First principles of income distribution

Anyone attempting to live well within a society must have a concept of fairness; there’s a limit to how much debasement you should tolerate. You wouldn’t just let somebody cut in line in front of you, not only because you would have to wait longer, but it’s a matter of principle: it’s not fair. This isn’t unique to humans, even monkeys wouldn’t do the same job another monkey is doing, if the other monkey is receiving a grape, while he a cucumber slice. I wouldn’t do it either; I prefer grapes too.

If your potatoes are as good as the neighbor’s potatoes, but he sells them at $20, while you can only sell them at $10, either he is doing something right, you are doing something wrong, or your view of the world is incorrect, and your potatoes are not as good as you thought. It is a puzzle that must be solved, because those extra $10 might be the difference between survival, attracting a potential mate, or death.

You might not be able to solve every mystery of life and the universe, but surely you should be able to sell your potatoes at $20, and so you must.

This is the simplest explanation why we are hard-wired for fairness, and we refuse to be part of a system that exploits us. We might not understand every aspect of an extremely complex socio-economic system, but we recognize we should be paid the same amount as other cogs in the machine of the same level, at least.

Inequality

We understand we can’t all have the same wealth, we can see people that work less than we do, or have less ability, so we should be paid more than them. If follows that other people provide more value than us, therefore certain level of inequality might be tolerated, if not even favored.

Many staunch capitalists shrug at the question of inequality. “You want everyone to have the same wealth?” they belch. Few things in this world are black-and-white, and inequality is no exception. The question is not “equality vs. inequality”, the question is “how much inequality?”.

It should not be surprising that high levels of inequality create social instability; large masses of people don’t like to be screwed over. If high levels of inequality are not rectified: crime increases, and eventually revolutions erupt. Ask Marine Antoinette if leveling the playing field a bit more wouldn’t have been a good policy, or rather–ask her detached head.

Therefore it should not be surprising either that elites pay close attention to inequality metrics as it stands to reason that nobody is fond of surprise revolutions. But more pressing than inequality metrics, are perceptions of inequality, because it doesn’t matter if large masses of people are being screwed over… If they don’t know it.

However, extremely high levels of inequality can’t be ignored forever, and eventually society descends into chaos. But what is that level? How much is way way too much?

Morality

The first thing a right-wing capitalist would tell you is that “it doesn’t matter”. It doesn’t matter how much money your neighbor is making selling potatoes, as long as you are making good money. This feels wrong, just like it feels wrong to receive a cucumber slice instead of a grape, but perhaps it is our base instincts at play, and in fact there is nothing inherently wrong.

The phrase they often use is “a rising tide lifts all boats”. The idea is that rich people are the ones that provide the most value to the economy, so if they have a lot of profit, they will know how to use that money best, and therefore the whole economy would benefit, including you. This is also called trickle-down economics; the earnings of the rich trickle down to the poor.

However, it doesn’t take a genius to find a caveat: what if the rich hedge 100% of the earnings? How much do you get in that case? Well, nothing. Right-wing governments have tried time and time again to decrease the taxes for the rich, in order to incentivize the supposed “job-creators”, increase the economy, and receive more total taxes as a result. The latest instance is Trump’s Tax Reform. It has never worked.

What many dogmatic capitalists seem to forget is the first principle of economics: resources are limited. So therefore naturally there’s a limit to how many resources the rich may hedge before the poor classes start to starve.

There is no magic bullet: there is a limit to the amount of value an economy can create. And how you distribute the fruits of that value does matter, and that is the distribution of income.

Numbers

So we start with two premises a) too much inequality is bad, and b) income is finite. We have to find a number to express how much inequality there is, that is certain, and anybody that lives in the real world understands you can’t give to four people half the pie each (4/2 ≠ 100%) (staunch capitalists seem to forget that).

I can tell that a nation has a R/P 10% of 23.05, a Gini of 48.86, or a top 1% share of 13.5, but what does that really say? I would have to explain what each metric means, and you would still not get a good picture. I could show the Lorenz curve as well, but I would have to explain it, and it still would be hard to see what is the problem, if there is any.

Example 1

Let’s say there’s an economy of two people, a total of value created of $100,000 (it doesn’t matter the units), and we divide that total evenly ($50,000, $50,000). This is perfect equality, or no inequality, something nobody is advocating for, or even possible. The Gini index is 0, but we’ll see later how to get that number in a more realistic example.

Median: $50,000 – Richest: $50,000 – R/M: 1.0

Example 2

A slightly more realistic example divides the value unevenly ($20,000, $80,000). In this case there is inequality, but how much?

Median: $20,000 – Richest: $80,000 – R/M: 4.0

The Gini index is often referred as a representation of the Lorenz curve of an income distribution, but we don’t need extra layers of complexity to understand what the value means. Another way to define Gini is in terms of the relative mean absolute difference: we find all the relative differences, and divide by n.

The total is $100,000, x₁ is $20,000, x₂ is $80,000, so: |x₁ – x₂| / total →|$20,000 – $80,000| / $100,000 →$60,000 / $100,000 → 60%. The relative difference of x₁ and x₂ is 60%, and the other way around (x₂ – x₁) is the same, so the sum is 120%, we divide that by n (2), and the result is 60%. The Gini index is half of the RMAD, so: 30.

So when you see a Gini index of 30, you can picture the above distribution (20, 80), but is that a fair distribution? Well, 30 or above is considered medium inequality (30 < x < 50), but I leave it to you to decide if it actually is.

Example 3

Let’s move to a more complicated example ($7,000, $13,000, $20,000, $60,000):

Median: $13,000 – Richest: $60,000 – R/M: 4.6

At first this looks like it has more inequality, but in fact the economy follows the same distribution as the previous example, except with more granularity: x₁ + x₂ = $20,000, x₃ + x₄ = $80,000.

It’s much more tedious to calculate the Gini mathematically by hand, just the first element would be: (|x₁ – x₁| + |x₁ – x₂| + |x₁ – x₃| + |x₁ – x₄|) / total → ($0 + $6,000 + $13,000 + $53,000) / $100,000 → $72,000 / $100,000 → 72%. The whole RMAD is (72% + 60% + 60% + 140%) / 4 → 332% / 4 → 83%. So the Gini is 41.5.

But wait a second! Why is the Gini higher in this case, if the distribution is the same? Well, that’s the first caveat of the Gini index: it depends entirely on the number of samples of the population: the more samples, the more precise it is.

But that’s not the only caveat. If you have been paying attention, you might have deduced already that there’s more than one set of four numbers whose relative absolute difference equals to 332%. Which means there’s many income distributions that result in the same Gini index, and there are:

Median: $17,000 – Richest: $54,000 – R/M: 3.2

Median: $11,000 – Richest: $46,000 – R/M: 4.2

Median: $12,000 – Richest: $51,000 – R/M: 4.2

Median: $11,000 – Richest: $64,000 – R/M: 5.8

So that’s the second caveat: a single Gini index cannot represent entirely a distribution of income. It is by far the best way to represent the economic inequality in a single number, but it cannot give you the whole picture.

The last example is particularly interesting, as the richest person earns 5.8 times more income than the average person, yet the Gini is exactly the same because the bottom 75% is quite homogeneous.

Example 4

Finally we arrive to the most realistic example ($2,000, $3,000, $4,000, $5,000, $6,000, $7,000, $8,000, $11,000, $15,000, $39,000):

Median: $6,000 – Richest: $39,000 – R/M: 6.5

This again follows the same distribution of the previous examples: add up the first five elements and it will give you $20,000, add the rest and it will give you $80,000. But the granularity makes the inequality more visible, the Gini index is increasing, and so is the ratio between the richest and the average person.

At this point I must confess that this is not an entirely fake economy; this is in fact a simplification of the economy of Mexico, and each example follows exactly the distribution of income in Mexico, which has a Gini of 48.86. As the granularity increases, the Gini index gets closer to the real value. Unfortunately even official sources list the Gini index as 47.13, but that’s because the economy has been simplified to ten values, when the real Gini is 48.86 (if you use the whole surveyed sample).

So we actually have reached the limit of official sources and we are going beyond.

Real numbers

It’s time to move away from fake numbers to real ones, instead of sets of 4 or 10, to hundreds or millions. Values are adjusted to have a mean of $10,000, but the proportions are the same.

Real 10

If we divide the real sample into 10 values, we get a graph closely following our fake example #4 (these numbers are not rounded):

Median: $5,791 – Richest: $39,476 – R/M: 6.8

Real 100

Dividing the real sample into 100 values we start to see how the inequality shapes up. Also, the Gini index is very close to the real value.

Median: $6,259 – Richest: $134,956 – R/M: 21.6

If you pay attention to the richest person you would see his income keeps increasing as we add more samples. At this point he receives 21.6 times more income than the average person.

Real

Finally, if we plot the real sample as it is (122,643,890 weighted values), we get the following graph:

Median: $6,313 – Richest: $4,406,353 – R/M: 698

Does that graph looks remotely similar to a fair distribution of income? The richest person has an income of $4,400,000; 700 times what the average person gets. That doesn’t even reach the 50 index needed to be considered high inequality. 48.9 is still considered medium. And yes; this is real.

There is a final caveat to income surveys: the richest of the rich are extremely underrepresented. The richest person in Mexico doesn’t receive an income of $4,400,000, it’s closer to $4,000,000,000 (400,000 times the media), but the chances of interviewing that person in a random survey are virtually zero. The real number of entries in the survey are 70,000, with a mean household size of 3.6, so you can’t say much about the top 0.001%, except: they have an insane amount of income.

At which point does an economy becomes ridiculously unfair? Well, apparently it’s not with a Gini of 48.9 (or at least this distribution), because Mexico has not exploded into a revolution, although that might be due to ignorance. Perhaps if the population of Mexico knew how unfair the distribution of income is, they would do something about it. But at the moment it seems a Gini index of 50 is manageable.

Conclusion

Hopefully after reading this article you have a better understanding of what the Gini index is, and why it’s a good measure of inequality, although not a perfect one. And what a distribution of income with a Gini of 50 looks like.

This article only scratches the surface of income distribution measurements. There are many ways to stratify the data: by area, by urban vs. rural areas, by number of habitants, by age, by work status (full-time vs. part-time), by sex, etc. The per capita income can be recalculated through equivalization, which increases it dramatically. And the top incomes can be calculated through other means. Plus, there are confidence intervals to take into consideration.

And we didn’t even mention wealth and income dynamics. The income distribution is the number that is more easily obtained, but what is most important is how that number changes, and increases the wealth of each individual. The distribution of wealth is a much more complicated subject, but suffice to say: it’s much more unequal than the distribution of income.

But all this doesn’t change the fact that an inequality in the distribution of income can be measured and visualized. Personally I think anyone with a pair of working eyes can say with confidence: yes, some distributions of income are unfair.

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The power of words

Quite often in a discussion I’ve heard the phrase “semantics”, as if the meaning of words didn’t really matter in a discussion. Words are the building blocks of complex ideas, and if we don’t have a solid agreement on what they mean, then how can we hope of ever transmitting our message? We might not need to use a specific meaning offered by a dictionary, we might not even need to use a real word, but we need the idea to be packaged in a neat container–a word–which we can send back and forth multiple times in a conversation.

Words do more than simply package ideas in a singular conversation; they can serve as Eureka moments; the first time an idea is not only realized, but packaged, captured like an exotic Pokémon. People might have had Eureka moments before the word “Eureka” was widely used, but it wasn’t until the coinage of the idea that our collective minds became fully aware of such phenomenon.

Have you noticed that when you learn a new word, it suddenly appears everywhere? You probably saw and heard such word many times before in your life, but you never paid any attention to it. It’s called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, which maybe you have never heard of before, but now that you have; ironically–it will pop up everywhere 🙂

It’s hard to explain how our minds work (or the current scientific understanding of it); but if I attempt to summarize; it’s all about recognizing patterns, and feedback loops. That’s why the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon makes so much sense: we can’t recognize a pattern we haven’t seen before, but once we identify it; our brain will try to see the world through different lenses in order to check if the pattern applies, if it does; the feedback loop will reinforce the idea so we can recognize the pattern better in the future.

So it makes sense to think that language affects our worldview, which is the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. Imagine we didn’t have a word for “thought”, how would you describe a thought? It’s hard to describe a mind if you don’t have the word “thought”, so it is to describe “believe”, “remember”, “forget”, and dozens of other ideas related to thoughts.

This is not merely a theory (or rather; a hypothesis); we know it happened in Nicaragua in the Seventies because there were no schools for deaf people. When the first school was established dozens of people without language gathered, and they slowly created their own sign language. However, their language was very rudimentary. The second generation of kids learned the language from the first generation, but they added new words. These new words did not merely amplify their vocabulary; they changed the way they thought. The first generation merely focused on describing events, the second generation talked about feelings, thoughts, ideas. They got better at thinking about thinking, in one generation, simply because of language.

There is an test called the Sally-Anne test; it is used to measure the ability of a person to attribute false beliefs of another; something that cannot be done without theory of mind. The test goes as follows:

Sally takes a marble and hides it in her basket. She then “leaves” the room and goes for a walk. While she is away, Anne takes the marble out of Sally’s basket and puts it in her own box. Sally is then reintroduced and the child is asked the key question, the Belief Question: “Where will Sally look for her marble?”

Fully functioning adult persons know the answer: Sally would look in her basket. But young children answer differently: Sally would look in Anne’s box. They don’t understand that Sally’s worldview is different than their own; they don’t understand that each person has a different worldview, a mind different of their own. The ability to understand that each person has a different mind is called theory of mind; something so incredibly simple most people take for granted, is actually a gift that young children don’t have, neither do most animals. And it turns out the first generation of Nicaraguan kids didn’t have this ability either, even after they became adults, even in their fifties. Language is the tool that helps us understand other people’s minds; it is words like “belief”, “mind”, “point-of-view”. The second generation of Nicaraguan kids had these words, and with them they easily acquired theory of mind.

Imagine the first time somebody used the word “empathy“. Surely the concept of empathy existed long before the word was coined. However, like many patterns; it was elusive, hard to explain, and thus hard to identify, discuss, mold, evolve. How can I say “the most basic level of empathy arrives with theory-of-mind” if I don’t have the word “empathy” at my disposal, and for that matter, the word “theory-of-mind”?

The word “economy” wasn’t widely used until after the 19th century, and again; surely people understood the concept of economy long before the word, but they couldn’t exactly discuss it. How would you say “the economy is bad lately”? How would you discuss different economic models, like capitalism, or communism? How would you measure something that doesn’t have a name, like using the GDP? The answer is: you couldn’t, and they didn’t. It was the word that gave people such power, in a way the word “economy” changed the world. Certainly there were many other factors revolving the industrial revolution, but the coinage of the word “economy” was instrumental.

A more recent example is the word “meme“. Again; memes existed long before the word, in fact; words themselves are memes; they spread around society like viruses. Curiously enough the word “meme” wasn’t coined until the word “virus” sank into wide use, which could only happen after viruses were discovered, at the end of the 19th century. It is no coincidence that the word “meme” was coined by an evolutionary biologist–quite familiar with viruses.

But words do more than expand our understanding of the world, they change it, shatter it, shift it. Consider the word “gender“. Previously the word “gender” was fixed to the word “sex”, so a male is masculine, and a female feminine. Today we’ve been forced to change that notion, mainly due to transgenders. So a transgender man might have been born with a female biological sex, but considers himself to have a masculine gender as far as society is concerned. This paradigm shift hasn’t settled still with many people, which consider both gender and sex to be the same thing. Inevitable society will have to change its worldview, otherwise transgender people couldn’t fit, and they must.

An even more dramatic shift happens with the word “person“. The concept of personhood has changed dramatically through history, in many cases excluding certain races, or considering one sex less of a person than the other. Today we accept that all people regardless of sex or race should be considered full persons, and the people that don’t accept that are considered bigots; sexists, or racists. So grand of us, isn’t it?

But that’s still not enough. Consider a human being so psychologically disturbed that he lacks any consideration towards other beings, incapable of empathy, even without theory of mind… Is he a person? How about a dog that truly loves his human companion, cares for him, would risk his life if the need arises, and would miss him to death if he was gone.. Isn’t he a person? Indeed; many dog lovers would attest that their dogs are better beings that many humans, and they might be right. A dog doesn’t care for race or sex, and in that sense he might be better than many family members that gather at your typical Thanksgiving.

Personally, I see empathy as the essence of person; if you can’t feel another person’s suffering, then what good are you in a society? Every dog owner has seen the expression of tilting the head to one side; it’s an attempt dogs make in order to understand humans’ emotions (probably because they have trouble seeing our mouths due to their snout), they do this because they are empathic; they understand their human might be sad, even if they themselves feel happy. Contrast this with a human infant, who is barely able to see anything beyond his own hunger, and certainly doesn’t have a theory of mind. Who is more of a person? Why should the word “person” be fixed to the word “human” then?

When you see from this vantage point, you realize that if it’s hard to say a human infant is truly a person, then it’s even harder to call a human fetus a person, which is barely distinguishable from a chicken embryo–both in terms of physiology and mental processes. Certainly less of a person than a fully functional adult woman, whose life might get ruined by abortion laws.

Thus the importance of thinking about the meaning of words, specially important ones like “person”, regardless of how firm you think you have your grasp on it. Because of the way minds work; it’s much more difficult to change the meaning of a word, than it is to learn a new one; it’s much easier to recognize a new pattern than it is to change an engraved one, thanks to feedback loops–much like a drop of water falling on a rock millions of times–the damage is already done. But if you don’t do that paradigm shift, you might end up in the wrong side of history, just like your bigoted, racist and sexist ancestors, you might end up being the bigoted family member in a future Thanksgiving, facing your son’s spouse which might be–let’s go for a long shot–an artificial intelligence; not a human, but still a person, as worthy of our respect as any other.

Being honest about Islam

The typical leftist has the idea that everyone should be respected, and every idea as well. That we shall all live in an inclusive world where every faith is tolerated, and all cultures are valued equally. It sounds lovely, an utopia we all should thrive for.

One of the latest examples is Khizr Khan’s speech at the US Democratic convention; the father of a muslim American soldier. Of course the media celebrated this event as an example of their culture inclusiveness. One more step toward the multiculturalism utopia. How progressive of us to accept cannon fodder of all faiths.

There is one caveat with this inclusiveness notion, and I’m going to show it with a single word, but first, it shouldn’t be hard to see that there’s a problem with inclusiveness; our body can’t ingest any substance. There are such things as toxic substances, things that just don’t belong inside our body–that are actively harmful. Similarly, there are certain ideas that are harmful, and can’t be included in a modern society that thrives to progress. If you have trouble thinking of one, here is an example: Nazism.

Now, the word Nazism is often overused, to the point that it has become a joke, but in this case it’s a good analogy; it’s an ideology that is toxic to modern values, and even the most inclusive societies must reject such ideology, we all agree on that. However, Islam is not Nazism, it’s a religion, it can’t be toxic, after all, we often hear it’s a religion of peace, right?

But is it a religion of peace? Let’s convert some of the common Muslim memes to Nazism to perhaps remove the veil: Nazism is an ideology of peace, not all Nazis are extremists, you are a Naziphobic.

So, if you follow the previous statements you might start to see a couple of issues. First of all, saying “Islam is a religion of peace” is worthless, you have to actually prove that it is (which I will try to explore in this post, it’s as worthless as saying “Nazism is an ideology of peace”). Second, when an ideology is toxic, it doesn’t matter if you are moderate or extreme; you are still toxic. And third, using a trump word like Islamophobic against all critics is not fair; the word implies an irrational fear against that ideology, but is it irrational? Plenty of Islam critics have been murdered, so would it be irrational for say, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, to fear for her life when her life has actually been threatened plenty of times?

A religion of peace

We often hear that Islam is a religion of peace, and that the terrorist attacks are an aberration of the faith. Sounds very reasonable, but is it true?

Christians often assume that Muhammad was like Jesus; peaceful, benevolent, surely Muhammad said something similar to turn to them the other cheek when you are hit. But that couldn’t be further from the truth: Muhammad was warlord, he spread the religion through the sword, many people had to die for his religion to be established.

Let’s see some verses from the Qur’an, to see how peaceful this religion is:

Quran (2:191-193) – “And kill them wherever you find them, and turn them out from where they have turned you out…”

Quran (8:39) – “And fight with them until there is no more fitna (disorder, unbelief) and religion is all for Allah alone.”

Quran (9:123) – “O you who believe! fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness.”

And there’s many more.

Very peaceful indeed! You might be tempted to justify this on Christian terms and say; “the Bible also has violent verses, but that’s the Old Testament”, or something along those lines. However, even the Old Testament wasn’t so violent as to encourage killing all unbelievers, and also, a key difference between the Bible and the Qur’an is that the later has the principle of abrogation: when verses conflict, the earlier is discarded. So, you might see a benevolent verse in the Qur’an about how to treat unbelievers, but that’s superseded by a later verse. The earlier parts of the Qur’an are more benevolent, and the later more violent. So there is significantly less room for interpretation.

So, when an ISIS fighter kills an unbeliever, is he really distorting the faith? The Qur’an is pretty much telling him to do so, without room for interpretation.

Islam is a violent religion. In fact, when people say “Muslim extremists” are the violent ones, that is pretty much conceding the point; they take their violent religion too seriously. Contrast that with Jane extremists, which are extremely peaceful, since Jainism is a truly peaceful religion.

Moderate Muslims

So maybe the religion itself is violent, but fortunately not all Muslims take the religion too seriously, and we shouldn’t worry about the vast majority of Muslims.

Let’s start with a number from a Pew poll: 36% of Muslims (around 580 million) want the death penalty for leaving Islam. So if you have ten Muslim friends, and one of them leaves the religion, four of them would want him to be executed. And they are the moderates.

68% of Muslims think Sharia law should rule. Another reason why Islam is different than other religions, like Christianity, is that it is more than just a religion; it also comes with a legal framework, and other ways to run the society. In modern inclusive societies we follow the principle of secularism, so that all faiths are accepted, or at least, the ones compatible with modern values. Unfortunately, Islam is not one of such; it wants  to subvert the society’s legal framework, and impose its own; it’s incompatible.

So yeah, not all Muslims are extremists, not all Muslims want the death penalty for apostates, and not all Muslims want Sharia law, but dangerously high numbers of them do. So we have to be honest about their views and values; we know we don’t want extremists, but we don’t want Islamists either.

The only real difference between an extremist and an Islamist, is that the Islamist doesn’t kill people, they want to implement Sharia law through political means, so they disagree on the method, but they want the same goal.

Hear it from the mouth of one:

Now, take the example of Belgium; it accepted large number of Muslim immigrants (5%-7%), and now it is suffering the consequences, not just from terrorist attacks from the extreme minority (a minority of a large number of people is still an issue), but from the “moderate” Muslims who don’t agree with the attacks themselves, but they do agree the objective; the Belgium society must change to be more in accordance with the Qur’an, and they will not rest, through political movements or otherwise, until it does happen.

Islam is not compatible with modern secular societies, it is toxic, and there is a direct correlation between the amount of the Muslim population in a country, and the violence and terrorist attacks in such country.

Even moderate Muslims are a problem.

Denial

Let’s jump to the real issue with Islam; denial. As violent and dangerous as the ideology is, the real problem the denial of it. Just like the public health problem of tobacco smoking was exacerbated by the denial that happened in the sixties. Just like prominent doctors made quite a bit of money denying the link from tobacco smoking to lung cancer, so is people like Reza Aslan profiting by telling multiculturalist leftists what they want to hear; that there is no link between Islam and terrorist attacks. But the reality is very different.

To exemplify the extent of the denial I will use the case of the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, in particular I want to use the speech that president Obama made.

While it’s true that U.S.A. has an issue with gun control, and mental public health, the motivation of the killer was clearly religious, however, due to political correctness, and fear of Islamophobia Obama didn’t even mention the word “Islam”. Sure, he probably wanted to use this incident as a political tool to promote his anti-gun agenda, but to avoid the word completely is astonishing.

The media, again, in the name of multiculturalism, denied the link between Islam and the hate of homosexuals. But is there really no link?

For starters we have an Imam in Orlando, just before the attack saying that death is the sentence for homosexuality.

Maybe that’s just one crazy leader, and the majority of Muslims don’t share his views. So let’s see what the polls about homosexuality in different countries say:

There is essentially no acceptance for homosexuality in the Muslim world, in fact it’s punishable by death in many Muslim countries. And it’s not that different in western countries like the U.K. where not even 1% of Muslims agreed homosexuality was morally acceptable in a recent poll.

The Qur’an is also clear (this is just one example):

Quran (7:80-84) – “…For ye practice your lusts on men in preference to women: ye are indeed a people transgressing beyond bounds…. And we rained down on them a shower (of brimstone)”

So there is absolutely no reason to think that Muslims are O.K. with homosexuality, and yet when a Muslim person with links to terrorist Muslim groups, throws a terrorist attack in a gay nightclub the media denies any link between his ideology and the attack, and the president doesn’t even mention the word “Islam”.

How hard must reality hit us in the face before we accept it?

The victims and the heroes

Although the western world has seen the tip of the iceberg that is the horrific doctrine of Islam, the real victims are Muslims, in Muslim countries, since they suffer the bulk of the violence, predominantly for believing in the wrong flavor of Islam. And the heroes are Muslims, or ex-Muslims, who recognize the threat that nominal Islam is, and want to reform it, risking their own lives in doing so.

Many religions, including Christianity, had to change, to evolve, in order to be compatible with modern liberal values. Currently there is no religion that needs it more than Islam, and many Muslims recognize that reality. Unfortunately they are the minority.

Our job as defenders of liberal values should be to empower these reformist Muslims, like Maajid Nawaz (an ex-radical), who want to transform their religion into a version that is compatible with modern secular societies. Unfortunately we do the opposite; Maajid is constantly criticized by popular media, and denied a platform, in fact, he is called an Islamophobe (even though he is Muslim).

The current, nominal, version of Islam is incompatible, it is toxic, it is a cancer in modern society, and it is openly at war with us. Tolerating an intolerant ideology is a recipe for disaster. And the more time we deny the link between Islam and terrorism, the more people will suffer, both Muslims and non-Muslims. I wonder how many more Muslim terrorists attacks will have to happen before we as a society realize the truth; they will not stop until we do something about it.

Basics in rational discussion

Lately I’ve been having deep discussions that get so abstract we reach deep into the nature of reality. One might think that in the 21st century we would at least have gotten that right, we could agree on some fundamentals, and move on to more important stuff–after all, philosophy is taught in high school (last I checked)–sadly, that’s not the case.

Nature of reality

The first thing we have to agree is the nature of reality. For example, it’s possible that there are multiple realities, maybe your reality is different than mine. Maybe I see an apple as red, and you see the apple as yellow, both our perceptions are correct, but the realities are different; you take a picture, and it’s yellow, I take a picture, and it’s red.

If this was the case, it would be useless to discuss reality; what does it matter if I see the apple as red and you as yellow? In fact, it’s pointless to discuss about anything; does she loves you? Or is she using you? Maybe there’s two versions of her, and if that’s the case, the discussion is over. It gets even more hypothetical than that: maybe I’m alive in my reality, but dead in everybody else’s.

This is where philosophy enters the picture, and more specifically; epistemology–the study of knowledge. We, rational people, have decided that we need to assume there’s only one reality, which is objective. It makes sense if we want to discuss about anything. What makes the apple look red to me, and yellow to you, is our subjective experience of the objective reality. Experience can be subjective, but reality is not.

So if somebody tells you there’s many realities, or that reality is subjective; end the discussion. Just say: fine, your reality is different, whatever it is, we would never know. Look for other rational people willing to discuss about the real reality we all live in.

Discerning reality

We have agreed that there’s one objective reality, but, can we really know it? If I’m thirsty can I really know that drinking water will help me? We can’t know for sure, but we have to assume reality is discernable. If I don’t drink water and I die, well, we know that drinking water would probably have helped me.

There really is no alternative; if there’s no way to know if water will help, then there’s no point in discussing anything.

But what if the first time a human being drinks water it helps, but the second one it doesn’t? What if reality is constantly changing, including the laws of physics? If that was the case it would be quite tricky to discern reality, and again; there would be no point in discussing.

Here enters science–the method to build and organize knowledge. Science assumes uniformitarianism; the basic laws of nature are the same everywhere, have always been, and would continue to be. It’s only with this assumption that we can even begin to attempt to recognize reality.

Now we have to decide the method. We can go with dogma, tradition, or even feelings, however, the only method that has reliably produced results through history is science. Science has taken us to the Moon, and improved dramatically our way of living–precisely by recognizing reality correctly. Science has proven dogma and tradition wrong, many times, and never has any of these methods proved science wrong. To put it simply; science works.

So, again, if somebody tells you reality can’t be known, just move on, and if he tells you he doesn’t believe in science, well, he isn’t interested the real reality.

Basic tips

After we have aligned all our necessary assumptions, and agreed on a method to find out reality, we can start the real discussion. In the process of doing this for centuries, we have identified a bunch of common mistakes in reasoning, and we call them fallacies.

Our minds are faulty, but what’s even worst; bad at recognizing our own faults. Fortunately we have given names to many of our faults in reasoning, in the hopes that it will make it easier to recognize them.

However, not many people are interested in their faults in reasoning. Again, if somebody tells you he isn’t interested in fallacies, move on; it will be quite unlikely that you will be able to show him when his reasoning is faulty.

Summary

So to engage in a rational discussion we need to agree on:

• Objective reality
• Reality is knowable
• Uniformitarianism
• Science is the best method
• Fallacies should be avoided

If anybody disagrees, you should be free to end the discussion immediately. Perhaps you can point that person to this post, so you don’t have to explain why yourself 🙂

The vanguard in the war of ideas

Language is interesting; it tells you about what’s going on inside somebody’s mind, but also; it tells you what’s going on inside the minds of a society.

At some point somebody came with the word “thought”, which changed the way we communicate forever. Same with many other words, like “racism”. There was a point where “racism” wasn’t a thing, and it’s essentially impossible to fight a concept for which you have no word.

“Racism” and “bigotry” are easy enough (although we don’t even have a word for “bigotry” in Spanish), but with them come more complicated notions, like “affirmative action”, and “the soft bigotry of low expectations”, both real things we should worry about.

I like “the soft bigotry of low expectations”, because it gives a name to an idea I adhere to; do not forgive a person that wronged you just because you are “morally superior”; hold other people to the same ethical and moral standards you hold yourself to, and you want others to hold you. It’s part of the golden rule, and it’s something the left doesn’t do with other cultures; we give them a free pass in the name of multiculturalism. It’s an issue.

But progressives don’t stop; while society catches on with ideas like “the soft bigotry of low expectations”, there’s even more novel ones, like “the regressive left” (also a real issue), which was coined only recently.

There’s a constant war of ideas, and it feels good when an issue finally gets identified and named, because all of us who felt the same way can rally and say; “yes! I feel the same way you do: the regressive left is an issue”. It feels good to be on the vanguard on the war of ideas, it feels good to know you are on the right side of history, just as I imagine the first people that said “racism is an issue” must have felt.

Social justice warriors and feminism, poster boys of the regressive liberals

A new term has been coined; the “regressive left” (or liberal), which perfectly describes a kind of thought that has become more and more prevalent of late, and it’s a real danger to real liberals, or “progressive” liberals, in fact, a danger to society in general.

Liberalism vs. conservatism

First of all, we have to define what a liberal person is. In it’s essence it’s the opposite of a conservative, a conservative is a person that doesn’t embrace change, that wants things to remain the same, because if it has been the same way for decades, centuries, or even millennia, it must be good, right? A liberal believes the opposite: we need to move forward, away from barbaric and backwards behaviors and thinking, that’s the way we progress as a species. A more appropriate term might be “progressive”, because, well, we want progress.

However, the crux of the matter is to find such things that need to be changed in order to progress. It might seem obvious to a rational person, but it turns out most liberals don’t realize this simple fact: not all change is good. Do we really need to even discuss about this? Apparently we do, as we will later see in this blog post; many liberals do not realize that just because a change is proposed, we must embrace it. Obviously just because we’ve frowned upon stealing for thousands of years, does it mean it’s time to change it? No.

So that is the key point: is the change progress or regress? Liberals tend to think change means progress, conservative that it’s regress. More often than not, liberals are right, and they end up being on “the right side of history“. Studies have shown that liberals tend to be smarter and better educated than conservatives, they tend to attend university and travel more, etc. However, society needs conservatives as much as liberals, in order to make sure that changes are going in the right direction. Sure, we need change in order to progress, but we also need devil’s advocates in order to make sure it’s progress, and not the opposite. Change for the sake of change is not good, and sometimes things are better the way they are, sometimes conservatives are right (although not often).

One of the best examples of progress in society was the abolition of slavery. In general, liberals were on the right side of history (as they often are), however, some conservative arguments did actually make sense, for example: some black people ended up worst being free that being slaves. We have moved ahead since those times, but still, in the United States black people fill their prisons and thus provide a good chunk of essentially free labor. Perhaps conservatives were right that you “can’t just abolish slavery”, maybe USA should have done it differently. Sometimes resisting change is a good thing, not just to make sure the change is in fact progress, but if change must be made, to find the best way to go about it, and not just go balls to the wall about it.

So it should now be clear what a “regressive liberal” is; a person that advocates change for the sake of change, and is in reality moving society towards the wrong direction; regressing.

Regression and reality

Lately there has been a tendency for liberals to act in an irrational manner, something that has historically not been the case. That is one of the problems with being right so often; you sometimes forget you can be wrong.

There are numerous examples of this way of thinking, too many to explore them all in dept, but I’ll mention a few.

Vegetarianism today is viewed as a liberal tendency; most vegetarians are liberal, many of them see it as a moral statement, some think we all should be vegetarians, and even go as far as saying that humans are vegetarian in nature. It’s the latter argument I want to tackle. I don’t have a problem if you are a vegetarian and say you do it for moral reasons, or health, or even push it to the rest of society for economic reasons, those are all valid arguments, and I might disagree, but the jury is still out.

The problem comes when people deny reality. It is very obvious to everyone that humans are not herbivores: first of all; we can eat meat, herbivores can’t. You give meat to a deer, and it will die of starvation. The opposite is true of carnivores as well. But we humans are in neither of these categories, we are omnivores, like dogs, and bears. We eat everything. It’s also very obvious from our physiology; we don’t have the stomachs of herbivores, nor the teeth. Since we have the technology and resources to gather vegetables from all over the world, we might be able to sustain a vegetable-only diet and be healthy, although it’s probably not economically feasible, not to mention that many vegetarians have health issues, precisely because it’s not easy to find all the nutrients with such diet (not impossible, it can be done, but it’s certainly not easy). The fact of the matter is that through most of the history of our species we have been omnivores; we are omnivores, we can eat both meat and vegetables in large amounts, and that’s an uncontroversial and undeniable scientific fact.

Yet there are some people–liberals, who deny those facts, who deny science, and claim that humans are vegetarians by nature. Things would be much easier if we were vegetarians, perhaps it would be ideal, but we are just not. When you deny reality, and reject facts in order to fit your ideal of how things should be, you are engaged in what is called wishful thinking. Reality doesn’t care about your ideals, things just are the way they are, it might not be fair, it might not be nice, but it just is. Is it fair–or ideal–for the female praying mantis to eat the head of the male during sex? Probably not, but that’s nature, that’s reality, we have to accept that such is the case.

A more controversial example is the whole idea that “Islam is a religion of peace”. In order to explore this topic I’m going to use many of Sam Harris’ arguments, which has done a superb job of shining light on the issue.

First of all, we have to understand that religions are different, that’s why there are so many of them, and they are not interchangeable. Religions are different, in the same way that sports are different; you can’t compare rugby with golf, and you can’t compare Jainism with Christianity; they are way too different to make any meaningful comparison. And you can’t generalize either; say that all sports are violent, or that all religions are peaceful. Different religions are different, and their differences matter.

Second, religions are ideologies, ideologies affect the behavior of people, and while it’s true that ideologies can be twisted to the point of breaking their core principles (at which point it can be argued you are not really following that ideology), the ideology itself remains having certain ideas, independently of how people interpret them. For example, a nazi that doesn’t consider the aryan race superior can’t really be considered a nazi, a nazi that adores the state can be said to be perfectly within the ideology. A Jainism follower that advocates violence is not really a Jane (violates the core principles), but one that is vegetarian is perfectly within.

The question then becomes; can a violent person be called a Muslim? By extension; does the ideology condone violence? There’s many verses on the Qur’an about violence, for example: (8:12) “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them”. It’s pretty clear to anyone reading the Qur’an that it not only condones violence, it advocates it.

So it’s that simple: Jainism doesn’t condone violence, Islam does; Jainism is a religion of peace, Islam is not. Yet some people, liberals, like Reza Aslan, claim that all religions are exactly the same, and their holy books interpreted in any way, the problem is not the ideologies, but the people, the followers of the ideologies. We know this not to be true with ideologies like nazism, Islam is no different; we have to look at the ideology in order to decide if it’s peaceful or not, and just because an ideology happens to be a religion, that doesn’t mean it’s inherently peaceful.

It would be nice if what Reza Aslan said was true; all religions are equally peaceful and/or violent, all religions are faces of the same prism through which we see the same truth. But just because something is nice doesn’t mean it’s true; that is wishful thinking. However, many liberals drink this Kool-Aid, precisely because of that; it would be nice if it was true, therefore it must be true. The evidence is clear; not all religions are equal, Islam is a violent religion, the Qur’an endorses violence, as much as we would want it to be otherwise, we shouldn’t deny reality, the praying mantis is the way it is, and the Qur’an is the way it is.

Now, there’s a difference between is and ought. One thing is to recognize human nature, another is accept it as desired behavior. We humans have a tendency to crave sugar, does that mean we ought to eat a lot of sugar? No. In order for humans to progress, we first must recognize our nature, in order to reject it and actively fight against it. If science demonstrates humans are xenophobic by nature (which seems to be the case), the answer is not to close our ears to the evidence, the answer is to accept it, and find ways to fight against our nature.

By rejecting evidence, and thus denying reality, liberals are doing a disservice to society, and pushing for changes that might as well be moving us backwards. If liberals push for vegetarianism because humans are herbivores, that’s wrong. If liberals want to label every criticism of Islam as islamophobe, on the basis that it’s a peaceful religion, like any other religion, that’s also wrong. Both liberals and conservatives must seek to be in contact with reality, even if reality is not nice.

Third wave feminism

This is the definition of feminism:

1: the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes
2: organized activity on behalf of women’s rights and interests

Once upon a time, not long ago, women did not have the same rights nor opportunities as men, so a movement was needed to achieve equality between the sexes by pushing for women’s rights, and that was perfectly fine, that was feminism.

Today, the world is different (at least the western modern world ), and women have as many rights as men, if not more, women have as many opportunities as men, some argue even more. Today, the need to push exclusively for women’s rights is just not as urgent as before, and perhaps even not necessary.

Today the discourse about sexism and gender issues has advanced tremendously, in part thanks to the first wave feminists, and that’s why today we recognize that actually men have gender issues as well, like being raped in prisons, be victims of domestic violence, much more likely to commit suicide, and die earlier than women from disease. Males are also raped, but society doesn’t want to hear about it, even ridicules them, that’s an issue, why are feminists who supposedly fight for the “equality” of sexes not fighting to change this? Why is Emma Watson’s movement called “he for she”? What happened to “she for he”?

The fact of the matter is that feminism was never about male issues, we all know that, even the name itself implies which gender was the focus of the movement. That might have been necessary in the first wave of feminists, but now?

Some people argue that in fact, women are the privileged gender today, and with good reason, yet third wave feminists continue to push to privilege women even more. Society is catching up to the fact that perhaps liberals pushed way too hard and we are in effect moving backwards in terms of gender equality.

These third wave feminists want still more change, as liberals that’s expected, but they are doing so denying plenty of evidence that goes against their agenda.

One particularly worrying aspect is that many deny that men and women are in effect different. We all know we are different from our anecdotal evidence, we have always been different since the dawn of time, and plenty of parents of boys and girls see this obvious fact. Yet these “sameness” feminists deny that fact and argue that it’s all due to culture, even though it has happened in all cultures in history.

Differences in men and women are not just obvious, they are scientifically proven. Sexual dimorphism happens through all the animal kingdom, why would humans be the exception? Yes, some differences can be explained by culture, like blue for boys, pink for girls, but certainly not all of them.

Let’s keep in mind that being different doesn’t mean one is better than the other, just different. Women seem to be better at some things, men at others, there’s nothing wrong with that. But more importantly; if our understanding of human nature advances to the point where we find that in truth, men are better than women (in general), what does that mean? Nothing. That’s just reality. But fortunately for us, no gender seems to have a leg up, and even if it did, it probably wouldn’t be by much, and evolution is always happening anyway, so things might flip in the future.

Let’s look at a very concrete example: chess. Men dominate the competitive chess scene, even though women have been given every opportunity, and many women have become indeed pretty good at chess; they haven’t reached the top positions. Why is that? “Sameness” feminists would argue that it’s all because of culture; women are discouraged from such endeavors, the culture of chess is toxic, women feel inferior, therefore they act inferior. While all of that might be true to some extent, there are always exceptions, and there are strong women who don’t give a damn about society’s expectations of them, or the culture around an activity, and that’s why many women through history have achieved great things despite the fact that they were not supposed to. Still, no woman has become a chess world champion, even come close to that, even with all the help from feminists to “empower” them in such activities.

IQ might be a controversial way to measure general intelligence, but certainly not the intelligence needed to play chess; if you are good at chess, you have high IQ, if you have high IQ, you have potential to be a good chess player. So, is men’s IQ higher than women’s?

The answer is; not likely, but this graph shows the distribution is different. You are likely to find a good amount of really stupid men, but also, really intelligent ones, on the other hand, the average woman is smarter than the average man. Does this not match to pretty much everyone’s experience? Most of the women I know are pretty smart, smarter than most men, yet, the smartest people I know, are men. And that’s why we don’t see women in the top chess competitions; exceptional men are more exceptional than exceptional women, at the same time stupid men are more stupid than the stupidest woman. It’s just a matter of distribution.

Why would we want to change that? It’s just chess. Plenty of men are bad at chess, the vast majority of men are bad at many disciplines that require exceptional people. Women are better at plenty of other things that men, and that’s fine.

The more science finds about the nature of the human brain, the more we find that there are plenty of inherent differences between the genders, that’s just a fact, that’s reality, and there’s still plenty more to find.

Why can’t we embrace and accept our differences? One example scientists have found is that a region of the brain called the corpus callosum tends to be bigger in women, what does that mean? It means women in general are more likely to associate seemingly unrelated ideas, which is very useful in the arts in general, so is it really a surprise that women are more artsy than men? Plenty of men have complained that when discussing with their partners, women often bring issues of the past, issues that–in the opinion of men–are not related at all. Why can’t we just accept this and say: “I’m sorry honey, but I just don’t see what X has to do with Y, I’m a man, remember?”? It’s not an excuse for us men, but it’s an explanation, and a reason for us to try harder.

It’s not sexist to say that praying mantises females eat the males’ heads, that’s just a fact, so if science proves that men and women are different in certain aspect, that’s not sexist either, just reality. Yet “sameness” feminists insist–and will keep insisting–that we are the same, and to argue otherwise is sexist. I don’t see a better recipe for unhappiness than denying our human nature.

In fact, studies have shown that women have become unhappier of late, in a pretty significant way, and this trend started–unsurprisingly–when feminism started. Maybe women really like to feel protected, maybe demonizing stay-at-home moms was not such a great idea, maybe there was nothing wrong with women being feminine. I personally don’t know, but what seems to be clear is that the feminist movement doesn’t seem to be moving us forward as a society any more.

Every indication seems to suggest that third wave feminism might be the first liberal movement that is actually on the wrong side of history (as far as I know). Society, especially millennials, are starting to turn away from this bitter form of feminism, and people are realizing that maybe there’s nothing wrong with masculinity. Polls suggest that the feminist movement is collapsing, and in a couple of years the amount of women that identify themselves as feminists have decreased from 28% to 18% in the US (source). Given the fact that feminism has never pushed for men’s rights, and has no intention of doing so, and really have failed completely to try to understand the male position, and discover the reality of gender differences, it seems that such backlash is well deserved. Perhaps it’s time to stop talking about feminism, and start talking about equalism.

True equality

Richard Dawkins when asked about MRAs said “I hardly know there was–is there a men’s rights movement? I mean… If there is discrimination against men, then that’s bad too. I don’t know whether there is, I haven’t heard of it”. I think that is pretty much the experience the vast majority of people, including men, and including me, until not long ago.

However, there are two possibilities: a) either there is no discrimination against men, or b) there is discrimination, but we haven’t heard of it.

There is in fact a men’s rights movement, and it is largely ignored or attacked. They do claim there are men issues, I won’t go through all of them, I’ll just focus on one: men are held financially responsible for fathering a child.

In the face of it, it seems perfectly reasonable to hold men responsible for the future of a child they bred, but let’s look at the women’s perspective. If a woman doesn’t want a child, she can just have an abortion (depending on the local laws), the father doesn’t even have a say on that, he might not even know about it, but even leaving the controversial issue of abortion aside, a woman can chose to give the baby away for adoption. Let’s look at this closely; a woman can opt out of parenthood. It also seems reasonable; a woman’s life is a woman’s choice, and the baby might not suffer at all from that choice, it might benefit him/her, and perhaps never be aware that such choice was made. Where is the man’s choice? Can a man opt out of parenthood? No. Can a man hold a woman responsible, raise the child, and demand alimony from the mother? No. Where is the equality in that? It seems to me this is a real gender issue, one that genuinely destroys many lives of men.

To be honest, I never really thought about it, but now that I’m aware of it; it’s impossible not to see the discrimination against men in this case. So, maybe it’s b): there is discrimination against men, but we just haven’t heard of it.

Well, no problem, we just have to make a social movement to bring these men’s issues to light, and surely enough society will mobilize to fix these problems, just like it happened with the women’s right movement. Wait a second, wasn’t there already a movement that claimed to advocate for the rights of both genders? I have never heard a feminist bring up this issue, in fact, I have never heard a feminist complain about any male issue.

When an educated man like Richard Dawkins is not even aware of men’s right issues, it becomes pretty clear that somebody has not been doing their job of shining a light on these issues. If feminism truly aims to advocate for men’s rights, they have done such a poor job.

We are all perfectly aware of feminism, we all know all the women’s issues, or at least the claims, some of us might not agree with all of them, or the severity of them, but we are aware of the claims.

If anybody laughed at a women’s issue, that person would be harshly criticized, but not only we can’t laugh at the issues, we can’t even criticize them. A commonly mentioned issue is the wage gap: women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man earns—for doing the same work. This factoid is repeated again and again by the media, politicians, celebrities, activists, you name it. In reality, it turns out to be a myth.

The only way this number could be true is if you ignore a variety of factors, like life and career choices, but if you take those into account, the gap essentially disappears. Yet we can’t even say the wage gap is a myth without being labeled as sexist, misogynist, patriarchal.

However, when Richard Dawkins claimed he didn’t know about men’s issues, the whole audience laughed, even more, I saw shows where people replayed this bit, and the host laughs as well. What is there to laugh about? The fact that men have gender issues too? The fact that some men complain about these issues? Wasn’t feminism supposed to advance equality for both genders? Maybe that was a joke too.

The fact of the matter is that feminism has managed to mobilize entire societies to the pursuit of wellbeing solely for women, while at the same time completely ignoring the male perspective. Men rights activists are mocked, bullied, and completely ignored. Every time somebody mentions a gender issue that affects men, they are ignored, and immediately people point out a women’s issue, because apparently, those are the only ones that truly matter.

Perhaps it is because men are privileged, and women are oppressed, but is that truly so? Maybe it was at some point in history, perhaps most of history, but it certainly doesn’t seem to be the case now. Yet hardcore feminists insist men are privileged, men hate women, men are patriarchal, and prefer men over women for work. None of this is really true, but I can’t provide a succinct way to prove otherwise, except for the claim that men hate women, for which I will provide an excellent comment by Karen Straughan:

I don’t think there is a universe that could exist where men, in general, hate women.

So maybe the first thing would be to stop accusing men of hating women? And to call out the women in positions of power who accuse men of hating women? And to call out the women like Quinn Norton who claim that men are raised to hate women, or Chloe Angyal of Feministing who claim that our entire society hates women?

Honestly, the Nazis hated the Jews. The Hutus hated the Tutsis. The KKK hated blacks. And yet this male dominated society, where men hold the majority of the positions of power, somehow HATES women despite not a single lynching of a woman for wronging a man, despite NOMAAS and the White Ribbon Campaign and HeForShe and a male feminist president, despite Boko Haram’s sparing of girls while burning boys in their dormitories, despite the unbelievable (and unbelievably unspoken-of) gender gap in executions and criminal sentencing in Islamic countries, despite males being the primary receptacles of violence by both males and females from infancy to old age GLOBALLY, despite not a single genocide in history that DIDN’T begin with the systematic extermination of almost exclusively men and boys.

And you think men hate women. If men hate women, then how do men feel about men? On any given day, any given male is more likely to assault a male, undermine a male, ignore a male in need, murder a male, celebrate the suffering of a male wrongdoer, hit his male child, make a decision to mutilate his male child, arrest a male, convict a male, and sentence a male to incarceration or death, than he is a female.

And yet women–yes, women–have allowed a narrative to become entrenched in all our systems and institutions that males favor other males at the expense of females. That somehow, there is a “team men” that has been oppressing, subjugating and subordinating women since the dawn of human history. That men have waged a “war on women” since we descended from the trees and first tottered on two legs on the African Savannah.

Men have bled for their women, fought to protect their women, died for their women, and admonished each other for millennia to love their virtuous women as Christ loves the Church, to treat their honorable women as queens and as jewels, to present to them the heads of the men who displease them, and to duel to the death to defend their honor. The literary canon, written primarily by men, has always lauded a masculinity that protects women–the villains identified by their willingness to harm women, and the heroes identified by their willingness to avenge those harms.

And you think men hate women?

Men have never hated women. Men will never hate women.

(complete comment)

In fact, we love women so much, that we have given them many rights and privileges without asking anything in return, so much that more and more men give up their masculine human nature, just because of the fear of being labeled as misogynistic.

We have done so much just to please women that quite honestly, it’s ridiculous.

I wouldn’t go as far as saying that men are being oppressed, but we are certainly suffering. The worst jobs are done by men (military, trash collection, construction), the most job-related injuries are suffered by men, men have a huge societal pressure to succeed, men are much more likely to commit suicide, men die at a younger age. On top of that, we can’t complain about any of these issues, because apparently we are oppressing women, and we can’t argue that either. We can’t follow our masculine nature, because doing that would be sexist, apparently now even smiling to a woman is sexist.

If a woman breaks her hand hitting a man in the face, guess who is going to jail?

Call me crazy, but this doesn’t seem to be fair towards men.

Social justice warriors

If staunch feminism wasn’t enough, we now have social justice warriors, which do exactly the same things as feminists do (most of them are feminists anyway), because well, feminism has done such great things for our society! But they do it on all aspects of it.

The modus operandi seems to be: find an ideal, make it a cause, do everything in your power to advance that ideal, ignore any evidence that it’s really not the best thing to do, and label everyone that criticizes this ideal as a backwards, close minded, bigoted person.

For example, ideally all religions should be peaceful, therefore we should tolerate all religions, some people are intolerant towards Islam, that must be changed, there is evidence that Islam is in reality not a religion of peace, ignore that, label anybody that criticizes Islam as a racist and an islamophobe, and you win.

What doesn’t seem to enter into this equation is: what if you are wrong? For some reason SJWs never entertain the possibility that they might be wrong, which is the quintessential feature of a rational person. If you don’t entertain the possibility that you might be wrong, well, you will end up being wrong plenty of times. If you are wrong with your life choices, well, so bad for you, but if you push society towards the wrong direction, that’s actually terrible.

A study showed that you only need 10% of the population to believe in an idea in order for it to spread to the rest of the population. It doesn’t matter if the idea is true or false, if 10% of the population believes in this idea wholeheartedly, it will spread. Feminists believe it’s absolutely true we live in a misogynistic society, so, we all as a society believe that. It doesn’t matter if it’s indeed true or not. Such is the danger of herd mentality, and such is the power of ideas.

Even worse, apparently universities today have a concept called “safe places”, where susceptive people can go when there’s a talk about a subject they find distressing, but even more, prevent certain talks to happen altogether. Universities are supposed to be the place where all ideas are discussed, if you can’t discuss a topic in a university, where can you? Endangering free speech because some people might find the comments offensive, especially in a university, is certainly one of the worst policies ever.

Why would SJWs act this way? Why would anybody reject evidence, reality? When you are confronted with evidence that contradicts your beliefs, you enter into a state called cognitive dissonance, which doesn’t feel good. If the objective is to better society, then you must confront your wrong beliefs, and you must risk feeling bad, and realizing you were wrong. So why don’t they do that? It seems pretty clear that their objective is actually not to better society, but to feel good about themselves, thinking they are bettering society, while in effect they might be doing the opposite.

The way forward

This is where we are today, thanks to staunch feminists, thanks to SJWs, thanks to the whole “political correctness” idea. We can’t criticize feminism, we can’t criticize Islam, we can’t criticize certain ideas, because some people find that “offensive”. It is such a recipe for disaster.

It is quite ironic that the places where most women are genuinely objectively oppressed are Islamic countries, however, even the most staunch feminists wouldn’t touch the subject, because, well, it’s not politically correct (a few feminists truly do). So the people that push for women’s rights the most around the globe, might very well be atheists (or new atheists as some people like to say). The people that prevent the women’s right to choose (pro-choice), are not actually men, or “the patriarchy”, but the ones that follow “christian values”, in fact mostly christian women.

The whole situation is incredibly depressing. Even if feminism seems to be on the way out, pretty much the same manner of dealing with social issues is spreading through liberal circles. Such an epidemic of–quite frankly–stupid liberals, deserves a name: regressive liberals.

Hopefully the majority of liberals can recognize this toxic behavior and distance themselves from these regressive liberals, otherwise we are heading to a period of pretty much no progress in society.

Los salarios en México y las malas estadísticas del INEGI

Update: Inicialmente mis cálculos no consideraban el factor de ponderación que usa el INEGI. Los números han sido actualizados para reflejarlo.

Yo crecí en México en lo que consideré la clase media, pero después viví en E.U.A y en Europa, por lo que tal vez mi concepción de las diferentes clases dejó de estar apegada a la realidad. Yo pensaba que un salario mensual de $20,000 (una cantidad módica en países del primer mundo) se consideraría clase media, y cuando una persona me dijo que el salario promedio era $8,000 no lo creí, y así comenzó la tarea de buscar los salarios de las diferentes clases en México que resultó no ser tan fácil como parecía.

ENIGH

El INEGI realizó una encuesta (Encuesta Nacional de Ingresos y Gastos de los Hogares) que supuestamente contiene estos datos, sin embargo, estos son los resultados:

I	$1,674
II	$3,033
III	$3,977
IV	$4,900
V	$5,959
VI	$7,183
VII	$8,800
VIII	$11,313
IX	$16,012
X	$42,120
* Trimestral.

En teoría ahí está toda la información y la tarea está hecha, sin embargo hay un problema al tratar de entender estos números. La tabla se titula “ingreso corriente total promedio trimestral per cápita en deciles de personas”. Ahí vemos los diez grupos, pero un decil se define como: “cualquiera de los nueve valores que dividen los datos ordenados en diez partes iguales”; nueve valores, y en la tabla hay diez, esos números no son deciles.

Básicamente, la tabla es completamente inútil. Si una persona gana $10,000 trimestrales, ¿Está en el grupo VII o VIII? El número que necesitamos para saber eso no está en esta tabla.

A mano

Afortunadamente el INEGI provee los datos originales, y gracias a mis habilidades de programación pude hacer las manipulaciones necesarias para sacar los datos de interés. Desafortunadamente en el proceso noté discrepancias en las tablas del INEGI, así que tuve que hacer los cálculos por mi cuenta.

10%	$835
20%	$1,180
30%	$1,478
40%	$1,798
50%	$2,182
60%	$2,632
70%	$3,306
80%	$4,315
90%	$6,753

Estos números sí son deciles, y es fácil saber a qué grupo perteneces. Si tu ingreso mensual es de $3,000 pesos (y no tienes familia), eso significa que ganas más que el 70% de la población (grupo VII). Curiosamente es fácil ver la media (50%), que es $2,182, es decir: 50% de la población gana menos de $2,182, 50% gana más.

De forma similar podemos dividir la población en tres grupos:

baja	menos de $1,579
media	de $1,579 a $3,033
alta	más de $3,033

Parece difícil de creer, pero estos números se pueden comprobar fácilmente. El tamaño de la muestra del INEGI son 19479 personas, con un filtro para ver cuántas personas ganan más de $3,033, el resultado es 8040 (41.28%), sin embargo al usar el factor de expansión el resultado es 33.32% (una tercera parte).

Cabe mencionar que los números son per cápita. Es decir, si ganas $8,000 pesos y mantienes a una familia de 4, cada persona se considera que percibe un ingreso de $2,000 pesos. Más detalles abajo.

Los números para la clase súper rica son:

91%	$7,156
92%	$7,663
93%	$8,325
94%	$9,130
95%	$10,065
96%	$11,516
97%	$13,159
98%	$16,475
99%	$22,763

Promedios

Los promedios pintan un panorama muy diferente. Por ejemplo; la clase alta es más de $3,033, sin embargo hay mucha diferencia entre un ingreso de $4,000 y $400,000 pesos, y ambos están en el mismo grupo. Al promediar a toda la gente de éste grupo, el resultado cambia mucho. El promedio de la clase alta (top %33) es de $7,262, el promedio del top 90% es de $14,040, y el promedio del top %1 es de $42,910.

Por eso son peligrosos los promedios. A pesar de que el promedio de todo el país es de $3,499, el promedio del bottom 99% es de $3,101, pero al juntarlo con el top %1 de $42,911 se eleva a $3,499 (3101 * 0.99 + 42910 * 0.01).

Ingresos por trabajo

Hay muchos detalles de estos números, pero en general es el ingreso de todo el hogar: salarios, utilidades, rentas, transferencias, y estimado de alquiler, dividido por el número de integrantes.

Si tomamos en cuenta sólo el ingreso por trabajo de las personas ocupadas, el resultado es más prometedor.

10%	$782
20%	$1,545
30%	$2,201
40%	$2,872
50%	$3,563
60%	$4,303
70%	$5,324
80%	$7,008
90%	$10,492

En tres grupos:

33%	$2,413
66%	$4,937

Y el top 10%:

91%	$11,041
92%	$11,848
93%	$12,739
94%	$13,960
95%	$15,473
96%	$16,988
97%	$19,565
98%	$24,508
99%	$32,983

 

Desigualdad

Existe un número que se usa para medir la desigualdad de forma rápida, el coeficiente Gini. Aunque no es perfecto, es el más utilizado, y no deja de ser útil. Una sociedad perfectamente igual tendría un valor de 0%, mientras que una totalmente desigual 100%. Alemania, un país con mucha igualdad social tiene un valor de 27%, Estados Unidos, conocido por su desigualdad, 45%. Según el INEGI México tiene un valor de 48%, pero según mis cálculos el valor es 49.70%. La diferencia se debe a que el INEGI usa sus promedios por decil (10 datos), mientras que yo uso todos los registros (19479 datos), por lo que mi cálculo es más preciso.

Probablemente la forma más fácil de visualizar la increíble desigualdad que hay es graficando todos los ingresos de la muestra:

Errores del INEGI

Ya mencioné el hecho de que para empezar su tabla de deciles no contiene deciles,  contiene promedios de los diversos grupos, que como ya vimos los promedios son peligrosos por que pueden pintar las cosas más positivas de lo que son.

Además hay discrepancias muy curiosas. La misma tabla de ‘ingresos’ está en un formato “tradicional” y de “nueva construcción”.

folioviv	foliohg	numren	clave	ing_5
0860298316	1	01	P043	8000
0860298316	1	01	P071	8237

folioviv	foliohg	numren	clave	ing_5
0860298316	1	01	P043	8000
0860298316	1	01	P071	58237

Aquí vemos dos ingresos de una persona; P043 es un beneficio de PROCAMPO, P071 es la clave de negocios agrícolas. En una tabla dice que sacó $8,237 de negocios agrícolas, y en la otra $58,237. Parece ser un error de dedo (que cambia las cantidades drásticamente), pero por qué no comparan sus propias tablas?

Como éste tipo de errores parece haber muchos. Por ejemplo en la documentación de la variable ‘ing_cor’:

inc_cor: ingreso corriente
La suma de ing_cor y percep_tot

Eh? Para sacar ‘ing_cor’ necesito ‘ing_cor’?

Otro ejemplo son registros marcados como “indemnizaciones” (P034), que no parecen usarlos en ningún lado.

Todo indica que al INEGI le hace falta revisar su propia información.

Mapa de la muestra

Update: Mucha gente preguntó que de dónde sacaron las encuestas, aquí hay un mapa para visualizarlo. Por alguna extraña razón en el centro de Tabasco es donde tomaron más información. Se ve muy evidente que a el norte no le prestaron mucha atención.

Conclusión

No queda más que aceptar que estamos mucho peor de lo que pensaba, no solo en cuestión de salarios, pero desigualdad, e incluso disponibilidad de la información. Si el organismo dedicado a proveer datos estadísticos no sabe ni lo que es un decil, realmente no se puede esperar mucho del futuro.

Nota: Estos números son confiables sólo si la muestra del INEGI es realmente aleatoria. Dado que ya detecté muchos errores en sus tablas, es posible que la muestra del INEGI también deje que desear. Desafortunadamente no hay mejores datos, así que hasta donde yo sé, estos son los números más confiables.

Método

Cualquier persona puede verificar los datos si le interesa. Todo el código se encuentra en GitHub, yo utilicé Linux, pero es posible correr Ruby en Windows también.