There is just a constant sound of sirens in the distance at this point. Most everyone on facebook from Philly is praising the rioters with comments like "let it burn", granted not a damn one of them own property or a business...

> not a damn one of them own property or a business...

@freemo Heh, if you social contract concentrates on protecting property, then it's not very surprizing that people who don't own any don't feel firmly attached to it.

Not that I condone looting/arson of course, this part of your toot just seemed amusing to me.

@timorl well yea thats exactly my point.. Obviously most people are selfish and only care about themselves. so if they dont own any property they really arent going to care how many lives are ruined by its destruction.

Thats exactly the point I was highlighting there, so we largely agree.

@freemo Oh no, that wasn't my point at all. I mean, I agree that this is related to selfishness, and someone completely selfless wouldn't do any of that. But my point was rather that countries/cultures in which social contracts concentrate less on protecting property and more on e.g. economic solidarity have people more hesitant to break the rules.

I encountered this concept fist in a discussion of homeless people shitting in streets. Since the social contract does not give homeless people literally anything (this was true at least for some of them in the context of the discussion) why would they feel the need to abide by even its simplest requirements? I think this situation is similar, although the contribution from this effect is relatively smaller.

@timorl Well sure, on the extream end of that if all property was owned by everyone, such as in a commune, then it is less likely that people are going to rebel and destroy property.

But while your point may have been coming from a different perspective I wouldnt say its all that different.. The underlying aspect of that is still that people dont care if property is destroyed as long as it isnt theirs. If the property is shared (economic solidarity, whats yours is mine) then that is less likely to happen.

But thats all still just selfishness in my mind "if you arent going to give me what you have then Id ont care what happens to what you have"

@freemo I understand that perspective, but I feel it still ignores the core of what I mean (or maybe just disagrees with it on a very fundamental level). If you think of a social contract as a, well, contract, then people shouldn't be forced to accept it if the terms are ridiculously unfafourable to them. You wouldn't really call someone selfish for refusing to accept a contract with very bad terms. It's not quite the same with social contracts of course, but the perspective is not completely invalid either.

As a pretty extreme example consider feudalism. It concentrates on protecting the property rights of the monarch (for simplicity lets say in the Russian sense of owning everything in the country). The peasants get little out of this contract -- at best they get some protection from outside threats and the possibility to live relatively peacefully. I would say in this case they can break the contract (by revolting) without being labelled unusually selfish.

I'm not saying this is the main thing fueling the current US riots (and definitely not saying the current US social contract is as bad as the extreme feudalism example!), only it's an interesting perspective as to what form they are taking.

@freemo Oh, and despite the extreme examples I don't mean extremes here. I'm trying to point out that the balance in the US is much more geared towards "property first" while in most of Europe it's much more geared toward "solidarity first". Neither are on the extreme end of the spectrum, and Europe doesn't have significantly more communal property than the US (I think?), but the social contracts are still visibly different.

@timorl So the big difference here is that in your analogy it would be the surfs rebeling against the lords. In this scenario that would look like the poor rebeling against banks and governments. burning down personal homes and businesses would be like the surfs burning down a random farm in the country side.. it isnt owned by the farmer but the farmer relies on it for his livlihood.

In fact its worse because in modern society if your business burns down and you have a mortgage you still owe the mortgage. So your hurting your fellow man even more so.

@freemo Yeah, I wasn't expressing myself clearly and in that example revolting was the only possibility. The riots in the US are not really a revolt, that would need organization which is missing. The feudalism example would have to be significantly altered to reflect the riots better.

I mean there is this whole social contract which, in the US, concentrates on protecting property. If you have enough property to live comfortably (i.e. you are at least middle class) you get quite a lot from the contract and have good reasons to accept it. However, if you have significantly less than that, then the social contract gives you... not much. Not completely nothing, the US is not completely... anarcho-capitalist? But the cutoff where they get little enough to not accept the contract on good grounds is pretty high in the US. And if the social contract is bad for them, why should they feel obliged to follow its conventions anyway?

I should still stress I don't the riots are the correct way of enacting change -- in fact I very much doubt they will. I'm only trying to explain the surprizing support for them. People don't feel the social contract is fair, so they reject it or at least are not very bothered if it's broken. I postulate that if the social contract included more "terms" providing for people without much property, they would still feel obliged to uphold the parts about property being important despite not owning much themselves.

@timorl I wouldnt say thats exactly true.. more than half of the US's 500 richest people all started with nothing. The US creates a system where the billionares are by in large part people who started with nothing.

I'd say that is what the social contract gives you. Not to say it is perfect, There is a lot I would do to improve wage mobility. But as someone who pretty much cant work anywhere in europe without taking a 66% pay cut I cant say the social contract is very appealing in europe when it comes to ownership and wealth speaking as a person who has roots in the poor community (I started out on welfare).

@freemo That is the wrong statistic for this problem. The issue is how many people start out below middle class and stay that way, and what they get out of the system. The people who end up extremely rich are a statistical fluke from that perspective (not to devalue their work, they just make up a miniscule portion of society).

From what I understand the US social order used to include a relatively likely path from lower class to middle class, which was slowly getting less accessible over the years. (I haven't checked any statistics on that, but this is my impression from reading about US history. Please correct me if I'm wrong.) This was essentially a part of the social contract -- as you point out, this can be acceptable for the poor. But it no longer seems to work, so with this part of the contract gone it gets less appealing etc.

It's not surprizing you like the social contract when you get more out of it, symmetrically to what the poor people feel. I think this is "selfish" to about the same extent. You don't like changing the contract in ways which would make you take a pay cut, they don't like keeping it as it is in ways that keep them poor. And note the quotation marks around "selfish" -- I suspect you would accept changes to the social contract that would cost you a bit while increasing social mobility (if that was possible of course), and the rioters probably would have accepted some changes like that too (although they would have had to happen in the past). The fact this didn't happen is a coordination problem, 'cause politics is hard. :/ It didn't happen, and now we have cities burning.

@timorl Well yes and no, depends what you care about..

If we just look at how many people start out below middle class and move up to middle or higher, we are really asking "how many people commit themselves to learning marketable skills and getting a job". We arent really asking anything about how much **oppertunity** they have to do it. A country can have the best oppertunities in the world but if no one is hard working enough to take advantage of it then the statistics will be low.

What I would say you are seeing is not that there is any less oppertunity to move from lower class to middle class, but rather the self entitlement of the lower class, coupled with a change in mentality in other areas (like you deserve to get paid just for doing hard work regardless of the skills you have) has largely shifted.

I'm relatively young, but I have been hiring people for about 2 decades now. I can say I've seen a huge decline in how much work a person will invest in themselves and even the work ethic of those who do. Its very hard to hire the vast majority of the yougner generation.

From what I've seen the issue mostly boils down to people sitting around thinking the system is corrupt and meanwhile they have no useful skills to speak of, the fault mostly lies in their own laziness in some ways (though there are systemic issues in the cost and quality of education too).

I am a person who started on welfare and worked his way out of it. so generally I expect people to be able to do the same.