London's burning - TTLG Forums

Pyrian on 10/8/2011 at 16:28

Quote Posted by Warren's Spectre

'The rioting is intensifying to the point were we may not be able to contain it.'

'Why contain it, let it spill over to the school and churches, let the bodies pile up in the streets. In the end, they'll beg us to save them!'

'...and the sound they'll make rattling their cages will serve as a warning to the rest.'

Dammit you beat me to it. :D

Quote Posted by Chimpy Chompy

There are clear links between this stuff and poverty, lack of opportunities etc. If everyone had a career and a decent home etc I doubt it would be happening.

But, do we let people off any standards of personal responsibility? Is it okay to be lawless and smash stuff up, if you have a crappy life?

I hate the underlying logic of this sort of attitude. There is absolutely no reason why something cannot have more than one cause, more than one thing to blame. There is absolutely nothing in pointing out that circumstances contribute to these situations that absolves even one iota of personal blame of the people contributing.

Quote Posted by Chimpy Chompy

I guess what would be best is... jobs. So people have something to do and to work towards. How to do that, since industry died, I have no idea.

Well, as I understand it, these particular economic malaise has been politically chosen rather than necessarily inflicted upon them. "Austerity" and all that. Influence of the rich, presumably, preventing the government from taking actions which would allow more people to get jobs at the expense of existing wealth, through taxes and/or inflation funding public works and investment in national infrastructure.

demagogue on 10/8/2011 at 17:29

I think the best level of explanation is usually bottom-up. People act on incentives & perceived opportunities and costs and based on their values & cultural background & experience, etc, a whole universe of cognitive mechanisms, which always means the responsibility buck stops with the individual, but some of which (not everything) a government can sort of tweak in some limited ways that might have some effect on how people might perceive them that might change their behavior for the better on the whole, haha, far from the clearest path, along with a barrel of side-effects that also follow from the tweaks, and even then no perfect agreement on how to weigh the pros & cons against each other... But I also think the fact it's not a perfect science doesn't let the gov't off the hook either for doing the best they can to the extent they can to improve all manner of social problems, which social ills like crime & riots tend to point towards in better or worse ways (though of course it's hardly ever a clear 1:1 correlation, cf again the complicated universe of cognitive mechanisms involved in any human project).

I don't know if anyone is questioning anything I'm saying, but this is the way I look at stuff like this. Getting into a blame game, from a policy-making perspective anyway, almost inherently makes people focus on a local slice of a social situation instead of taking the global view of a mixed bag of situations, actions, & reactions all over the place & at every level of scale, some of which policy makers can address and some of which they can't. But if your goal is just backseat moral judgment -- a perfectly legitimate thing people do in open societies; don't get me wrong -- that's different and people are justified in holding responsibility where the buck stops, the acting person.

Chimpy Chompy on 11/8/2011 at 00:51

Quote Posted by Pyrian

There is absolutely nothing in pointing out that circumstances contribute to these situations that absolves even one iota of personal blame of the people contributing.

So.. people failed the "morality test" but circumstances are what caused the test to be put before them in the first place? Something like that?

[edit]just trying to work this through in my own head, given that A: my instinct is to think "what a bunch of shitbags" but B: I realise how much better my life is. Okay I'm basically doing backseat moral judgement...

Starrfall on 11/8/2011 at 01:56

Quote Posted by CCCToad

So what is your response to the people who say the same thing about the US? There's no such violence here yet.

It's apparently been a problem on a (much) smaller scale in several places in the US actually.

Quote Posted by Thirith

There's a difference between condoning what has happened and addressing the underlying reasons.

I was going to say almost EXACTLY that, except it was "There's a difference between understanding why people are so pissed off they just don't give a shit and condoning what they do with it."

Not considering the circumstances they're in and frustrations they're facing is far more condescending, I think. Smacks of the "why don't poor people just bootstrap their way into a better life?" stuff the anti-welfare people like to throw out. Why? Because it's hard as hell, getting harder, and assholes like them are doing their damndest to make it harder. Take the minimum wage: here it's worth less now than it was years (and even decades) ago because of inflation. Meanwhile, the costs of college tuition, for example, have outpaced inflation, often to a very large degree. So FUCK all the middle-to-late aged politicians who like to brag about how they worked and put themselves through college on minimum wage, so why should we raise it? Note however that here "fuck" means "don't vote for" because beating them up and taking their stuff isn't cool. I guess what I'm saying is that you can morally condemn them as long as you're compassionate about it.

Martin Karne on 11/8/2011 at 02:32

I had nothing to do with this actions, at the time of this regrettable accidents I was grabbing my di.. oopps, my pillow, yeah my pillow.
:angel:
Hopefully those chavs will get all shot dead, luckily.

SubJeff on 11/8/2011 at 02:58

Quote Posted by Starrfall

Smacks of the "why don't poor people just bootstrap their way into a better life?" stuff the anti-welfare people like to throw out. Why? Because it's hard as hell

There are a good number of people in the UK who don't want to work, have never worked, have parents who have never worked. I'm not anti-welfare, I'm anti stupid welfare.

I personally know a girl (17, daughter of a family friend) who is pregnant with her second child, who has never worked and whose boyfriend (36) has never worked. Her mother (a single mum) only started working recently as she'd lived her whole life on the benefits she got for being a single mum with 3 kids.

This 36 year old is an able bodied man, he's just lazy as fuck. Jointly they get more money per month than I did as a first year doctor because they're out of work and have kids (he has a child with someone else that he has custody of). If this sounds right to you I don't know what to say.

Azaran on 11/8/2011 at 03:51

Quote Posted by Martin Karne

Hopefully those chavs will get all shot dead, luckily.

:thumb:

Muzman on 11/8/2011 at 04:01

It's hardly representative though is it. A properly functioning welfare state will actually end up funding a few serial breeders and surfy bludgers living it up from time to time (intinerant surfies are less of a problem in the UK I imagine), though no politician or civil servant will ever admit this.
No one can come up with a sensible rule structure that says actually you can't have any kids, or any more kids, and we won't help you or them without going to decidedly unpleasent places and starting a countdown to hurting lots of people they didn't really want to.
More to the point; people complain about the cost yet demand oversight of such refined and precise detail that to truly make it as perfectly "fair" and rort-proof as they want it, to eliminate outlier cases, would only make it vastly more expensive on the whole.
It's a matter of where you want your tradeoff to be between justice and expense (well, there are plenty of unreconstructed eugenecists around who say fuck the lot of it and let the place go to Judge Dredd land, but I'm assuming that's not on the table)

demagogue on 11/8/2011 at 04:18

It's always a risk that state support creates a perverse incentive towards a culture of dependence; it's such an old observation it's not even seriously questioned. On the other hand, if the state is going to give support with the right incentives (to get a stable job that can support a family), there has to be a viable route to actually get to that end for it to do what it's supposed to. A good incentive is only as viable as the real-world opportunities available to act on it. I don't know enough about this guy's situation to comment on it; but anyway the system has to look at the overall scheme across the whole population (the law has to apply equally to people). Then the question is, what's the best incentive structure so that state support assists the most people into normalizing their situation? And the state can't just drop the ball on the problem because a mass of persistently unemployed people is like a social disease; it just pulls everything around it down with it. So it's not like state assistance is just about normalizing individuals; it's part of managing the health of the whole economy.

It's interesting we were talking about Krugman in another thread. One thing I remember about his actual economics theories (edit: or maybe somebody else, can't find the source I got it from now...) is treating unemployment as a kind of market failure of the labour market, a negative externality onto society (an externality is like a cost the company doesn't internalize, e.g., reflect in its prices or cost/benefit thinking, but is just dropped on something else without being a cost for the company, like the environment when they dump toxic waste for free). Here, employers don't internalize or take into account the social costs of choosing not to employ able bodied folk when deciding to hire them, or choosing to give them shit terms like short terms or parttime positions, all the rage these days to save money... Then you get people that have been unemployed a long time, and all it does for the labour market is make the employers all the more wary of every hiring this guy, but the social costs (which they don't account for) are even worse. But again the employers never have to internalize that costs and it doesn't go into their decision; it's externalized into all sorts of social ills associated with persistent unemployment, like arguably these kinds of riots, crime, a dependence lifestyle, etc. Externalities are like the textbook market failure situations where the state has a good cause for stepping in & slanting the playing field (in this case the labour market) to counteract the failure (unaccounted costs) in how the market operates, in this case, giving the persistently unemployed a viable route back into stable fulltime employment, or making the labour market somehow "feel" the costs we all feel and take them into account. Then there were certain policy things that follow from that, but I get hazy on the details...

Edit: It was Stiglitz, and here's the wiki entry on it, explains better than my feeble attempt!
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stiglitz#Efficiency_wages:_the_Shapiro-Stiglitz_model)

Muzman on 11/8/2011 at 04:41

Back to my This American Life-ducation again, there was a good one from a little while back about how government "creates jobs" (short answer: they really don't, or its such a long term thing that certainly no single term could take credit for any given employment growth). There they were talking about the raising of standards and how the truly unskilled job has all but disappeared. Even arguably unskilled jobs expect you to have finished high school just as a sort of arbitrary class/culture watershed.
I find this to be the same here and wouldn't be surprised if it applies to the UK as well. The days where you could at least live fairly well on a not even blue collar job and there were a good selection of them, have just about gone. It's a broad socio-economic trend I don't think there's much to be done about, but it's going to throw up a lot of problems when it comes to rehabilitating lower class areas.
I don't want to overstate unemployment's role in this, actually, but life is getting interesting in that way.