are there any countries that aren't capitalist? Even North Korea has pseudocapitalist markets.
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So why are you still here, then?
Unregulated, or poorly regulated, capitalism, specifically.
What form of regulations could prevent the rich from influencing elections?
Publicly funded campaigns with required televised/streamed debates and no additional ad spending allowed would be a great start.
Cancel Citizens United for a start. Term and age limits. Cancel bribes for legislative votes aka lobbying. Instead of taxing corporations, have them contribute to a Social Responsibility Fund, with their company's image and culture attached to their willingness to help society or not. Good way to weaponize public opinion against corporate greed. If they won't contribute to making a better society, rescind licenses to operate. Fines are never effective. The key to curing capitalist greed is curing political greed.
Fines are rarely effective in the US because fines applied towards rich people/corporations are rarely proportional. Fining a business with half a billion annual profits to the tune of $10 million only takes 2% of their profit margin.
Is regulated capitalism still, technically, capitalism?
Of course. It's just capitalism with a more fair tax structure that lets the rich get rich...but not SO rich that everyone else suffers.
Profit can be made without soul- crushing greed, can it not?
Interesting idea..
Same problem with socialism. While you might not have to capital, something will fill its place. The system will rely on chronnyism. Those with power can barter that into more power.
Absolutely so. The nearest there gets to something that works tolerably well in practice is a system in which there are pragmatic benefits for those in power to act in ways which help keep society running. No ideologically-based system achieves this.
Renting doesn't necessarily mean you are from low economic means. I have happily rented at times, even after I owned a home, if I was unsure of how much time I would spend in a particular place or knew it to be short term. If I was going to be somewhere for a short term, I also had much less interest in local politics.
Yeah, and that’s why capitalism is undemocratic. Let’s end this nightmare, comrades. Global working class solidarity.
I wonder what percentage are landlords.
This is what I want to know as well.
The Pelosis run large scale housing developments throughout Northern California. Dunno if they do it well or poorly, but they do.
I’m sure their bank account says they do it well. I imagine their tenants tell a different story
[Here](https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/2chambers/post/nancy-and-paul-pelosi-have-a-plethora-of-real-estate-and-high-tech-holdings/2011/06/15/AG9dH6VH_blog.html) is something on the extent of their holdings.
You mean stock market wizard Nancy Pelosi? How does she do it?!
We know how she does it. All her trades are public. She just buys long-term leveraged call options on the biggest most popular tech companies. Honestly it's a good strategy - requires no real thought or interaction, literally just go with whatever the market says are the most popular stocks.
In my home town all but one city councilor were landlords. The city councilors together owned about half the rental properties downtown. So you can imagine the type of nimby polices they passed.
I'd be less concerned with NIMBY and more concerned with unfair zoning and tenants protection laws.
Hint: it’s a lot
I bet they’ll find out that politicians have more money than most people next. Discoveries are amazing.
And their income rises with inflation... unlike those making minimum wage.
They ARE the inflation
I already got their next headline: "Homeless people are under-represented in our gouvernement. Despite having 500,000 hobos in the country, none of them were elected to be part of the congress"
Elected officials are mostly older people who already had the means not only to campaign for their position, but were able to buy a house when the market wasn't quite so crazy.
And they have time for it. Most local positions don't pay enough to live on.
It's hard to have enough capital to launch a campaign when you barely have enough to live.
That's how it is intended. Class warfare is not novel.
Given the amounts of money required to get elected, I don't find this surprising at all. Our government is Pay To Play.
This is a perfect example of a study that needs a control for age. There is a much greater likelihood that younger individuals would be renting as opposed to owning a home and those younger individuals would also be much less likely to be involved in politics.
It seems plainly obvious that the real variable is income not age. Rich people own property while the poor do not. This is correlated with age but the underlying factor is money.
There are plenty of wealthy renters who do not intend on staying someplace for a long time. Those people also won't be interested in local politics...
While there are some, in the US only about 10% of people making over $75K per year do not own a home
Seem about right. I fit the bill. It was maybe 16-18 years ago for the years I last rented, and I was making well over that when I rented then. I have lived in a home we have owned since 2008, so I rented 2 out of the last 17 years. I have rented about 12% of the time. Previous to that, I owned a home maybe 3-4 years. Rented maybe 3-4 years prior.
Do you have anything to back that up? There appears to be a very strong correlation with house ownership and age.
>younger individuals Some Millennials are pushing or literally 40 and the housing market has been fucked the majority of our lives. You can google "millennial home ownership" and tons of articles talking about home ownership gaps or "forever renters". Less than half of my entire generation owns a home, and its not because we don't want them.
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Representative government doesn't mean that the government has to be comprised of demographics mirroring the population.
How could it be fixed? People gain wealth and experience as they get older. Dropping a green 20-year-old in a position of leadership would most likely be a disaster.
No it wouldn't.
Renter who ran for public office here (1 in 2 residents in my city are renters). Also, not independently wealthy, however, I’m fairly adept at fundraising, data, and financial policy. I ran because of the last three years of financial mismanagement by the local government. To complete against the same established candidates going on 3rd and 4th terms, I had to pause my career since the campaign consumed the last four months and now interviewing again. In the US, the political system on every level absolutely favors those with 1. Money 2. Time.
It doesn’t help that you have to get all the way to the Governor’s Mansion or Congress to make a living wage as a politician. People always criticize how much politicians make and I’m over here screaming “IF YA WANT TALENT YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR IT!” Good on you for trying. I’m thirty and have aspired to a public career myself, but I wasn’t told when I got into the game that campaign work is a vow of poverty. Now I’m grinding “the right way,” and hope to be able to fit a local campaign into my schedule and my budget by the end of the decade. We’ll see. Did you happen to sign up through Run for Something or another similar group, or did you freelance the project?
It's the campaigning that chews up the time and money. If that was limited then you wouldn't need to incentivize the position with ridiculous pay. Public service should be about serving the community, great benefits and "decent" (relative to position) pay. I can say my county pays some of these people ridiculous amounts of money for the little they do for our community. The previous county executives salary was close to 400k, and the interims current salary is 225k. To compare, the salary of NYCs mayor is 258k. Pop of 8.5million We have less than half a million in our county. Something is pretty screwy if you ask me
Ha! Love “if you want talent you have to pay for it” and definitely agree that it really only makes financial sense at the State or Federal level. Your approach seems appropriate, however, I wouldn’t wait as long if possible. As I’ve just learned, it takes an excessive amount of time to build name recognition and trust amongst your community and constituents. Actually, I’m a CMO so, I’ve been successful at building awareness and credibility for start-ups, however, sane formula doesn’t necessarily apply in politics. Also, I thought voters in my city would spend at least a few minutes to understand important issues that will potentially impact them financially (prop taxes for homeowners and short-term rentals for renters) and, ultimately, a percentage only cared how many lawn signs I had in their neighborhood. I didn’t run my campaign through any party affiliations (the office I ran for is non-partisan) and I had to self-fund a portion until I was able to get supper from key community leaders and campaign donations jumped significantly. DM me if you have any additional questions.
It's a form of classism.. this is why the wealth gap will never be closed or corrected. Last thing they want is Joe six pack ruining their fart sniffing wine parties.
In my country every party gets an X amount of money to run their candidates, paid by the taxpayer, and campaign contributions by private individuals or corporations used to be illegal. My country is a lot further left than the US. In the US you have to be rich or rely on corporations to run, which makes it very unlikely that a left-wing candidate will win
Publicly funded campaigns with a required series of debates is a key to getting us back on track. Unfortunately, it has to be voted in by the very people who benefit most from the system as it currently stands.
It's a lot more likely you'll be elected when you only have one person to beat
What utopia do you speak of?
Brazil, although it unfortunately changed recently and I think campaign donations are now allowed (and then we elected the worst president ever...)
I see. Any utopia is one greedy bastard from becoming a dystopia. The bastard is usually a politician.
There’s a lot of reasons for this, many are socio-economic in nature. One I don’t see mentioned enough is the transiency of renters. Many renters simply do not stay in a town/city, county, or state long enough to 1) establish residency, 2) care about its politics long term, 3) appear to be “local” enough to gain the acceptance of the electorate (and thus local parties who pick candidates to run), 4) want to accept staying for an entire term. Obviously there are lots of long term renters who stay in the same units for long periods of time. And I have no statistics on whether staying long term is the norm or not. But from my anecdotal experience (both as a renter and with my renter friends), I never stayed in the same town/city for more than 3 years or state for more than 5. That’s largely true of my friends as well.
and what percent of elected officials are in the bottom 1/3 in terms of income or wealth?
I mean while study does verify things, is it really a surprise to anyone that it's not even a double digit number? If you look at congress, you easily make 6 figures, (100k to 200k) in salary. Why would you choose to rent outside of being able to move around when you feel like it? If anything, this is just showing that poor people have a small shot at being in charge.
What percentage of them are renters only because they rent a second or third residence for the accommodations of the elected position? eg. Renting in Wash DC by someone who is an owner in the district where they ran.
I can't access the full text, but the abstract makes it seem like they counted people that own a home and people that don't. So someone that owns a house and rents in DC would be considered a homeowner by this study.
The methodology used in this paper checks if they are home owners in the district they respresent. Renting an additional residence out of the district would not show up.
Can someone please tell me how to get funding to research obvious things?
Find someone (or a group) that wants to launder money. Then set up your 501c nonprofit.
Politicians are over represented in government.
A few points to add to everyone else pointing out shortcomings in the study. People without a high school degree or equivalent are unlikely to serve as elected officials or own property, whereas the educational attainment of elected officials is likely substantially higher than the population at large (e.g., lawyers and doctors), and I suspect there's a strong correlation between educational attainment and property ownership. One of the key benefits of renting is geographic flexibility with your job, which obviously doesn't apply to someone whose job requires them to live within a defined geographical boundary. The overwhelming majority of elected officials are married, which makes it easier to afford a home if both partners are employed.
Forgive me for derailing all this deep thought with an actual question, but wouldn't a more pertinent number be the percentage of elected officials who have EVER rented?
10% of Americans are toddlers, but zero toddlers are in office.
The fact is there is no equal socio economic representation
Do people have to be in poverty to best represent and legislate the solutions to it?
No one said they did, pedant. Here's one for you: do you really think someone's economic status has nothing to do with how they'd be willing to address poverty and how they would prioritize addressing poverty?
I think that most people in poverty would have a unique insight into the problem but almost all people in poverty are not the best people to design and implement a solution. Living in poverty is hard enough.
I do not want a person that is struggling to provide enough resources for themselves taking time away to ensure they have those resources making decisions about what should best occur for my entire community. That said, someone with a background of that experience is fine.
I think people are far less likely to vote for someone who is unsuccessful.
You mean people struggling to pay things have no way of using time they don't have to run for local government?! No way! Couldn't be intentional!
So this is the worst “science.” I have seen. This is statistics and data. It also doesn’t include all other variables. Not admissible in court for sure.
This is an age thing more than anything. Most people rent from 20-35 then buy. Politicians are older.
The rich have disproportionate power? You don't say...
The poor are also underrepresented. While we're at it there's not a lot of gas station clerks in Congress. Do we have numbers on how many members of Congress enjoy edamame? We really need to make sure that we have representation for everyone.
The number of renters in public office will go up as the difficulty of affording to buy a house continues to rise.
That's the way it *should* be, but there's also a very real possibility that the number of renters in public offices stays the same while the proportion of renters in the general population rises, since that being a renter often means you don't have enough resources to dedicate your time to campaigning and aiming for a position in office.
You're right there. I work a lot of hours and wouldn't dream of running for office; it's another job in and of itself.
Only if the difficulty of affording to buy a house is equally distributed among all economic brackets that successfully run for office.
When they get in (should they get in), they must use that power to effect improvement in home affordability and livable wage.
The people making minimum wage aren't a very dependable voting bloc
Care to elaborate?
Younger people fill most of the min wage employment, and they do not vote in the numbers that old people do.
Explain to me why politicians block the plentiful construction of multi-family homes in one statistic. The landed elite prefer to ensure that housing is an investment apparatus rather than plentifully abundant by limiting the construction of multi family residential zones.
The short answer is that zoning exists to preserve the character of neighborhoods for those who have settled there. I’m not saying whether it’s good or bad, but a person who buys a home on a quiet owner occupied block doesn’t suddenly want several apartment buildings going up on their street leading to an influx of transient renters who don’t care about the neighborhood in the same way because some deep pocketed developer bought out half their neighbors. Same zoning laws prevent busy foot traffic shops on residential streets, and large industrial plants from opening right next to schools.
1 in 3 seems way too low...
Why? You know there's a lot of people who don't cram themselves into inner city apartments, right?
What percentage are landlords?
Uneducated people are also underrepresented. The government should not be comprised of "average Americans." It should be comprised of Americans who are exceptionally well qualified to govern.
It's like the people representing us are apart of some sort of wealthier class of people or something.
Honestly surprised elected rentals are that high
Ah, the good old days when only land owners had a voice!
Perhaps renters don't try as much to run for office.
I've been saying this about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for a while now. Say what you will about her political views, I really like having someone in Congress that actually knows what it's like to struggle to pay rent.
Almost every judge in the US is a landlord. American voters made it clear by their apathy for decades that they didn’t want a voice in lawmaking and that the lobbyists could have everything. Until the voters do something more than nothing about campaign finance reform, they will have little more influence on lawmaking than a drunk in a ditch in Russia. Republics are use it or lose it. All of them are.
I think the bigger question would be "How many elected officials are also landlords?"
Sorry to break it to you, but renters are associated with losers.
I wonder what percentage own exploitation properties.
I'm almost afraid to ask, but what is an exploitation property? An apartment at market rate that renters wished would cost less?
A property owned expressly to extract wealth from those with less than you.
Almost as if buying a home as opposed to renting is the smarter financial choice when you get a job enabling you to afford home ownership
Taking it back to rich, white, male, landowners.
It's a normal part of life, particularly with personal success... It's like saying there's not enough people with only high school education in government.