Following on the post immediately below, "Fun Fact: "New York City spends more per homeless person than the median NYC household earns. $81,705 per person in FY2025" a bit of scholarship from the National Bureau of Economic Research:
James Michael Curley, a four-time mayor of Boston, used wasteful redistribution to his poor Irish constituents and incendiary rhetoric to encourage richer citizens to emigrate from Boston, thereby shaping the electorate in his favor. Boston as a consequence stagnated, but Curley kept winning elections. We present a model of the Curley effect, in which inefficient redistributive policies are sought not by interest groups protecting their rents, but by incumbent politicians trying to shape the electorate through emigration of their opponents or reinforcement of class identities. The model sheds light on ethnic politics in the United States and abroad, as well as on class politics in many countries including Britain.
NBER download page.
Both the authors have those "https://scholar.harvard.edu" email addresses.
Enough appeal to authority? I've got more if it is desired. Here's Mom:
A Mother's Love, Letter To Arthur Schopenhauer
‘All your good qualities,’ she wrote on 6 November, ‘become obscured by your super-cleverness and are made useless to the world merely because of your rage at wanting to know everything better than others … If you were less like you, you would only be ridiculous, but thus as you are, you are highly annoying.’
—Aeon, The semi-satisfied life
....MUCH MORE
Now THAT'S authority. But in Arthur's defense that post goes on to look at his "Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten" with its thirty-eight stratagems for making an argument including:
And that, children, is why we study philosophy.#30 - Appeal to Authority Rather Than Reason and:
#38 - Become Personal, Insulting, Rude (the Ultimate Stratagem)
