52
votes
Why are countries consistently ranked across "nice" lists?
It just happens that scoring high in the indexes you listed - progressive policies, social mobility, education and income equality - all require the same two things:
A productive economy which ...
- 78.9k
50
votes
What did Frank Herbert mean when he said “humans do not have equal ability”, concerning equality?
I think that Frank Herbert's points were these:
Everyone is different, with different varying abilities. You might
be good at math, I might not be. I might learn by doing, you might
learn by ...
- 1,516
41
votes
Accepted
Is there a feasible route by which UK housing can be made more affordable without devastating the housebuilding sector and its employees?
Another reason you cannot have a significant drop in house prices is that it would push millions of people into negative equity, which in itself would cause massive damage to the economy (not to ...
- 962
28
votes
Is there a feasible route by which UK housing can be made more affordable without devastating the housebuilding sector and its employees?
TL;DR - the government should print more, take less, and stop interfering
Houses aren't that expensive. Land isn't that expensive. Land with planning permission is incredibly expensive.
A hectare of ...
- 402
24
votes
Crime and poverty: Correlation or causation?
It really depends (but sometimes there is causation)
As noted in other answers, "crime" is not necessarily a philosophically coherent category. Some classic examples of activities that have ...
- 18.1k
18
votes
Is OpenAI Anglo-Saxon propaganda?
This question shows an – unfortunately widespread – misunderstanding of what GPT-3 is and what it isn't.
GPT-3 is a language model. It is being fed with vast amounts of text, and from this text it ...
- 5,214
16
votes
Accepted
Why are there so many adults in the US who cannot read?
Second question: Yes perhaps by trillions of dollars.
First question: It's complicated. The actual number is hard to measure, since literacy isn't a digital, yes/no property. There is a spectrum of ...
- 124k
14
votes
Does a best or most optimized system exist?
The problem with this question is that you can not think of this as an objective mathematics optimization problem, because quantifying "benefit" and "suffering" is a completely subjective thing. So ...
- 78.9k
13
votes
Is there a feasible route by which UK housing can be made more affordable without devastating the housebuilding sector and its employees?
I think an as-yet largely unaddressed point is the impact of planning permission. Trilarion mentions land being expensive, but this is true mostly due to artificial limits on supply. As an ...
- 131
12
votes
Accepted
Why is Facebook not restricted by the U.S. government to be politically neutral, like the U.S. Army, for example?
Okay, this requires a lot to unpack, but I'm going to try here. For the purposes of this discussion, I'll use two "controversial" statements one that will be agreeable to most US society including ...
- 16.1k
12
votes
Why has the State been considered as a problematic institution?
Cynical answer:
The paragraph quoted seems like an ominous portent of the boredom to follow. They're just saying that over the centuries various authors have various differing definitions of "the ...
- 13k
12
votes
Accepted
Crime and poverty: Correlation or causation?
FWTW, there's a somewhat old [1997] World Bank study on Jamaica:
Disentangling the direction of causality between violence and urban poverty is difficult.
There are many channels through which ...
12
votes
How long have people been predicting the collapse of the family?
Question:
How long have people been predicting the collapse of the family?
Predicting the collapse of the family, observing it's collapse or generally worrying about the future of society because ...
- 5,595
11
votes
What did Frank Herbert mean when he said “humans do not have equal ability”, concerning equality?
In fact, I believe attempts to create some abstract equalization create a morass of injustices that rebound on the equalizers. Equal justice and equal opportunity are ideals we should seek, but we ...
- 93.3k
11
votes
Is OpenAI Anglo-Saxon propaganda?
ChatGPT gives a misleading appearance of being a research tool. As Jorg's answer explains, it's a language model, and no more than that. It does not understand the the things you ask it about.
It has ...
- 10.9k
10
votes
Why is Facebook not restricted by the U.S. government to be politically neutral, like the U.S. Army, for example?
Facebook is not a government organization. It is a private company. As such, the first amendment does not restrict its right to free speech, it protects it. As a private company, they can decide what ...
- 78.9k
10
votes
What are the core universal differences between young and old people's political attitudes?
Has political psychology revealed some universal differences between
young and old people's attitudes that would explain big factors such
as the identification on the left-right and globalist-...
- 88.3k
10
votes
Is China suffering increased crime levels or reduced GDP growth from having 17% more men than women in the 15-24 age bracket?
Yes, but perhaps not as the ones you discuss. The South China Daily Post has an article:
Cai Yong, an associate professor of social demography at the University of North Carolina, said men from ...
- 124k
9
votes
2024 UK election: What connects the regions where Liberal Democrats succeeded?
You've got some baseline regional power bases.
Lib Dems: South West
Conservatives: Rural Areas - South, South East, East Anglia, Home Counties, Fens
Labour: (Former)Industrial North, Towns and Cities....
- 220
8
votes
What did Frank Herbert mean when he said “humans do not have equal ability”, concerning equality?
The bit concerning you seems to be
humans do not have equal ability.
That is manifestly true though.
Some people are strong, some are fast, some are smarter, some more intuitive. Everyone has ...
- 1,426
8
votes
What did Frank Herbert mean when he said “humans do not have equal ability”, concerning equality?
It's not an interesting quote politically or otherwise, because it's obvious.
SF writers of Herbert's generation were prone to issuing frank and chronic updates of their educational misadventures. ...
- 13k
8
votes
Accepted
Does a best or most optimized system exist?
As a question on this stack, this seems to assume that the "best" system will be political in nature. That's not necessarily so. Many of the improvements from five hundred years ago are ...
- 90.3k
8
votes
Why are countries consistently ranked across "nice" lists?
Political goods tend to reinforce each other. For example countries with good, free or cheap higher education tend also to have high social mobility. Moreover, an informed citizenry can hold the ...
- 9,168
8
votes
What it the logic behind prisons' spatial distribution around the world?
Beware of statistics with low sample sizes. While 8 is almost three times 3, the absolute numbers are so small that random effects might distort things. And according to this site, Latvia has 9 ...
- 116k
7
votes
What connects successful enterpreneurs and populism?
What connects them seems to be some obvious (even to non-academic-politologists) facts.
One of the most obvious is the trust in institutions:
As per FiveThirtyEght (originally sourced from Gallup), ...
- 93.3k
7
votes
Are there countries where the Roma have integrated into local society?
The Dom (in North Africa and the Middle East) and Lom (in the Middle East) people are, insofar as I'm aware, relatively well integrated compared to their Romani cousins in Europe.
The thing with ...
- 30.7k
7
votes
Are there countries where the Roma have integrated into local society?
I will try to provide an answer from Romania's perspective which has one of the largest communities of Roma people: ~850000. It might also explain, at least in part, Bulgaria's issues in integrating ...
- 53.5k
7
votes
Are Americans more critical of their own country as compared to other countries with similar levels of development?
Are Americans more critical of their own country as compared to other
countries with similar levels of development?
it appears to be extremely common to hear people fault U.S. society in
various ways, ...
- 88.3k
6
votes
Is there a feasible route by which UK housing can be made more affordable without devastating the housebuilding sector and its employees?
As others have pointed out, the affordability of housing is not really linked to house-building profits.
House-buying is limited by:
high-demand areas such as London; meanwhile there was a period ...
- 22.2k
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