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Economic inequality leads to democratic erosion, a new study finds. (www.futurity.org)

submitted 17 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Absolutely. If it looks like, walks like, talks like duck. It's probably a duck.

Any cause of inequality should be nipped in the bud.

In this case they are highlighting corporate control since they found it is the duck of the inequality they are experiencing

[–] [email protected] -3 points 16 hours ago

I think this is where this thread is getting stuck - they did NOT just study "that duck". They studied multiple ducks. They found that no matter what kind of duck it is, it eats bread. The commentor above that I'm replying to said "why are they afraid to name the duck?". I said "it's about more than just that one type of duck, actually - the paper studies a bunch of ducks, and has found that all forms of ducks eat bread".

Somehow they've taken this to mean I think that duck doesn't eat bread.

We overcome this obstacle by building on recent developments in the measurement of democratic erosion. Doing so allows us to conduct a large, cross-national quantitative study of democratic erosion and economic distribution. Our key conclusion is that income inequality is a strong and highly robust predictor of democratic erosion. This basic result is stunningly robust. In all, we find a consistent, positive association between income or wealth gaps and democratic erosion across more than 100 distinct statistical models.

They studied multiple ducks. My point is that they studied multiple ducks, and getting mad at the paper for not focusing just on one duck is dumb.