Topic: Why do people in USA fear socialism so much? - page 19. (Read 34853 times)

Well, simply put:
Socialism F**ed up Portugal, my country, by spending tax payers money in corruption, in construction work that never saw the day light, in in paying for people who got advantage of the system and lived without jobs (because they wanted to, not because they couldn't find one), not paying taxes or even the food they ate.

So simple as that.
Want to be social? Get a job first.

A few comments:

1) Science can never prove anything. Only provide evidence for or against a theory.

2) The common way of analyzing data used in this study (the p-value) is widely believed to be faulty by statisticians. It does not assess whether the data provides evidence supporting a theory, instead assumes that a null hypothesis is true and tells you the odds of getting results as extreme as were observed. Thinking that a small p-value means the evidence supports a theory is committing the fallacy of the transposed conditional. This is like thinking that just because every time it rains there are clouds, there is rain every time there are clouds. There are hundreds of papers on this dating back to the 1940s, and the statisticians are getting more and more pissed at the refusal of scientists to acknowledge this. The false positive rate amongst studies with p-values near .05 is estimated to be as high as 80%.  

3) The conclusion that "the reason is that people get bored by stuff and hate to be told to do something, while they love to achieve something" appears to be pulled out of Dan Pink's Ass (correct me if I am wrong here...). This is the explanation offered by the authors of the paper:
In other words, most people perform worse under pressure. Note that the validity of this explanation for the data was not tested at all. However logical it sounds, it is completely hypothetical.

4) Interestingly, the authors also appear to be using these results to justify paying lower wages and salaries:

5) I really hate how science gets distilled for the NPR, TED talk audience even more than when it is totally dumbed down for the general public.

For anyone who cares...some free links below.
Here is the main paper Dan Pink is referencing:
http://www.bos.frb.org/economic/wp/wp2005/wp0511.pdf

Short article on p-values:
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Odds%20are,%20it%27s%20wrong:%20science%20fails%20to%20face%20the%20shortcomings%20of...-a0223598536

Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-value

*Edit: I did find the rest of your post interesting though.

Assuming different human natures, everything from anarchism to communism could potentially work.  Problem is, this just doesn't happen in real life

In 2 words: Cold war

Scientifically proven to be wrong. The reason is that people get bored by stuff and hate to be told to do something, while they love to achieve something. You can see this when people play video games and invest a lot of time and money into this. You can see this in open source projects, etc. Besides that work (or achieving something) is a good way to impress. That's also why people who don't work, even if they have enough money are more likely to become depressed and commit suicide.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

I am still not a socialist, not an American and don't think they are doing it better than socialists. I think they do it worse. The US has an awesome concept, because it's based on liberty/freedom, but sadly the people are being manipulated all the time. In a way the US are way more authoritarian, than China for example. However, the way this is enforced is completely different. Advertisement, religion, nationalism and the resulting society enforce a much stricter rule set than it would be possible doing top-down using a form of dictatorship or police state. If you change the society to enforce things on their own then you also prevent movements to change the status quo. If it's not just the government, than it's way harder to declare an enemy. In the US corporations are very strong, so power is spread. This may be the cause for the stability of the US. Don't get me wrong, I am not saying this is planned, it's more like the evolution of a society. Maybe it's even beneficial that this attitude causes hate by other and an enemy people like terrorism is good for nationalism. I guess there even is a demand for this. People in the US appear to need some kind of enemy and some strong men to face it. This enemy also justifies stuff like COINTELPRO, the PATRIOT act, even if they are meed public by the freedom of information act. It appealingly works pretty well and countries like China are trying to copy this strategy. Btw. in China you have one party, while in the US you have two, but in most areas they aren't too different from each other. It's the same in most Europe countries. They usually are like extreme centrists reflecting the intersection of everyone's thought and since people are not smart in every area, just in their own ones the outcome is pretty plain and often simply dumb. In China you have the big cities, that are a lot like the US, while the rural areas are more like the medieval and people don't care for them, because they don't know about it. In the US they are more like "everyone can achieve anything", so it's pretty much their fault. It's the problem if -some- (really, just some) libertarians and liberals, who think people would be equal and therefor it's everyone's business to care for themselves. I actually know that most libertarians and liberals think there should be institutions caring for people, but things shouldn't be enforced and it should be an institution, not the government. The thing is that such a society wouldn't really be too different from a socialist one. With that I mean that both systems would theoretically work well, if people would be informed or better inform themselves and actually care. I think most people mix up political or economical systems with society. A society defines how things are, not a small group of rulers. Of course, a small group may influence society, but pretty much everyone may do so, else we would still have kings ruling everywhere and not what people call democracies.

tl;dr: Forget socialism, capitalism, liberalism, anarchism, nationalism or whatever -isms. It just prevents people from working together and doing the right thing.

Want a proof this works? See Bitcoin. All kinds of people (whatever -ism they are) are here, because it's awesome and probably the right thing. It's the same for the internet and same for pretty much everything else. Just because things work, not because they are liberal or conservative.

i think its possible. not all but some, like Atlas or other sociopaths, might get killed or commit suicide.

EDIT: I DO NOT LIKE PEOPLE GET KILLED.

I just want to know how you think the transition can happen without killing us all.

Simple != Easy

Uncontrolled information channels (like the internet) are certainly helping a lot though. 

Yes, very simple. OK, then do it.

Simple, abolish the state.

Once one realizes the immorality of the state, the only moral choice reduces to abolition.  Laying groundwork for what might happen next is secondary.  For example, many pro-slavery people in the 19th century attempted to shift the burden of argument by asking, "How will the cotton industry survive?" when facing slavery abolitionists.  From a moral standpoint, the burden actually lies on the shoulders of those who continue to advocate immorality.

Possibly the US government is more clever about it. But yea, eventually I will look into how those numbers were calculated and try a better way of charting it. I was hoping someone else would be interested enough to do it though.

Very true mashuri, now what do you propose we do about it?

Socialism, fascism, democracy, monarchy... all variations of human farming.  Until people realize that human ownership (sometimes referred to as slavery) is inherent to the state, any state, they'll continue to bicker about which plantations and masters are best to serve under.

Sure it does. Very interesting. But a bit subjective, likely. In particular the UAE seemed to be exceedingly corrupt when I was there. When I went there for my company 2 years ago I had to deal with corruption before I could even start to work: I had to pay a "sponsor" handsomely to get a badge to enter the facility. And Goodness only knows what kind of cash changed hands to get the contract in the first place. On your chart, UAE looks almost leveled with the USA.

So this sigmoid curve with two city states at the top right doesn't interest anyone? I mean it looks almost like a drug dose-response curve. That could be due to ceiling and floor effects though...

This is mostly just a concept since I don't know exactly how these scores were calculated (i.e. is the perception that Venezuela is corrupt shared by Venezuelans, or is it an outside perspective, etc). Also, "freedom from corruption" was included in calculating the economic freedom score but is only one small factor, so it is not responsible for the entire correlation. Anyway it should be recalculated without that factor.



http://www.transparency.org/policy_research/surveys_indices/cpi/2010/results

http://www.heritage.org/Index/Explore.aspx

*edited to label a few more countries

Yes, at least they can possibly rob from me some of the time while not robbing me all the time.

At least primitive monarchies are honest about stealing from you, eh?

Monarchies and dictatorships, when they existed long ago, were preferable to what we had today. One could easily evade the laws and taxes since the technology and means to enforce them were negligible. I would take a primitive monarchy over what we have today any time.

Agreed (that it is a mix). But where is the line? To my mind, the banks are on the socialist side these days. Obviously I, which countless others, pay for their losses and the bonuses of their traders and board members. Even though I have nothing to do with most of them. Which I think is not a good thing. But a very socialist thing. My uncle (self employed) did that 40 years in the GDR.


Hmmm, I might have guessed that corruption existent, but was not extremely high during the Great Leap Forward. But then, maybe you are right and corruption is to blame for the ~20 Million who starved to death at the time. I would have thought it was planning, and particularly incompetent planning at that.