Everything is not falling apart, though certain institutions may be falling apart.
In America, there's definitely been a breakdown of belief in its own institutions. Far more people are skeptical of things like journalism and Silicon Valley; it really wasn't that long ago that the former was constantly salivating over the latter, but now it's more of an openly vulture-carrion relationship because that caters to public sentiment. People who I would consider "normies" even don't trust law enforcement and the FBI anymore (not that they ever should have). Even the education system from K12 to college is increasingly being seen as a joke and an outright racket. We also went from the President being a more respected position to one deserving of relentless tabloid gossip. Even if one's "guy" is in office, I don't think we feel the same about it the way we did even as recent as Obama, and his administration was when we really began to see the social cracks forming.
Civilization ebbs and flows, but I think the current sentiment is unprecedented in my lifetime. This is not a high point by any stretch of the imagination, and while I see "everything is collapsing" to be hyperbolic, it seems inevitable that many things we thought were rock solid are in a transition period where either they will reform or one day be replaced with force of some kind.
I have a much different experience. I have a dozen family members that were part of the auto industry in Michigan. They were on top of the world for decades. It ended with most of them thinking society has collapsed in the 80s and doubting they'd actually get their pension.
My grandfather spent the last 30 years of his life in retirement collecting a pay check that he thought might be his last.
So it sounds like you're saying things have just been getting progressively worse. That doesn't sound like much of a different perspective. There was a time when people were optimistic about the future, but granted that was a long time ago.
This is why defined benefit pension plans are so risky for retirees, employers, and taxpayers. We need to completely eliminate them and use defined contribution plans such as 401(k) instead. That way retirees actually own the assets in individual named accounts and those can't be taken away if the employer is sold or goes bankrupt.
Pensions do have risk, but you act as if 401(k) style plans don’t. Imagine how difficult it would be to plan fastidiously for your retirement and then have the stock market collapse and wipe out 1/4 or 1/2 of your savings. Yes, you should diversify your investments to reduce your exposure, but in this instance the risk and responsibility is on you the individual. Isn’t it strange how two different systems that on paper have totally different risk profiles both have a huge risk of low and middle net worth individuals getting wiped out?
In practice there is no risk of defined contribution plans getting wiped out unless the account holder does something exceptionally stupid. Most plans default to using target date mutual funds which automatically rebalance to reduce stock exposure every year. If there's a major stock market crash then older employees will have very little exposure and younger employees have plenty of time to financially recover.
Exactly, target date funds and broad market index funds with 0.03% fees have automated away the entire job of the pension fund. And the Feds will bail out the public markets, so retirement funds invested in the market are effectively insured by the best insurer possible at all times.
My grandfather worked for the steel mills. Some workers didn't get anything for their pensions. He was one of the lucky ones and got something, like 10 cents on the dollar. I think they even stopped sending them before he died (remember him saying something about that was the last check and complaining about the company).
And this is why forcing USPS in 2006 to prepay pensions for the next 70 years is a good thing, as opposed to a "GOP conspiracy to privatize the post office". Why it was passed almost unanimously by Congress.
USPS's primary business, delivering letters, was by 2006 clearly in terminal decline, with no guarantee that parcel volume would increase to compensate. Many, many employees of newspapers—the other industry that in 2006 was facing similar danger—wish that Congress had mandated something like this for their pensions.
1) Except that NO OTHER COMPANY needs to prepay pensions for 70 years. I have no problem with the fact that companies must prepay pensions. Then make it the law for everybody--not just the USPS.
2) The USPS is supposed to be unprofitable--it's supposed to service everyone. If you are going to hound the USPS about profitability, then they should be allowed to drop service in rural areas. The easiest way to decrease pension obligations is to permananetly drop a whole bunch of workers from unprofitable areas, no?
The problem is that the arguments around the USPS aren't made in good faith. The goal is to bankrupt the USPS so that they have to sell off the extremely valuable real estate that many USPS facilities sit on.
>1) Except that NO OTHER COMPANY needs to prepay pensions for 70 years.
I wrote that the newspaper industry was the other that by 2006 was clearly in decline for the same reason as USPS letter delivery: The Internet. Most industries aren't like this.
>2) The USPS is supposed to be unprofitable--it's supposed to service everyone.
I said nothing about profitability. The Constitution also says nothing about profitability or anything else about USPS, other than that Congress has the authority to establish post offices. That's it.
That said, Congress has historically required USPS to self-fund as much of its operations as is practical. Were this not the case, postage rates would never have risen in history, before or after the 1971 reorganization of the cabinet-level agency to the quasi-independent entity that it is today. Nor would it have consistently issued new stamp editions to sell to the public.
More to the point, making sure future USPS pensions are funded has nothing to do with profitability, at least directly. It's simply good sense given the ongoing and, in all likelihood, irreversible decline toward zero non-parcel volume. Even if the USPS were mandated by law to always run at a slight loss to maximize customers' savings on postage, pension prefunding would still be prudent.
>The problem is that the arguments around the USPS aren't made in good faith. The goal is to bankrupt the USPS so that they have to sell off the extremely valuable real estate that many USPS facilities sit on.
First, there is no major political movement in the US to "bankrupt the USPS", presumably in advance of a sale. No political party has such in its platform. (If you reply that the very absence of such is proof that the plan exists, I'll just throw up my hands and give up now.)
Second, there's nothing in the Constitution that would prohibit USPS from being privatized, which has happened in most European countries, usually with little controversy.
It got complicated when the steel mills went bankrupt and the pensions were taken over by federal agencies. The bankrupt company, in this case, was paying more for pensioners than what the federal agencies paid.
I'm not entirely clear on why this was, but it may have been that they were not fully insured or that promises made by the steel mills were not backed by anything. In these cases, some pensioners actually had to give money back [1].
This happened to my grandfather, who worked in the steel mills in western Pennsylvania. If you ever wanted to see him red-faced mad, this was the topic to discuss.
That doesn't mean you will get what you were promised if the pension was underfunded[1]:
> If you look at multiemployer plans, those people worked in coal mines, driving trucks, in bakeries — typically physical, difficult jobs, and they certainly earned the pension they were promised by their union. Now, some of them are 70-years-old and in retirement and have the terrible prospect of having their pension cut.
> There’s a government backstop for private pensions, but the government backstop for multiemployer plans is very modest
Do you have a source? I wonder if that covers all pensions or just public pensions? Or if that requirement is newer and didn't exist when the companies went under 50 or so years ago.
Even taxpayer funded DB pension recipients have had to accept benefit cuts, such as former employees of Detroit and Rhode Island.
If the entity that owes you does not have the power to print money, then there is always a risk of non payment. And how much of a bailout you get depends on your political weight.
Looks like their site says there was little protection for pensions before 1974. So it sounds like there wasn't any protection before that. Their wording around "insured pensions" also seems to indicate that some pensions may not be insured (no requirement to insure them).
I used to work in film, and every once in a while I get a script to read, passed around because it is "too good to be made". One such script I read about 2 years ago had the premise of an archeological discovery, rapidly verified and with duplicates found all over the world proving "the rapture" happened back in the year 1000 AD. The modern world realizes we're in the 2nd century of the 10,000 year reign of Satan. All hell breaks loose, of course.
I don't believe it is available anywhere, because it is entangled legally, as apparently the author of another literary work with the premise of finding lost bible books documenting a continued life of Jesus with a family and kids sued the author of this script. I've not followed the situation, simply because I don't care about such things.
Not all pensions are well managed; some have needed bailing out from public coffers. Other companies have shuttered completely, and the lack of incoming money to the pension funds made them insolvent (again, not especially well managed).
Its doesn't have to be public bailouts. There is something for Americans where the pension funds have been seized by the federal government to be managed. I worked for a company where the executives were using pension funds to give themselves annual bonuses until the federal government stepped in around 2009. There wasn't much money left over, so I'll be receiving very little, but at least the executives could raid the funds anymore.
> Welcome to PBGC! Since 1974, we’ve protected retirement security and the retirement incomes of over 33 million American workers, retirees, and their families in private sector defined benefit pension plans.
It's a shame that you got screwed out of what you'd been promised. I'm guessing yours wasn't in the $86 billion bailout (maybe because it only went to multi-employer union plans?)
Unfortunately, it's not just the private sector pensions that have been mismanaged (or raided, as you pointed out) which are in dire straits. California, in particular, has a lot of public pension headaches that will be coming to a head (and in some cases already have):
No, this was a telecom company where the Canadian executives were siphoning money from the American work force, which was net profitable. The Canadian side was losing money by the billions. The pensions were down to a mid sixty percent reduction before the American government stepped in to stop the transfers. It was in all the papers.
Even well managed funds can result in someone getting the shaft. My dad's pension (Delphi Salaried) was cut to 50% of what it was supposed to be after the events of '08, and it was funded to something like $0.86 on the dollar, above the national average.
The hourly workers (i.e., unionized) still got 100%, which was pretty unfair.
In the last few years, there's been some nostalgia in the US over pensions, but people tend to forget that they're tied to employers, so people feel tied to jobs because they're building up a pension, and the pension is often managed by and dependent on the employer's business in some way.
One of the disadvantages to democracy that Thomas Paine actually highlighted in "Common Sense" is that when things are off the rails in a monarchy, the cause (and remedy) are obvious. In a democracy, far less so.
When Americans elect bad leadership, they ultimately have nobody to blame but themselves, and that damages the public attitude; I suspect one of the reasons "stolen election" conspiracy theories are so popular right now is that the alternative is one must simply be skeptical of the good judgment of one's neighbors, and people don't want to live like that.
This, too, is a pattern we've seen before. The several Presidents elected prior to Lincoln were known as the "Bumbling Generation." When America gets scared of its own shadow, it tends to elect ineffectual leaders because neither side actually wants an empowered Presidency, lest it reward their opponents.
(One major difference between the antebellum period and now is it's a little harder to see precisely what the cleave-line is that has America's hands around its own throat. In hindsight, slavery was obvious. But the battle lines here are not so brightly drawn... Class? Faith-based conservatism vs. modern cosmopolitanism? Tech savviness vs. technophobia? Possibly enough of all three to make a crisis).
>> the alternative is one must simply be skeptical of the good judgment of one's neighbors, and people don't want to live like that.
People love being skeptical of their neighbors' judgement, what they're afraid of is being skeptical of their own. They can't handle backing the wrong horse, so instead they declare that the system is wrong
Was just going to say this. We have gotten away from any kind of accountability as a standard, and some of that is driven by the fact that our leadership(no one specific, talking about the state of global leadership currently) shows no accountability either.
The system is wrong. It already has been corrupted to a very large degree, because, surprise, people who gained power, like to retain it and an average power broker is as willing to let go of it as an average mollusc attached to a rock.
The problem is that workable solution within the confines of the system requires somewhat educated populace. Or maybe not educated given the state of education in US.
I do see signs of hope in the form of push to 'return to office' mandates ( I just threw a middle finger to HR for denying my remote myself simply refusing to come back ). People seem to rediscover that the rules are really 'by the consent of the governed' and there is strength in numbers.
This reminds me of negative interest rates because they are inherently about giving up power, or rather, artificially raising interest rates from the negative range is about maintaining power.
Let's say there are sources of excess power like political corruption. You can gain a lot of power over a short period of time but you want that power to last long. You wouldn't want to be corrupt and become rich for 5 years, be voted out then be poor again, you want to be rich your entire life long after your political career has ended.
That excess power needs to be stored somehow. We use land and money to store this excess power. In my opinion, corruption wouldn't be as widespread if its impact didn't outlive the original act of corruption.
Isn’t some of this power dynamic just human nature to a degree? Those in power often have a hard time believing that someone else would do a better job. Power is truly a corrupting force over a long enough time span, even for those that start out with the best intentions.
>I suspect one of the reasons "stolen election" conspiracy theories are so popular right now is that the alternative is one must simply be skeptical of the good judgment of one's neighbors, and people don't want to live like that
I suspect it's because the major politicians of one of the two major parties overwhelmingly tell them it was. Trump says so, the Republicans who follow him say so, and the alternative is to acknowledge the guys you support are trying to overthrow the government, so it must be "true".
The fact that the leadership of a major party has chosen to not show restraint is certainly part of it. But there is a reason that their message is resonating instead of the voters just turning away in disgust and the party replacing those pressing that narrative with someone else in the party as leadership. Instead, the party is bending towards that messaging because it is resonating with voters.
The cleave-line IMO is very clear: the have and have-nots. People who live of capital (i.e. rent-seeking) VS those who live of their labour (or rather increasingly don't).
>(One major difference between the antebellum period and now is it's a little harder to see precisely what the cleave-line is that has America's hands around its own throat. In hindsight, slavery was obvious. But the battle lines here are not so brightly drawn... Class? Faith-based conservatism vs. modern cosmopolitanism? Tech savviness vs. technophobia? Possibly enough of all three to make a crisis).
It's two fundamentally irreconcilable worldviews, which are alluded to in TFA.
FTA:
>>One grievance that drove support for Donald Trump in 2016 was that American coastal elites felt more connected to elites in other countries than to their fellow Americans in the heartland. And there was some truth to that! There’s also truth to the European version of it—that some elites in France and Germany and Britain feel closer to one another than to the working stiffs in their own countries.
>>Interestingly, there have been attempts to counter this international network of elites with an international network of Trumpist nationalists (however ironic that may sound). I can actually imagine this kind of international populist tribe becoming a stable part of a global community—but this isn’t the place to elaborate on that long-term scenario (which I’ve done elsewhere). My main point is that one big development of recent decades—the formation of international tribes whose cohesion sometimes comes at the expense of national cohesion—was bound to happen, given the direction of technological evolution; and it was bound to be turbulent.
>>And, leaving aside the inherent tensions of moving toward a global level of social organization, there are lots of other digital-technology-abetted (and sometimes specifically social-media-abetted) problems to worry about. Like QAnoners and other conspiracy theory tribes. And violent political extremist tribes. And intense animosity among even less extreme ideological tribes. And so on.
Wright (the OP) is sort of taking this for granted, and the phrase "global level of social organization" sounds pretty benign - lots of people from different cultures all over the world, getting together and organizing humanity ... sounds great, like the plot to a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode. Anyway, the two irreconcilable worldviews are wanting this to happen and thinking it's good and inevitable, and not wanting it and thinking it's terrible and represents an erasure of national and cultural identity.
To your point, about past presidents, it would be very very helpful if people on the left and right would just be honest about all of this. Instead it gets cloaked in a lot of technobabble or scorn or just taken for granted because, again, how could anyone possibly disagree with a global organization of humanity unless they're racists, right? That's the future we've all seen in the more utopic science fiction over and over again. Whether this leads to a hot conflict within nations, or just remains a cold-but-simmering civil war is a separate question.
This makes a great deal of sense. Coupling it with the classic American entitlement thought in a peer thread, I think I can even see why it's only manifesting as a problem recently in the United States (I would say mostly within the past decade or so, whereas the technology to enable cheap long-distance cross-national cultural and economic flow is decades older)... Americans hadn't had this problem previously because the global metacultural phenomenon had been heavily America-biased. People were concerned about McDonald's crapping up in Russia, but concerns about other people's ideas blending with the American way of doing things were dismissed mostly, I think, because a lot of Americans just assumed their way was the best way so it would dominate.
But that was never going to happen, and the cross-national mixing has been passing the inflection point where things that seem anti-American to those disconnected from the rest of the world seem perfectly natural to those deeply plugged in.
The "global" vs "local" dynamic also maps pretty well to those other issues you referred to - class dynamics, cosmopolitanism, tech savviness ... all of these make a strong inference where, if you fall into the category where you are upper class and cosmopolitan and are optimistic about technology, you are very likely to be in favor of a more global approach to managing civilization. Hell, it even maps (though less cleanly) to things that at first glance you'd assume are completely unrelated, like thinking the pandemic originated in a lab in Wuhan.
It is worth noting, however, that there is strong push back in the broader west against the more aggressive American cosmopolitan ideas that half of the country here finds alien. Macron in particular seems to recognize this trend[1]. He seems like a genuine outlier, though, and his skepticism may be an artifact of the general weakness of the French left. This is to say, that while these ideas look and feel alien to ~50% or more of each country in question, they still did, in fact, emerge and gain prominence in America first and were then exported.
If you look at life expectancy in the America, it has been flat to reversing. Understandably with added pressure from Covid, but at a rate higher even with Covid higher than all other well resourced major nations. This not because we are unable, but because those with the power are unwilling to engage fundamental issues. Covid is not the only issue for which this is the case - it was happening before covid.
Multiple major issues with scientific and economic root causes are simply being ignored as stability and promises of improved prosperity provided by civilization is going backwards. This is meets my definition of falling apart.
>> If you look at life expectancy in the America, it has been flat to reversing.
>> Multiple major issues with scientific and economic root causes are simply being ignored as stability and promises of improved prosperity provided by civilization is going backwards.
How much of this can be explained by the fact that one third of adults in the US are obese as opposed to major scientific and economic issues?
IMHO, falling life expectancy is a macro measure of multiple failing institutions, not a singular cause.
Obesity is driven by systemic commercialization and sugaring of our food supply, combined with inequality of too low a pay, too many hours, to little vacation. Even funding of highway and road infrastructure over other areas is a contributor here.
Another large part of it is because we elect to keep both private health insurance policy which ends up being racially and economically biased, and what little social safety we provide is riddled with self-imposed rules of means testing and other red tape cutting the effectiveness of even the meager allocation of resources. Many very easily and economically preventable illnesses and deaths keep happening and that is a decline to me. e.g. https://www.propublica.org/article/black-diabetics-lose-limb...
Let us imagine that starting tomorrow every single American is granted infinite endless and free access to anything available at any restaurant or grocery store or other food service. Do you think that in 10 years the obesity epidemic would be: better, same, worse?
I have trouble imagining that it would be better. Look at people who come into access with large sums of money for reasons outside primarily mental achievement - athletes after leaving pro sports, musicians after they stop performing, actors after they stop acting, lottery winners, and so on. Some quick searching turned up articles like this [1]:
"The researchers found that the athletes' weight held steady for over 100 years, with the majority of them weighing in at what is considered "normal," -- i.e., with a body mass index (BMI) between 18.5 and 24.9. However, around 1991 the average player's BMI began to rise, and over the last 25 years nearly 80 percent of players fall into the overweight or obese category with a BMI above 25. "
There's a strong correlation between socioeconomic status and obesity, but that doesn't mean it's causal. Obesity is primarily driven by a lack of impulse control. If you force yourself not to over-eat, you could live off of even McDonalds without becoming obese.
Good science always leaves the door open to alternative explanations, even when it may be unlikely. In this case the researchers were relying on BMI to measure obesity. BMI doesn't account for musculature. To not even consider this possibility would be the domain of agenda-driven research, which this paper clearly was not.
Here is a link to the actual paper [1]. Their concluding statement was:
"Professional athletes are not immune from the
growing obesity crisis and may not provide optimal role models of health. Concussions have drawn
attention to overlooked long-term health consequences of sport participation. Increasing body
mass in professional baseball players warrants similar attention for its potential impact on long-term
morbidity and mortality because these players hold
a special place as role models of health and human
performance in our society."
Spot on. BMI is a bad indicator of individual health and fitness. I have a BMI of 25 right now but that’s because I added 14lbs of muscle over the last year while dropping a couple pounds of fat. Body fat percentage sitting at 18%.
Now, there are lots of big boys in the NFL that definitely have a couple extra pounds on them, which could also be skewing numbers.
It would be an accelerant for sure, but maybe there would be a self-selecting correction: people with no self-control over food intake would just die out over the centuries (assuming there are genetic and cultural factors involved in food intake south control).
And why is obesity rising so quickly in nearly all first world countries but particularly in the US? Most of the research points at three reasons:
1. Modern food systems - fast food, frozen boxed food, and a severe lack of access to healthy whole foods
2. Income inequality - Obesity rates are far higher in lower income people and healthy food is far more expensive
3. Work culture - We work far more hours and far less physical jobs. Less hours to exercise and more cost to exercise.
Sure individuals can find ways around all these issues but the more roadblocks we as a society put in people's way the more that will fail. Which is is exactly what the OP is talking about, major scientific and economic issues cause far worse health outcomes.
Folks in the US are on average very fat and very ignorant, not a great combination if you would prefer to have people that are healthy and/or capable of improving their own life.
"Multiple major issues with scientific and economic root causes are simply being ignored"
Such as?
"but because those with the power are unwilling to engage fundamental issues."
It's possible that some issues they are unable to address because there are legal or practical hurdles. For example, obesity is a massive issue that is dependent on individual buy-in. Things like addiction and crime could use improvement, but they are both highly complex issues and not easy to solve. Of course most systemic issues are difficult to solve in a democracy simply because they need a lot of support to have any momentum, especially if individual and states' rights/liberties heavily protected in the democracy constitution.
What if that is the only choice they are being offered? When you go into a supermarket you are already being surrounded by awful food. The only good food there is the food you cook from scratch.
It's like the food industry is "conspiring" against you. Obviously they are not, they just deliver crap quality to make more money.
Yes, education is definitely part of it. It’s possible to eat one meal a day (intermittent fasting), it’s a choice many aren’t educated about (hunger pain goes away after a few minutes, esp. if there is enough water intake).
I mean the default assumption/mode of thought of the average uninformed person today seems to be a cynical one, at least judging from friends/family and top ranked posts from random people on the Internet. Given a situation in which they have zero knowledge, they will assume a conspiracy, cheating, corruption, malice, or some kind of deliberate inequality or unfairness in which they are the disadvantaged party.
Usually the way these assertions are frame leaves anyone who disagrees in the position of having to prove the negative. Lack of evidence is no mater because "we know", while any trivial facts, even completely circumstantial ones, are held as proof.
For example, I spent many too many hours arguing with my partner that Epstein wasn't "certainly murdered", that not having camera footage wasn't proof. While possible, we simply didn't have evidence, and suicide was hardly inconceivable given the circumstances. Yet seemingly everyone I know seems to not merely believe that this happened, but that they know this for certain and that there is a mass conspiracy to cover this up. There's a belief that a) you have to take an absolute position of fact on unknowns and b) the case that attributes the most malice to the greatest number of the highest status people is always the correct one.
The result is kind of interesting to me, because you end up where a majority of "regular people" end up sharing a common view of the world, even without any coordination and often when their ideologies are polar opposite each other.
Maybe this has something to do with the declining belief in god and religion that another poster mentioned. Things that the average Joe used to simply blame on god are now being blamed on the "Shadowy Elite" boogeymen, who are purportedly always conspiring against the public.
> Given a situation in which they have zero knowledge, they will assume a conspiracy, cheating, corruption, malice, or some kind of deliberate inequality or unfairness in which they are the disadvantaged party.
That's baloney. People have knowledge of Epstein. They see strong evidence he trafficked children (police findings), and strong good evidence he hung around rich and powerful people (photographs). The can see he was under trial for conspiracy, and that his two prison guards were convicted for conspiracy, and that his partner, Maxwell, was convicted of conspiracy. You'd have to be cynical to assume people put no thought into their beliefs.
What concerns me more than the collapse of many of our intuitions is the fact that the Neocons have emerged from the rubble. Regardless of party or political leanings there was a time when Neocons were universally reviled. Watching people like Bill Kristol, David Frum, and The Lincoln Project get so much press and attention makes my blood boil. Heck, they even brought out Dick Cheney(!!!) for the J6 anniversary.
I don't think the neocons will survive. It really feels like a last ditch effort to me. I'd say upwards of 90% of Republicans have turned on neoconservativism and the remaining 10% are more likely to vote Democrat where neocons are only welcomed as cheerleaders.
I think regardless of if he gets elected again, even if he only even serves one term, 50 years from now Trump's name is going to be plastered in more history books than any modern President before him (and possibly after). He truly did radically alter the party to an amount that will define different eras in political history.
I would guess it's because both parties are neoliberals since Reagan, and the D or the R is just culture war distraction. Sadly, the economic policy is all the same.
> Even if one's "guy" is in office, I don't think we feel the same about it the way we did even as recent as Obama, and his administration was when we really began to see the social cracks forming.
I really don't see it that way - this isn't at all a new phenomenon. What feels different to me is the intensity and pervasiveness of division, but then again that could be attributed to being more generally aware of things thanks to the Internet.
I'm 39 and have lived in America all my life. In my childhood, I dimly recall bitter rows over whatever Regan was doing - my parents lost friends over their opposition to him. In the 90s, Clinton scandals were all people could talk about for a good while. George W, of course, took social division to new heights - or, at least, I was finally old enough to appreciate just how far-ranging the dividing effects of ideology can be.
I remember in my first job in the mid-2000s, my team was already socially-clustered based on political/religious identity - "Libs" weren't invited to some parties, and vice-versa.
Of course, Obama's election really triggered a certain section of society, there's no denying that, but all that is to say that none of this is really new. In my view, our "tribes" broadly descend from pro- vs. anti-slavery camps, and the different geographic targets of migration from different parts of England and Europe. (I highly recommend the book Albion's Seed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albion%27s_Seed), which explores the influence of regional cultures of 18th-century Britain on American cultures).
> In my view, our "tribes" broadly descend from pro- vs. anti-slavery camps
Fact: George Floyd wouldn’t have died if he didn’t resist arrest.
I’m certainly not pro-slavery, and agree people can be racist, but there is certainly something wrong if people can’t openly discuss taboo truths without being slighted as a racist themselves, utterly dismissed, or censored.
The debate wasn't about that fact, it was about rather a white man would have died resisting or if him resisting in the way he did justified his death. The data shows that minorities are killed by cops at much higher rate[1]. He was accused of writing bad checks, that doesn't carry a death sentence nor should it. The reason people that express that opinion are often called racist is that it seems obtuse to bring up in the discussion. I'm NOT calling you of racist, I don't think people that state that are by default. Many are just siding with the police for various reasons.
Yes but there really wasn’t a debate. You either agreed or were racist, and that’s the issue in a nutshell.
Even just scratching the surface of this point, the data you shared fails to include details of whether the victims resisted arrest or not.
There have been dire national consequences of how the public views enforcing the law since Floyd. And claiming racism when a point seems obtuse to you is hardly productive
Yes this is quite simple. Cops can use deadly force to defend themselves and the public. If you’re threatening a cop or the public you’re increasing your own odds of getting hurt.
> there is certainly something wrong if people can’t openly discuss taboo truths without being slighted as a racist themselves, utterly dismissed, or censored.
There are things that are true and impactful and worth talking about, and some of those conversations get shut down because they make people feel uncomfortable. Your statement is not in that group.
There are statements that, while technically true, are misleading. They do not illuminate. They are so _obviously_ cherry-picked from the range of all possible statements that they reveal the bias of the person presenting them. Your statement is in this group.
Personally, I’m fine with people who reveal themselves to be racists to be labelled as racists. I’m fine with this category of statements being utterly dismissed. I’m fine with these statements being “censored”, as in people choosing not to publish them.
I flat out dislike most of current "black" culture, especially the american one, and think it's detrimental to black people and anyone that follows it. Racist or not?
My statement is admittedly terse but you’re wrong to dismiss it.
The unwillingness to even consider other opinions and the abject expansion of what qualifies as racist (and it’s use as slur) is exactly what’s perpetuating our issues.
What opinions? You labelled something a fact. Do you have an opinion to share? How much of my finite time on Earth do I have to spend on this opinion before I can dismiss it?
> and the abject expansion of what qualifies as racist (and it’s use as slur) is exactly what’s perpetuating our issues.
No. Definitely not. This is just detached from reality. Think of “our issues”. Whatever that list means to you. Society’s problems, our culture’s conundrums. Now, think of the list of things perpetuating those issues. If you put “the abject expansion of what qualifies as racist (and it’s use as slur)” anywhere near the top of that list, you are caught up in a delusion. I would sincerely suggest taking action to reground yourself.
It’s not detached from reality in the slightest. This is the crux of the debate on censorship. Biden just created a Ministry of Truth surrounding this issue.
You’re just stubbornly attached to your own beliefs. Most people are like this—they don’t like admitting when they were wrong. In general, the reason ‘why’ (above) is because it could benefit you to find a better conclusion if one exists. Do what you want, but very dangerous to burden society with the same handicap
Is the debate on censorship what you meant by “our issues”? I just think there’s much more important stuff going on. Maybe we disagree on this and that’s why your claim seemed ridiculous to me.
I'm not certain how that bears on what I wrote, and won't comment on it except to say that the American "pro-slavery camp" is not merely a synonym for "racially bigoted" - there's a whole world-view there in which groups of humans are inherently and fundamentally unequal, and in which might makes right, to a certain degree.
On your topic of "taboo truths", personally I agree that we ought to be able to discuss things with civility and assuming good faith. It's not always or even often possible these days.
I’m trying to illustrate that using racism as a baseline to divide camps of thought is the root cause of the fracturing of society.
For example, I don’t understand how you expect a civil and good faith discussion by first labeling the opposing viewpoint as ‘pro slavery’ at the onset.
Politics was literally divided into pro-slavery and anti-slavery during a pivotal moment in american history. We can't really discuss american political and cultural history without referencing this. The impact from this event directly comes up in politics to this day and it is weird to ignore it.
We're in the last 50 years of industrial civilization. Anyone who spends enough time with systems thinking and looking at the big picture of industrial society inevitably comes to the same conclusion.
I was a "doomer" back when everything seemed fine. Nothing since 2019 has surprised me at all.
Things will continue to break down at a faster rate and more severely. However, one of my earliest realizations upon waking up to this was that as things become more obvious, people's denial will be not chipped away but rather strengthened.
The collapse of industrial civilization (and the non-zero possibility of species extinction) isn't just scary for most people, it deeply cuts into existential crisis territory. The vast majority of our strategies of copping with existence and our deep rooted fear of our inevitable death is a system of meaning largely created around our hopes in the future of society. As society collapse we are forced to start confronting things that terrify us, and the natural psychological reaction is often to just double down on not seeing it.
There are already so many things that we've normalized that would be shocking to someone from 2012: Global pandemic, land war with Russia, lake Mead on track to stop water flowing through the Hoover dam in 10 years, crop failures, supply chain crises, etc.
In a very literal sense "everything is falling apart". We have destroyed vast portions of the biosphere, we're seriously looking at ecosystem devastating ocean acidification, most of us will live to see a blue ocean event. But people will be unlikely to ever recognize this, rather they will continue to double down on "this is fine" and the associates madness and extreme cognitive dissonance required to maintain this illusion.
If you think pandemics, crop failures, "land wars with Russia" are new, you are very much not paying attention. People lump normal history in with ecological problems all the time for a better sense of doom and gloom.
This coincides will my belief is the rise of self-degrading memes running rampant on every social platform I use. Every "funny" slogan, has a negative connotation, or self-degrading message attached to it. "When you only have $4.20 in your bank account", "How I look in the mirror vs tagged photo", etc.
We need to be very, very hesitant about identifying trends we see on social platforms, because most social platforms are highly optimized to show us the trends we want to see.
I think there’s something more fundamental going on in the US.
First, I’d want to say that we as humans love to simplify complex things. There are large macroeconomic trends at play that are boring or hard to explain, and it’s easier to blame immigrants, social media, or blame <X> because that gives us an outlet to make sense out of complexity. For politicians, depending on their political leanings, it gives them a way to avoid any form of accountability or responsibility. Regardless of party affiliations, Mitch McConnell, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi - some of the leaders across both parties have been in power longer than I’ve been alive. They can blame Facebook or Twitter for what’s happening in the country, but in my mind, these “excuses” are an indictment of out of touch, entitled “leadership”.
America is facing a reality where the rest of the world is catching up. In chase of endless profits, we stopped producing things at home. And frankly, our standards of living or at least the expectations have risen - everyone wants <Y> now, without patience, and they need it delivered now or within two days. They want a standard of living that requires competitiveness globally, but in this country, we no longer want to work for it. On one hand, we have homelessness, housing shortages, issues with getting access to healthcare. On the other hand, we’ve sold the promise of America and glamorized it so strongly that so many people want to come here, when we cannot even take care of folks that are already here.
We’re getting lazier, more entitled, and under delusions of a God complex. In every Hollywood film, we continue to be the good guys that save the world. On one hand, we have zero trust in our politicians. On the other hand, the notion that perhaps we’re not really “good” guys in some international conflict - that it’s not so black and white - is simply incomprehensible.
The last part of my rant is on the rising intolerance. There is now only one opinion, it is the truth, and anyone willing to step outside this narrow circle is a racist, bigot, etc. Worst of all, the people pushing this narrative are the loudest voices in the room, and our corporate interests are happy to assist and provide these people the megaphones they need, on their quest for endless profits and infinite growth.
> They want a standard of living that requires competitiveness globally, but in this country, we no longer want to work for it.
That’s not what I see at all. Most working people in the current generation are working more hours, at more skilled jobs, with more education than their parents, and yet the lifestyle they can afford (aside from tech gadgets) is worse and less secure than their parents.
I’m pessimistic about more young people studying subjects that are not useful, but I think in general this generation has gotten a bad (financial) deal in comparison.
> Most working people in the current generation are working more hours
This is just completely false. Both average working hours (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AVHWPEUSA065NRUG) and labor force participation (https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...) has been trending downwards. I think more revealing than our hours of work is our attitudes towards work. Watch American Factory and observe the difference between Chinese and American workers. The Chinese workers simply care a lot more about getting their jobs done. I do think it's a good thing that we can afford to have higher standards for ourselves, but let's not delude ourselves into thinking this doesn't come with any downsides.
This idea of higher hour and higher skill jobs doesn't necessarily conflict with the claim about not working (or being lazy). Workforce participation rates are historically low in the US.
So the people who work tend to work hard. But a large number of people choose not to work or even seek work (for a variety of reasons, so lazy might be a little too catch-all).
This just doesn't seem to be the case with the peers I know, and covid made everything worse for morale. Nobody really wants to work anymore, service speed has fallen off a cliff in my area (South Florida), staff shortages are still in effect, nobody wants to have kids/get married, etc.
In many parts of jobs that have public facing people, the perceived increase in the lack of civility has made those jobs much more difficult to accept for any length of time.
The combination of job loss, retraining for jobs that don't deal with the public, and acceptance of austerity (including moving back in with one's parents in some cases) to have an extended duration of no income means that you don't need to accept a job that pays poorly or deals with uncivil people.
This has resulted in a reduction of capacity in many parts of the service industry.
> staff shortages are still in effect
A lot of people upskilled in the past two years and those staff shortages will remain until a new cohort of workers exists in that area that lack the skills to get the better paying jobs that don't interact with the public.
> nobody wants to have kids/get married
While the marriage rate has dropped precariously, I'll point to https://www.statista.com/statistics/195951/marriage-rate-in-... and point out that the chart ends in 2020 and that weddings weren't things that were easily held in the past two years either. However, the trend that is shown in that graph is one that has lasted for three decades - not three years.
The "no one wants to have kids" needs to also be put into context of the percent of the cost of raising a child against the income and wealth for the generational cohort.
Still, if one is paying off their own college loans it is difficult to think of adding to that putting away money for a child's college costs. If a household is living pretty much paycheck to paycheck or has significant debt that they're paying down for whatever reason, having a child with an additional amount of cost would be considered to be unwise for people who have a fiscally responsible mind.
I’d like to make a meta response to your post not about specific points you raised but how you made your point.
I’ve been a fairly progressive or at least liberal my whole life. I also like to look at what the data tells us.
I’m not certain that looking at “data” means we have real facts. At best, we have some quantitative representation that fits the narrative being pushed by its creators.
Within progressive circles, I’ve seen data showing that the new generations are placing family on hold because they can hardly afford things, despite having “well paid” jobs. Other data shows that these millennials are all living with their parents. But then there’s another study saying something completely different. People slice and dice whatever information they have to fit whatever narrative.
I’ve personally become less willing to engage in conversation or debate when someone comes in and claims to have the data refuting what everyone is seeing with their own eyes and living day to day.
It’s like in Seattle. We have homicides, shootings about every week. A woman was recently beaten with a baseball bat at a transit station. But then the local government and its outsourced “activist” advisors say we cannot and should not lock up the suspect (who confessed) because he’s a minority, and minorities have faced systemic racism, etc etc. and the real solution is to increase taxes on billionaires. “I have some data, therefore I know more and I’m right and everyone else is wrong.” No thanks.
There are three parts to the supplying the data that supports the narrative that I show.
First, often I've had situations where the other party uses the "support it" refutation in some way. In an online environment, the time between the "support it" reply and my response gets responses like "[crickets]" suggesting that the other person won the argument - and that any who see the "support it" being the last post supports the position that I am wrong.
Second, it moves the burden of the previous "support it" refutation to the person without the data and telling a just so story ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-so_story ) or working off of personal anecdotes. A refutation of my post needs data of comparable weight.
Third, sometimes I am wrong. There have certainly been times when I was tracking down the information that would support my position only to find that I was in the wrong. By providing the data up front, I save myself from this possible loss of face from posting an unsubstantiated narrative that runs counter to what the numbers present.
All you're saying is that you like your narrative & you intend to stick to it despite any contradicting evidence that may be presented.
It's true that data must be judged for relevance & validity, but to just discard it in preference of your opinion is really egotistical.
Also, statistical data doesn't offer solutions; it only presents a broader perspective than one's collection of anecdotes.
So your example of Seattle choosing what you consider to be the wrong solution is not a very persuasive argument against collecting & using data itself.
> All you're saying is that you like your narrative & you intend to stick to it despite any contradicting evidence that may be presented.
Not at all.
I’m simply saying that anyone can fudge the numbers and claim to have “data” to support their argument.
> Also, statistical data doesn't offer solutions; it only presents a broader perspective than one's collection of anecdotes.
It offers an easily distortable “perspective”, and the same dataset is often misrepresented and twisted for convenience.
It’s a recurring theme, especially in leftist politics. Using “data” to spin a narrative and tell people the sky is pink when they can clearly see it’s blue.
> I’m simply saying that anyone can fudge the numbers and claim to have “data” to support their argument.
This is why reproduction & peer review of methodology are such important steps of the scientific method.
You're not supposed to take a single person's word on what data is.
This is also why certain fields like psychology have something of a credibility crisis, because so many "discoveries" have not been able to be reproduced.
I'm curious though: Can you actually recall specific events of a "leftist" using a false data set or are you just engaging in general slander against your political opponents?
Well, the US is a nation of some 330 million individuals. It's the 3rd most populous nation after China and India. The US is also the 4th largest country by land mass. It's actually tied with China in that regard.
Why is that important? Because at those scales, a population isn't remotely homogeneous. On the contrary. The US is a massively complex nation with many complex histories, cultures, economies, politics and belief systems. Languages spoken in the US are a massive topic in their own regard. American linguistics is a huge field.
The thing is that all that complexity gets hidden by a few dominant narratives. Noam Chomsky has been instrumental in pointing that out through his career. [1] Even so, the role of the media is just the top of the iceberg. Far more interesting is digging into deeply ingrained belief systems and the formation of identities throughout the history of the US from when settlers first arrived until the present day. One can never really fully escape one's own past, and this rings very true for collective histories.
I wouldn't characterize the US population as collectively having become "lazier" or "more entitled". I think that's short selling a national identity. However, one narrative is that the US fully became a global empire after World War II. The effects of those 5 years, and the preceding decades, from 1918 onwards, have profoundly transformed not only the US but also the world as a whole. Global economic prosperity up to the 1970s (in France, they are called the "Thirty Glorious Years") and it's subsequent decline over the past 50 years are ripples of a turbulent first half of the 20th century.
The fact of the matter is that the US - just like the rest of the world - is facing a new, challenging future with many new, potential and real, fault lines that might give rise to conflict and tension. Many of which still being rooted in historical differences.
It's easy to see how that breeds uncertainty and a sense of "everything is falling apart". Old certainties, dynamics and beliefs that have dominated the thinking of billions for the past 80 to 100 years are now being challenged. The question is how the US, this complex nation such as it is, is going to rise towards the occasion.
"There are large macroeconomic trends at play that are boring or hard to explain, and it’s easier to blame immigrants, social media, or blame <X> because that gives us an outlet to make sense out of complexity."
Very true. So many people rate the president based on how the economy or market is doing, yet they have very little influence over it.
"we no longer want to work for it.
...
The last part of my rant is on the rising intolerance."
If we're not busy working or "building" something, then the other thing people tend to engage in is tearing things down.
I always thought that the open ability to perform damaging speech against institutions and public figures in the west was “cool” — a major distinguishing factor between free countries and non-free ones. But I was also always a little skeptical of that ability. It seemed ok in small doses, just to prove we can do it.
Now we’re grappling with the full import of nonstop destructive speech coming from all sides and being amplified and mass-distributed. Nonstop shit talking and denigrating of our systems is what’s causing this drastic loss of confidence in them. Any imperfection will be amplified to where it looks like a total failure.
It not the small doses that makes it ok, it's the fact the speaker is small. If however, the speaker gains a following and the systems starts to perceive it as a threat rather than a nuisance, the reaction is much different.
I think it's a temporary phase introduced by the hyper-reflective nature of the internet. Younger generations will handle it better because they grew up in the new environment. Older generations are struggling to adapt.
I do think we are stuck in this cycle, where our government/politicians appeal to our basest impulses and urges. Outrage, sympathy, jingoism.
This is rewarded with political support, viewers, clicks on the headline. Even this article “Is everything falling apart”. Alarmist clickbait.
So if you’re society consists of too many people who simply act on impulse, instead of thoughtful consideration, how do you deal with that?
I’d argue less vitriol would help, but you’re incentivized in the opposite direction. Both the person who feels helpless expressing your outrage in the comments, or the media outlet trying to get viewers and clicks.
Empires can suffer military defeats, economic collapses, even civil wars (they were pretty much a national sport for the Romans) but what kills them off for good are crises of legitimacy. When people no longer believe in the unifying ethos of the empire, it's game over.
For example, when people stopped believing in Communism and the institutions of the Party, the USSR was done. All the nuclear weapons and KGB goons couldn't keep it together. When Roman citizens figured out that the legions would no longer protect them and they were better off paying tithes to a local feudal lord rather than taxes to Rome, the Roman Empire was done. And in the US, if nobody believes in the democratic system of government and the only way to keep their party in power is through insurrection or voter suppression, then the US as we know it will be over as well.
Ultimately I think it's gonna be a good thing, as a lot of public naivety re: its institutions is destroyed and things will be rebuilt on a newly defined "social contract." The transition may take generations or a new threat comparable to global warfare for it to happen though.
I think the climate emergency[1] compares and is only going to get worse.
Also, it is already partially responsible for warfare[2] (though not global, yet).
That is a good way to think about a lot of aspects of society. For the forest to remain healthy old trees need to die to make room for the new trees just waiting for enough sun to sprout from seed. After a tree falls, the patch of new trees compete to be the next old tree to fill the space. As the years go on hundreds of saplings become dozens and eventually one as the slow growers get shaded out.
Exactly. A forest is always growing and dying simultaneously. On average a healthy forest will grow more than die or be in equilibrium. A forest in decline will die more than it grows. There is also the cleansing effect of fire from time to time. It's a good analogy
>Civilization ebbs and flows, but I think the current sentiment is unprecedented in my lifetime
I generally agree that anti-instutional sentiment is at short term highs, but from what I've read it doesn't seem remotely as bad is it was in the 60s.
>People who I would consider "normies" even don't trust law enforcement and the FBI anymor
Ehh I think this is mostly short term partisan politiking
> Far more people are skeptical of things like journalism
I’ve spent a lot of time looking into that kind of skepticism. It turns out, the vast majority of people who say they are "skeptical" of journalism adhere to far right, conspiracy-laden fringe news sites that create fake news and cast doubt on science. It’s safe to say that the entire "skeptical of journalism" meme can be traced to a handful of billionaires who have used dark money networks to go after journalists who have dared to investigate and publicize their malfeasance. These billionaires use the far right blogosphere and fringe news sites to encourage public mistrust of journalists for this reason. Sites known to do this include the Gateway Pundit, Newsmax, OANN, Breitbart, Fox, and most notably, the NaturalNews disinformation and propaganda network run by Mike Adams.
That’s quite a broad brushed, generalization don’t you think? Also, it’s expecting journalism to be a perfect discipline run by imperfect humans. Skepticism is needed in just about every field; journalism is no exception or special case.
In any case, intellectual honesty is needed here. The case against journalism comes primarily from those on the far right, from people who peddle pseudoscience, and from the rich and powerful.
They don’t want to be held accountable, and they don’t want the public to know what they are doing. Anyone who has spent an hour looking into this issue knows this is true.
Billionaires like the Kochs and Mercers (and many others) have people on their staff ready to do a hit job on any journalist or media organization who dares to shine the light on their behavior.
Going after journalists is what all good authoritarians have on their wish list. Anyone who sides with this kind of bad behavior and has been taken in by these anti-democratic impulses is part of the problem.
For what it's worth, the decline of trust in institutions is primarily among "Republican/lean Republican" respondents, who are a minority of American voters and likely a minority of American non-voters as well.
> For what it's worth, the decline of trust in institutions is primarily among "Republican/lean Republican" respondents, who are a minority of American voters and likely a minority of American non-voters as well.
The problem with this line of thinking is that "Republican/lean Republican" is not a fixed trait. People can switch to that category instantly, overnight; so dismissing them just because the last time there was an election the other party managed to curry more votes after having every advantage possible - that's quite dangerous from a societal coherence standpoint.
I think it depends on exactly which institutions too. I would guess that law enforcement is an institution that more liberals distrust and more conservatives support.
Yes, there is a clear political tribal alignment between the current "out-group" and skepticism of institutions, but the rise of that iconoclasm on the right seems to be correlating with its growth as a whole.
I think your summary is obscuring some of the nuance in that data. What it shows is that independent voters self-identify as "lean rep"/"lean dem" based on their approval of the current president, which is low right now. Historically though, self-identified independents lean dem more than they lean rep (data in your link). Consider that the last time a Republican presidential candidate won the popular vote was in 2004, and before that was in 1988. It's well known that conservatives tend to vote Republican, and also tend to have much higher voter participation rates than progressives, so if your belief is that there are more Republicans and Democrats, you would expect to see more popular vote wins in elections with generally high participation (relative to other American elections - obviously American voter participation is dismal overall). So what accounts for that discrepancy?
You break out a poll to cast a group as fringe. Other people bring up other polls (more recent ones) to counter that argument, and then you shift to a different line of evidence citing "historical trends." Please, take this advice to heart, you are clearly trying to justify a conclusion with whatever evidence you can grab at hand. Take a step back and ask yourself if tribal loyalty is clouding your judgement.
We are all allowed (at least in the United States) to change our minds on things, but we can get in our own way. Lots of people seem to be changing their minds these days based on recognizing that their trust in some institution, process, or brand was misplaced. That might be you in a little while, and if it is, don't hate who you once were or once believed. Here's wishing you a good journey on your search for truth.
The original point I was making, "republicans are a minority", is true, and the data shows that. This isn't a tribalism thing, it's a question of data analysis. Also, I take umbrage at your patronizing tone. Personally attacking me does not change the data.
Here, swing this one, a minority of Americans support the President, Democrat policies, and plan to vote for a Democrat in 2022. There's your minority.
Agreed. Also, calling conservatives a minority is misleading since I'd hardly call like 47% a minority. It's technically true, but it's awfully close to even.
It's also worth remembering that unaffiliated is the largest group, and has been growing. Lots of partisans like to poopoo the idea that "independents" exist, and claim that they are just closet-partisans, but I don't buy it. Massive distrust of politicians and establishments is not something people are faking because they want to fake their stance on the internet.
Anecdotally, people who consistently vote for Republicans are less likely to identify themselves personally as Republicans than in the analogous Democrat case. (The media made "Republican" a dirty word, but didn't really change anyone's mind.)
If you're willing to dismiss polling out of hand for selection bias reasons, then why would you put any more weight onto intuitive arguments that rely on an even smaller and less systematic sampling?
Why would I trust reason over a process that collects a series of anecdotes from the most bat-shit members of society willing to talk politics with a stranger on the phone and then tries to correct their data through mumbo jumbo fake math?
Looking at that data, Republicans trust the institutions they control and Democrats trust the institutions they control, with the trends following the direction the institutions are themselves moving. Our institutions continue to polarize and cleave society as a consequence.
I'd argue the cracks really formed in the Bush era, but began to rise during the Obama era, and skyrocketed in the Trump era (Though I am a Millennial, so perhaps that biases my recollection of timeline).
What's interesting is each reader of the above comment will take something different away from it, based upon their political alignment.
What is interesting is that society hangs on by a thinner thread than we imagine. Chaos lurks just beyond a corner. Preventing it is much easier when in union.
Oh yeah no doubt; I collate trends into reports for rich investors. Lately they have been focused on youth trends, and some numbers are wacky.
<50% believe in God/higher being, down from 80%+ in early 00s.
40% point drop in 16 year olds getting a license since the 80s as urbanization puts people closer to stuff and ride share appeared.
Youth participation in sports, especially full contact sports, had been going down since before covid which just accelerated it, leading to forecasts of a major contraction in commercial sports.
“Essential workers” are pretty fucking pissed millions sat on their ass with no clue how to feed or care for themselves, while being paid minimum wage. They are not showing the same allegiance to shit jobs and moving on.
We engineered away stability for JIT, covid came along and proved to many we live in a Banana Republic exporting memes of exceptionalism, while most people can’t grow a potato for themselves.
Given sentiment nurses, teachers, “essential” workers just experienced from their neighbors during covid, why not tell the so called gritty masses who melted down over hair cuts to find new solutions.
People who are not alive yet have no obligation to carry our sensibilities forward after we die.
Yep. It would not kill us to recognize that globalization went 20% too far, and that supply chains in the US is good for us. We also have to deal with the fact that job loss v. cheaper goods has gone too far too. We need to swing back to a more US focused economy. Ex: I recently ordered brakes from a US company. They were out of stock of my model. I asked when it'd be back in stock. They said their suppliers didn't have the stuff. We're talking car parts: aluminum rotors, metal calipers, brake pads. We're not talking chips. Apparently this US brake company is just an importer and paper-pusher.
I think we also need to recognize that almost all real gains since 1985 have gone to the top 5%. Seen locally or tactically year-on-year that's not per se the rich's fault. But it nevertheless needs a course correction. Cheaper medical, education, housing is what other 95% could use. Congress is a part of the problem here too being more aligned with corporations instead of the middle class.
It's funny, because this should be a point of crossover for the (populist) left and the right. Basic nationalism on the one hand, "Buy Local" on the other. They all want the same thing, or close to it. The potential for alliance on economic topics like this is so blindingly obvious, and it's so frustrating that it gets derailed by "cultural" sideshows so that no one can talk to each other or realize they have the same interests ultimately.
There is a framing in which they want the same thing, but each side wants to use a method to achieving that thing that is antithetical to the other. The left wants to achieve it by limiting the power of capital and corporations. The right wants to achieve it by limiting the power of democracy and restricting it to certain demographics. Each finds the other's method appalling.
That doesn't really align any more. Some of the largest, most powerful corporations are now led by ideological leftists, and right wing politicians aren't shy about attacking them.
There is a common misconception that being willing to market products at LGBT people is "ideological leftism". Even worse is if they think supporting a center-right candidate like Hillary Clinton is "ideological leftism".
Some examples: Disney, Netflix, Salesforce (Marc Benioff used to host fund raisers for Hillary Clinton), New York Times. Larry Page made donations to Democrat candidates, 88% of Google staff made donations to Democrats so maybe we can include Google as well?
Disney has supported basic rights for LGBTQ+ people. This is one of those things which pretty much isn't up for debate anymore in most other developed countries. Beyond that, Disney has been solidly pro-corporate, anti-union, and generally right wing in its policies. I'm unaware of any stances Netflix and Salesforce have taken beyond similar support for LGBTQ and lip service to "racism is bad". Again, as far as I know, their economic stances are solidly anti-union, anti-worker, and pro-corporate.
None of those are "leftist".
Staff support is entirely different than institutional corporate support. Is Amazon leftist because one of its warehouses just unionized? No, it fought (and is fighting) that union effort tooth and nail. Similarly, Google has punished staff who were too open with their leftist beliefs.
Nor is support for the Democratic party "leftist". The Democratic party is split between neoliberals (who would be considered right of center anywhere else) and social democrats (who would be considered center left anywhere else) for the most part (with some rare Democratic Socialists who might actually qualify as leftist).
Hillary Clinton is a prime example of this. Anywhere but the United States, she would be considered solidly center right. It is only in the United States, where Fox News, et al have dragged the spectrum so far to the right that anything less than neo-fascist or anarcho-capitalist is considered left, where you could even pretend these corporations had a less than rightward slant.
Edit: I will note, this dragging of the spectrum is one of many, many reasons why I try to avoid spectrum based labels (left/right, etc) and stick to actual ideological labels. There is no single "leftist". There are Democratic Socialists, State Socialists, Communists, various flavors of Anarchist, etc who all get grouped together as "leftist", but generally don't agree on much. The other group of ideologies that get grouped with leftist are those supporting historically oppressed minorities - antiracism, antipatriarchy, and pro-lgbtq+ rights. Again, these are discrete ideologies and while people who subscribe to one often subscribe to the others, just as often they don't.
Similarly on the right, neo-facist, neoconservative, paleoconservative, evangelical theocrat, and anarcho-capitalist (the proper term for US libertarians) all get grouped together under the heading "right". When many of these ideologies are (or should be) completely at odds with each other.
Am I the only one that thinks corporations really pulled a veil over the American people's eyes? And that Republican and Democrat parties really differ only on social issues, but when it comes to economics they both favor the corporations? My investing strategy has been to stay in the stock market until there is a constitutional amendment that forbids money in politics. Until then corporations will continue to buy the Senate and Congress (and Supreme Court too which is no longer a-political and thus can be bought)
Corporations and black money from rich people giving to american political parties does provide an endless pressure on both parties to cater to the needs of rich people and companies, of course. But it's not that simple. The republican party has been the party that supported large companies directly, but the populism of Trump and culture war pushed most recently by DeSantis in Florida shows they are happy to score points against say Disney. The democrats have been pushing for people to have nationalized health insurance if they want it, which would definitely reduce the power of corporations - at the same time the dems go along with needs of big business very frequently. Yet dems support unions, repubs are very against them.
I agree with you that the core of this is money in politics leads to money having too much influence with politics. On the supreme court, I think that republican federalism has control over the court, that's the clear place where the 'ideology' of dems would lead to different results. But this isn't a secret, the parties encompass multitudes of views, because we squish all views into two fairly narrow groups with our accidentally designed for two-parties political system.
The problem is that they are both lobbied / paid for / bribed by the same companies / interest group, which seem to have more long-term commanding power over the evolution of US society than the elected president, so whoever you end up electing won't make as much of a difference. Similar to the time of Standard Oil etc., the rules have changed less than one might think. Maybe the real dilemma in US politics is that there are only two parties that stand a chance (and they both kinda suck, at different magnitudes), it's maybe a problem related to the election system and zoning?
If they want the same thing, the laws will get passed. What actually happens is that each side proposes laws that are not even close to acceptable to the other side, proving that they don't actually want the same things.
> We need to swing back to a more US focused economy.
> Cheaper medical, education, housing is what other 95% could use.
Eds, meds, and beds can't be outsourced, which is why they're increasingly too expensive for workers. Fix the first problem above and the second will follow.
> Eds, meds, and beds can't be outsourced, which is why they're increasingly too expensive for workers. Fix the first problem above and the second will follow.
Education has been forcefully disrupted, by the institutions themselves no less: Zoom School proved what most of us knew all along, most institutions are just costly degree mills with little to no emphasis on truly educated their students. I personally attend a CompSci program from a university in the UK and it's quite flexible and affordable when compared to US standards.
Meds can and should be outsourced where ever possible: US,,Switzerland, Germany and France are the gold standard for reasons I don't time have to explain here, but there is no reason we couldn't just acquire their drugs and medical devices at wholesale prices from the aforementioned nations if the US pharma complex refuses to play ball and compete on price.
Thousands of nurses are on strike right now as we speak in Stanford, and many more are expected to quit the Industry entirely in the next coming years nation wide after being abused by the system during COVID.
This could be the perfect time to re-negotiate the terms imposed by the AMA and the Industry as a whole, ideally opening the roles to more practitioners and thus lowering the costs.
Housing, is sadly the last (investment) refuge of the dying middle class' networth in the US: I highly doubt that will be disrupted until 3-d printing of homes becomes common place, continuing the remote-first work place will definitely help in that, but right now the transition is that high paid tech workers can move and gentrify previously affordable areas.
I under stand that it's partly creative destruction, and to be honest as a digital nomad with no real need to stay in the US, I'm staying the hell out until these things are resolved--which I'm sure they will in time.
I see no real need to be in the US if my quality of life and standard of living is only going to continue to be impaired to prop up the decaying business models of archaic monoliths who have systematically reduced the standards of living for so many.
> Zoom School proved what most of us knew all along
I'm not sure how things are in the UK, but the sentiment in the US is that Zoom schooling was an unmitigated disaster.
I was bullish on remote education prior to COVID, but interacting with the output of remote learning (at work and in volunteer work) has completely changed my mind. COVID was nowhere near a perfect experiment, but what evidence we can glean overwhelming contributes to evidence to the "remote learning sucks for at least a majority of students of all ages" side of this debate.
> I was bullish on remote education prior to COVID, but interacting with the output of remote learning (at work and in volunteer work) has completely changed my mind. COVID was nowhere near a perfect experiment, but what evidence we can glean overwhelming contributes to evidence to the "remote learning sucks for at least a majority of students of all ages" side of this debate.
I feel it's still rather early to say that, we're still on at the optimization level but it's clear things definitely need to be improved (I still haven't received my final scores despite knowing I have 1st honors for my first year with a plugin that has a SQL lookup), but with that said I also got to sit in Master level lectures in AI and ML at Stanford with Dr. Andrew Ng while I was attending my intro courses and for not much money I could have gotten credit for it, too.
I think this appeals most to autodidacts as we get to choose what and how I want to learn, which as a self-taught programmer helps a lot to stay motivated. I'm on a Performance based admission enrollment: previous fintech founder, with professional experience in a mega-corp after being head-hunted for said fintech startup.
It could also be because I was so deeply disillusioned with my first BSc in Biology that I see this as a more suitable outcome for a working professional; I had launched my 2nd business my Junior year of HS and it was starting to get quite a bit of traction in the middle of my Freshman year. University was always my plan B and I treated as such, but since I was paying for it I valued flexibility over actual substance--my discipline and focus as a cellular and molecular biologist was widely used in research but despite going to a good research university in the middle of the Capital of biotech (San Diego) it was woefully underwhelming.
I still speak with my one of my Biochem professors and things haven't progressed much from back then, either.
In my experience after having worked at a megacorp in tech that came from an open-source project (Bitcoin, or Blockchain) I just don't think the on-campus model has done much to earn my trust either. People with MSc and PhDs were showing some incredibly sophomoric mistakes with even basic things like annotations that I thought were understood when you started to make learn to make commits on github. I could make a prototype with limited supervision, despite being forced to do it in Soliditiy which remains a horribly buggy lang, where as they couldn't do much without lots of hand-holding from someone that was forced to learn how to code from free tutorials, youtube videos, hanging out #IRC and tons of hours on Stack overflow.
I self admit I'm not even very good as a developer either, I just knew what I didn't know and knew where to look and how to ask the right questions: which is something I took away from a lecture in a PhD level Virology class I sat in by accident my senior year in University.
3d printed houses are a silly idea. Cost of construction is not the problem, the problem is zoning, NIMBY, low interest rates, and tax policies that favor long-term owners.
> 3d printed houses are a silly idea. Cost of construction is not the problem, the problem is zoning, NIMBY, low interest rates, and tax policies that favor long-term owners.
I think it's part of the problem, consider the massive boom/bust cycles and material shortages that occur in this Industry. I used to do framing in the off-season of my farming apprenticeship and I can tell you cost of construction and labour is a MASSIVE cost because things always run longer than expected.
I think that 3D printing can achieve several things, but you're right the latter issues are a major problem in major cities in SV, but honestly that place is such a cesspool that I don't even put it into my calculus anymore.
As Starlink gets rolled out more and more, I think development in more rural areas will seem more favorable than major cities.
You're right - cannot be outsourced. Then it'll fall to US labor which is more expensive.
Now, on the other hand, if I was running Congress or the Executive branch I'd do a Consumer reports on steroids for "eds, meds, and beds" (a nice rhyme BTW - borrowing it) which would,
* publish medical costs (now mandated to be available I believe) and ranking them
* publish costs of 4 year education by basic degree category vs. expected income and ranked so student loans are NOT forgiven while students are helped and advised to not spend stupid amounts of money on dumb degrees with no ROI.
* While theoretically government student loans help the borrower not the school, there may be a perverse incentive for some schools to raise tuition and board if they think students can afford with loans
* And good lord, would it kill us for the Fed to negotiate prices down on pills? Not it would not! I'm annoyed that private companies threaten the public with higher prices and/or less innovation. I say, let's see where it goes!
* Maybe the federal government should make generics. I mean if the private sector doesn't play nice, take competition to them.
The larger point is that in meds the consumer has fundamentally less control than say a customer purchasing a service. In a typical setting the consumer knows more about the price and price spectrum going into the sale, and the servicer needs the client to pay. So they both gotta get along. In meds the billing prices are less clear and the paperwork for billing goes between the servicer and insurance company. I do not like that. I want the medical provider to know I have the money, and if I don't know or like what's going on, prompt payment is a question.
> organized religion will always be a net negative.
There are clear benefits to organized social stuff. For whatever reason, religions appear to be more effective at this than secular groups. One of the more "fun" theories I've seen is that this is because religious beliefs are often nonsensical and costly.
For large scale events, I'm not convinced that nations that tried to do away with organized religion got better outcomes for it.
Actually, it's organized religion that can be good or bad. Personal religion is a personal affair, which seldom concerns society. But organized religion has been critical in the establishment of laws and customs, ethical change, societal norms, national expression against opression, etc.
Organized religion helped to defeat Communism, and tempered dictatorial control of many despots in the middle east. So your statement is far removed from reality.
This only works to your benefit if the despot is on your side. Even if you are in the inner circle, despots tend to be very temperamental and murder their own supporters on whims of insecurity. So be careful what you wish for.
Organized Religion is literally the only organized opposition left under dictatorial rule. Even tyrants have a hard time going around murdering clerics. But you go ahead and believe what you want.
The cold war propaganda was ratcheted down some time after Gen X; to a super-majority of under-30s, even conservative ones, this probably sounds more like a knave's laugh line than a sincerely held belief.
If that's the case, they have no clue what they're talking about. The Pope literally helped to organize and support the main opposition Solidarity movement.
With many churches across the world actively working to end it.
They still have imaginary friends on facebook though. At least god has morals. We haven't replace those and the number of mass shootings seems to be going up as belief in god goes down.
> <50% believe in God/higher being, down from 80%+ in early 00s.
> 40% point drop in 16 year olds getting a license since the 80s as urbanization puts people closer to stuff and ride share appeared.
As a young-ish person neither of these seems particularly “wacky”, and if places actually are re-urbanizing to any significant degree I’d say that’s a good thing given the changes we need to make to address climate change. Doesn’t feel like they are in the moment though.
> “Essential workers” are pretty fucking pissed millions sat on their ass with no clue how to feed or care for themselves. They are not showing the same allegiance to shit jobs and moving on.
They never had allegiance, they didn't leave shit jobs because of fear and the fact that moving between 2 minimum wage jobs likely wouldn't improve their circumstances. People are switching jobs because its an option now where it wasn't before and it's a good way to make more money. Do you honestly believe that pre-covid people worked at McDonalds because of their desire to provide food to people?
> We engineered away stability for JIT, covid came along and proved to many we live in a Banana Republic exporting memes of exceptionalism, while most people can’t grow a potato.
This is progress. Do you believe a world where everyone grows their own crops to feed themselves is an improvement? People don't grow potatoes because it is a waste of their time when you can buy a giant bag of them for next to nothing. Something only possible because of the modern JIT economy. What you call stability is actually inefficiency and waste in disguise.
Its not progress. Your car plant now needs a truck worth of car bumpers every day, when they take 4 weeks to ship from overseas. Any disruption means that your whole plant is now idle. But because of accounting rules, it made companies look much better off if they got 2 trucks of bumpers every day, rather than have 28 trucks worth of bumpers sitting in a warehouse. Much more risk, but sure does help up that earnings per share to help the CEO with his bonus based on stock price.
Remember how hospitals didn't have PPE, because they could always get more shipped in 2-3 days? Works great. Until it doesn't.
People are not concepts. There’s a real difference in QOL between an office worker and a retail worker.
You can ramble off the memes etched into your meat based tape recorder all day long; others do not owe putting agency into routines you prefer to avoid.
Such sentiment approaches thought policing. You are still one of seven billion to those other meat bases tape recorders.
The last two years have shown younger generations that JIT is not resilient. Some level of self sufficiency is a requirement for stability and resiliency. Past generations learned this lesson with some portion of the population starving. There aren't any farms within 500 miles of where I live. If we can't get shipments from outside people are going to starve. This realization of supply chain fragility is what many people have come to after seeing some items absolutely unavailable at stores. Each community must grow some amount of food locally or their continued survival is reliant on there being enough food to make it profitable to ship food thousands of miles.
> The last two years have shown younger generations that JIT is not resilient.
I'm a millennial and I worked for 2 of the big 3 German Auto manufactures in Supply Chain and Logistics and then went to work for a US megacorp, I can assure you: many of us of from all ages have been sounding the alarm since of an imminent crisis since at least 2016. No one cared, the MBAs in collusion with the executive board were too busy asset stripping and optimizing business models for short-term gains and massaging PnL sheets to make it look like the future was filled with endless profits.
The reality is that accounting displaced it's responsibility on to the SC and Logistics side to the absolute limits to the determent of accurate forecasting and modeling in order to keep the 'make believe' narrative alive.
> Each community must grow some amount of food locally or their continued survival is reliant on there being enough food to make it profitable to ship food thousands of miles.
To be fair, 2020 marked a high-water mark for CSAs in the US [0] due to the COVID shortages, sadly it was soon forgotten afterward. People have short-term memories, and the appeal of outsourcing this vital component of keeping Society functioning has little effect on people until it's often far too late.
This isn't progress, it's exporting the work that has to be done, someone has to grow potatoes. We have exported that hard work to poor people across the globe at horrible cost. Cost to the environment, cost to stability, cost to geo-political safety. Someone has to have their hands in the dirt, we act like it's progress because it's cheap and fragile because we don't have to do the work. Is it progress to pay artificially low prices on beef or bananas because poor people in the global south are destroying the rain forests to raise crops? Cause that's the only way the modern JIT system works right now.
That's a huge part of the problem, farming shouldn't be heavily mechanized in the way we do it. Monocrops, pesticides, fungicides, and huge feed lots all have terrible environmental costs. Even aside of Climate Change, soil erosion is a massive problem.
I used to be sympathetic to this line of argument, but I'm no longer so sure. Organic farming has lower yields, so to feed the same number of people, you'd have to bring more land under cultivation. That would presumably outweigh any environmental advantages you get from using less chemical pest control.
Second, the extra people you employ, aside from the obvious mind-numbing drudgery and hard labour you're ruining their lives with, would have a carbon cost.
Third, I can see that some pest-control chemicals are bad for the environment. However, it seems also clear that the demarcation line between eco and non-eco is not the same as the line between organic, and non-organic. In fact, it seems like there is no relation at all. There are many chemical pesticides that are not environmentally damaging, and many traditional farming techniques are environmentally damaging.
Actually if you look at no-till and permaculture it 100% can have the same or higher yields per acre. The process of farming also doesn't have to be mind-numbing in this case. The combination of AgTech/Robotics and no-till/permaculture could produce vastly larger yields vs Organic traditional farming.
That's for soil based farming, personally I think Hydroponics (raising plants in water with no soil), Aeroponics (Hydroponics but grown in vertical towers), and Aquaponics (closed ecosystem using fish to fertilize the water the plants are grown in) are the only real way to feed a growing population and not destroy the environment. The Netherlands is already the leading European exporter of food, here is a great youtube video that touches on some of the ideas. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5clOYWsNhhk
Bottom line is that traditional Organic farming isn't the answer anymore than modern factory farming. AgTech is something I'm passionate about and I honestly believe that if we don't adopt more modern science will we face a large crisis in our food systems sooner rather than later. Some crops will need to be soil based (grains and related crops mostly) but nearly everything else grows faster, more reliably, and with out the need for chemical treatments. There are a large number of Hydroponic and Aquaponic farms already in operation but the percentage is still very small.
Aside from the no-till/permaculture stuff (which has been around for decades now, and has never seemed to take off), what you are talking about is ultra-automated, extremely centralized farming - and in general, I kinda agree that it's a part of the future.
One issue is just that if you're trying to convert solar energy into calories, you naturally want to spread out over a large area (a field) then use an efficient process to do this (photosynthesis). You then want to make these calories easy to process with machines (monoculture), and to defend them against pests (sprayers), etc. So there are advantages for traditional farming that are rooted in simple physics and economics, and a lot of that won't go away.
I do think the use of robots to apply pesticides in a more targeted manner is probably something we'll see more and more of, but I think for most crops, building a super-controlled green house is probably never going to be economical.
Getting rid of those things would at most double the farm payrolls, which is still a tiny minority of Americans. For the most part, monocrops, pesticides, and fungicides have HUGE economic efficiency incentives ($ ROI / acre) even if you subtract the contribution to labor efficiency (humans / acre).
Your 2nd point is complete nonsense. Something can be stable, inefficient and wasteful all at the same time.
Just because YOU think 'progress' is making something more efficient & less wasteful at the cost of stability does not make it fact. I, and probably many other people, would consider it a foolish approach. Progress, to me, would be making the food industry less fragile (i.e. more stable).
> Progress, to me, would be making the food industry less fragile (i.e. more stable).
How much so? FOr all the talk of techno-utopian ideals amongst the HN crowds, it isn't until you reach the 'I'm burned out, so I'm going farming' phase of a tech worker (I did rather early at 26) that most here will take any level of consideration in making any effort towards that end.
For most, it seems like a contrarian past time to argue the merits of conventional vs organic food becase: 'carbon is carbon.' Not realizing the underlying aspect of most of the local and organic movement is to strengthen the food supply that had been vastly consolidated by the pharmaceutical corporations in the late 70s who filled your plate with pesticide-laden franken-food shipped from all over the World and made us more food insecure (in non=processed junk) and diseased than ever in the US history.
In short, simply going to the farmers market once in a blue moon to have a story to tell here isn't living up to your rhetoric, and it seems that salary/TC alone isn't enough to compel some of the most well paid workers in the US to opt for making the food supply less fragile at all.
> 40% point drop in 16 year olds getting a license since the 80s as urbanization puts people closer to stuff and ride share appeared.
We’re just going to ignore the trend of states eliminating general licensing for that age group and replacing it with time-, purpose-, and passenger-restricted provisional licensing that happened between the 1980s and now as a driver of that trend?
>> 40% point drop in 16 year olds getting a license since the 80s as urbanization puts people closer to stuff and ride share appeared.
Is it urbanisation? I've noticed this trend in the suburbs in my country too and there seem to be a couple of reasons:
1. Driving tests have gotten progressively more difficult and more complex over the last 10-20 years.
2. The cost of learning to drive is insane and getting more expensive.
Personally, I put off learning to drive and now that I'm in my 30's I'm finding it very hard to justify the cost and time investment necessary, despite wanting to get a license. Until I need it, I think I'll continue putting it off.
Hmm, I don't know what country you are in, but this doesn't sound like the US at all. There's a recent spike in the cost of driving due to gas prices and car supply, but afaik driving tests here have always been fairly trivial and still are.
The states that I'm familiar with require a number of hours of supervised driving before allowing teens to get their licenses, along with the enrollment in certified driving schools. That can be both expensive and time consuming, especially if parents are working and don't have the time to do supervised driving with their kids.
The skyrocketing cost of living all over the country means that parents must work more, sometimes multiple jobs, in order to make ends meet.
Yeah. I can back up the OP's claim with some anecdata as well. If you've ever had a license in IL, you can pretty much guarantee they'll give you a new one with no testing right now.
I know 3 people that have renewed in the last 6 months. They all commented that the experience was weird. They'd be told that they would need to do all sorts of exams, but never end up having to do them. They would just get the new license.
I've lived in a lot of places, and I've never once had to take any kind of exam to renew a license. Not sure who told them you need to do that - I don't think that's a thing in any US state, and probably not in most countries either.
Renewal of a license is mostly just updating the photo.
You can also transfer licenses between states with no exam. Not necessarily between countries though, some allow it some don't.
I think the OP was talking about an initial license though - for the most part exams are not very hard, you just need a basic level of skill, and some knowledge.
A Swiss colleague was doing his pilot license at the same time as his son was doing a driver license. Both were about the same price, but apparently flying a Cessna is somewhat easier than driving a car.
I don’t just use opinion polls, but the sources for the explanations are opinion polls.
Top responses to “why not get your license” point to availability of public transit, ride share, viability of walking, or biking, all of which are not an option for folks beyond the suburban fringe.
Can you even get a license at 16 anymore in all states? I know when I was getting mine two decades ago it was already getting to the point where people were saying “I might as well wait until 18”.
IMO the only real downside of waiting till 18 is that your insurance rates are gonna be sky-high for the first few years regardless of your age when that happens. If you've held a license for 2 years with no accidents then your rates are gonna be cheaper, regardless of whether you actually drove anywhere.
That's offset by teen driver education being a fucking racket though. The entire thing is just a scheme to extract a grand from mommy and daddy.
Wait till you're 18 and suddenly the need for that course and the hours of supervised driving will vanish. Pass the driving test and the written and boom, there's your license.
Your observations about minimum wage work and globalized JIT supply chains are, I think, pretty valid.
> <50% believe in God/higher being, down from 80%+ in early 00s.
Source? The only recent poll I could find on this was a 2020 poll from Pew, and in that poll the number is still over 80% [1]: "more than eight-in-ten American adolescents say they believe in God or a universal spirit."
> most people can’t grow a potato for themselves.
Not new, especially if meant literally, but also even as an abstraction. Non-farm employment has been WAY below 50 percent for most of our country's history. The inflection point was in the mid 1800s.
Incidentally, I know how to grow potatoes thanks to rocky west virginia soil.
I'm not sure why I would, though. Spending a lots of time and an acre of land on a personal vegetable/fruit/spice garden makes tons of sense in terms of quality and price. Growing your own potatoes is just silly in every way unless you either LOVE potatoes or have land that's not productive for anything else. But even then there are probably better options.
> Youth participation in sports, especially full contact sports, had been going down since before covid which just accelerated it
This reeks of "Bowling Alone".
Contact sports are in decline because we learned a lot about concussions. Just like bowling leagues died because we learned a lot about smoking and drinking in a previous generation. People aren't "bowling alone"; they stopped bowling because they stopped drinking and smoking, and for most people bowling was a thing to do while drinking/smoking during the winter months. People didn't stop socializing, they just stopped spending their free time in the town's primary smoke+alcohol+child friendly indoor space. Lanes were replaced with places like coffee shops and gyms.
> leading to forecasts of a major contraction in commercial sports.
Maybe. But there's also way more televised skiing/climbing/dirt biking/etc. than there was in the 90s. The MBA/NFL/NBA cartels aren't owed an audience, and shifting attention to other sports doesn't necessarily portend a decrease in interest in commercial sports.
The conversations I’m in are not simply focused on brain trauma; the resource cost of hauling around teams and gear is substantial. Conversations at homes on “Main Street” are more frequently referring to multiple reasons for a decision, not reducing it to one or another.
Same goes for traditions like coin and paper money; they consume a lot of stuff and energy. That’s become a repeated talking point when polling people why they are interested in crypto, which was unexpected.
The data models I’m asked to build include more than just opinion polls though, as it’s felt by the folks I work with opinions are biased by media, anxiety of going against the grain, and frankly, lack of imagination and considering alternatives on the part of the public.
See a quote commonly attributed to Adam Smith about extreme division of labor resulting in humans dumber than animals; there’s no exploration across contexts; a farmer is a farmer and that’s it. Proper Anglo tradition of staying in lanes dictated by aristocracy.
Generational churn won’t end reality itself, or be so dramatic we stop using English. It will curve agency away from old forms of agency to new. A lot of people freak out about that.
>We engineered away stability for JIT, covid came along and proved to many we live in a Banana Republic exporting memes of exceptionalism, while most people can’t grow a potato for themselves.
This is hyperbolic. The US is not a banana republic. Why would you expect the average person to need to know how to grow a potato?
Replace potato with any old piece of handy info, like home or car maintenance. A lot of younger Americans (myself included) have little practical knowledge, so everything needing knowhow in this generation must be outsourced.
Compare this to my grandfather's generation, he knew how to frame houses, plumb, electric work, auto work, gardening, etc, and he was not alone. If he needed something done you'd get four of your buddies and work on the project for the weekend instead of hiring a contractor. In my dads generation fewer people knew these things but still, a lot of people learned from their dads. In my generation otoh it seems like no one knows any of this, and therefore any issue around the home or the car becomes this catastrophic repair since you have to hire a specialist who charges hundreds an hour because you haven't learned very much that's actually practically useful for your life.
This sounds a little rose tinted to me. I personally think for simpler tasks, much more information is available these days compared to older times. There's many resources on how to grow a potato (and other things) on the Internet.
For other tasks, some things have simply become a lot more complicated to work on. Electronics were a lot simpler in older times, for instance; swapping out a surface mount quad flat package will require a lot more "finesse" than swapping out a 1960s capacitor. Cars too have gotten more electronics and software. Despite this, there are definitely still people that have the skills to repair modern electronics and cars. (I will say that these types are often hampered by manufacturers that seem hostile to the idea of users being able to practically repair devices, hence the "right to repair" movement being a thing these days.)
I'm convinced there's more noise but I'm not sure how much of it is really more signal. Consider growing a potato and searching for that term on Google. I'm betting a lot of articles are going to be somewhat junky SEO spam that's repeating the same few pieces of info. Whereas if you were to go to a garden center or library, and find a book or pamphlet on growing a potato, that's probably going to be great information and very comprehensive, and covers a lot more than those short articles ever do. This generation wasn't without good information. They were consulting things like the Haynes manual for their cars the same as your mechanic does today, or reading on the pros and cons of different truss designs from books available in the hardware store.
Information about 'how to grow a potato' and a season or two of experience working out the kinks of growing a small crop of potatoes on available land near you are two very different things.
You can still learn these skills. In fact, the wide access to knowledge should give you enough to learn these skills without ever having to ask someone else. The larger reality is a lot of these people don't need to learn these skills, so they won't, for various specific reasons.
Same way you can ask a ton of people gen X and higher how to open a Word document, many of them don't know. They don't even know where to get the information besides asking family and friends, because that's their modus operandi. Tons of human support still has a job only because these people can't figure things out without another person helping them.
Every generation currently alive has a large degree of learned helplessness. The areas where they are helpless just vary.
If you go a few generations further back, your ancestors lived in crushing rural poverty but literally hand-made most of the things in their own house, with the rest produced by local craftspeople; grew/raised or gathered/hunted most of their own food; made their own clothing starting from raw materials; etc.
Your buddies today have dramatically greater material wealth due to worldwide supply chains and mass production, but don’t know how to turn an unshorn sheep into a blanket or sweater or build walls out of mud and sticks. Today it’s no longer worth even fixing most stuff because the labor costs to do anything as a one-off are prohibitive compared to buying a new one from a streamlined (capital and energy intensive) factory.
I dunno. I’m early millennial and, due largely to money reasons, I’ve done the following myself in past 12 months:
- re-graded slope of dirt in back yard (by hand, oof), trenched and added irrigation (to code), and seeded a successful lawn
- rebuilt upper valve train on my minivan (5 failed hydronic lifters)
- reframed my garage, which had massive termite damage and wall was 1.5” out of plumb, roof sagging badly
- wired new 60A circuit for EV charger (to code)
- excavated (by hand) and replaced 10’+ section of sewer lateral
- rebuilt washing machine pump, added dynamat sound deadening so quiet when on calls in garage
- re-heeled my wife’s shoes
- designed / built custom bunk/loft/desk for my sons’ shared room (Baltic birch, flat packable, surprisingly beautiful)
- re-roofed and reflashed chimney to fix leak (then re-drywalled 1/5 living room ceiling, skip trowel texture)
- abs so on…
Not trying to humble brag, but I hadn’t done a single of those tasks before (except framing, drywall, electrical, plumbing, which I taught myself in last decade). Push comes to shove, people can get a book from the library.
This [1] is worse than a banana republic, is society collapsing onto itself. Supposedly, inside a banana republic the family as an institution still holds some value, close friends and relatives still act like a de-facto safety net if the need arises. The people from that video have none of that.
Because someone has to know how to grow the potato or raise the cow or plant the corn. Right now we (modern first world countries) export that to fragile processes far away. Generally at great cost, environmentally and to the people/countries we export form. See the Amazon rainforest, slave labor in China or Africa, or un-controlled overfishing.
You sure? I'm in the Midwest and absolutely surrounded by farms. Do you really think your beef, grains, and potatos don't come from the heartland? How in the world would that make sense?
Yes the US supplies the majority of it's food. I was talking about the first world countries in general. Second the monoculture farming system the US is using creates HUGE environmental costs, it's not just about import/export. Beef feed lots with thousands of cattle packed together, chicken and pork farm pollution, monoculture (corn and soy beans) destroying soil, pesticides polluting and killing river ecosystems, and up to 40% food waste. All products of the JIT food systems. The rest of the western countries (except Canada which is similar to the US) are mostly food importers generally from the Global south (with Russia and the Ukraine also supplying quite a lot). I grew up in the midwest in a family of farmers and my wife grew up on a working small cattle farm. There are MAJOR issues with the US system, generally it's not the import/export part though. That's more of an issue in European countries (the Netherlands seems to be the major exception here). Palm oil is also a major factor in rain forest de-forestation, which is a major import in many countries:
The average person actually exists. They should have reality based skills and knowledge in self sufficiency.
Low effort consumerism, freedom to, takes freedom from others.
Freedom to be yourself cannot cost others freedom from the same. We’re a caste system that uses concepts like net worth as the measure instead of religious sigils and totems.
Freedom to sit at home on a laptop takes freedom from others in measurable ways; making less for work laptoppers want to avoid but need is kind of a joke system.
Remember millions of real people are being pinched harder and harder. That’s never ended well in human history. You can’t simply point at a philosophy and demand well understood biology to deal with it forever.
What’s hyperbolic is a defense squishy meat bags very much like passed squishy meat bags aren’t just larping the same old. That somehow magically it’s all different.
Keeping stats in the right place just makes truism out of political bias.
Reality is not unzipping in that the speed of light is different. A lot of inner monologues, sense of belonging, hope for the future, as something like covid makes the masses see a minority who do none of the “real work” as dependents who somehow have far more comfortable lives.
Tech oligarchs who were all “Disrupt!” are now all “Wait not me! I’m a rent seeker now!”
It’s a predictable circle of life given the common and fundamentally unchanged from any past iteration over the last thousands of years, human condition.
> Tech oligarchs who were all “Disrupt!” are now all “Wait not me! I’m a rent seeker now!”
It's always been an empty platitude from the SV disillusional masses: when the business model is 'grow at all costs, even if you lose money' in order to cash out on an over-inflated IPO, it was clear that it was never to disrupt anything. It was t:o build something seemingly novel, raise funds to fight a war of attrition, moat, weaken the opposition and take majority market-share and then cash out.
Plan B is selling out to some megacorp/tech oligarch in order to rinse and repeat as a 'serial entrepreneur' until you eventually get to a position in which you get on a board and you can ossify something like Twitter, too!
It’s interesting, even if you don’t believe in a higher power, people that believe in God have far lower rates of depression and suicide, so if you try to optimize your life for happiness and mental robustness, it’s then logical to believe in a higher power.
This is an interesting manifestation of the incompleteness theorem. :)
The happiest country in the world is Finland [1]. And two-thirds of them are atheists[2]. On the other hand, the most religious places in the world [3] are not on the happy list and most of them are desperately poor and miserable places.
“ In one comparison made by the World Health Organization, the per capita prevalence of unipolar depressive disorders is highest in the world in the United States. Among Western countries, Finland is number two.”
Every religion states that the other religions are lies, which means that, at the very least, the majority of religious people believe a lie as a fundamental aspect of their worldview.
Thus, you apparently can be genuinely happier if your worldview is based on a lie.
> Every religion states that the other religions are lies, which means that, at the very least, the majority of religious people believe a lie as a fundamental aspect of their worldview.
I don't think I've ever heard of a religion that is so airtight that it blocked any ability to reason on how the others might not be a lie also.
That's a false dilemma, you are corroborating the actions of extremists with the entire concept of religion. This sounds more like Hitchen's kind of an argument, which is fine for entertainment purposes but it is reductive and prevents us from having interesting philosophical discussions regarding God and religion.
Philosophy has no practical value, except for contrarians who don't want to admit being wrong.
History does though & the history of religion is that extremists who are religiously exclusive are much more likely to affect someone else's life due to their zealotry.
That why there are so many wars & crimes linked to religious exclusion.
Corelation does not imply causation. Maybe its that people who are prone to depression have some factors that make them less likely to believe in religion.
It seems obvious, but I'll accept disagreements as a way to learn. While we aspire to build anti-fragile systems, there are real sort term incentives to building efficient fragile systems. Capitalistic incentives exactly like evolutionary pressures, have no responsibility to provide solutions which match our views on how the way the world should work, what's fair, and what's just. I find it personally difficult to assume that a business owner when faced with the a series of micro-choices each of which impacts profit could not choose to maximize profit the majority of the time even at the expense of robustness or anti-fragility. It's this garden path optimization that leads to catastrophic outcomes like supply chain paralysis or bankruptcy.
Very interesting comment, but one thing I don't get is the sports one. Why would lower participation in youth sports lead to a contraction of commercial sports? Does low youth participation in making TV shows hurt the market for consuming them?
>Everyone I know that didn't grow up playing sports also doesn't watch them.
An excellent point.
When I was a child, we just grabbed our mitts/bats/balls/frisbees/whatever and went out to play with our peers and came home when it was dark/raining/time for dinner.
Over the last 30 years or so, it seems that (not that such things didn't exist 30+ years ago) in most places it's difficult to engage in sports without an organized group/league, especially in places where greenspace isn't within walking/biking distance.
As such, most kids need adults to get them to/from sports and there's not very much in the way of pick-up games[0] and the like.
The lack of unstructured sport leaves many kids out of sports (given that parents need to spend time and money to get their kids involved and to/from such activities)
N.B.: The above is definitely a US-centric viewpoint.
Old institutions cannot compete with Elon Musk, YouTube, podcasts such as Rogan, and the dopamine of social media. The CDC changing minds on masks hurt confidence, for example. Someone like Musk is viewed as decisive .
While Musk is certainly more entertaining - which coincides with your point about dopamine - I would not call him more decisive. The argument that the "CDC flipflops but Musk does not" doesn't really hold water.
I think I get what you're trying to say - that we haven't yet found a way to put our important ideas into a medium that's entertaining for us to understand, so we fall back on simpler things like sound bites and internet memes. Like, virology is hard and confusing and scary, but Elon Musk smoked weed once on camera so we'll pay attention to that instead.
Things collapsing has been a predominant sentiment in every modern generation. It's unprecedented because of our collective amnesia, that regards the familiar as a stable starting point rather than a random moment in a volatile reality.
Journalism was a tawdry, un-respectable business since its conception, but experienced a brief period of valor around the mid-twentieth century when industry concentration, Cold War ethics and regulation collectively reworked its incentives. The education system has always been in a position of scrutiny since universal education become the norm. Presidents have been the stuff of tabloid gossip since the founding fathers with the media mercilessly opting to promote scandal and controversy over respectability. Our conception of President as moral arbiter is a function of the reworking of journalism mentioned above.
The difference in peoples attitudes reflects an increased diet of emotion inducing media that accelerates fears and expectations, rather than some great pivot in volatility. Yes there are things to worry about but there always are (let's remember the twentieth century had two world wars, the Great Depression, and an even worse pandemic).
I think there is a real danger in just arguing basically "things have always been a shit show, empires collapse, pandemics rage, etc. etc." for a couple reasons:
1. While true, lets not ignore the fact that things get really, really, really bad during those periods where empires do collapse, or environmental damage causes ecosystem collapse, etc. etc. I mean, yes, you could argue "Hey, the Black Death killed a 3rd of Europe" and be correct, but I'm not sure what comfort that's supposed to give. Even if you want to argue that the post-war era up until, say, the 80s was an extremely unique period of progress and broad-based social advancement, that still doesn't make me feel any better if we're now in a "reversion to the mean."
2. Advanced technology does make "things collapsing" potentially much more catastrophic than in generations past. I'm not just talking about things like nuclear war, but things like the speed with which modern social media (and regular media) can pit people against each other is very different than, say, the yellow journalism periods of decades past.
Contextualizing the present with the past is less dangerous than feverishly articulating the uniqueness of circumstances. It's more helpful to be aware of current events as a continuation of past events since it allows a better understanding of the present.
As an individual, it doesn't serve you well to exist in a fog of worry among perceived threats. Volatility should be understood as a common facet of life so you can shape your competence to deal with it, rather than assume a static environment that demands alarm with every variation.
Furthermore, collapse doesn't happen everywhere the same, nor all at once. It's more like things break down slowly, and never get fixed rather than explosions on the street, until one day you are a third world country.
And third world countries still have very nice neighborhoods, and very rich people. But everything around gets much worse.
> collapse doesn't happen everywhere the same, nor all at once.
Frankly, I have a “living experience” of a practically instantaneous collapse. January 1, 1992. Prices were “freed”, (hyper)inflation started, people life savings were burned to dust, monthly pensions - at once - begin to cover just about a week of food (and were not paid until 3 months later). Policemen’ salaries became meaningless and the police - in the whole country - started to look for additional ways to feed their families… It all happened pretty fast.
So “inflation” is a trigger word for me since. And you can imagine unease I am watching the US government printing shiploads of money with.
Why not talk about nuclear war? It’s one of several elephants in the room. The full collapse of a nuclear super power is unprecedented. Who gets the weapons?
Which is interesting to note since a majority of the other weapons the former Soviet Union had made their way into several revolutions happening in the Middle East and Africa via several well known international arms dealers.
Not sure if it was just operationally unfeasible to move something like a ballistic nuclear weapon, but from what I can gather, it was one of the few things that wasn't sold off en masse after the collapse.
The Soviet Union (and America) made hundreds if not thousands of tactical nuclear weapons. These were very small; you could put many of them into a single standard shipping container.
During the 90s there were persistent rumors that some of these had been "lost", but as far as I know these rumors were never substantiated. If in fact these weapons didn't get stolen/sold, we probably have numerous intelligence agencies to thank.
My sentence was "I'm not just talking about things like nuclear war". Point being that, yes, the unique dangers of nuclear war seem so blatantly obvious that they're not likely to be ignored. Contrast that with one of the other "elephants in the room" that has the potential to be nearly as dangerous, but as these other risks don't involve, on the surface, metro-area obliterating fireballs, they are easier to downplay.
> Journalism was a tawdry, un-respectable business since its conception, but experienced a brief period of valor around the mid-twentieth century
And it wasn't just journalism. After WWII many veterans took advantage of the free education offered by the GI Bill. That gave us a lot of highly educated people (with no student loan debt to worry about!) who then went on to use that education to improve things. Couple this with the recent memory of fascism in Europe and The Civil Rights movement and we had sort of a golden era. We were able to live off the fumes of that era until right around the end of the 20th century. You could say that in a sense things are just returning back to a more normal state of affairs and this seems painful because many of us lived through an era that was unusually good.
I added the clause: "With no student loan debt to worry about!" above. That's an important aspect, I think. They could afford to get degrees in subjects that may not have paid all that well (teaching, for example) where as now people have to consider how they're going to pay back that debt and choose degrees in fields that will enable them to do so.
> They could afford to get degrees in subjects that may not have paid all that well (teaching, for example)
I also wonder how much of that growth is from high school students being told to go to college above all else, and how this graduation increase corresponds to enrollment and graduation from vocational schools.
I do think your point is the big one: people could go into college and come out with knowledge in the so-called soft skills, like philosophy or literature (areas that don't pay well but are vital for a society to understand itself, if nothing else). Why society doesn't value teaching and similar jobs as much as it does other industries is left as a debate for another time.
It isn’t obvious from your link… what % of current grads are “business majors” who don’t really know anything other than how to be greedy and justify it with fancy PowerPoint slide decks?
The number of grads may have gone way up, but I think the education itself had slid down the slippery slope to create too many administrators and bureaucrats.
"don’t really know anything other than how to be greedy" - this is a pretty bad faith take, and also simply not true. In the US at least, business grads typically take accounting courses, marketing courses, even statistics courses. All of those skills lead to jobs that can provide both societal and economic value.
My personal experience says otherwise, but I’ll concede that accounting does have value.
Marketing? Well, we can disagree there — to me marketing is making a science out of “parting fools with their money”, so to speak. It’s always felt fundamentally dishonest and a little dirty. But again, thats me and I am definitely biased.
Maybe the problem now is we have too many college educated people and not enough high paying jobs to offset the cost of those people's education costs. Leading to #1 people working terrible jobs they were not educated for, #2 leaving these same people with a huge boulder of student loan debt that is hard to be paid off due to #1. Its a classic problem of supply and demand. In addition people's degree choices do not reflect the markets needs, way too many people went into communication/sociology/LA stuff than what the market wants which are STEM.
IMHO I think part of the problem is that there's been a shift in how degrees are interpreted. It used to be someone wasn't equated with their degree so closely, like a branding. The idea of a liberal arts degree was not to be unknowledgeable about STEM, but diversified.
Now you have automated HR depts and someone is equated with their degree one way or another. It's not really that different from ads for knowledge of particular programming library, when the potential hire clearly could pick it up in a week based on their other experiences.
This isn't all of it of course but I do think people tend to be treated as objects, no more or less than their degrees or certifications to a greater extent than the past. It's the dark side of meritocracy in my opinion, which is a horrendous mislabel.
Sometimes I feel as if we live in a world of formalized stereotyping, where the stereotypes have shifted from race and sex to some extent, to political, employment, and degree stereotypes.
To the extent that our present time is at all unique, I subscribe to Robert Putnam's thesis that much of what we see today can be explained by the drop in social capital in American life over the past several decades. Less socialization means less trust in other Americans or in the government, fewer norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness, and increased polarization. There are various reasons for this, television being a prominent example. Surprisingly, it seems as though these trends were firmly in place well before the internet or 24 hour news came along.
> There are various reasons for this, television being a prominent example.
I tend to agree with the Putnam thesis, but I don't think you can lay this all on television. Until the 80s there were really only 3 viable TV/radio networks (CBS, NBC and later, ABC). If you watched the nightly news on any of those networks you got pretty much the same vision of reality. There was more variation in newspapers, but people watched a lot of TV in that era and for the most part they shared a cohesive vision.
Putnam ascribes ~25% of the drop in social capital over the past 70ish years to television's rise, but not because of fragmentation of visions of reality as you suggest. Rather, it is due to TV soaking up time that might be used to build community and social cohesion. See below for an example quote and corresponding link that goes into more detail.
"Even though there are only 24 hours in everyone's day, most forms of social and media participation are positively correlated. People who listen to lots of classical music are more likely, not less likely, than others to attend Cubs games. Television is the principal exception to this generalization--the only leisure activity that seems to inhibit participation outside the home. TV watching comes at the expense of nearly every social activity outside the home, especially social gatherings and informal conversations. TV viewers are homebodies."
All fair points. The change, as I see it, is the speed at which information flows. The old saying about how a lie can circle the world before the truth gets its trousers on applies. Only now, the lie can travel at the speed of light.
Narratives have a very strong early-mover bias.
The OPs point about things starting to crack in the Obama years rings true. For all of his positive points, there is nothing in Obama's resume that suggests he was qualified to be President. He was the first President to be memed into office. The press loved to talk about how adept the campaign was in utilizing the Internet to mobilize and motivate supporters.
Everybody took notice, and now the narrative battle happens online, at Internet speeds. This is a terrible, terrible idea. Unless you're some kind of otherworldly genius, taking in all of the input and coming to a rational opinion weighing all the pros and cons is impossible. So, like a black-box AI algorithm, people come up with opinions based on odd things like who has a more insulting neologism for their opponent, or whatever.
The "collective amnesia" you mention also occurs at Internet speeds. What was major news on Tuesday is fishwrap by Thursday, replaced with something else. There's no value in revisiting it, so whatever narrative gets entrenched is it.
I don't think there's a solution for any of this, short of a CME wiping out everything more technological than a shovel.
With all due respect, this is not some in-the-moment emotionally-colored thing. Months after America has almost lost its democracy for good, we are just now finding out that we were extremely lucky that it all worked out this time.
So, no, it's not just an old man opening a paper in the morning and claiming that "this country is going to hell". That's not new. THIS is.
I am genuinely surprised by this take on HN, which is very common. Any serious historian will tell you that this is not normal.
The idea of mass disillusionment is pretty academic. If we just think about it for a moment, it's very hard to argue that there was some cohesive, clearly articulated illusion that was shared by everyone regardless of demographic, and it was somehow lost.
The narrative of mass disillusionment is more based on the limits of a historical narrative that must broadly categorize a mass of people as having a unified reaction for the sake of a simplified historical account.
Disillusionment is a persistent experience for people as they grow up. The idea that one period was "more" disillusioned than another isn't a real phenomenon.
Humanity is largely self-grouped by culture. Cultures fundamentally share mythologies, both about themselves and about other cultures, be they rival or friendly.
What we experienced in the '60s and are experiencing right now is a dissolution of the predominant self-mythology in American culture, which was temporarily boosted to a high degree of uniformity first by the advent of mass media, then again by 9/11. That's what's causing the culture war we're all entrenched in, willing or not. American self-mythology is in a period of redefining itself.
As cultural collapses go, mass media (the internet included) has caused these unprecedented waves of disillusionment happening at lightning speed compared to how they happened in the past. Historically it took massive famines to cause the degree of social unrest that modern war photos and videos can incite (as in the Vietnam era).
The speed of communication is unprecedented; as a result, so is the severity of this age-old issue.
80s checking in. It was way more disillusioned too.
They created a whole genre of punk music where the lyrics were basically fuck Thatcher/Reagan for a reason.
And the baby boomers who created the upset of the 60's are now in charge, and their disillusioned leadership is pushing these divisions ever wider. They are the institutions and they do not trust themselves, as is clear via the leadership stalemate and both parties destroying their best hopes in favor of the crumbling and ever more distant wealthy status quo.
> And the baby boomers who created the upset of the 60's are now in charge
No, "they" are not. The few people in the inner political circles of that generation are in charge, same as every other time in history. The normal hardworking people are never in charge.
I remember when in middle school (Gen X here) I thought when our youth generation grows up and gets to be in charge the world will be better, because everyone I knew in school and out was so reasonable and so nice. Surely none of these people will be the corrupt politicians of tomorrow?
And turns out they(we)'re not the corrupt politicians of today. Because none of those regular kids of then are in charge. Who is? The children and grandchildren of the corrupt politicians of back then, groomed from childhood to be the corrupt politicians of today. They weren't in our middle class school of course, so never met any of them.
How to break that cycle? Ideally by voting for people not affiliated with the dominant two parties, but the system is rigged against that succeeding, so I don't know.
As a gen-x-er I agree. I realized this year that in the last 30 years politically, NOT ONE STEP OF PROGRESS HAS HAPPENED. 30 years ago the big political issues were culture wars (Gingrich vs Clinton), row v wade, unaffordable healthcare. Guess what we have today? Culture wars, row v wade, unaffordable healthcare, unaffordable housing. Fuck, well, that's progress.
If you try to support a third party things it splits the vote so much things are too divided so nothing gets done. Support a mainstream party, surprisingly, also nothing gets done. For 30 years. Before my generation they stymied the hippies. Before that the Lost Generation was just made invisible by the Greatest Generation. And the Greatest Generation was made too exhausted by fighting WW2. It is not a generational issue. I promise, no generation says 'I don't want things to be better for my kids'. It's our political class. They are garbage.
>And the baby boomers who created the upset of the 60's are now in charge, and their disillusioned leadership is pushing these divisions ever wider.
Why do people think of an entire generation of people as a single minded entity? Might as well say, "women," or "men," or "humans." Did you know the majority of baby boomers weren't hippies? Looking at documentaries of the era, you'd think they were. Many boomers hated hippies. So which boomers are creating these divisions? The hippies or the non-hippies?
>their disillusioned leadership is pushing these divisions ever wider.
This would be much more targeted (and accurate) if you said the current generation of politicians. Last time I checked, I've mostly only had two bad choices for president since I've been voting. The third choice was, "throwing away my vote." Guess who came up with that one? The politicians. When you blame a generation of people, you don't blame the people who actually have the power to make the decisions affecting our lives.
Is this sarcasm? It's truly laughable if you don't think boomers had a clear advantage in comparison to Millennials, Gen X, etc;
I'm sorry you didn't reap the benefits of the most benevolent time in America's history but plenty of your Boomer counter-parts sure as hell did. I've met enough Boomers that there is nothing wrong with generalizing Boomers as a whole. Just like a huge percentage of my generation totally gave up and resort to 'UNFAIR MEH WON'T TRY NOW'. Am in that camp? No. I don't get upset when people generalize because it doesn't pertain to me as an individual. There is some truth to prejudice
Boomers had an era of prosperity that we will never see again. My in-laws purchased their first home in 1971 for 60,000. That same home is worth 800,000+
The only reason I can even own a home or compete in my late 20's is because I wasn't naïve enough to think that any degree would pay the bills.
You might not like it, but Boomers took their hoard and pulled the ladder up behind them. It is what it is.
>You might not like it, but Boomers took their hoard and pulled the ladder up behind them. It is what it is.
And what mechanism did they use to do this exactly?
>I've met enough Boomers that there is nothing wrong with generalizing Boomers as a whole. Just like a huge percentage of my generation totally gave up and resort to 'UNFAIR MEH WON'T TRY NOW'. Am in that camp? No. I don't get upset when people generalize because it doesn't pertain to me as an individual. There is some truth to prejudice
Its an unwillingness to understand the predicament or situation and just blaming it on a group of people. It's pretty common throughout history; a weapon wielded by the powerful.
>I'm sorry you didn't reap the benefits of the most benevolent time in America's history but plenty of your Boomer counter-parts sure as hell did.
Housing in almost all the west is a huge rent extraction scheme made possible by politicians catering to boomers and run by boomer savings allocated in real state + NIMBYism from boomers that prevent the market to adjust.
'I've met enough __________ that there is nothing wrong with generalizing about ________ as a whole. Every last __________ are __________.
You have no perspective, self awareness, nor understanding of economics and history so you blame it on boomers.
The prosperity you talk of included smaller homes, built to different code, with a population of 205 million not 330, at a time with huge unemployment and high interest rates. There are so many factors, but yeah distill it down to BOOMER hate because it works for your simplistic thinking and you have met a representative portion to be able to judge them all.
I grew up in the 80s. EVERYTHING is nicer today, everything. But let's look at your example. Housing. Job stress was super bad in the recession of the 80s. You don't understand what it is like to live in the gloom that was the 80s. Let's talk about the economic part of that gloom. Continuing on the inflation/high interest of the 70s. Every night on the news they talked about how no one would ever have the American dream of owning a home again, what with the combination of high interest rates and no one having jobs because of the recession (unemployment 1980 7.2%, 1981 8.5%, 1982 10.8% 1983 8.3%, 1984 7.3%, 1985 7%).
Man if you could only live in those glorious times when house prices were cheap because nobody had jobs, and those that did have jobs were poorly paid (because of competition for jobs) and their money was quickly worthless because of interest rates/inflation (Inflation of 1979 13.3%, 1980 13.50%, 1981 10.3%). You leave out that homes were cheaper because interest was so high people couldn't afford the price they can with lower interest. 1980 15%, 1985 9.93%.
I remember my boomer parents and the stress in their eyes every day. But yeah, when they were young everything was easy not like your generation's struggle. FU dude. How dare you judge my parents? You don't know them. You don't know their struggles to keep food on the table for me. Just straight up F U dude. You are garbage, thinking you can judge them because you 'met enough Boomers that there is nothing wrong with generalizing Boomers'and because you are to ignorant to understand the factors that created the spread of home prices in the past and today but want to feel like you do.
Stop being a tool, get some perspective on what you are talking about if you are going to judge people. You don't understand what it is like to live with a horrible economy for basically a decade, but because it depressed housing prices want to act like it was some sort of blessing.
Don't forget the Vietnam draft (that's a big one) and the closing of factories and farms, computerization and automation went from 0-100 in the 80s, and the OPEC oil crisis where you had to wait in line for hours to get enough gas (if you were lucky) to even get to work. Speaking of, you know how soul sucking working in a factory is, day in, day out? I don't but I can only imagine. Big union busting under Reagan, pension stealing by corporate raiders, and social safety nets were cut pretty hard in the 80s as well. Oh yea and the whole looming Cold War, nuclear winter, getting your skin burnt off at any time. People are beginning to get a taste of that again. That's no fun either.
Average income in 1960 (as an example year since it wasn't listed) $6000 or 10% of that house.
Average income in 2021 $65,000, well short of the $80,000 to equal 10% of the house. Also, there has been a large increase in other expenses. Most households had a single earner, leaving another adult to generally raise children. That's much rarer today. Two car households, higher utility bills, etc... The evidence is pretty clear that money doesn't go as far today.
$10K in 1971, so 1/6th of the house. I suspect the people in this example made well more than that because buying a home at 6x income is not very responsible. That kinda skews the results because if you buy a home in an already well off neighborhood, I suspect the chances of it increasing in value are much better because the neighborhood has already proven to be valuable.
The boom in housing prices is also a temporary anomaly. That's only half the reason young people can't afford them. The other half is NAFTA and globalization and trade agreements, etc. Those were all done by politicians for corporations. It's easy to blame Boomers because you read an article that did that very thing (it's common in news to stir cross generational resentment). It also lets the politicians off the hook. Remember that next time they say the presidential candidate of whatever party you prefer will actually help you. Unless you are a corporation, that's unlikely.
>> It's truly laughable if you don't think boomers had a clear advantage in comparison to Millennials, Gen X, etc;
Baby boom generation started in what, 1946?
In 1946 almost half the houses in the US didn't have full indoor plumbing. That's some era of prosperity to be born into.
I'm not of that generation, but my parents were. My mom and her brother were driving tractors and operating other heavy machinery on a farm when they were still in elementary school. That was how a large part of the baby boomers grew up.
Everything that happened to a Baby Boomer was the most extreme ever. All other generations before Baby Boomers and since the Baby Boomers have had an easier time than the Baby Boomers. Their experiences are the Alpha and the Omega of human experience. When they die, the universe probably will cease to exist.
Well, they did have domestic terrorist groups going around setting off bombs on the regular in the 60s and 70s. I was quite surprised to read about it.
I’ve never heard an argument about the “specialness” of that generation?
I’ve only heard the relentless shit all the younger generations started talking about Boomers at some point.
Which always came as a surprise to me… If we’re going to generalize about people based on generation (bad idea, but…)— I conclude that every generation since the Boomers has been linearly weaker and less competent, in aggregate, than the generation before it. Definitely in the West, but I suspect everywhere. And no, I’m not a Boomer, I’m one of the younger ones.
>I’ve only heard the relentless shit all the younger generations started talking about Boomers at some point.
Counterreaction, a lot of voices claiming to speak for boomers, or boomers themselves, have done plenty to claim "it's just young people messing up". Despite the obvious that they have been the majority voter base for decades, have more wealth as a collective, and because of their age and wealth, tend to have different incentives and opinions than the younger generations having problems to do something as simple as getting a foothold in adult life.
NB: the obvious problem isn't "boomer / old", but the nature of the social game as it is (relatively or perceived zero-sum) and the haves voting against the have nots.
>I conclude that every generation since the Boomers has been linearly weaker and less competent
Weaker and less competent how? I assure you, for every argument you'll find, you can find another argument which would flip the script.
Dude, if you think that is different than any other generation ever well, hopefully when you get older you'll learn about perspective.
The 'Greatest Generation's version of the boomers sent them to WW2 to die by the millions, but poor you, right? Never has a generation been handed such a shit sandwich by the generations before them as the boomers have handed you. Get over yourselves. You aren't so special in the list of generations.
When the boomers had nothing in their youth they created the hippie culture where it didn't matter. Today's hyper consumerist tiktok generation think they have a right to live like the made up people on TikTok do. They aren't boomers, but you know the characters on the TV show Friends could never have lived like that in New York, right? That it was a fake show that portrayed an unrealistic quality life that young people working those jobs didn't actually live, right?
That may have been the case among the young (coincidentally the boomers). But it would be difficult to make the case that a significant percentage of people over 30 were disillusioned in that era.
I'd argue that the greater risk of things falling apart is economic rather than political. We've built our society on two near-ponzi schemes that are in danger of falling apart. The first is pension funds which are paid into by current workers to pay out for past workers. Pension funds inherently depend on population growth to avoid shortfalls. They rely on the fact that more people pay into them then take out from them at any one time. This literally meets the definition of a ponzi scheme and it will be heartbreaking when it comes due.
The other near-ponzi scheme is the real estate market. In my city of Toronto, average real estate prices have gone from 2x average income in 1972 to 16x average income today. To continue growing at this pace they'd have to reach 128x average income by 2072. Those prices are absurd enough that it's clear there will be a slowdown in real estate prices before then. But much of our society is built on real estate growth and we aggressively encourage people to own real estate assets worth more than the entirety of their net worth. When these assets stop going up, or even worse start going down there will be major complications for society. I'm not talking about the adverse effects of a temporary market correction, I'm talking about a new normal in which real estate is flat or downward trending. When real estate is no longer an incredible investment opportunity it will have significant adverse effects on society. For instance, homes are currently a large part of people's retirement plans and selling a home is often used to pay for an extended stay in a nursing home (which is quite expensive). For many people the home represents over 60% of a retirement plan. In my parents lifetime, their home value increased to roughly 10x what it was worth. If my home increases 4x instead this is a substantial adverse impact. If my child's home increases 0x this is disastrous.
The things we fundamentally depend on to provide things as important in society as retirement are breaking badly. Meanwhile we're so obsessed with political differences that we barely talk about or work towards solving the slow economic crisis we are facing.
> Pension funds inherently depend on population growth to avoid shortfalls.
Pension funds inherently depend on increases in production. Population growth is one factor, but technological development can also increase production.
> The other near-ponzi scheme is the real estate market. In my city of Toronto, average real estate prices have gone from 2x average income in 1972 to 16x average income today.
Hello from a Vancouverite! I broadly agree with this point, and I'm not sure how to work our way out of a housing bubble beyond popping it and dealing with the aftermath. Too many people are invested in the status quo, so any politician who tries to pop it will be crucified for destroying the savings of a large portion of the population.
I haven't worked out all the details but I think the right thing to do is some form of gradual transition to a Georgist taxation system (perhaps with compensation from the government for those who suffer sufficient adverse effects).
Reducing the value of property to the structures on them by having heavy taxation rates on unimproved land is fairer than the current system and makes access to property far easier. It reduces speculation in real estate which also improves access.
I also agree with the Georgist moral perspective that we have equal entitlements to all land and natural resources. From there, distributing land that is undertaxed seems to give certain individuals and companies unfair advantages. An added benefit is that income taxes and capital gains taxes have always from my perspective been on morally shaky ground as I struggle to find a good moral perspective that justifies them compared to other forms of taxation that seem morally just.
Doing a transition like that will be just as difficult as popping a housing bubble (if not more so) but I think it will be of great benefit to society.
>> Pension funds inherently depend on population growth to avoid shortfalls.
>
>Pension funds inherently depend on increases in production. Population growth is one factor, but technological development can also increase production.
Interestingly, capital returns and population growth are (unquestionably?) on exponential curves. So, are production factors too slow to evolve along with the exponentials? Maybe they are, because of waste, lack of recycling, raw resources decline and environmental damage.
>> The other near-ponzi scheme is the real estate market. In my city of Toronto, average real estate prices have gone from 2x average income in 1972 to 16x average income today.
>
>Hello from a Vancouverite! I broadly agree with this point, and I'm not sure how to work our way out of a housing bubble beyond popping it and dealing with the aftermath. Too many people are invested in the status quo, so any politician who tries to pop it will be crucified for destroying the savings of a large portion of the population.
You could argue that in the same time frame, world population has more than doubled, and because the cost of capital is a lot cheaper elsewhere than in Canada, pressure on attractive living space in peaceful and stable countries has increased exponentially. At this point, the "liberal" view on capital flows and capital control, the fuel of foreign direct investments of Western countries into overseas properties since WWII, came back to bite the originators of the idea in the ass.
Economic and biological growth curves look exponential right up until they don't. Both are limited by energy consumption, and nothing with limits can exceed the growth rate of its constraint.
Yeah, and if the study of populations has shown us anything, exponentials can also turn quickly into gaussians when a tipping point is passed. Not all of them end up as nice (if you are not afraid of the end of growth anyway) logistic curves.
Building taller, denser housing doesn't pop the real-estate bubble. As cities grow denser, the land gets more expensive because land is finite. The solution to housing shortages is to build more, denser housing. The existing homeowners aren't getting a bad deal - they'll still be able to sell their houses at an immense gain. It's just that the same plot of land would occupy more units of housing.
This is largely how dense cities like Tokyo manage to keep housing affordable [1].
When population increases you keep housing affordable by building more houses per unit of area.
Density is not a panacea though. Density reduces revenue per capita as you end up with property tax from the cheaper housing so as you build it you see declines in services. Most notably education, if you ever wondered why suburbs tend to have much better schools than urban areas a big factor in any jurisdiction where schools are paid for in part through property tax is that the suburbs have more property tax per student.
Roads are also an issue as it is seldom viable to build more of them and there is limited ability to widen the ones we do have. The net result is a substantial worsening of transit infrastructure to levels far worse than ever intended for those neighbourhoods.
Property taxes can be raised, if higher density makes it so that existing taxes are too low. Furthermore, education is more strongly correlated with parental education and involvement than with spending per pupil. Wealthier, more educated people tend to live in suburbs, that's why schools do better there.
Higher density makes mass transit systems like subways more viable, opening up alternatives to automobiles. Furthermore, greater density means more revenue to spend on infrastructure projects.
When a metro area experiences growth, higher density is inevitable. It's more a question of how that density will be accommodated. Construct no housing and it will take the form of ever-increasing home costs, and higher rents for increasingly subdivided apartments. Construct denser housing and people will be able to live comfortable and affordably.
Pension funds depend on increased in production, but are run on common management strategies locking them into broadly supporting large corporations - which actually run less efficiently overall in improving production than small to medium sized companies. Also imho, the public stock markets have decoupled from having a good effect on being able to promote good fundamental value creation behavior on public companies.
You sure about that claim re SMB vs enterprise? There's millions of local businesses that engage in very slow innovation, including restaurants, laundromats, etc.
Meanwhile the SP500 have all gotten religion about innovation as a driver for productivity increases.
I had read a set of clearer papers on this, but I didn't keep a link to them (of course there are many economic views this is just mine). However a couple of large scale effects may indirectly capture it. First there are fewer and fewer new business starts, meaning surviving firms are getting larger and older, and second the overall gross productivity has been dropping.
Maybe it's just correlation and not causation. I'll post again if i can find the more direct paper on the anticorrelation between very large corporations and productivity.
Optimizing the economy for the retirements funds (creating favorable conditions for existing big companies) has eliminated the paths to prosperity for the new generations (you cannot run your own shop to outcompete Loblaws or Walmart, and a cashier job there will never afford you anything more than bare survival). This is discouraging people from starting families and having kids, so the government began outsourcing population growth by importing people from other cultures with lower standard of living. This ignites political division in the society where the far left sees anything beside a shared room a privilege and the far right wants to deport anyone who isn't a 3rd-generation local.
Keeping the real estate bubble from popping has served somewhat well the real estate investors, but made property ownership impossible for many people. The political response is unsurprising: many question the whole concept of owning real estate, it's becoming increasingly hard to evict a bad faith tenant, and aggressive homeless people actively disrupting the life of nearby real estate owners are seen as victims and not malefactors.
The corporate media is doing their best to steer the discussion away and people are buying it. "Fair" isn't somehow when the median salary can reasonably afford a single-income household comfortable to raise 2+ children. It's now about how your fellow minimum-wagers should use the pronouns and how promotions from toilet scrubber to shelf stocker should be granted based on the skin color and historical oppression points, while the actual oppression of the former middle class by the corporations is happening right now.
> Optimizing the economy for the retirements funds (creating favorable conditions for existing big companies) has eliminated the paths to prosperity for the new generations (you cannot run your own shop to outcompete Loblaws or Walmart, and a cashier job there will never afford you anything more than bare survival).
Technology, efficiencies of scaling, and automation make it difficult for less efficient businesses to compete. Retirement funds have nothing to do with it.
Most economic discussions are inherently political but it's not the case that most political discussions are inherently economical. I argued that we are avoiding dealing with our economic challenges and are focusing on non-economic political problems.
>I argued that we are avoiding dealing with our economic challenges and are focusing on non-economic political problems.
Well, yeah, since all major media companies and social networks are owned by the entities directly benefiting from the "economic challenges" of the former middle class.
> This literally meets the definition of a ponzi scheme
It absolutely does not. Investors in a Ponzi scheme do not have the information needed to allow them to be aware of the fraud involved. In contrast, at any given point in time you can extrapolate when the Social Security system (for example - the same principle applies to any pension that isn't literally cooking the books) will need to start drawing on the general fund, or fail, if it continues operating as it is operating today.
It is a bad mistake to just characterize every non-sustainable investment scheme as a Ponzi scheme. For starters, you'd be awfully confused about what is legal and what is illegal...
This is splitting hairs. You are forcibly invested in social security so you have to pay it even if the numbers indicate you won't be able to get anything back out from it. If the distinction between this and a Ponzi scheme is having the information it's a mighty fine distinction when you have zero ability to act on the information you have.
It’s the difference between defrauding people or not, among other things. Wow.
> when you have zero ability to act
You have hit another item (do I have the option to opt in?) on the “differences between social security and ponzi schemes” bullet list, but you are pretty aggressively missing the point, I think.
US real estate has gone up significantly in _desirable_ markets. There are plenty of cities in the rust belt where neighborhoods are in decay, you can buy a home for 20k if you wanted.
What we’re going to see is either govts incentivize people move back to these places. Or more housing in desirable locations. I think the former will happen more than the later.
Agreed. And we've seen crises in the neighbourhoods in decay and significant adverse effects for those who don't get the housing investment gains that much of society is built on. The numbers seem to indicate that will be something of the new normal for everyone rather than just the unlucky few in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Theres a generational rift that will stop a lot of decaying areas from seeing repopulatin from newer generations.
My wife and I saving to house shop soonish, but one of the primary requirements of our residency will be transit access. We don't like driving, don't like having to own a car, and definitely do not want to have to drive up and down the east coast to visit friends and family. Amtrak access is thus basically required, and anywhere we can avoid buying a car to live is valued dramatically higher than alternatives.
Its a growing sentiment the younger you get, where the veneer of the 50s American dream is more and more eroded and we are realizing humans in the 21st century should be living denser, with public transit, and walkable access to day to day needs, than to live in gated communities without a sidewalk or any human contact.
And 99.9% of US real estate is built up totally in antithesis of this, largely on racist fundamentals dating to the early 20th century.
Like we legit were looking at areas and when talking about just over the DC border into MD the conversation always immediately goes to "yes the properties are a third cheaper, but theres no metro access" and its just off the radar. Pittsburgh is our joke city since it has no usable Amtrak routes out of it (and yes, I know its urban core is nice, but its also tiny and unable to grow).
None of these decaying places can afford the capital investment to redevelop to be walkable and sustainably dense. They already are burdened to maintain a million acres of suburbia that is all tax negative. And nobody wants a "top down" solution that involves displacing millions to redevelop cities so the demographic trends going forward want to live there.
For anyone looking, Philly is actually pretty affordable. Its combined income tax is 6% in the state, the sales tax isn't outrageous, and property costs are a fraction of NYC or DC. Its definitely near the top of our list considering how unaffordable the parts of Portland, Seattle, and Baltimore with transit are.
I medically can't drive, and my other half doesn't want to drive. I see this as well, a number of my circle also want walkable/transit areas. In the states it's NYC, Philly, Boston, Chicago, San Fran, Seattle and a bit more. I feel like I need to leave just to get a sane metro area.
I'm in NYC now, but keep circling back to Philly. We're renting for ~3200 now a one bedroom 650sqft in NYC, both work from home. To get the ideal separation we want, not have our joint offices in the living room, we would need to go to between $5,500 and $6,500. While in Philly we could get a trinity, small town house three floors plus basement, about 900sqft, in downtown for ~2200.
I wouldn't buy in Philly, I just don't trust the city planning at this point. They're trying, but it's an uphill battle. The tax situation as a self-employed was much more complex in Philly. Safety is not something to just shy away. I lived in Old City, two years back, and there were still shootings near my apartment. It's a problem in a lot of cities as we gut social spending and relief programs. Philly did open a safe injection site, and is making head way.
I really like Philly, close to NYC Megabus was 15$ a seat, and about 3 hours. Amtrak is even quicker. Great music and food scene, Reading is great for food / produce.
The biggest issue I've found is the job market. Locally, a lot shifted out to office parks, requiring regional rail, and walking along multi-lane roads. If you're working remote, I got cost of living adjusted like crazy. The quotes I got were 80% pay cut over my NYC rate. While local jobs, were only a 10% cut. The local tech scene is a bit behind, more legacy.
Comcast has a great VC program as well for startups. The city also has tax programs to help get startups in the area.
> I'm in NYC now, but keep circling back to Philly. We're renting for ~3200 now a one bedroom 650sqft in NYC, both work from home. ... While in Philly we could get a trinity, small town house three floors plus basement, about 900sqft, in downtown for ~2200.
Where in NYC are you and how does it compare to downtown philly? $3500 NYC rent means you're living in a hip/gentrified neighborhood. You can certainly find cheaper apartments if you are willing to go deeper into Queens. Whole houses? They exist but are in the 4-6k range as well ( friends aunt rents a home in belle harbor for something like 4-5k/month). By me (ozone park) the rent is not that high (~1600+)and we have plenty of busses and the A train. Further north is woodhaven with busses and J&Z train. You can go further east but you are now past most subways.
A lot of "undesirable" markets have become desirable. The remaining ones, the market has decided has too many external cost to make such low prices worth it.
> The first is pension funds which are paid into by current workers to pay out for past workers. Pension funds inherently depend on population growth to avoid shortfalls.
This is fundamentally a demographic problem, rather than a problem with the pensions system.
If pension funds worked by people saving their own money for themselves, it wouldn't actually be all that different. At any point in time, there's the productive part of the population, and the unproductive. If the productive part is too small to support the unproductive, there is going to be a worsening of the situation, probably especially so for the unproductive.
> They rely on the fact that more people pay into them then take out from them at any one time.
This doesn't need to be a ponzi scheme though. Even if population size is stable, if people on average work longer than they are retired, they have to pay less than they receive, all things equal. A problem here has been that people get increasingly older, so they spend a larger percentage of their life being retired, making the ratio of payers vs. receivers worse. The most obvious solution to this is raising the age of retirement, but that's always politically difficult and somehow seen as cruel.
Raising the retirement age I think is not fair. Asking guys in their 60’s to do the same work as guys in their 40’s is not fair if the job is at all a hands on doing job. Anything as simple as a big flight of stairs can become a major obstacle. If all you do is go up and down elevators, talk, and use a computer then you can go as long as your mind stays sharp and you have the drive. Not everyone loves their job after doing it for 30+ years and would like to slow down just to appreciate the people and world around them for their remaining time.
In the UK the retirement age of 65 (for men) was set when life expectancy was 64. Now life expectancy is 81, and the retirement age is only 66.
Completely untenable when the generation retiring has also taken the lions share of property wealth, imposed student debt upon and consistently voted against the interests of the generation paying for their retirement.
These figures are highly misleading though because life expectancy includes significant outliers dragging the number down from infant mortality rates which declined over the same period. It is not the case that your life expectancy given reaching age 60 has increased by anywhere near as much as 17 years over the same time period.
> The most obvious solution to this is raising the age of retirement, but that's always politically difficult and somehow seen as cruel.
There is another problem: many people go into decline as they get older. My company retires some people at 40 with a full pension because most people physically cannot do the job anymore (I'm not sure if they are able to do much else after that). Airpline pilots are required to retire at 60 (I don't remember the exact age) because we are sure none are very far into mental decline even though a few could work for 30 more years.
The ponzi part of it is that current payers pay for current retirees. If the pension worked on a forced investment model where you paid into your own retirement and the money was invested for you that would be different. It would even be viable to say the money from those who died prematurely would be distributed to other users and it's possible to have the system generate more overall money for retirees than just what they put in and gain from investment.
However, the current system is quite far from that. The money you pay in goes nearly immediately to existing retirees with a moderate reserve of capital that is slowly decreasing as more money exits the system than enters it. This system cannot pay current retirees without the investment from new users, and that's what makes it a ponzi.
Pensions paid directly by current workers are not really so different from pensions paid out of investments. The thing that one "owns" in most of today's public equities is not physical capital (plants and equipment) but the "nexus of contracts" that allows you to make money from other peoples' labor. In other words, you are still living on backs of the working generation, same as Social Security or similar schemes.
Until we invent self-replicating physical capital (i.e. a Santa Claus machine that can make other Santa Claus machines), this will always be true.
All models are a ponzi that depend on a future generation doing labor. Retirement is ultimately a promise that someone will grow food and the other things you need/want. SS depends on the next generation being willing to pay, while stocks depend on the next generation willing to buy those stocks (or dividends because the company because the next generation bought things from it). Funds in a mattress depend on people wanting your cash.
No, they are not. “A ponzi” is a fraud. Some of the schemes you mention are not sustainable under certain hypotheses, but none of them have the deceptive and fraudulent aspects of Ponzi schemes, which is important. These are strategies, that might work out or that might not, but in any case they are not tools for personal enrichment through deception.
The biggest issue with social security funding is there is a cap on it. Once you put in so much a year, you don't have to put in anymore. It's essentially a regressive system. A guy who makes a million bucks a year only has to pay social security as if he made $147K. For example, in 2022, everyone only pays social security tax on their first $147K.
There is a cap but I think a large part of that is to prevent people from complaining about the size of pensions paid out by the government. What you get back from the program is a function of what you put in and if you allowed people to put in the portion from $1 Million of income you might owe them $200K pensions after 40 years. I don't think the public has appetite for that.
Yes, it's progressive if you just consider the lower and middle class. Actually I think if you get what you put into it, it's neither progressive or regressive. If you include the upper earners, it's regressive. It's as if they capped income tax to your first $100K. Great for one group of people, not for the majority other.
> But much of our society is built on real estate growth
As an italian, I don't get that.
I bought a 240k euros home for 25k in advance and 550 €s month of mortgage for the next 30 years. And in 30 years I will pay nothing, neither rent nor mortgage. That's why I did that.
Real estate growth wasn't even in the back of my mind. I bought a home to have MY place, and to stop paying 750€ plus rent to some landlord. Rent will also go up with inflation, mortgage payment will get smaller and smaller meanwhile thanks to inflation.
I just don't understand the whole estate growth thing at all.
The idea in North America is that homes are mostly investments. The real estate market grows and the home accrues additional value. At some point in retirement, typically when stairs become too difficult you might downsize to a condo, cashing in a fraction of the value. Alternatively, if you need a nursing home you sell the house to pay the exorbitant costs associated with that.
The motivation for homes to be investments is that we are taking out the largest loan we will ever have and allocating more than 100% of everything we own into an asset. Having done so it's natural to want that asset to generate returns.
This is so alien to me. It's a place to live, it has walls, it has a resell value but it's not the main purpose of it. And all investments are risky by definition.
One should buy a house because one wants to save money, compared to renting, and have its own place, if you are buying for a price increase it's called speculation. If it is speculation, then you should not depend on it for your future and should put little money into it not decades of mortgage.
This is so linear to me. The idea that things keeps getting value forever is flawed and a house is too important and expensive for this kind of speculation.
> In my city of Toronto, average real estate prices have gone from 2x average income in 1972 to 16x average income today. To continue growing at this pace they'd have to reach 128x average income by 2072.
Places like Toronto are generally an outlier. Part of it is due to high skilled worker immigration (to read it differently: more well off people emigrating to Canada) and high concentration of jobs in cities like Toronto.
I agree with your thesis although I think it has more to do with CAD losing its value compared to hard assets and a consequence of a decade with bad monetary policy.
I think it's hard to classify Toronto as an Outlier, especially if you mean the GTA. There are 38 million Canadians according to the 2021 census. According to the same data source 6.7 million of them live in the GTA. This "outlier" is 17.63% of the data set which to me is closer to a quartile of your data than an outlier.
I think the ponzi-scheme is the lie of eternal growth with finite resources (real estate included) combined with the "trickle-down" narrative. It's a pyramid scheme in the sense that it will collapse by its sheer weight before the "trickle-down" effect reaches a critical mass of the population, but those at the top will be very well-off by then anyway. It's maybe just a parameterization problem (wrong initiatives).
You know, the problem with both is actually the same. The home owner and pensioner both rely on a young population that will take care of them. Owning a home only reduces the need to build one, which is better than nothing but it does not reduce the need to farm food for example.
If you make the assumption that PI is 3.14, that's going to work for a good while. But eventually you are going to need to build a circle that's bigger, and 3 significant digits will not cut it, and errors will start showing up. Our economies work in the exact same way. Capitalism started out improving on what came before it, but it has now grown to the level that errors are appearing more and more. We need to be more precise.
You've outlined very clearly one of those errors - housing. We know that housing values can not both be an investment and affordable long-term - those things are inherently at opposition. Therefore the best price for land is zero. The way to do that is to increase the tax on the market value of a house until the market value of the house is equal to the cost of the parts and labor needed to build that house. When you do this, you have what we call a 100% land value tax. It fixes all sorts of incentives, turns NIMBY's into YIMBY's, incentivizes the best use for the land. A land value tax is not just increasing the equivalent of PI from 3.14 to 3.14159, it's setting the correct value for land exactly equal to PI.
One of the amazing side effects of the land value tax is that now that you don't need a continually increasing housing values, the amount of debt in the world is going to start growing less quickly, as a large percentage of debt comes from mortgages. When you zoom in on how that works, and why it works, what you find out is that you want debt to only increase when real productivity increases. The flipside of that is also true - you want the currency to increase equal to productivity, this is why Bitcoin is fundamentally unstable long-term and why the gold standard collapsed. The reason the land debt is bad is because land is zero-sum. It can not be created or destroyed. Any debt that is created to buy a zero-sum good will eventually turn the economy into a Ponzi scheme. So while a LVT will fix a large portion of the problem, eventually some other zero-sum asset will arrive, and that too will need to be fixed. When all zero-sum debt no longer increases the money supply, the problems that you outline will be resolved.
Once you have a money supply that increases equal to productivity, suddenly retirees will be able to save their money and retire on it without threat of inflation. We used to have this in the middle ages, but that's only because we had a flat population with no productivity increases, so a stable currency was sufficient.
I argued for a gradual implementation of Georgist Tax Policies elsewhere in the thread so we are in agreement. I think transitioning to a LVT is a very hard problem that requires a great deal of thought and care. I'm convinced such a transition needs to be gradual because instantaneous is far too destructive. I'm also leaning towards government needing to compensate at least some of those who lose significantly in the transition. I'm open to being proven wrong about either point but the proposals I've seen from Georgists advocating instantaneous change seem woefully ill informed or quite naive about consequences.
I'm a huge fan of instantaneous change, as it instantly sets the incentives, but am willing to have a large transition period.
If we were to do an instant change, the best way to do that is to give everyone a tax credit equal to the value of their existing land, with retirees and others who need public support having a few more options to convert those tax credits to cash.
Instantaneous change with compensation is extremely expensive. I noted in another thread that it's quite possible for the costs of compensating affected parties to reach $30.5 trillion, the current size of the US national debt. This assumed compensation had a needs component to it and only half of the US property market was compensated.
The basic issue is the current US property market is estimated at $33.6 trillion. If you assume 80% of that is land value you end up needing to compensate 26.88 trillion. On the other side of the market you have mortgages you put under water that people will walk away from. The mortgage market in the US is $17.6 trillion. If you assume 80% of mortgages are walked away from and the mortgages end up 70% underwater you end up having to compensate $9.856 trillion dollars. So solving the residential portion of compensation potentially costs $36.736 trillion dollars. If you have compensation in the commercial and industrial land markets as well that makes things even more expensive.
Right, so you could see that 30 trillion + commercial number as a loan that the federal government is taking out that they only need to pay the interest on as it accrues(as people spend their land tax credits). This is something the federal government can handle, as the system will more than pay for itself over the lifetime of the tax credits.
A tax credit that gets subtracted when the homeowner defaults equal to the value of the default would resolve the walk-away problem.
The issue is the gains in efficiency from the introduction of the Georgian tax system get traded off against the loss in efficiency from more than doubling the national debt. I don't have enough economic skill to model all of this to know whether we end up ahead or behind but my intuition is the effect sizes may be similar in a number of key dimensions.
I agree you can modify how the tax credits work to potentially transfer the mortgage loss credits from the homeowner to the mortgage holder when the homeowner walks away. If you do this effectively you can reduce the cost by nearly $10 trillion but still have around $25 trillion in residential costs.
Have you compared your parents return of their down payment if they had invested for the same duration in the stock market? I've seen a few cases where it all comes out in the wash...
It might come out in the wash if you ignore the fact that you have to live somewhere. Property taxes and upkeep on a house tend to work out cheaper than skyrocketing rents over the long run. Home upgrades return value on the property. Having freedom to develop the place you live into something you like is incredibly valuable as well.
I agree there value in the freedom. My point is simply on paper, housing is as expensive as every other asset (well, maybe not art). Of course, the real question is if housing should even be considered an asset in the first place.
The Georgist answer is that the structures on the property should be assets and that taxes should reduce the land value to $0 and be updated regularly to capture the gains in the land value. That's the theory I ascribe to although I think transitioning from our current society to a Georgist one is incredibly difficult.
Remember, the "stocks" here, are all fiction. production at time t pays for retiree consumption at time t. Likewise housing prices are a waste of time when we should all rent, and there should be a land view tax (rent-turtles all the way down).
"Pay as you go" pensions scheme is good for the same reasons as LVT is good.
I believe society could function with a shorter work-week so I sure as hell am not worried about needing to raise the retirement age cause people are living longer.
The constant theme since the dawn of civilization threaded through all of history is that everything is falling apart. Change is continual. History is more like the seasons. Nations rise. Nations fall. Sometimes there's revolt. Sometimes there's peace. There's a continual game of King of the Mountain being played at all levels.
So what can we say? Situation Normal - all effed up!
Enjoy this phenomenon called life. You only get one.
Eh, there have been institutions with almost absurd longevity in history. The catholic church has stood largely unchanged for the 1600 odd years between Constantine and Vatican II. Ancient Egypt was already thousands of years old when Socrates harassed aristocrats in Athens.
It's very easy to forget that the revolutions of Britain, France, America, Russia; it happened just a few generations ago, and upended most of the political landscape (even in countries that didn't see actual revolutions). I think what is happening is most of our modern institutions are all of roughly the same age, and after initial idealism and momentum have roughly at the same time begun to ossify and show cracks as people have started taking them for granted.
This is the first time anyone has attempted democracy on this sort of scale. Looking back we've had republics with longevity, we've had autocratic dynasties with longevity. But democracy? Besides Athens, which had a very different shape of political system, this is really a first. It's a huge political experiment, the long-term viability of which is being determined here and now by our ability to keep our shit together.
> catholic church has stood largely unchanged for the 1600 odd years
You have a very flexible definition of "unchanged" then. The Catholic Church pre-Charlemagne is going to be very different from Saeculum Obscurum-era, itself different from Investiture Crisis-era, itself different from the one familiar in the Late Medieval, different from Counter Reformation-era one. It's absurd to me that you think the first time it changes significantly is Vatican II!
> Ancient Egypt was already thousands of years old when Socrates harassed aristocrats in Athens.
My knowledge of Ancient Egyptian history is extremely poor, but what little I do know strongly suggests that considering it as a single stable form of government for thousands of years is even worse an error than claiming the Catholic Church was so stable and unchanging. Perhaps akin to saying that the Holy Roman Empire, the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and modern Germany are all one single country that has lasted for 1200 years (because they're all called Germany).
It's not 100% undisputed but most historians would agree that until conquered by the Persians in 525 BC, Egyptian history consists of 26 dynastic changes and 8 major distinct periods. Each dynasty of course usually had more than one ruler. Since we're talking about Socrates, then the slightly extended timeline of 33 dynastic changes (including 2 Persian, and 2 Greek), across 9 major and distinct periods, would represent pretty much the mainstream view that is supported by the available evidence, ending in its incorporation into the Roman Republic in 30 BC.
If anything, Egypt is one hell of a counter example of institutional stability. I would also make the pedantic quibble that the HRE never called itself "Germany" until the term was incorporated into part of its much longer official title in the late 1400s. English usage started in the 1500s. It's not to say that the concept of "Germany" or "Deutschland" didn't exist, but pre-Westphalia it's difficult to make truly apt comparisons to conceptualizations of states today, and the term equivalent to Germany was used, intermittently at that, from Charlemagne's death for the next 700 years somewhat like the status of Scotland or Wales within the UK today, as in, it coexisted with the HRE as an part but not considered to have referred to the whole until the HRE lost its non-German territories an that was pretty much all that was left.
>The catholic church has stood largely unchanged for the 1600 odd years
That's a bit of a myth, thrown around a lot but not quite true. It has existed in some form, but by no means remained changeless. The doctrine is substantially similar but then we can say the same thing about Judaism. Here, we're really talking about the organization, which has many issues:
-The East-West schism in 1054 tore the Catholic Church in half.
-Then there was another schism about 500 years later when Martin Luther & subsequent Reformation really splintered things, sparking many violent conflicts over the centuries. I'm sure many Catholics felt like things were falling apart then.
In lesser events that still made people feel things were falling apart:
-Rome was taken & Pope Pius was imprisoned in the Vatican during the Italian Reunification in 1870 there was probably a similar feeling.
-After Vatican II from 1962-1965 I know from my own relatives that they felt (and still feel) that the catholic church began to fall apart.
-The last few decades with countless child abuse scandals.
I did stipulate until Vatican II, and my point is rather how little the preceding millenium of reformations and Avignon popes and so on actually changed the church. It undeniably had some impact, like the reformation created a need for educating priests to be able to actually argue their case. But the shape of the organization was largely the same through all of this.
Vatican II was a trivial change compared to vast numbers of other changes in the Church - the Church of the 3rd-7th c. and its hierarchy were dramatically different than the Church once they'd broken from Constantinople and Eastern Rome had lost Ravenna and it's control over the Vatican. The Papacy and institutions that formed after the 700s/800s once Italy was independent of the Byzantines are where the pope transitions to a king lording over the Papal States which was a massive change. Those Papal States are gone now, another dramatic change that fundamentally redefined the Church. There were other revolutionary changes throughout the church's history like the Avignon Papacy which changed not only where the Church was centered but reformed the Papacy dramatically to put it under the thumb of the French kings. The schisms after that changed the Church brought the relatively late invention of the College of Cardinals and significant reforms and changes in hierarchy. The developments of various monastic orders and knightly orders also brought major changes and reforms. The Church after the Protestants sacked Rome and Pope Clement VII fled into hiding and was reduced to a figurehead controlled the Holy Roman Emperor was a massive break as well. The reforms of the Counter-Reformation were dramatic as well. The church has always claimed to be a stable perpetuation of tradition, while the reality has been a dynamic institution that's changed significantly not only in hierarchy and structure but doctrine. There always were popes, cardinals, and bishops, but their roles, powers, and relations changed constantly.
> I did stipulate until Vatican II, and my point is rather how little the preceding millenium of reformations and Avignon popes and so on actually changed the church
Clearly, that was your point. It's just completely wrong given things like the Gregorian Reform.
You'd have a better argument that the Catholic Church has been largely unchanged in the nearly 1000 years since the Gregorian reform (or, even better, the 700+ years after the series of reforms starting there and running through the 13th century councils) than the 1600 years between Constantine and Vatican II. It’d still be making the qualifier “largely” do an unreasonable amount of work, though.
The reformation didn't just change the educational needs for priests, it split off a significant portion of it's population out of the church.
I don't think we can cite 1600 years of stability for the organization at all. We may do so, somewhat, for doctrine, which is an achievement, but it's also equalled or exceeded by a few other religions.
The other thing to remember is that even those long-standing institutions had internal change that was a huge deal at the time but is now hardly remembered at all, or considered minor.
You can even see this right now, where countries do not consider themselves to be as old as the current government's age, but much older. For example, most Italians will not consider Italy to be "started" at the Republic in '46, or even the Unification in 1861, but that the country is much, much older.
Italy as a polity, regardless of how real the polity actually existed as a coherent and cohesive governing state, pretty much existed continuously from Rome until entirely left out by the Congress of Vienna in 1805 though. By the time 1848 rolled around most people alive were perfectly aware of the concept of Italy in living memory, and even those who didn't actually live in what was considered Italy - in particular those living in the south from Naples down to Calabria and Sicily, if they were educated and literate, were still aware of the notion of Italy as a distinct political entity. There might not have been much of a centralized government based in Italian territories that represented the polity for long periods of history, but ruling regimes/dynasties come and go but political entities tend to last longer.
Egypt, even though it was still intact by the times of Socrates, has had a number of changes and shake-ups, rises, falls, attempts to change the ancient state religion, etc.
Britain had the Glorious Revolution in 1688, the Magna Carta which amounts to a major revolution was enacted in 1215, and the Norman conquest happened in 1066. All these major events hardly occurred "a few generations ago".
I'm afraid that the idea of things largely unchanging in the past comes from our poor knowledge of history, compared to recent events.
The British revolution, which is the first revolution, is still fairly recent on a historical timescale (and the later revolutions would arguably reshape Britain more than the British one ever did). My point is exactly that 2-300 years is not a particularly long time.
> Egypt, even though it was still intact by the times of Socrates, has had a number of changes and shake-ups, rises, falls, attempts to change the ancient state religion, etc.
There were some dynastic changes and bumps along the road, absolutely, but my point is the overall shape of Egypt was remarkably stable even through the Persian conquest.
Ancient Egypt's "bumps along the road" were several periods of almost total anarchy and state disintegration that each lasted for many decades.
You're right that there's nothing comparable to the modern era: the modern era hasn't existed long enough to have collapses that total. I think you are not applying the same level of scrutiny to ancient societies as you are to modern ones.
Perhaps with regards to "scale" this may be true, but in most ways I disagree. There were hundreds of democracies in the ancient world - particularly in Greece - and they all tended to break down along similar lines. The Greeks even had a term for this - stasis - which there's a body of literature about. In stasis, the norms of democratic government are slowly eroded through an escalating series of power plays (each justified by previous excesses). This in turn erodes the public trust in institutions required for society to function. Which usually ends in violence. So I think it's a mistake to assume our situation is unique.
> The catholic church has stood largely unchanged for the 1600 odd years between Constantine and Vatican II.
No, it really didn't.
> Looking back we've had republics with longevity, we've had autocratic dynasties with longevity. But democracy? Besides Athens, which had a very different shape of political system, this is really a first.
Modern democracies are almost entirely representative democracies, more like historical republics (and in fact, many of them are explicitly republics, though some are technically limited monarchies) than classical democracies.
For a few decades we enjoyed one of the great periods of peace and prosperity. That was surely doomed to end eventually, but I wish it could last a while longer.
Unless you lived in the parts of the world that didn’t have that peace or that prosperity… it’s important to remember peace and prosperity are regional phenomena that are not shared around the globe equally.
Certainly there have been some parts of the world that didn’t have that peace or that prosperity, but it was widespread.
Former colonies threw off their colonial yokes. Most of the "developing world" developed. Marginalized groups gained new civil rights. China and India rose to become great powers even as their former colonial masters, though declining, still enjoyed peace and prosperity.
Recognizing that there is still a lot of injustice and inequality in the world doesn't require denying all the progress that has been made.
> Certainly there have been some parts of the world that didn’t have that peace or that prosperity, but it was widespread.
> Former colonies threw off their colonial yokes.
While I don’t disagree that decolonization was progress, it ironically came at the cost of the peace that had been imposed on the colonies by their former colonial masters. Many of the world’s most conflict-stricken areas today are ex-colonies still in the process of stabilization.
The dirty secret of peace is that it is often imposed by a dominant power. Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Americana. These were peaceful times because of intense power asymmetry.
> dirty secret of peace is that it is often imposed by a dominant power. Pax Romana, Pax Britannica, Pax Americana.
If it’s literally in the name it’s not a secret. Competition for monopolies on violence are bloody. When we can sidestep that contest, we get a lasting peace.
> While I don’t disagree that decolonization was progress, it ironically came at the cost of the peace that had been imposed on the colonies by their former colonial masters.
What is this "peace" you speak of? I think you want to take a closer look at the oppression that was endemic to colonization and occupation of foreign lands. One of the worse examples is Belgium's colonization of the Congo:
If an African laborer didn't produce rubber (for example), it was common to chop off a hand (his own or a family member's) to encourage him to work harder.
Congo may be on the worse end of the spectrum of colonization, but it is hardly a singular example.
> Recognizing that there is still a lot of injustice and inequality in the world doesn't require denying all the progress that has been made
And recognizing that we've made process shouldn't make us believe that we've done enough. Recognize what we've (or they've) achieved, be proud about it but never loose focus on making "it" even better.
(I'm just adding to your comment, not disagreeing)
I've always thought that saying is pretty weak, not only because of the bias that anyone believes it will tend to characterise themselves as one of the "strong men", but also because what one side characterises as good times, another side will characterise as bad. The end of WW2 was a good time for the allies, pretty devastating for Germany, and yet we don't see Germany in current times as on a completely different trajectory than the rest of us, its actually probably the most average of the former allied countries.
Also the political perspective, what the left would characterise as good times the right would probably characterise as bad, and visa versa. At that point its no longer strong and weak men, but men of one camp and men of another.
It's pretty much the definition of fascism - a delusional paternalistic idiot infecting everyone around him with his own neuroses and narcissism, in the name of "patriotism" and "respect."
Good god, enough with this "fascist and nazi seem to have lost all meaning" nonsense. Let's call it the "No true fascist fallacy". I could bring the corpse of Himmler here and some people would regurgitate the same "Bu-bu-but that's not actually fascist enough!". OP was basically quoting the definition of Ur-fascism by Umberto Eco. Is that historically accurate enough for you? Or should we check beforehand if whoever he was referring to has ever took part in the Salo republic, before we commit the grave sin of not being taxonomically accurate?
The reason people focus on definitions like “oh, it’s really about toxic masculinity!” is because admitting the truth would make them look bad:
Fascism is a collectivist authoritarian system with regulated commerce rather than direct state control, often co-occurring with systemic racism.
The reason people don’t want to be honest about the definition is that it’s the platform of modern Democrats, who are gaslighting by calling everyone else a “fascist”:
Democrats are collectivist authoritarian.
Democrats are pushing for regulated commerce.
Democrats are rebuilding systemic racism, from rationing healthcare [2] and government aid [1] based on race to attempting to repeal civil rights laws in WA [4] and CA [3].
Democrats took to the street in acts of arson, violence, and murder to terrorize the public ahead of an election — the modern Brownshirts. [5]
I couldn't care less what oblique definition of fascism came out from some american think-tank in the 80s, narrow enough to not anger any of their thatcherian or reaganite friends.
I'm italian, my grandfather was drafted in the balilla first at 14 and the fascist army later. And his stories of the time were all about the violence, the machismo, the open contempt for the gay, the jewish, any other minorities. That's fascism, no matter if it doesn't match your clinical idea of what fascism should or shouldn't be.
And yes, they were as silly and ridiculous as the tiki torches guys or the Jan 6 coup guys. Until they were fully in power. Then everybody stopped laughing, or wondering if they were really dangerous or not.
And to be quite honest with you, worry not - I think we'll find very, very soon how close those are compared to US democrats to actual fascists(tm).
I’m paraphrasing what the fascists said their goals were.
If you read about fascism, their proponents viewed it as “Marxism 2.0” — where they could leverage the socialist ideas of collectivist authoritarianism without the problems encountered by the original Marxist revolutionaries with total state control of commerce.
A unified populace where “everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”
Well yes, the Goodwin point is now crossed very casually, just like people are using superlatives for the mundane things, such as "I ate the most amazing fries yesterday".
This makes for poor debates, where there is little nuance, fuzzy scales and hardly meaningful communication.
As I said in another post, I'm italian, and my grandparents had some direct experience on the matter. Their families were destroyed by nazists and fascists. My grandmother family was jewish, A have a few pictures of her relatives with a number tattoed on their arms. I never dared to ask where or how they got them.
No idea how fucked up my gramps were, but by their direct account, yes that "strong males" attitude we're talking about was quite a fascist trait.
It's the nationalism, totalitarianism and dictatorial control that make fascism. The obsessions are a means to an end or just quirks by example and do not necessarily fascism make.
When the far left calls Trumpists fascist they are generally referring to the far right's current objective of overruling elections and installing a theocratic theocracy under Trump where white males are in charge across the board.
The definition of fascism is the merger of state and corporate power. Patriotism and respect, while they may be against your ideology, have nothing to do with it.
Though that may be, it is in fact not how the word is used, and likely once the concept was pressed to the fore and came into relevance beyond the pale of the esoteric, never more was used with that definition in mind.
No, "a strong man" makes fascism. This happens when the rest of the men are weak, so they seek a strong leader to make up for their own weakness. Strong men don't follow a fascist leader; strong men can't be led like that. It's weak men who are the fertile ground for fascism, not strong men.
If you find yourself in good times, then the key is to make them harder for yourself. Self sabotage by being an outspoken iconoclast, and be hated by everyone! Whee!
This is utter nonsense. Strong men make bad times, as anyone who's lived under a strongman can tell you, and strongman regimes are extremely weak in terms of human development, technological progress, and military power, as evidenced by the utter failures of North Korea and Nazi Germany and the USSR. Whining about how they did some notable things is missing the point: They couldn't sustain, they had no staying power, they achieved some victories and then either got pounded into nothing or stagnated while the rest of the world moved on.
You can see in modern Russia what decades of strongman rule, first in the USSR and then under Putin, looks like: Idiot conscripts hyped up on moronic propaganda getting blasted by an actual military fielded by a so-called "decadent" Western nation, with their ships being sunk by land-based weapons (and if you don't get why that's pathetic, you're not worth talking to) and their economy being destroyed by those "decadent" nations deciding to not buy from them anymore.
Strongmen create good times? Briefly, maybe, but get out before the piper demands to be paid, if anyone will have you.
I mean, even in your own post, you spell strong man different from strongman. Here’s a definition of the word strong for you: “possessing skills and qualities that create a likelihood of success.” Obviously this meaning is divorced from the definition of strongman you provide, so why be obtuse about it?
There are places that have been great to live for multiple generations, and places that have been troubled for just as long, I don't think this model has much predictive power.
Perhaps the language has evolved to the point that the work needs some translation. Because it strikes me as vague enough to be harmful with folks like Putin aspiring to embody "strong men".
The point is I was trying to be neutral. Because depending on who you ask Putin is the definition of true "strong men" or he's a tyrant desecrating the phrase.
I'm saying that right-wing authoritarians often use it as an attack on people they deem as not traditionally masculine, despite the original intention. It's used frequently enough that some people might mistake association.
Search for this saying on twitter, for example. It's been co-opted as fascist propaganda.
Good point. Wait, no I disagree and I think history probably does as well. If you'd like to engage in some unmitigated pedantry regarding this topic, check out https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-... which refers to this exact cycle.
The post specifically calls out the saying as “the modern version of this idea has deep roots in Romanticism (c. 1800-1850), a reaction against the reason of the Enlightenment – which makes it more than a touch ironic that this brain-dead meme is so frequently presented as clear logic.”
Strange because I've always seen the saurdukhar/fremen as a literary interpretation of a real aspect of human nature - the ability (of some) to perserverve and excel in stressful/difficult situations.
Some real life examples I've pointed too are the ghurkas in WW2 or Russian hackers.
The "Defining a generation" section is fairly short and describes the theory, and the "Timing of generations and turnings" section maps the theory onto the past ~500 years.
(Edit: got the indentation wrong, I thought the comment I was replying to was on the quote, not the "it's BS" reply. I don't think this is BS, at least not completely.)
The quote is similar to "what does not kills you makes you stronger", easily disproven by polio. [For the nitpickers: I know, the statement depends on the context]
But let's move on: what do you mean with "strong men"?
If you mean some sociopath/callous/ruthless emperor or dictator capable of starting massive wars - it hardly constitute creating good times.
If you mean men that are successful in current society... then very very few billionaires came from a childhood of hardship and poverty.
If you mean men that are capable of taking good decisions while facing difficulties and the stakes are high... then you are describing good education and good mental health, which are does in now way comes from "hard times".
All modern pedagogy and psychology sciences indicate that hardships create a lot of broken people and a few hardened narcissists.
If you mean that affluent and decadent societies become self absorbed and weaken as a whole - then I would tend to agree... but the term "strong men" would be profoundly misleading.
> All modern pedagogy and psychology sciences indicate that hardships create a lot of broken people and a few hardened narcissists.
Really depends on who you ask in the field of psychology. There have been several perspectives contrary to what suggest (e.g., humanistic psychology, positive psychology, post traumatic growth, etc) and I don’t agree that “all modern pedagogy and psychology sciences” suggests that hardships yield nothing but broken people and narcissists.
However, I generally agree with the idea that sayings like “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” are a bit silly (they ignore the fact that what doesn’t kill you can severely weaken you for life).
I just don’t think it’s particularly helpful to take things to the other extreme either.
Makes sense. Strength is useless during peace times, so strong men find themselves out of a job with nothing to channel their strength into. "Weakness" which in this case means classically feminine traits are useless during war times but are far preferred during peace times.
We don't need strong men during good times and we don't need weak men during bad times.
Although now we are in neither a good nor bad time. What kind of men do we need?
Virtue is not what survives hard times, it's grit and brutality. Raw strength. Morals and virtues are what arise during good times once we've secured survival.
I'd argue that virtue is a strong survival trait, and vice is a sign of weakness. But we may be considering different things, different aspects of life.
For a few decades we enjoyed one of the great periods of peace and prosperity. That was surely doomed to end eventually, but I wish it could last a while longer.
You mean Ukraine? I would hardly say that the current situation threatens the post-ww2 peace. Compare now to ww2 and the differences are huge. ww2 claimed vastly more lives, in addition to Stalin and Hitler.
> Nations rise. Nations fall. Sometimes there's revolt.
I think the concern at hand (at least in the US) is that we’re on the eve of that fall or revolt, and whatever is born out of that, for good or ill, probably means a couple of really hard decades.
I understand taking historical perspective, but I'm not a fan of complete equanimity about change. Lots of bad stuff is "happening all the time", like murder and cancer. It'd be nice to acknowledge when the things that are happening seem to be good or bad.
Do you think there can't be any civilizations in the universe which exist indefinitely? For the past millions or even billions of years? If humans get past the next couple of centuries and start spreading out into the solar system and possibly beyond, what would cause us to have a last generation?
That's so far away that "indefinitely" applies. If I told you could live until there was no more usable energy left in space, would you worry about not being immortal?
This gets straight into realms of like eschatology and the sources of and constraints on life, areas in which I hold deeply unpopular beliefs compared to the norm here.
The most neutral way I can phrase this is that I think life is a planetary expression, more or less fundamentally inseparable from the planet on which it emerges. We may eventually be able to break those bonds but I don't think we're anywhere near as close to that as we think we are, nor do I think we should even try.
I can't see that there's a moral way for people exit the solar system boundary out "into the stars." No one making that choice can arrive there, or even experience an appreciable part of the trip in one life. It's committing generations to be born, live and die for no purpose except to exist and to breed for some future goal of some past people. I believe this to be wicked.
People have always migrated into the unknown in the hope of something better for the people who will call them ancestors. But they've also always been able to make certain promises: that the sun will shine on them as it does on us, that crops will grow even if they aren't the crops we know, that the air is safe to breathe, that god will hear them there. Some of those people have been wrong about some of those things, but they always had good reason to trust in them.
We don't have reason to believe any of that about anywhere other than here. It's possible to imagine a future so grim that the best chance for our offspring is for us to force them to risk these unknowns. It's our responsibility to prevent that choice being necessary.
We can imagine things that could change this calculation. FTL, centuries-long human cryogenics, cross-lightyear microbiology. These are fantasies. If these powers are ever in anyone's grasp, that people will be fundamentally different from what we are, even if they came from us. I don't know what will be right for them and I have no claims on what they do.
Focusing on those far off fantasies of another people is a failure to appreciate our place here, the cosmic gift we've been given with our solar system. It is an understandable weakness but we should fight it. We have enough future in front of us as ourselves, we should leave the unrecognizable far depths of it to the unrecognizable people who will inhabit it.
Highly recommend Kim Stanley Robinson's novel Aurora, an exploration of precisely these concepts written in the fascinating perspective of a generation ship's AI instructed to narrate its journey.
The idea of going multiplanetary is not to abandon Earth out of necessity, but out of precaution. When you make a backup of your hard disk, it's usually not because you intend to go use your other one for target practice. Waiting to leave Earth when problems become clearly insurmountable is akin to waiting to backup your HDD until you notice it's failing. Indeed the very first thing we should start doing once we begin colonizing our second planet is planning to colonize the third.
There are countless ways human civilization, if not the human species, can come to a rather abrupt end: supervolcano explosion blotting out the sky, directed gamma ray burst destroying the atmosphere ( hypothesized as one of the reasons for the great ordovician extinction ), comet impact acting similar to the supervolcano, random evolution creating a supervirus, and so on. And the countless ways we might manage to kill ourselves go without saying: nuclear war, nukes, deploying weaponized viruses, even far more innocuous things like fertility < 2.5 for too long.
Many of these causes can, have, and will happen abruptly.
Human lives aren't data to be stored against future need. These "backups" aren't redundant; they will have worth, and demands, and dreams, and rights of their own. Are we adequately accounting for that when we imagine this interstellar future? Are we able to meet our responsibility to them with the dignity they deserve? I strongly do not think we are.
It's chilling but correct that so much of the language around this concept talks of colonies, because that is what we're discussing. Other lives, kept far away, for some benefit to ourselves, but not to them.
Until we can present a plausible vision for "the good life" in space, away from the earth that birthed us, we should not be pursuing this goal. If we end then so be it. We have many other means to reduce that possibility, much more accessible, that we're refusing to use right now. Let's pick up that shovel and see how far we can get first.
I don't necessarily agree with giraffe_lady, but I can see the argument where leaving the planet fundamentally changes what we currently consider "human" society to a point where it no longer can be a considered a continuation of the general earthly society. Evolution maybe, but less star trek and more belters from the expanse but taken to an absolutely extreme extent. Maybe closer to something like Seven Eves.
There definitely can be human civilizations that last indefinitely, so long as we stop keeping all our eggs in one basket, planet-wise.
Once we get humans living far enough apart that information about pandemics travels faster than pandemics do, then we should be largely invincible, barring suicide from ennui.
The larger our sub-galactic civilization, the more resilient it becomes to things like total war, total political revolution, etc.
It's really hard to be a galactic emperor at multi light-year distances. By the time you wipe out half the population of the empire, the other half will have doubled.
It's also easily conceivable that in less than 100 decades from now, global unrest or war will make us regress 100 decades. Climate change in particular is going to cause a lot of problems with feeding people.
Maybe so, but that would be straying from the point.
GP said "there can't be any human civilizations that last indefinitely" and in response I gave an easily conceivable version of how human civilizations can last indefinitely.
But what you've posted is science fiction, in contrast there have been a number of historical civilization collapses. Something that's easily conceivable in the mind isn't necessarily practical or going to happen.
It's been over 50 years since humans last set foot on the moon. While there's hope that man will land on the moon again by 2025, success is not assured, and a catastrophic accident could set manned space missions back by decades.
Yes, we might collapse and never recover, but the universe is a really big place, so there might be civilizations which avoid that. And if they did, then maybe we can also.
The fact that no one has figured it out in over 13 billion years kinda suggests not, doesn't it? That's pretty much the Fermi Paradox, and perhaps the answer.
The psychological tension that is inherent to capitalism (indefinite exponential growth is required, unbounded exponential growth is impossible) requires that the system be under plausible existential threat at all times.
I remember watching the universal disdain Americans shared for high finance after 2008 and even movements like Occupy Wall Street resonated with a lot more people than one would have predicted. Then, all of the sudden, a whole new field of social engineering algorithms are unleashed on the populace, convincing everyone that their neighbor is the true enemy.
Why do you think that OWS was killed by new "social engineering algorithms"?
The US has had a strong anti-protest culture for decades. March in the street, for anything, and the response is near universal cynicism and derision of the "hippies". With OWS this was apparent with traditional news coverage that constantly focused on the most ridiculous looking protestors
things became quite, i think the main reason was that they fixed the economy, for a while.
However you have a point, media is very potent factor; You see that in Russia, where the state has a monopoly on the press, and old TV managed to persuade a majority in necessity of this senseless war, which is going on right now.
The new media thing is creating a kind of monopoly on information for your own tribe, because it trains everyone to discard any info that comes from the other side of the fence. So there is a strong element of social control here. (don't know if Mr. Musk will manage to change that, but he seems to be trying...)
... actually you can escape the filter bubble: On twitter they have the 'list' feature, you can define your list of sources and switch between lists, however most users are probably not using this feature. You had a similar feature on google+, but that was a long time ago.
And now we're even teaching children which "group" they belong in, from the time they're in kindergarten, to further divide the populace so that we can be at war with each other instead of them.
I think some things are falling apart but not everything. If you had the foresight/luck/guidance to get into a stable white collar career, find a partner, and buy a house before 2022 I think you're on "the train". This train is currently pulling away from a burning station containing everyone else who hasn't done those things yet. It's still possible to escape the station by running down the tracks but at this point the train is picking up speed so your odds aren't too good. Obviously this is a young single person's perspective but I think we're by far feeling the shifts in society and the economy the most right now.
Alternative, darker analogy: everyone is on the Titanic. It's currently breaking in half and about to sink, but people like the author of this blog post are on the upper half looking down.
I think the 'train' is also on fire just more insulated from the burning and it'll be a bit more comfortable until your car is engulfed and disconnected. IMO the beginning of Walkaway or maybe After the Revolution is a reasonable picture of what the future will look like economically with the gap between the rich and the rest of the world continuing to widen and life outside of that becoming increasingly tenuous. I'm not bullish on major changes happening that manage to address the causes of that. How well things stay glued together like in Walkaway or we get an explosive fracturing like After the Revolution is anyone's guess.
Yeah I liked it. They also made a TV show but I never watched that. Thought about how to include references to it but it didn't quite fit so I dropped it.
That's definitely possible, I'm only going from people I know personally. Lots of insurance and finance and consulting types whose lives seem obscenely easy with their regular raises and functioning health insurance (grass is of course always greener). And as for tech, while the industry isn't going anywhere I think any single tech job is not necessarily super stable either. I guess by white collar jobs I was specifically thinking of jobs at Fortune 500 companies.
Except there's a mob outside with pitchforks, and the conductor and engineer are part of it[1], and everybody in it has the same look on their face, "You really thought you could get away?" as the air brakes hiss into their fail-state, and everyone on board the train realizes the red herring of the burning station didn't work out.
While I agree that buying property has become very difficult, what has changed in 2022 that prevents you from getting a stable white collar job or finding a partner? If you have the requisite skillset (which can be acquired more easily than ever thanks to the internet) getting a stable white collar job is very possible. And in the age of dating apps, so much friction has been removed when it comes to finding a partner (although it might not feel like it at times).
While I know you inteded this as a direct question, I'm actually going to give a meta-response. It seems to me that you think that the problem I'm outlining in my "train" analogy is that I personally am not on the train. To the contrary, the problem is that there is a train at all. Even if/when I manage to climb safely aboard, I'll have left behind an entire class of people who weren't so lucky. Smart, capable people who just wanted to do something respectable and beneficial for the world, like teaching or journalism or home health aide. I understand that all those people could just give up on what they're doing and "learn 2 code" but I think it should be obvious that (a) not everyone wants to code (or can do it to a high level), and (2) a society made up entirely of coders is not desirable.
More broadly though, I suspect you and I just have totally different worldviews. You correctly point out that there are straightforward steps to escape the crushing hopelessness of life in the modern underclass. What I'm saying is that it should be made possible and in fact easy for people to carry on a dignified, non-hopeless existence without being coerced into chasing the absolute highest-paying job available. I suspect this comes down to personality. If you're satisfied living "defensively," putting aside what you most crave or are actually best at in favor of the thing that will keep you protected while the rest of society atrophies, well that's lucky for you. But not everyone is wired that way. If we were, I doubt things like good food or art or music would exist.
As for the dating thing, if you're not on the dating market right now you might not be aware that COVID massively messed things up. People now (myself included) are weirder than pre-2020. Human connection is harder. In fact, I'm going on IRL dates from apps most weekends now, but it's still a struggle compared to how things used to be, for me at least.
I doubt anyone is still reading by this point but I will say this: my original post was not about how my life is falling apart. I suspect I'll be fine; I'm doing more or less exactly what I want to do, all day, every day. The issue is, net net, lots of people are struggling. If people pulling themselves up by their bootstraps was a viable solution, we'd live in a utopia by now.
Regarding career choice, I completely agree. People doing important useful work (e.g. teaching) should be paid enough to have a comfortable life. They should be able to buy a home, go on vacation, have a family, and not struggle financially. I guess I was looking at it from a more “realistic” point of view. I think, sadly, this is what people need to do. There are career paths I wish I could take but unfortunately they don’t pay well enough, even though they should, and I have to code useless crap instead. So I think it’s possible to have a comfortable white collar career (relatively easily if you are intelligent, hard working, and willing to move to a major city) but unfortunately it may not be fulfilling or noble.
Regarding dating, I got off the market just before covid. But - I didn’t date for the majority of my 20’s due to pretty bad anxiety. After finally starting dating (using apps) I’d found a long term partner within 6 months. I feel like, if I could do it almost anyone can. Maybe things have got really weird but it’s worth maybe reconsidering your expectations etc.
>> The issue is, net net, lots of people are struggling.
I completely agree. Things need to change. However in the meantime, I think it’s still possible to “play the game” and succeed. The problem is it may be incredibly unfulfilling.
Some friction was removed; some friction was added. The 'ease' of finding a partner on apps creates an illusion of 'plenty fish in the sea', but 10s still go after 10s and, apparently, so do 6,7,8, and 9s creating a very interesting vacuum.
As far as skillset goes, I would argue that it is only part of the story. Knowing the right person, is the key. You want to talk to people. You want to showcase what you can do. Stable job is doable then, but I don't know if it is easy.
And that does not even touch the simple fact that not everyone is built for that.
>> Some friction was removed; some friction was added. The 'ease' of finding a partner on apps creates an illusion of 'plenty fish in the sea', but 10s still go after 10s and, apparently, so do 6,7,8, and 9s creating a very interesting vacuum.
Is this not what happens in the real world too? The bit I'm stuck on is how it's gotten harder in 2022. At worst, it's the same as the past as far as I can see.
Crap. One of three for me. I'd have had a house by now if it weren't for the fact I had to pay back $120k in student loans. Heavy drain on my finances for years. Finally paid the damn things off earlier this year. In some ways I did the stupid thing by moving to an area where the property costs were beyond me, but it's where the people I know live. I was so very alone where I was before.
This is a good way of putting it. Having graduated high school in 2008, it's felt my entire adult life like I've been reaching for brass rings just within reach (for me), barely clinging on, but still doing better than so many people who weren't even in position to do that.
We'll see about 'stable', there's some work I need to do if I want this to be sustainable/not something I'm at risk at crashing down from, but I've made it on the train while feeling the flames lapping at my neck.
I'm currently running to catch up. Feels like there's a non-trivial chance of failure, but I have enough privilege that I think I'll get on all right in the end. I could have been on the train from day 1 if I had made some different choices but there's no helping that now.
As someone born in and has all my family in BC, Canada; I barely lucked out securing a house in 2020. This was thanks to a white collar career and financially literate partner.
There is no next stop. Look at Canada's housing crisis if you want to see where the United States is headed.
I appreciate extending the analogy but I don't understand what this actually looks like in real life. You only go to college one, have your first job out of college once, etc. If you don't maximize ROI on those (not just financially but socially) you're playing catchup forever. Success is absolutely still possible but it will take hard work and luck compared to if I had just followed the prescribed path like so many people I know.
You wait for the market to cycle again - crash, boom, then crash, etc. Parent poster might have been in their 20s/30s though and implying that waiting for the next cycle would waste prime years of their life.
I'm not sure that life is wasted, but I'd suggest financial opportunity is wasted.
You just can't reach the level of financial security that the previous generation could if that previous generation had a drastically lower cost of living relative to income for the first X years of their adult life. Especially as X approaches the length of your entire career.
That’ll happen at far too late of an age for it to matter though. Parents aren’t dying at 60 when they had kids at 30. They’re dying at 80 and the kids will be 50+ when they finally get anything. By then - it’s far too late.
Anyone can move to my town and get an $18/hour starting wage job and buy a $150,000 house. Hard to imagine that this is unique. Look outside the cities...
I feel generally that everything is falling apart. I also have an article still pulled up from earlier this week titled Why Pessimism Sounds Smart. It seems pessimists are sometimes wrong! But sometimes they are right too - especially in the last couple of years I have observed incompetence seemingly everywhere I go. But is this the changing world, or my changing perspective? It's really difficult to pin down. At the same time, I read books that were published before I was born that allude to many of the same problems that seem so prominent in our society today, reinforcing the idea that We Didn't Start the Fire.
Still, the decline in quality of goods and services seems to be backed up by data as well as anecdote. I go to schools, churches, businesses. I see lightbulbs out. Things that are broken that could be repaired if only someone would put in 10 minutes of effort. My opinion: Everything is maybe falling apart in America specifically. I hope I'm wrong, for my childrens' sake.
Maintenance worker can't just pull over on a lark with a screwdriver and fix a wobbly thing anymore. someone needs to submit a ticket. we've processified everything to the point where it stops making sense.
Unfortunately said someone has been made redundant, and the parts wouldn’t be available anyway because all of the planets microchip factories are building bitcoin rigs
The incompetence could also be a result of the fact that a lot of shit is happening at the same time.
I suspect that the world after WW1, where they also faced many similar situations at the same time (pandemic, financial crash, etc), also looked pretty incompetent to everyone.
I think the question shouldn't necessarily be who started the fire, but if it is a good idea to just let the fire burn, even though you weren't the one igniting it.
Yes, that is how I think about it. Billy Joel's generation didn't start the fire, but they also sure as hell didn't put it out. Don't get me wrong. Some people are carrying buckets of water towards the fire, but there are other people poking holes in the buckets, or shoving them so that they spill the water, or whatever other metaphor you would like to use here. And also some people standing around and telling the people carrying the water that it's not the correct way to put out fires.
Yes, exactly. And to add to your list, there are also people who are not carrying buckets, because "I didn't start the fire, others are making it worse, so what's the point in even trying to carry a bucket."
The worst thing is feeling defeated, even though you could actually be helping. Doesn't even matter if you're carrying a shot glass or a whole barrel full of water, at least you're doing the best you can.
The US is a culture of authoritarian narcissism, and while it feels good - to some people - it's simply not sustainable.
In the US it's more important to be rich than to be moral or right.
But you can't deny mutuality, interdependence, and rational modelling of collective consequences without getting into some very broken places and bad outcomes.
We were getting close to a fairly positive future.
There are three basic constraints to material and non-material goods:
- capital
- labour
- energy
There are other raw materials, but they aren't limiting factors. For example, processed Lithium is in short supply right now, but it's not raw Lithium that's the constraint. We don't have enough Lithium mines and processing facilities. capital/labour/energy, in other words.
We had a glorious period in the post-WW2 era where the price of energy & capital was dropping dramatically so the world was labour constrained. Wages skyrocketed, and the middle class emerged and prospered.
Then the 70s halted cheap energy and the 80s halted cheap capital and the world has stagnated since.
In 2019, things were looking up again. Capital was cheap, and green energy prices were dropping in their own version of Moore's law so it became crystal clear that energy would be very cheap soon.
But we can't have the proles regain the power they had in the 60's. Low unemployment, cheap energy and cheap capital means that power will shift from the rich to the middle class. So a crisis was invented. Let's pretend that the inflation caused by a supply crisis and a war in Ukraine is actually caused by cheap capital. That way we can get rid of cheap capital and throw a ton of people out of work so the rich and powerful can maintain control. While we're at it, we'll use the war as an excuse to stay on the petro-economy.
Luckily, it's not too late. I expect inflation to quickly turn negative as bottlenecks free up and high interest rates throw the economy into a recession forcing the fed to reverse the interest rate hikes.
>But we can't have the proles regain the power they had in the 60's. Low unemployment, cheap energy and cheap capital means that power will shift from the rich to the middle class. So a crisis was invented. Let's pretend that the inflation caused by a supply crisis and a war in Ukraine is actually caused by cheap capital. That way we can get rid of cheap capital and throw a ton of people out of work so the rich and powerful can maintain control. While we're at it, we'll use the war as an excuse to stay on the petro-economy.
That's basically Keynes general theory of employment, interest and money. The moment the marginal efficiency of capital falls below interest paid on money(=capital is cheap), capital is abandoned in favor of money. My entire stance is based around the concept of lowering the interest rate all the way down to the marginal efficiency of capital.
For example, during the great depression people couldn't afford food due to a lack of jobs, at the same time farmers did not harvest their crops because it was unprofitable, they let them rot on the field: http://exhibits.lib.usu.edu/exhibits/show/foodwaste/timeline...
A lot of military spending is simply motivated in using that cheap capital for _something_. After all, the military will give you a job and make your country "great" again. At worst you get to plunder a country which is highly profitable because you didn't have to create all that value yourself.
What boggles my mind however, is the fact that we have this climate change thing. If you want to keep this farce up, just invest in green tech. It's just a matter of changing the tax code. Excess energy/capital can be used for capturing CO2.
I like your framework, but I do question your dismissal of raw materials.
The 'green revolution' broke a barrier in our ability to grow food (amount per acre), but it isn't clear if that increase can be sustained for the next 100 years-- the massive amounts of chemicals we put on the land are killing the soil.
That's before we get to climate-change threats to food production.
Or species diversity threats to food production.
Or the elimination of 80% of insect biomass in developed countries, with concordant impact on food production.
We could easily grow a lot more food in less space if we had to. To give an extreme example: greenhouses grow about 1000x as much food per acre as conventional farming does, but the resulting food costs about 10x as much.
We use all our land to grow food not because we have to, but because that's the cheapest way of doing so. We could grow food more intensively, but then the price of food would go up.
There is this agrotech thing called no till farming and combined with proper crop rotation and carefully selected cover crops and soil management your soil will improve every single year instead of degrading.
I have seen a lot of hackernews comments that think they can just chemically or genetically engineer their way out of this. Just spray compound X and Y on crop Z and you are ready to go. It may look technologically impressive but that is actually the lazy solution.
You're totally right, no-till farming is the best way to preserve the soil. The problem is that no-till farming uses a lot of chemicals, and consumers think that organic farming is the solution. But organic farming uses tillage for weed control, so it destroys the soil.
Are you saying that the millions upon millions who died (not to mention the untold millions who are suffering long-term health problems), didn't actually die? Or that what they died from (a highly contagious and infectious novel virus) was engineered?
The crisis that was invented is the perception that it was government stimulus that caused the inflation. The pretension that millions of deaths didn't cause the economic problems, it was the stimulus that caused the economic problems.
We need to return to federalism and bring an end to activist politicians. (Good luck with that, I know...)
The reason the American Experiment has worked so well for a few centuries is because we knew how to leave each other alone. If I'm in New York City, it's really none of my business what's happening in Albany, let alone Albuquerque New Mexico, so long as some basic standards of universal liberty are upheld.
Today that's all out the window. Activists for every issue want every issue solved at the federal level. Well, the problem with that is the US is a big country and the federal government should do the bare minimum, not the maximum. Both parties have completely forgotten this and it's really heightened tensions.
If you are a resident of NYC, what is happening in Albany (the capital of the state) certainly affects you.
If you are a resident of New York, some of your Federal tax dollars[1] are going to New Mexico. Why would what they are doing with your money not be your business?
No, otherwise we wouldn't have been able to obtain our status as a nearly Type I civilization (we are currently 0.73 on the Kardashev scale).
But we do have a lot of what some describe as sludge. For example, in the USA, with the awful state of healthcare, where even with a good job and "good" benefits and being in the so-called 1%, it can be a struggle to obtain certain kinds of medication, and insurance companies will absolutely fuck with you to avoid paying, giving patients the runaround and making them waste hours and days in endless phone call black holes until you give up. Doctor's offices and hospitals will and do double- and even triple-bill you, then bully you into paying by sending you to collections. God forbid you should get a catastrophic illness. There are so many similar and related examples that we could have entire threads about. There was a book recently written about this but I cannot find it right now...will update when I do.
There certainly is the sense that we are losing a lot in terms of core values, especially as technology evolves (we seem to be resembling the movie Idiocracy more and more), but this has also been the case with other, now fallen civilizations. The ancient Greeks thought that books/the written word would bring about the destruction of their society because people would lose their ability to use their memories.
Things are not falling apart any more than they have in the past. What we are witnessing is a shift in power structure brought about by new communications technology. Humanity has been through this many times before. The invention of writing in the first place empowered the scribes. The printing press disempowered the scribes and empowered publishers . Radio disempowered publishers and empowered broadcasters. The internet has disempowered broadcasters and empowered the unwashed masses. Every time this has happened there has been accompanying social upheaval. We will probably figure this out. But until we do (and it could take a while) things will be a little chaotic.
Oh yes, absolutely. Climate change is a whole 'nuther kettle o' fish, and it is very, very serious. Nuclear war is also a very real danger. But that's not what TFA was talking about.
I've had some thoughts lately that these issues are closely linked with physical borders.
In the old days, people with similar ideals would gather in physical proximity. Eventually, their common values would form nations.
In today's world, it is trivial to find people who share similar values - but they might be on the opposite side of the world.
We are doing nation building in a virtual space, but we are unable to realize them because we reside within physical borders that we did not draw, cannot change, with mismatched governance.
The values of everyone around us have changed - and we are stuck in some type of twisted hell of a prison where we can't escape those we don't share values with. Your neighbours are now on the Internet. Some of those people might be your physical neighbour, but many aren't.
> In the old days, people with similar ideals would gather in physical proximity. Eventually, their common values would form nations.
I can't think of any nation in history which was formed by such a rational and reasonable process, but I'd love to be informed otherwise.
In my estimation, nations were formed by force, usually by individuals with a functional balance of ruthlessness and charisma. Sometimes by confederations of people with the same qualities.
This is a bit of an oversimplification of the argument. Technology is argued to be a wedge, but this is in the context of well documented social division. In recent memory we were significantly less divided and the most consumed media sources served as moderators. Brushing this off as just another prognostication and everything is always messed up is missing the seriousness of this.
It is perhaps fortunate that the Ukraine situation is demonstrating once again that just about the only time America can function in a coordinated manner is when there is an agreed upon external threat. Perhaps the next external threat will be carbon climate cancer? Or will our internal divisions prevent us from effectively dealing with that. It is going to be a rough ride one way or the other. The current war will be our first experience with global famines since the so called green revolution.
There's a lot more political polarization, no doubt, but I'm actually not sure it's true that there's more social division. A few decades ago, basic questions like "is it OK for different races to get married" and "should women participate fully in society" remained unresolved, with a ton of people wielding substantial power sitting on the "no" side. (The Handmaid's Tale wasn't meant to be some crazy impossible premise; Margaret Atwood genuinely believed that she was describing a real trend that might happen if we're not careful.)
There's still time for that backslide to happen we're already seeing conservative reactionary groups pushing for returns to before those questions were 'resolved' in more and less direct terms.
I wouldn't claim that a backslide is impossible, but it's important to understand that these weren't just conservative reactionary issues at the time. I have an uncle who got interracially married in the 1990s, and his wife's family were concerned about it because of gender rights - they thought that he as a Hispanic man was going to expect her to be "barefoot and pregnant".
People are only measuring social division in the online discourse imo. Look at the world. People are lining up politely in the grocery store and smiling when you cross paths on the street. I'm guessing you will also note there is no social division in your neighborhood either when you go out walking around.
Meanwhile, in the 1960s people were burning their draft cards, starving themselves to be underweight for the draft, or fleeing to canada. Returning soldiers at the airport would be spat on by protesters. Black people regularly had stones thrown at them or worse and no one made any news article about it. Activist groups were actually armed, and serious situations occured with that. Teenage girls were congregating in a canyon outside of los angeles to join a serial killers sex cult. Groups of people were travelling the country in a school bus turning square people on to acid and mushrooms. That was the peak of social disorder.
We are all in line now, despite what the narratives in the media make us think. People hold opinions strongly, but they are of a limited set of prescribed opinions from the media. Find any thread online about a given topic you've read about online before, and the comments will all be the same and predictable. We aren't exposed to as much unorthodox thought as our population used to be back before global media had total influence on how we sourced our information about the world.
I hate to make both of us feel ancient, but Bowling Alone was written in the "decades ago" period I'm talking about. While the trend of social atomization has definitely continued, I don't think division as such has gotten worse since then.
(Seconding the recommendation though, it is a good book.)
He has follow up books like the one I suggested. It hasn’t gotten better. Division is stronger at socioeconomic lines than ever afaict. We replaced race and sex division with class.
Also that will prove costly to the existing economic order, companies will resist every change that threatens their bottom line unless and until they find a way to benefit themselves. Look at oil now "energy" companies like Shell that knew climate change was a looming cliff but were so heavily invested in oil they buried the issue in confusion and flak until they figured out how to make money off of green energy.
Hits close to home. Several years ago, people from one end of the political spectrum mistook me for another person on the opposite end of the political spectrum and doxxed me. I haven’t been able to correct the record to any real extent, and I basically live in fear that the whole situation will flare up again, and all it will take is for one crazy person with a lethal weapon to find me and make me pay, and that’ll be it.
Which is just to say that I experience these self-reinforcing divisions at a visceral and existential level, which I suppose is the case for everyone. It only leads me to want to withdraw. I would like to try to explain who I actually am to people who think I’m the devil, but i think that would just backfire. So the solution at an individual level is to pull back my online presence and, I don’t know, buy a gun. Which clearly doesn’t help at the macro level.
Edit: typo
Further edit: I guess the second paragraph there illustrates how the prisoner’s dilemma comes into play to reinforce the mass psychology of tribalism. I long for the days of my youth, when I could still talk with my ideologically-different family about issues, but extending that to others on the internet feels fraught with danger, leaving me more exposed. It feels like the best strategy is to stay in my bubble and armor it up—safety in numbers, and all that. Which must be the same on the other side. The better solution is cooperation, but given the unknowns, everyone has to act suspicious and fortify instead.
Bingo. Like many in my generation, I used to not worry about it at all. Now I am a bit obsessive—constantly checking my name, number, and address on people finder sites and sending takedown requests when they pop back up, and currently trying to transition all my online accounts to use e-mail addresses provided by Hide My E-mail on iCloud (which is quite the project). Seems like changing my e-mail on different accounts could be useful, since people would be less likely to connect those different accounts. I keep reporting the links to the doxxed info on pastebin, Twitter, and google (pro-tip: you can ask google to remove doxxed information from their search results). I know I will never be able to ask the actual extremists to take down my name when I am mid-identified as that other person, which sucks. And it still feels like there might be some other exposure that’s just waiting to blow up in my face. Open to suggestions on the subject if anyone has any.
I was advised by multiple sources not to try. The initial people took down the info pretty immediately, but now it persists over a lot of forums, blog posts, etc., so I imagine it would be a game of whack-a-mole that would require significant legal resources, and it would draw a lot of attention, which would be unpleasant.
It's easy to lament polarization, but the reason it's not going away is that there are important differences in how people view the world, and calls for unity are really closer to "It would be so peaceful if we could eliminate the opposing viewpoint once and for all".
I agree. It seems "compromise" is increasingly used as "What I'm proposing should be considered the compromise and you should listen to me". There's no real debate. Nobody tries to address the other side's concerns. And then we do have, as you say, some fundamental differences in world views and experiences that sometimes form an impasse.
Per Wikipedia, the US army defines an assault rifle as: "short, compact, selective-fire weapons that fire a cartridge intermediate in power between submachine gun and rifle cartridges."
Selective-fire means it's not just semi-automatic (one shot per trigger pull), it can also be set to fully auto (shoots as long as you pull the trigger) or burst (shoots a few rounds when you hold the trigger, then stops). These are essentially unavailable to the average civilian.
In popular usage, though, "assault rifle" means a short semi-automatic rifle with a plastic stock--anything that looks like a modern military rifle. Heck, I bet if you chopped down grandpa's bolt-action .30-06 deer rifle and put it in a black plastic stock, somebody would call it an assault rifle.
Personally, I think the AR-15 pattern rifle is a deeply boring and unattractive firearm. It's also become a symbol in a culture war: a terrifying "weapon of war" to some, a statement of rebellion and "owning the libs" to others. At the end of the day, though, there's just not a hell of a lot of difference between an AR-15 civilian rifle and, say, the Ruger Mini-14, except that the latter has a less scary wood stock.
'Per Wikipedia, the US army defines an assault rifle as: "short, compact, selective-fire weapons that fire a cartridge intermediate in power between submachine gun and rifle cartridges."'
The etymology supports this as well, going back to the first ones during WW2.
One thing to note, is that the law can define terms however they want. So places are applying their own novel definitions, largely involving cosmetic features or make/model.
Of course one other thing to point out is that the assault rifle bans are mostly a red herring given the relatively low contribution to homicides.
I don't know much about weapons, I'm European and we don't have much of them, but regardless of the definitions a gun is meant to kill people it has no other uses other than hunting. I find it very effective how in US the discourse can be shifted to which tools to kill should be limited more or less, rather than considering if society wouldn't be better off without them.
US police is violent, but how terrifying it can be when every car you pull for a routine control may contain a person who may shoot you?
"US police is violent, but how terrifying it can be when every car you pull for a routine control may contain a person who may shoot you?"
Arguably any car pulled over in any country has the potential for an occupant to shoot (or otherwise kill) you, even if guns are illegal and uncommon (as are murders). The likelihood just varies. In general, an officer should not be "terrified" of being shot on a routine stop. There are many technologies and procedures designed to minimize risk. Once you are no longer a rookie, the practice is routine. Being shot or shooting someone is fairly rare. I believe the lifetime chance of firing your weapon on duty was 2% or so, which is relatively low. Likewise, I remember non-violent fatalities were larger overall percentage (car accidents, drowning, suicide, illness, etc). Yet most officers are not terrified of covid nor car accidents. Situational context is a huge factor.
"I find it very effective how in US the discourse can be shifted to which tools to kill should be limited more or less, rather than considering if society wouldn't be better off without them."
Sporting purposes include target shooting in addition to hunting (see the Olympics, etc). The needs and ideals in one country are not necessarily the same as in other countries. It certainly does come up about repealing the second amendment and banning guns almost entirely. Some of the counter points are that much of the US is rural, where police response can take hours or even days (remote Alaska), and many of those residents require a firearm for various rural purposes, like protecting livestock from other animals.
On top of all that, it's a fairly large minority that owns guns. Many do not want to be burdened by additional regulations. It's similar to any other issue in a democracy - people vote for their own interests and benefits.
Everybody has internalized the idea that if you ask for twice what you really want, meeting in the middle will give you the thing you actually wanted. So if you notice that the other side is doing the same thing, you double it again...
They never read Never Split The Difference. Negotiations are supposed to be value based and each side should listen to the true concerns of the other.
That said, I don't think the political sides are really asking for twice what they want. It seems very clear on most subjects that they really do want all that they are asking for, but will occasionally accept less and continuing to press for the rest in the long run.
Thinking about it, I think you're right that the political sides aren't doing that. The Culture-War wedge issues that are the most polarizing don't really have a halfway; we've seen that with abortion, for example, for decades. All the halfway positions are unsatisfying to everyone, and the issue is still there.
That’s because — by design — the culture war issues do not have a compromise position. The compromise on abortion was Clinton’s “safe, legal, and rare” — and it didn’t solve the problem. The compromise on guns was a ban on assault weapons, background checks and letting states regulate guns. It didn’t solve the problem.
These issues were cultivated by right-wing think tanks over decade with the sole purpose of making it impossible for voters to even think of doing anything but electing Republicans.
I’m not excusing the idiocy of the Democrats here, but you can’t both-sides the fundamentals of the culture war — it’s not a symmetrical problem.
I’d just be happy if we could agree on basic facts. I don’t expect everyone to agree on the right way to solve a problem, but it seems increasingly difficult to even come to a common understanding of what’s true and what’s not.
You would think cold hard data would be lead everyone to the same truth of a situation, but the problem is that in reality, data can be tortured to confess to anything. Data is constantly weaponized by everyone to push the narrative they want to believe, whether the data is about guns, violence, education, covid, racism, drugs, etc, data can be tortured to tell nearly any story by people wanting a specific narrative.
How often do people see a graph or something on twitter, and the data seems to go against what they believe, so they examine it and conclude that the graph is misleading and that actually the data says the opposite? Nearly every graph posted on twitter experiences this phenomenon.
But data can't encapsulate values. My friend sent me a chart asking why were pushing vaccines for kids when only .001% of kids were dying from COVID. I looked at the chart and saw that 1000 kids had died from COVID and thought 1000 kids have died from COVID!?! There's no objective way to agree on whether a number is high or low. A lot of values transcend the underlying data, even when "the science is on your side". I can't imagine any data that would change my values around abortion access or gay marriage.
> There's no objective way to agree on whether a number is high or low
But emotional responses to absolute numbers aren't a good mechanism to inform policy making either. That's why absolute numbers are usually normalized to a "per capita" figure. If 1000 kids die in modern India (pop > 1 billion), that is less cause for concern than 1000 kids dying in a rural town in Pennsylvania (pop < 10000). But just looking at the raw number "1000" can't tell you that, you need to give it context. Yeah, 1000 kids died either way, but in the Pennsylvania case something very bad is clearly happening (poisoning, disease, etc), whereas in India a freak one in a million accident could have happened 1000 times.
I don’t think we’re really disagreeing here, I think my point was just that in addition to your point about people misreading data, some people read it correctly and come to different conclusions. Not to mention the issues we have no data on like people believing who believe in vaccine shedding. I think people believe in this stuff precisely because there is no data and you can come to whatever conclusion you want.
The even stranger thing is that I’m not sure we even all agree on what knowledge is. I think some believe more that knowledge is about what you can argue, sort of a rhetorical/debate centered argument vs a scientific observational/data centered argument.
Do you have an example of that? I haven't seen a lot of debate about the data (facts), but usually it's about the information (how it was formed from the data). Of course there are a small group of leaders (and/or crackpots) on either side spreading blatantly false info, but I feel that's rather small and receives outsized coverage.
I think one of the most basic facts that we can't agree on is what constitutes a man or a woman. It's a very simple problem that a 5 year old can point out, yet we somehow lost sight of this very basic fact.
To me this is a category problem, which are very complex. Because man and women are concepts like a chair is a concept. Ask a hundred people to define a chair and you are going to get a hundred different answers.
I suppose that's a perfect example of what I was talking about. The only reason it's controversial is due to the ways we apply them. The man-made contexts can convolute the meaning of man or woman.
For example, are we talking about sex, gender, or something else? In the context of reproduction, sports, or something else?
Most people agree that the various labels exist. It all depends on how we want to define them.
It can get even more complicated because we have this artificial tautology of man or woman, but in fact there are naturally occuring intersex individuals who fall in between and are mostly forced to choose.
So in closing, I feel the facts are not at issue here (xx vs xy vs intersex). It's how we are utilizing them and applying them to our social constructs which do not necessarily follow nature. If we are are talking about gender, then we take it a step farther into artificial labels and buckets built purely on one's preference (no way to factually check claims). The facts of the subject are simple and agreeable, yet the way we apply them make for controversy around our policies.
What if the facts or basic-ness of them are disputed?
You can see this clearly in pro-choice/life debate for example.
One side is saying it is murder and the other side is saying everything from it is not a murder to society doesn’t support the born kids, so this should be allowed.
What ends up happening in that case is that people disagree in defining "What is a human?". That's not about facts, it's about values and conclusions. That becomes uncomfortable very quickly, because we've seen what happens when a society excludes some people from their definition of humanity.
I think there are two intersecting issues. The first is the dwindling of easy resources. The second half of the 20th century was so easy it was wasteful, and we don't want to give that up -- that abundance of resources, readily available and on the cheap.
But the bigger issue right now is the end of the US/NATO empire. It matches with the end of other empires like Rome: the spending, the inflation, the corruption and the splintering/partisanship, where groups hate other groups because they blame them for what's going on. They say, "if it wasn't for this group, or if only they would agree with our side, we'd be fine again," but in the end nothing was going to stop it. What goes up must come down.
>if only they would agree with our side, we'd be fine again
I'd argue a lot of problems today would be solved if people stopped buying into the massive intra-class war propaganda pushed onto the working class and had a little more empathy for one another.
I sort of agree. A lot of the normal people, like neighbors, tend to be more empathetic and are accepting of people who are more or less affluent than themselves. But the normal people aren't the ones that run the country.
The article seems to be blaming the division of society on the Like button. I'm saying it was going to happen with or without that for the reasons I listed.
Yes... the article that this article was responding to is the kind of thing you get when you rule out an analysis of material conditions and focus exclusively on the ideological superstructure.
It is very interesting to see this come up so much here. I, personally, don't feel epistemically equipped to have an opinion on this, but it seems a lot of people do.
My main takeaway from this piece and the fellow comments (but not Haidt's piece, which is just Substack doomerism), is that you could probably roughly approximate salaries based on someone's stance on this, whether they are right or wrong.
So many comments, especially, make this clear, if still under the surface. And that makes sense! If you have a business, a mortgage, or whatever critical long-term investments, you have to be at least somewhat inclined to, 1., think positively about the way things generally work right now, and 2., to feel confident that history is skewing towards progress and good things, however qualified.
This also kind of explains how it seems generational too. Kids and millennials are without a lot of wealth, have little investments, and are most likely just in terminal debt and paying rent month-by-month. There isn't really the sense of a tomorrow for many, much less accumulates ROIs.
I have noticed a pretty strong trend of "falling apart" in specific niche. It seems related to the combination of inflation and people being fed up with low wages. It's hard to get workers for low paying jobs, and the things those places are selling have gotten more expensive.
So we're paying quite a lot more for services and goods, but the quality of those things are declining at the same time. Declining quality both due to the providers buying lower quality supplies and due to the workers willing to take the lousy jobs not giving a shit.
I see it pretty strongly in areas like restaurants and retail.
{I'll be savaged for this comment} but I think that'll be fixed by the free market, if we let it. The trouble is that it doesn't happen instantly; there'll be a lot of reluctance to raise wages, a lot of reluctance to value unpleasant jobs more, it'll take a while for the wage gain/inflation feedback loop to settle down... and in the mean time, there's a lot of suffering.
To make things worse, attempts to shortcut the process, or temporarily alleviate the suffering, can have detrimental unintended consequences.
That sounds like a non-solution. Especially the reference to "the" free market, such a thing does not exist. You can't just take whatever market we have, with all its imperfections and then slap the label "free market" on it, it doesn't work that way.
If something is unfair, you shouldn't call it fair because of ideology.
For example, my primary objection to the idea that we have a free market is that we are mortal and are born with basic needs that must partially be acquired from the last generation. If people need land to live on, and land is owned by old people, then the young must appeal to the old to be allowed to exist on this planet. At that point, any attempt to call the market we have "free" becomes completely absurd because the term "free" now refers to the freedom of letting someone else take your freedom away.
In fact, most "free market" attempts are entirely about sweeping the problem under the rug and pretending it doesn't exist, which only makes it worse due to negligence. Just drop the damn "free", in Germany people just talk about the "market" in general. They just say "market economy". In fact one of the most common sarcastic phrases is "Der Markt regelt das", "the market is going to fix that" when talking about market failures.
In theory I agree that a free(=freedom) market would be good for everyone, but the amount of people that want a free(=freedom) market is incredibly small. Capitalists don't want a free(=freedom) market for example, because that would be the end of capitalism. They want a free(=without cost to capitalists) market, which is inherently against the idea of maximizing freedom and self determination.
Take Say's Law for example. If we postulate that Say's Law is correct and involuntary unemployment is impossible, then for our market to be "free(=freedom)", we should make it impossible to let the economy reach states that make involuntary unemployment possible. That means the ability to indefinitely defer spending shouldn't exist beyond the point that people agree to let someone defer spending. That would immediately break the idea of endless capital accumulation. Capital accumulation would have to stop at some point and that means the end of capitalism.
Who here is ready for the end of capitalism? Does anyone want to live in a market economy that isn't capitalism? Just a regular market? I doubt anyone is.
I think there's a bit of the Copernican fallacy at play here; the assumption that things are getting worse is pretty dramatic but it's not clear that it's supported in any real way.
We point to the riots last summer, and while there are debates about how severe they are, we willfully ignore that there have been riots in the past, even much more pervasive and deadly ones, even with a significantly lower population and population density than we have now.
There's political divisiveness, but students aren't getting shot at Kent State, and the Weather Underground isn't blowing up bombs in Manhattan, and there are no open wars being fought between private armies, militias, and government forces in West Virginia. Maybe once upon a time people were as passionate about George McGovern as people are now about Hillary Clinton, but passions fade and people forget.
There will be implications for the direction of history based on social networks and open information exchange, but likely we won't recognize them until far in the future. I'm sure there were dozens of upstart anti-Catholic movements that preceded Martin Luther and had the advantage of the printing press but fizzled out into nothing are are forgotten to history before the circumstances led to his success, but we can't see the invisible failures, only the visible successes, so we try to take lessons there.
I appreciate the sentiment that 'it's always been like this.'
That said, I am of the view that the mindset of optimizing for efficiency and the tools we've acquired over the last 50-100 years for doing so may, in addition to the benefits, have unintended consequences on a large scale. A couple of examples; in yesterday's discussion of nurses want to leave the profession, it was observed that the buyers of EMRs are optimizing for different things than the nurses that use them, to the detriment of nurses and patients. And, Boeing's products may be less safe now that it is optimized for capital rather than engineering.
To vastly oversimplify, it seems to me that optimizing for efficiency will eventually remove all margin for error, and so errors will be more frequent. The larger the span of influence of the optimization, the more these errors will accumulate in all kinds of places and all kinds of ways. So, my running joke is that the spreadsheet may be the death of Western civilization, and it remains less funny to me as time goes on.
> To vastly oversimplify, it seems to me that optimizing for efficiency will eventually remove all margin for error, and so errors will be more frequent. The larger the span of influence of the optimization, the more these errors will accumulate in all kinds of places and all kinds of ways. So, my running joke is that the spreadsheet may be the death of Western civilization, and it remains less funny to me as time goes on.
That may be a problem that can be addressed though. Neglecting resilience to over-optimize for efficiency seems like it's symptom of stability. People, as a whole, seem to lack the wisdom to not fool themselves that they can ignore long term risks while the short term is good, especially when we're talking about spans greater than generation.
However, a lot of that stability is getting disrupted right now: the pandemic, a big land war in Europe, supply chains are fucked, etc. The war especially has blown up a lot of naive assumptions that had been taken for granted until a couple months ago. I think here's a decent chance that for the next few decades, Western civilization will value resilience far more than it has over the last few.
The printing press story always seems to focus on the Protestant-vs-Catholic conflict, but let's also recall it fostered an explosion of scientific and mathematical knowledge across the continent. For example, the print runs of Isaac Newton's Principia:
I'm not sure if social media has contributed in any similar way to the spread of useful scientific and technical information... there's an argument that it has of course, but this is a very small fraction of the total content. The Internet overall has (long live sci-hub!), however.
I think in this analogy, the Internet is the printing press.
Social media is maybe the gutter press. But note that the gutter press is only possible where enough people are literate, which is definitely a good thing.
> The framing begins with appreciating how closely intertwined the divisive and unifying effects of information technology can be.
The author speaks as if "unifying", as opposed to dividing, is the redemptive quality of information technology. I don't see it as an unmitigated good and, somewhat ironically, the story of the tower of Babel is about how their single-purposedness (?) was the source of the problem altogether. Genesis 11:6: "And the Lord said, "Lo! [they are] one people, and they all have one language, and this is what they have commenced to do. Now, will it not be withheld from them, all that they have planned to do?"
The issue of climate change, among other issues, is being used to promote unity and one world government. But it doesn't follow that this approach is best to climate change or anything else. We need variation in policies and technologies in order to select the best approach (and not get locked in to a sub-optimal approach).
One world government is bad because it will attract evil elements who use it to place all peoples under their control/taxation/exploitation, with no recourse or escape. All in the name of helping people and fighting for <insert your favourite political cause>.
By analogy, it might seem more efficient if families were to live in communal dormitories instead of their separate houses. In reality it would create stultification and at worst mass suffering when individuals took control over all aspects of other families' lives.
Currently, on climate change this variation is some countries doing nothing, others doing worse than nothing (e.g. encouraging mass deforestation, as in Brazil), and some countries doing a little more than nothing, but saying they are doing enough when compared to those who are doing nothing or worse, and that they can't afford to do more because it would put them at a disadvantage to the others. So this is less about "selecting the best approach" and more a race to the bottom of how little one can do while still pretending to care (or alternatively keep denying that the problem even exists and do nothing).
Problem is that, as I said, the architects of globalism are using this issue. They aren't motivated by the climate or any other of several, rotating concerns. They're motivated by a lust for power/wealth/prestige. You can't achieve difficult objectives unless you are really trying--and they aren't!
However you can ruin the efforts of others by demanding that their work serve a primary political agenda.
I find all the comparisons to previous technological changes lacking for one very simple reason. Previous technological changes never had granular data on individuals the way today's technological revolution does.
Since most such pieces are written by journalists, or written by people who think about these things but are also writers, they tend to focus on the idea distribution medium aspect of today's technology. So that would be the internet, or social media platforms, or chat platforms, etc. That's the most easily comparable part to past information technologies such as the printing press.
But the novel danger with what we're facing today is not the fact that everyone is on social media, or that stuff can go viral. Even though these are turbocharged versions of past technologies, they are still versions of past technologies (being turbocharged can still make it meaningfully different, but for now I'll ignore that). The novel danger is personalized data collection. It's the fact that major companies can built extremely accurate and granular profiles of every single person on their platforms.
This is completely unprecedented. Throw in even rudimentary AI, and I can target my message to match every individual's unique psychological profile. This was never possible in the past. The most you could do is target something based on a few broad aspect of someone's personality. Where they lived, what religion they followed, what language they spoke, etc. But there were thousands if not millions of people who filled that mold, and there were vast variations within those people, which still allowed for non conformity.
Today, however, you can target every individual and even the same individual differently depending on whether it's the morning, or evening, or if they are working or relaxing.
It's this that's truly novel and truly dangerous. You don't even need Social media to be involved for this to be a problem. The Chinese government, for example, famously has a highly intrusive citizenry score for its citizens based on a variety of such micro targeted factors. And pretty much every government across the world is also doing the same. Corporations have gone even further because they have all the data.
The tower of Babel is a story of how man tried to create their own salvation through technology and was punished by God. The punishment was the fracturing of language.
The fracturing isn't the subject or metaphor. The metaphor is people attempting to create their own salvation in a very ignorant and shallow way and being punished for it.
I hope I am not being too inflammatory by saying this but it's ... quite amusing how sheltered Americans are in thinking that a little political tension is a danger to their own country.
Bosnia was about to be destroyed and more recently, attempted to be divided by neighbors and they're still fine.
Look at anywhere that's not Americas or Western Europe.
Contrapoint: it is actually good for Americans to worry about whether democracy will be destroyed in their country. Complacency and ignoring issues with "there are other countries that got it worst" may sounds smart or "worldwide-inclusive", but does not help neither Bosnians nor Americans. Possibly the most politically apathetic nation is Russia .. and where it got them. Political apathy is what you get in autocracies and dictatorships - and what simultaneously empowers them.
It is debatable whether Bosnia is fine or will be fine. It is in danger of new rounds of violence. For that matter, even if Ukraine wins, which I hope, it wont be fine. Wars do actually damage places where it all happens and price is paid for many years after.
Well look at Israel, it had so many wars(some it almost lost). I would argue it made it stronger, more cohesive. I hope the same happens to Ukraine, despite the price it is paying.
They have own hard liners with genocidal rhetoric's and pretty violent practice. No, all the threats and violence did not made Israel better. It made them increasingly violent place.
As an American, I tend to think we have a sort of permanent linguistic hyperinflation. Everything here is always bigger, huger. Sometimes it's true and sometimes it's not.
Part of the strength of the nation, however, is that everything is a big deal, all the time. This causes things to (eventually) get dealt with.
In the USA things appear to be big or are getting bigger but really they are not.
Residential structures are made from ever lower quality materials that are thinner than ever and with shorter lifespan (accelerated aging, necessitating sooner replacement).
Foods are being stuffed with ever larger quantities of fillers such as corn, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, and air to make the package look big even though there is nearly nothing nutritious inside.
I have never known anyone who lived in Bosnia in the 1980s, but I can imagine that the arguments over Yugoslavia's makeup might have felt like 'a little political tension' back then.
It's true that the US has a lot going for it. No enemies to its north or south, still the largest economy, high levels of education, etc. At the same time, standards of living have seen a large drop over the last two years. This appears to be intensifying the arguments over social issues, and increasing incitement to violence. What I see when I look at places that are not the Americas or Western Europe is that the peace and wealth people take for granted can be lost so easily.
quite amusing how sheltered Americans are in thinking that a little political tension is a danger to their own country
As an American, allow me to be even more inflammatory. Americans think that everything is falling apart because we've collectively never had a real problem in our life.
The amazing thing is as an American, I can ignore TV, all sources of news, fights on Facebook, etc. I've done it for years. Nothing bad happens. In fact the only effect is that I am blissfully unaware of all the minutia that are leading people to believe everything is falling apart.
America has a history of political tensions posing a danger to it. For a few years it maybe wasn't one country and quite a significant percentage of the population died sorting that out.
Americans seem to think that we're the only ones who ever had a Civil War and that it is a Really Big Deal, ignoring that there are civil conflicts occurring right now, and with higher body counts, too.
I get your point, but a lot of Bosnians died in that conflict. I have travelled there, and have talked with a lot of Bosnians. A lot of them are still pretty shook about the past. A lady I talked to had a sniper shoot each stair below her as she walked up a flight of stairs to mess with her. Stuff like that sticks with you.
Most people are still alive and life goes on but it is not a road you want to go down if you can avoid it.
With 500+ comments I doubt anyone will read this - and please don't - but "it happened before and we survived, so it's going to be okay" doesn't really resonate with me. We survived perhaps the bloodiest period of European history, where people set about to exterminate each other based on religion. Catholics in England weren't really given their full rights back until after the 1920s. And the schism in Christianity was like the Tower of Babel. So I'm not any more sanguine about the future after a the author brings up what became about 300 to 400 years of very bloody and repressive sectarian violence as a ... as a way to say it's going to be okay? Holy shit! If it's anything like the protestant-catholic sectarian fighting in Europe, it's going to be hell.
Well... dead planets (that harbor no life) are lower entropy than living planets as their surfaces change much less over time. Fewer possible microstates = low entropy.
Hence, if you take a complex biochemical system and reduce it to <100 piles of atoms of specific elements, this is a lower entropy state. Mass extinctions, collapse of civilizations, that does lead to a 'more stable and ordered' state.
How devoid of intelligence it is to consider this manufactured divide as the reason things may fall apart. The group of mass media big-shots is extremely cohesive, as per this author's own perception of integration. Yet they fuel both sides without a single care about whether this may cause things to fall apart, and they're not wrong, which becomes clear if you actually look at the world and try to understand it instead of just absorbing mass media without practicing intellectual self-defense.
Our eyes are being averted from the actual problem, because it's believed that the more we look at it, the worse it becomes. I reject this anti-intellectualism, therefore present you why everything is actually falling apart.
The more humanity advances, the more we lack eros (loosely love for things we do not have) and the eros we have becomes weirder or outright bizarre. As this happens, we lose hope, that's the fatal hit. For example, access to porn has demonstrably been extremely detrimental to sex. For every passion we lose, we lose hope or replace it with a fetish. When we lose a healthy passion for clothes, we stop caring about what we wear or (more common in the west) become fetishized with bizarrely priced brands. When we lose passion for work, we stop caring about the future entirely (common in the third world) or become parasitical bureaucrats. It all adds up and often materializes into drug abuse. For an extreme example, look up the catalytic converter gangs in Kinshasa [0]. This loss of hope is monotonically increasing globally, and the manufactured divide has nothing to do with it. In fact our elites believe a little infighting and polarization may be good, as extremists are generally hopeful when they see things going their way, and more traditional solutions like education don't seem to be working these days. I don't think this theory has a name yet.
He speaks of "the magnitude of the attendant change in social structure: a movement from national toward international social organization."
This can't work because it is not associated with growing prosperity in developed world but rampant inequality, the decline of good jobs for the non college educated, and growing resentment about this. Particularly in America, labor has been crushed.
The substitution of "international" for "national" elites has worsened the problem and made the resentment worse not better. Because there is a material basis for the discontent it is indeed likely that we will fall apart.
Well if Malthusian scientists are to be believed then we only really have another couple of decades at best before the global population level causes society to collapse. So you could interpret recent events to be the first warning signs of that.
Personally I remain unconvinced of that, though. Or at least, it seems to me that humans have the unique benefit of being able to problem solve their way out of the issues related to population growth, at least for a while. We don't have to be gazelles grazing themselves to death or to act merely on selfish instinct.
I think that's actually less contradictory than it sounds. In one case you're doomed in the way where too big a population uses too many resources leading to a crash. In the other case what you're actually doomed by is a historical population boom that requires a large younger population under it to sustain it, and in the absence of new young people, maybe that older generation cannot be sustained, potentially leading to catastrophe.
In fact I'm pretty sure there's a potential middle ground with large enough historical population boom where both of these issues could hypothetically be realised simultaneously...
But, you know I think we should really focus on just making agriculture and energy production more efficient/cleaner, reducing waste and making care work a decent living or something.
I think this kind of framing of the question is very close to being a sly form of gaslighting.
What people want to know is not whether the current state of things is "normal". After all, death, sickness, war, hunger, disease and crime are all perfectly normal. Everyone gets that at some level. What most people want to know is what the fuck happened with the metanarrative that we were fed for the last several decades. Is it defunct and debunked? If it is, that has obvious implications in terms of who we should trust and who we should empower.
> "... We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.”
Since when did we ever "speak the same language or recognize the same truth". We've always been cut off from one another. Racially, regionally, econonically, etc. The civil war being the obvious one. America is a country of many nations. America, the empire, is an empire of many countries.
> It’s a metaphor for what is happening not only between red and blue, but within the left and within the right, as well as within universities, companies, professional associations, museums, and even families…
This is just silliness from the media. This snapshot that the media portrays doesn't really exist in the real world. People just live their lives. Go outside and see for yourself. And even if it did, it doesn't matter. The red/blue, left/right, etc doesn't matter.
Things fall apart when the elites are divided. And the two dominant forces in american life (political, media, economic, cultural, geopolitical, etc ) are imperialism and zionism. I don't see any division amongst the elites on that. Left/right, red/blue, up/down, flat earther/round earther, etc. So I don't think anything is falling apart as there are no signs of fracture.
My impression is that optimism peaked in the '50s -- some time before I was alive -- and has been in decline ever since. That's not to say that there haven't been major achievements since then -- I wouldn't have a career without them -- but increasingly, we have seen experts throwing up their hands and saying "I don't know how this will ever be solved". The most optimism right now comes from people who think major societal problems will be solved by machines that can solve more problems than people. That of course does not contradict the idea that humans are having more and more trouble solving our problems, even as we continue to move forward in the near term.
We have never had a unified cultural perspective on this phenomenon -- it is either an artifact of regressive politics, a warning sign of the limits to growth, a reflection of deep failings in the basic structure of society, a punishment from Heaven for our disregard for tradition, or [choose as many as you like]. But as it continues to become more visible, the possible conclusions clash more and more. So while social media appears to create divisions in society, I don't think it's the only cause, and I don't think the only causes are things for which we can so easily allocate blame.
The argument that things will work out in the end is not particularly reassuring when it still rests on the idea that I will have to spend most of my adult life in turbulent times.
Just as I wouldn't have liked to live through the Protestant Reformation and the wars of religion, I'd much rather have spent my adult life in the peace and prosperity of the late 1900s than on the trajectory people agree the world is headed for now.
"The story of Babel,” Haidt writes, “is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.".. it could be Germany from 2015 and beyond..
> By that I don’t just mean that I see social media, and the internet broadly, sustaining a trend we’ve seen at earlier technological thresholds, such as the print revolution—a trend toward more tribes, often narrower tribes, and sometimes more intensely combative tribes.
Instead, bad people weaponized k-means clustering to lock-in us-vs-them.
> The inexorable march of information technology, combined with the psychology of tribalism, has heightened turbulence, loathing, and delusion before, and it’s doing that now.
Yes and: Decreasing costs seems to accelerate winner-takes-all outcomes.
We technoptimists thought that improved production, distribution, discovery, and consumption would lead to a better signal-to-noise. We were wrong. Sure, we got a lot more content. But now anti-information dominates.
Why? Some scattered notions:
I guess we didn't anticipate the attention economy, how an over abundance in content (opinions) would create a scarcity of attention (deliberation).
I definitely didn not anticipate automating the hate machine with recommenders. (Parisi's filter bubble thesis was a near miss.)
And I was totally ignorant about rent seeking, financialization, and usury. How our economy's transition from manufacturing to services would accelerate inequity. The resulting anxiety is a huge part of our current hysteria.
h/t Clay Shirky's obervation about power laws, Chomsky's theory of the 5 filters, Brandolini's law, Marshal McLuhan's Understanding Media.
America is having a Pluto return. Traditionally this is a period of time when nations are dissolved or at minimum completely transformed in their nature.
It's currently turning retrograde and will scrape back across the US natal Pluto on July 12th, and will be conjunct again December 28th for the beginning of its next 246 year cycle. If it matters by that point.
The elephant in the room is that the Industrial world wanted alot of people, and the post Industrial world does not. Not only in terms of production, but in terms of having a livable environment for everyone.
So what happens to what are now "excess" people? The answer to that question is gonna define pretty much everything.
This is dangerous bs. Easy to swallow for the uneducated masses.
Putting all moral consideration aside, imagine you could totally depopulate two continents of your choosing. Why should any problem of modern economics be solved by that?
The concept of depopulation is simple enough to fit in a single sentence, it leaves out the real problem and its vast complexity (our linear economies and lifestyles attached to it), conveniently some one else is to blame and with all that, it is compatible to xenophobia. It ticks all boxes.
Of course, no problem would be fixed, the only thing you would buy with depopulation is time. The real problem is our unsustainable system, which is independent from any population count.
>We are too many people for what?
Is the question you fail to ask and answer. And going further this path of stupidly easy enemy stereotypes leads to all the societal atrocities you may have heard of.
> The real problem is our unsustainable system, which is independent from any population count
I mean it's just science that the planet can only sustain X people at Y life style (you can swap out "life style" for "level of consumption"). Like there is hard rules of physics about quantity of water, minerals, et cetra. So you can either lower X, lower Y, or try to side step the problem entirely by going to other planets/mine asteroids/magic to increase the resource pool.
A glass can hold X amount of water. You add X plus 1 and water spills out. "Guess the glass couldn't sustain X water!" is what you are claiming?
Systems can only be sustained within certain parameters. There is no magical system that is always sustainable regardless of parameters. But it sounds like we are saying basically the same thing in any case.
Consumption can go down and more population can be supported. Or consumption can continue at current levels but population will have to go down. (and that level it would have to go down might be truly horrific)
We can’t sustain our current levels of spending without a growing population. The lions share of American spending goes to social services: social security, Medicare, Medicaid.
If you’re referencing to automation taking over…I fully agree with your point. It seems like half the people around me have made up jobs.
The elites that control everything dont really care about social security, medicare, medicaid.
Automation can make all the things they would want. Why do they need you around again? Especially when having you around creates pollution that makes things worse for them....
Whats scary to me is that before the elites needed other non elites to be bodyguards/administrators/army/muscle for them to help avoid that, and they at least had to trickle down to their henchmen to keep in power. What happens when they have automation for that?
If you only look at your lifetime things might not look great at this exact moment. But this too shall pass.
Expand your lense to include a few hundred or thousand years and you'll realize we're doing fine. Things have never been better. However the perception of what could be has shifted because memory is short.
During the course of history every period post pandemic has brought drastic change, what makes this one so different[1]? Institutions that have not fared well are the media, colleges(dropping attendance due to high paying jobs everywhere). Urban cities have also seen record numbers of residents leaving, SF lost 6.7% of its population in a year and a half. For some that are connected to those places/institutions things are really falling apart. For everyone else things are slowly getting back to normal.
Humans just tends to repeat themselves every 50 to 100 years. But the good thing is - with each iteration we are learning. It's just a bit but maybe in a thousand years we will come out of our puberty.
And no - the world won't go down due to climate change. It won't go down because of some silly war either. It's not a simple graph showing where we are heading to. Especially not an exponential graph.
And we are still repeating history because we haven't learned the simple lesson which Leo Tolstoi already knew: Everybody wants to change the world but nobody themselves.
But this is where the real change starts. And do not believe all those angst people out there.
Life is way too complex and beautiful that we will ever understand it's secrets and twists it's capable of.
> the world won't go down due to climate change. It won't go down because of some silly war either.
When most collapse-aware persons write about "the end of the world" they mean "the end of complex human civilization", not the total destruction of the planet or even the end of humanity.
> It's just a bit but maybe in a thousand years we will come out of our puberty.
You're asserting that we'll solve the phosphorus problem (among others) in the next 50-100 years, then?
If you look back 150 years or so the "complex human civilization" which existed back then don't exist anymore. Maybe only in a museum or some buildings here or there.
We can now label that replacement by being "evolved" or "transformed" - but the way people thought back then, were dressed, behaved in a social environment, worked or lived is now totally different.
Some of those aspects are better now, some aspects got worse.
What I want to say is that we can already say good bye to the current way of life because it won't exist in 150 years anymore. Maybe we have found a way that people are not triggered anymore by advertisement to consume things because they are bored with their life.
And yes - a lot of things will hit us hard. Maybe we are going to solve it, maybe we will being forced to adapt. A lot of people will die, a lot of people will be born. If we can reach space, then the possibility of 10+ billion people is rather good. But even if we shrink to 500 million it won't be the end of complex human civilization.
And to be honest - are you proud of the current form of "complex human civilization" and would it be such a bad thing if it would being replace with something else?
Well, the view that history may be in fact (perhaps not objectively, but to any observer cultured enough to entertain himself with observing it) not a time line into the future but cyclical, with civilizations rising and falling, is not new [1].
Perhaps this time what's different is that due to our information age and accelerated rates of change, cultural history's process of change has been pushed from being viewed closer to evolution (the next step of the change being defined by "environment and chance", that is, stretched out over long periods of time and caused by factors not directly being under human influence) to being much closer to immediate, accountable, man-made history (the next step of the change being defined by "environment and choice", that is, actors making active choices causing outcomes) [2]. And so, because most humans, even humans of influence making the choices altering the life outcomes of populuations not over generations but even within single, half or quarter lifetimes, are terribly selfish and stupid and unwise, the outcomes of bad choices just never seem to stop coming.
I'm no expert, but topics like shifting balances between global powers which are interested in different kinds of change (from hegemonic US in a post-WWII word to a very multi-polar world order to xyz) causing metrics like HDI to even out between global population groups have been "hot" since when? the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s? So sure, things might keep falling apart for one population group but still improving for the other group(s).
Another interesting take on "falling apart narrative" interpretations of current history might be a take on how looming juggernauts like climate change, migration waves and so on play into it. This kind of change may be good for something, but surely not perceived stability in the factors that make up human societies.
I think if the debate is "everything is pretty bad" vs "everything is kinda bad, but..." then it's not going to go anywhere.
I wish that Wright had focused more on Haidt's concrete suggestions in his article. For example, towards the end of his article, Haidt writes,
"Reforms should reduce the outsize influence of angry extremists and make legislators more responsive to the average voter in their district. One example of such a reform is to end closed party primaries, replacing them with a single, nonpartisan, open primary from which the top several candidates advance to a general election that also uses ranked-choice voting. A version of this voting system has already been implemented in Alaska, and it seems to have given Senator Lisa Murkowski more latitude to oppose former President Trump, whose favored candidate would be a threat to Murkowski in a closed Republican primary but is not in an open one."
And that's an idea that may have pros and cons! But it focuses the debate on specific proposals to improve the situation, rather than just a general referendum on "How Bad Are Things?"
Doesn’t this get brought up every few years and the answer is neither yes or no but instead everything is changing. When companies disrupt others they put them out of business but it doesn’t mean they do a complete replacement . When Google and Facebook disrupted text advertisement local reporting disappeared. The Internet made companies that can have services anywhere but the people who make them work moved to the coastal cities which unemployed many people. Just in time manufacturing shifted it to other places and the rise of computers made manufacturing in the US much less than it was before.
There is a specific danger that will form the context for evaluating the destructive power of social media: The invasion of Ukraine will have costs. Innocent people will die. Obviously in Ukraine, but people who ate the grain produced in Ukraine and Russia may die of starvation because Ukraine's ability to plant an harvest large areas has been destroyed. Prices for the available grain in the world will go up.
Starvation and price rises will provide new opportunities to fearmonger and divide. Social media is ill equipped to stop Russia and others from using it to manipulate fearful people.
It seems a little odd to try and reassure me that everything isn't falling apart by referencing the Protestant Reformation as the "we've been through this before and come out of it" example.
The Protestant Reformation was something of a disaster. Everything DID fall apart. It got rebuilt again into something better but the transition period was an era of war and strife and bloodshed. It is not at all reassuring to lean on that as the example. (Ditto broadcast media (radio, TV, film) and its associations with the rise of fascism and bolshevism in the early 20th century.)
I think this is a great article, which doesn't say "everything is fine" but analyzes underlying root cause, and that the problems are older than we think. But also, wars have been fought due to the kinds of changes we are experiencing. I am truly concerned for the fate of Democracy in America.
This has a similar to e to Jon Meacham's "The Soul of America" which looks back through times of great division and bitterness brought about by rapid societal changes. It is well worth a read if you like US history and think this was a good article.
We are seeing the slow collapse of the globalized economy and it will be painful and last for a couple of years as things relocalize. The constant chasing after larger margins lead to centralization of key industries in a few countries. We are starting to see that unwinding as some of those countries can no longer be trusted to be partners.
Not sure what it means long term politically but it’s easy to imagine big block politics rearing it’s head again. I am however unsure if the west had the will to stand on principles anymore.
"Everything is falling apart" if you are someone who contributes information to the public sector in the form of analysis, scientific studies, news reporting, etc and your audience was built solely on your credentials, or the organization you belong to being respected. Those credentials and institutions are collapsing and they need to rebuild public trust by providing legitimate value instead of spending the next 10 years whining about how the commoners just don't get how valuable they are.
The answer to a headline is usually “No”. Some things are falling apart, as always, but civilization marches ahead exponentially through war and famine and plague, again as always
Who cares what people feel like is happening? Just look at the data you care about.
For example, I think it’s interesting that many major cultures are dying because they have below replacement rate demographics.
The trend looks like a slow-moving Black Plague, except at the end of the rollercoaster you are left with old people instead of a bunch of young people (that survived the sickness).
This is certainly a new experiment by humanity that hasn’t happened before quite like this, so we are in for interesting times :)
It’s becoming increasingly inconvenient for the minority to control the majority in this country. This shift has been discussed for decades. I would expect more “dumb” to come.
Immigrants bring Covid so we need to control the border, but Covid is a conspiracy. My candidates won on a ballot where my candidate that lost on the same ballot was cheated. The democratic presidents showed weakness to Putin, but somehow the insurrection does not.
Most Americans are unprepared to compete against others who view life objectively and earned advanced degrees and practice introspection. The math books are threatening. Teachers shouldn’t teach grade schoolers subjects taken from graduate courses (CRT). There is no way this doesn’t backfire. Too many contradictions to enumerate.
The media want you to show that the world is falling apart for all kind of reasons. The social media shows you posts about the world falling apart for same kind of reasons - it generate views and sells ads.
The world hasn't been falling apart for the last decade as far as I can tell. Not in the US and not in many other parts of the world.
Those of us who have been around for awhile haven't respected the Presidency for far longer than Obama, nor trusted the institutions of government to work on behalf of the American citizen. Further, what is now called the "deep state" has been an issue for many decades, previously referred to as the administrative state. I worked for a company shortly before I retired that employed full time lobbyists. They would arrange meetings with various members of Congress to discuss pending legislation. Not once, in ten years, did the actual member of Congress attend the teleconference, always staff and agency personnel. Big Tech has become a tool for elitists to control the narrative. It's not necessarily a conspiracy. It's an artifact of a laughable public education system and political malice. One need only look at the hyperbolic reaction of liberals to Elon Musk buying Twitter and promising to allow "free speech", something Twitter certainly doesn't allow today. Or the "ministry of truth" established by Mayorkas. Or more broadly, the so-called "social credit" systems. The United States has been moving in a fascist direction for decades, interrupted only briefly by outsiders such as Trump. Many of the positions of today's Republican Party more closely resemble the Democrats of the 60s when I was growing up. The views of today's "progressive" Democrat Party more closely align with Marx and other communists. It's been trending for decades and I see little reason for optimism.
“ As I emphasized in Nonzero, the digital revolution—even before the internet age dawned, and certainly after that—did what the printing press did: It made promulgating information cheaper and easier.”
The author clearly underestimates how many orders of magnitude greater the Internet’s impact is over printed words.
“When eras are on the decline, all tendencies are subjective; but, on the other hand, when matters are ripening for a new epoch, all tendencies are objective.”
Like an entropic principle of social information exchange, with the potential for reorganization under a new paradigm.
It's not falling apart if you make a good income, but I would say it's getting harder and harder to get by as a middle/working class person in America. It's become much more of winner take all economy and I think that's destructive to a society in the long term.
Nothing lasts forever, and we have been on the downturn of the civilization for the last hundred years or so. This is merely the time when we started running out of the reserves that our ancestors had secured us, and thus problems started becoming apparent.
I think we're at a transition point. People talk about our entering a post-scarcity economy but what you don't hear so much about is exactly how would that happen? Human nature being what it is those at the top who are accustomed to consuming the most civilization has to offer are still playing by that same old playbook - but in a post-scarcity economy that consumption is obscene and it's becoming clearer to more and more people that the old playbook needs to be thrown out. But that "old playbook" has been around for 6,000 years (actually more)!
I remember the old Police song having the line "there is no political solution for our troubled evolution." They say we live in the Anthropocene epoch, an epoch dominated by man. The problem is that's not the world we evolved in and for humans evolution isn't just a matter of physical adaptation but social adaptation as well. Our social structures we've built over the millennia no longer work the same in this new world we've built. We have to evolve, but social evolution typically involves violence and upheaval and would appear that everything is falling apart.
Nothing lasts forever, but some things last a really long time. Like life on this planet (several billion years). Or possibly advanced alien civilizations out there. Question would be why can't humans find a way to last a really long time?
The last hundred years? So electrifying rural areas, civil rights, vaccines, space exploration, Medicare (US), public medicine (first world countries), and more are all the downturn?
If the democracy is actually working and elections not fortified, why do so many US politicians predate the collapse of the Soviet Union. Things seem like they are falling apart because these people have been holding on to power for generations.
It's not that things are falling apart, it's that things are not being put back together. Complex societies have systems and mechanisms in them that require people to do a.) do their job and b.) hold others accountable. We're a uniquely distracted and lethargic generation obsessed with titillation, fantasy, and procrastination. Yet a lot of things require sober, deliberate work, and enforcing the rules. With the level of corruption in the US government--the level of open shirking of duties and outright lies, coupled with the seeming inability of elected officials to accomplish overwhelmingly popular policy changes, coupled with prolonged strategic malinvestment and a obvious debt bubble, we're in some serious hot water.
"coupled with the seeming inability of elected officials to accomplish overwhelmingly popular policy changes,"
I feel like this is always a hot button. What are the overwhelming popular policy changes, and just how popular are they? I'm wondering if there's a list somewhere that will show the top ones with the percent of support.
There are tons of them, so long as you poll for them carefully such that each person surveyed can imagine that it's the version of the proposal that they support.
Nimrod built the Tower of Babel to challenge God. It was hubris. It sounds like we have many Nimrod's running around lately (Bezos, Musk, Buffet).
Where do you get your happiness? Amazon or your tribe? You know that this partisanship we are experiences, sounds like people are talking another language sometimes, yes?
For completeness:
---
Now it was Nimrod who excited them to such an affront and contempt of God. He was the grandson of Ham, the son of Noah, a bold man, and of great strength of hand. He persuaded them not to ascribe it to God, as if it were through his means they were happy, but to believe that it was their own courage which procured that happiness. He also gradually changed the government into tyranny, seeing no other way of turning men from the fear of God, but to bring them into a constant dependence on his power. He also said he would be revenged on God, if he should have a mind to drown the world again; for that he would build a tower too high for the waters to reach. And that he would avenge himself on God for destroying their forefathers. Now the multitude were very ready to follow the determination of Nimrod, and to esteem it a piece of cowardice to submit to God; and they built a tower, neither sparing any pains, nor being in any degree negligent about the work: and, by reason of the multitude of hands employed in it, it grew very high, sooner than any one could expect; but the thickness of it was so great, and it was so strongly built, that thereby its great height seemed, upon the view, to be less than it really was. It was built of burnt brick, cemented together with mortar, made of bitumen, that it might not be liable to admit water. When God saw that they acted so madly, he did not resolve to destroy them utterly, since they were not grown wiser by the destruction of the former sinners; but he caused a tumult among them, by producing in them diverse languages, and causing that, through the multitude of those languages, they should not be able to understand one another. The place wherein they built the tower is now called Babylon, because of the confusion of that language which they readily understood before; for the Hebrews mean by the word Babel, confusion ...
Thank you, out of all of the comments, I think yours is the best model for what is happening. The anti-woke sentiment coming from the rich is about keeping the members of the working class from discovering their own divinity. Specifically, that the miracle of creation and their own consciousness dwarfs any material value.
That misalignment in perception is what lets people be ok with profiting from another's labor, or hurting people for material gain, or having more wealth than a thousand/million/billion people. Pure free will, intelligence without wisdom or empathy for oneself on another timeline, is the stuff of nightmares.
The relevance of this is that we're doomed to keep reliving these timelines over and over, stuff like JKF's assassination, 9/11, pandemic, etc, until we wake up and realize that feeding our ego feeds these systems of control. Which separate us further from the divinity of the universe/creation/aliens/god or whatever name we want to assign to the source of meaning (love).
America is at the end of the neoliberal political/economic cycle, so (somewhat obviously) neoliberal institutions are failing and being reformed by groups with power who want their preferred system to prevail for the next 40-50 years. Radicals want socialism, reactionaries want fascism, and the wealthy on both sides want to consolidate their oligarchy, Its less “falling apart” and more that those interested parties are all happy to pick away at the carcass of the current system in the meantime.
I concur with everything the author says here. If you want to visualize this for yourself, just take yourself back to the whole science/anti-vaxx debate we've had the past 2 years. That was a pretty accurate picture of the biblical tower of babel. Social media as a tool keeps sowing more division than ever because that's the growth incentive and we are too afraid to kill the golden goose. Once the metaverse becomes a thing, we will have better bricks to build the tower even higher.
China is soon going to overtake the US as the world hegemony. This disruption will have devastating effects. The accelerated move to the 4th Industrial Revolution will be even more disruptive, unlike anything we as humans have ever known. We keep on ignoring the global warming threat because we think our survival will be under threat if we go cold turkey on fossil energy and the creature comforts necessary to forestall the climate disaster. The covid pandemic gave us all a unique opportunity to recalibrate our collective lives. Today, we go about our daily lives as if the past 3 years was just a bad dream. I very much doubt we can make it through another global pandemic on a scale as or bigger than covid was in the near future.
>China is soon going to overtake the US as the world hegemony.
I don't think this is guaranteed. I think the world should be prepared for it, be resilient against it, and (ideally) undermine it if possible.
Six months ago, I don't think many would have guessed that all of Europe, including Germany, would unite in ending their relationship with Russian fuel. Perhaps at some point, the free world will unite in diversifying or ending their relationship with Chinese manufacturing.
The rest of your analysis I agree with - the automation/"AI" process marches on. Ownership of production and capital continues to concentrate, and population grows while employment needs will shrink for non- and semi-skilled workers. Oh, and climate.
> >China is soon going to overtake the US as the world hegemony.
>I don't think this is guaranteed
This is very much assured. Only a matter of when. It may take 2-3 decades to realize but it's gonna happen if China's growth rate [0] continues as US GDP [1] steadily declines. Though with the current geopolitics around the Russia/Ukraine war, maybe China may threaten to invade Taiwan and speed up this process of dethroning US as the top super power.
Our society is in a big change phase so anything need to fall apart while the new emerge. So far we see the decline, still too early to see the new.
Beware a thing: while things changes, an old model disappear a new one is gestating human needs do not change that much in fundamental terms. Our eating, sleeping and sexual needs are still the same. So not "all" fall apart but something at a time, something will remain, something grow, something change, something disappear etc.
We have electrical lights since "much" time, but we still have stearic candles on sale. In the past they was a big industry, now is marginal, but it's still there. Civil construction techniques have changed much, but we still have the concept of construction companies. Dress have changed much, but not that much. We still have pants, skirts, jackets, hats in new shapes, different tissues but essentially the same since hundreds of years.
What's really falling apart is the present paradigm, the economy-centric society of neoliberal capitalism that it's about to overthought itself to remain in power.
Something unique has happened and I don't think anyone sees it for what it is. A new type of agent has taken control of human behavior--or at least has taken a major stake in influencing human thought. Call it the algorithm, call it AI, call it a simple recommender. It doesn't have morals, doesn't want to benefit we biological beings. It is mindless except in a very narrow sense. The greatest of idiot-savants. It doesn't care about human values in any way as it has shown over and over. It doesn't even come with common sense. Beware its influence.
But it does generate money and so it is given free reign to bait us into psychopathic behavior if needs be. It is encouraged to inject whatever it needs to into our communications in order to keep generating wealth without any recognizable constraint.
I hope a counter or limiting factor evolves before we start killing each other as its thralls.
This is an interesting response to the original article. My TL;DR for this is something like 'Yes, information tech has always resulted in social upheaval, so notwithstanding the scale and speed of the current iteration, this isn't new. Also, it can result in international social cohesion (aka Nazis of the world unite). The thing is, it feels like the author is telling us not to worry because all of this has happened before (with horrific consequences to those caught in the churn, to borrow my favorite phrase from The Expanse). That is a weak rationalization at best - 'same shit, different day, (albeit global scale, speed of light) so don't worry' isn't as reassuring as it should sound
I think it's worth considering the scale of change is different as well. Things like the printing press and the translation of the bible into English definitely did result in upheaval and information being more widely available, the scale is our new information systems is much larger, so the potential stress on people and systems likely will be as well.
I think practically the best strategy is to reduce your exposure to the churn as much as reasonably possible if it's something you're worried about.
Those aren't the big problems. These are the big problems the US faces:
* Putin wants to conquer Eastern Europe. It's been over 75 years since a major nation in Europe had comparable territorial ambitions, and that didn't end well. Nuclear war at some scale is a very real possibility, especially if Russia starts losing in a big way.
* Coronavirus. It's not over. 988,690 US deaths to date. Case rates are headed up again.
* Global warming. It's just getting started.
* Supply insecurity. Between troubles with Russia and China, and coronavirus, there are far more shortages.
America hasn't always been the 1950s. We'll survive a bit longer. There is polarization but it's not as much as the far left and far right would like you to think (that basically the world is burning down). Although Putin may burn it all down for us if he has a terminal illness like some people are proposing. That's the only significant threat I see to American and civilization itself. I mean it's a strange game. We can't cave to him but if we don't he may be the suicidal dictator with nukes that we were always worried about.
what is collapsing is the planetary ecosystem, thanks to industrial practice. Especially in North America suburban sprawl and industrial agriculture and waste have eaten into and degraded what was very recent a deep well of ecological wealth. I would call this a major impact on the American culture which built it's identity around that seemingly boundless wilderness, and as well our basic human psyche and culture for which (many argue) proximity to deep ecological process is a fundamental need.
The consumer culture and consequent wealth of things, especially images and meditated simulcra, really only echo the naive American soul in a wasteland of it's own making. All cultural realities are fundamentally ecological. We fill our lives with artificial realities so liberally because we are born into a culture that took massive wealth of natural resources and the experiences they provide for granted. As they vanish, we fill the gap with artificial things and experiences.
It's a dangerous game with potentially grave and unexpected consequences, and we have played it before many times on a much smaller scale: hunting food sources to extinction, turning rich farmland into desert, etc.
It seems that the collective human psyche it's unable to reflect accurately on the consequences of it's own actions with respect to our fundamental biogenic foundation.
Take for example the flooding of our nights with artificial blue spectrum light pollution. In evolutionary terms, this is a new event. For billions of years nights have been uniformly mostly dark with a regularly variating moon glow. Suddenly we change all that and dark nights are a thing of the past. Nevermind the massive affect on a whole ecosystems, nevermind studies that show a severe affect on the human psychological health, status quo says lighting up the night is normal, good, and safe.
And there are shootings at schools and terrible crime and massive loss of insect life and songbirds dying off and these quite extraordinary changes to the continuity of our bio systems and our lifestyles, and yet we don't see the connection. We blame the media or Donald Trump or the 1%. We don't see the problem as something we have direct control over. We blame our institutions or leaders or gods or what have you, anything but ourselves, and anything to avoid changing our lifestyles and behaviors.
So imo things really are falling apart, just not the things we think.
Modern America is thoroughly a product of capitalism -- the belief that economic growth is a) the solution to all problems and b) easy to achieve (just deregulate and let the market figure things out!)
Neither of those are true anymore. So yeah, things are falling apart because their foundation is rotten.
The disconnect is so large. What the author calls mere tribalism is freighted and begs the question in regard to his example of US coastal and european elites having more in common with each other than their fellow "working stiff" citizens. What I think he misses is that these elites aren't elite, and the popular/ist reaction to them is to being made subjects of technocrats who always seem to be working for the good of someone else far away but mostly self-dealing to their own benefit.
The reason these elites are not in fact elite is their (our?) advantage is mediated by technology, and so it doesn't matter whether it's social media or muskets, without legitimacy, there is no elite, just a crumbling power vaccum sustained by the control of tech. The hatred we expereince is from the impostor syndrome that comes from the precariousness of this percieved elite status.
People who percieve themselves as having been elevated from ignorance and poverty have unlimited cruelty for others who "held them back," and who they "left behind," and I would argue that's the crux, as there's almost no way to convince them they have been seduced and decieved as a means to unleash and harness that very cruelty for political ends. If you feel justified in being cruel to the ignorant and that they are deserving of humiliation, I am sorry to have to be the one to say, you are the mark.
The author chalks up the social tension Haidt identifies as the effect of neutral and inevitable change, but to me that belief is a kind of affectation. The attitude of, "this is change, learn to cope or be left behind," is the newly bourgois version of "let them eat cake," and Haidt I think identifies that the consequences are looking similar.
In general we can bet that all people will align to whatever they percieve to be power. The notion of change is presented as inevitable, and so aligning to it seems like aligning to the power of the universe and the prevailing forces of history. The notion of history as progress iterates the logic of that idea. But what undermines the legitimacy of the people who percieve each other as an elite, installed and annointed by the inevitable forces of historical progress, is that they exist over a substrate of stability, built for them, and provided to them by people who have invested themselves and their identities in it.
There is an appealing argument to be made that the working stiffs whose parents invested lives to build homes, communities, and institutions so that their children could thrive, have a more persuasively legitimate claim to the fruits of that culture and society than those who identify as a new elite and use tech to deconstruct and redistribute them to the arbitrary and placeless coalitions they assemble to support themselves. The counter to this is that there is only one humanity, which even seems compassionate, until it clicks that a single humanity and shared interdependent planet reduces to a zero-sum power struggle to prevail in the flow of progressive history, with no truth or rules, and in whose pursuit all things are justified.
The explanation for why things are so irreconcilable is not that one side is basically stupid, but this author seems to have fallen for that.
In my experience the young tend to exaggerate highs and lows because they tend to have lived through one and not the other. This is particularly true because many people today have no memory of actual recession. Far fewer have any memory of war (in the West in general and the US in particular).
The last few years have really exposed just how profoundly irrational and profoundly selfish a significant percentage of the population is.
So take climate change. Yes, it's a big issue but my view is now fatalistic. Humanity won't even minorly inconvenience itself to do anything about it. So we'd better hope there is an economic solution, specifically an eenrgy source without greenhouse gas emissions that's cheaper, because nothing else will change behaviour. And I actually expect that will happen. Many people will be displaced and die in the meantime, which is obviously awful, but people collectively are completely fun with letting other people die and that's just the truth.
So for many things I just don't think it's as dire as many think.
But one area where I think we're in real trouble is the the resurgence of literal Nazism. This isn't a perjorative. We've come so far that the former Prime Minister of israel engages in Holocaust revisionism to blame it on Palestinians [1]:
> Mr. Netanyahu said in a speech to the Zionist Congress on Tuesday night that “Hitler didn’t want to exterminate the Jews at the time, he wanted to expel the Jews.” The prime minister said that the mufti, Haj Amin al-Husseini, had protested to Hitler that “they’ll all come here,” referring to Palestine.
> “ ‘So what should I do with them?’ ” Mr. Netanyahu quoted Hitler as asking Mr. Husseini. “He said, ‘Burn them.’ ”
We have the highest-ratest host on the #1 cable "news" network openly pushing Nazi propaganda [2]. Republicans are in love with autocrats and the examples are legion (eg Trump's praise of Jinping, Kim John-Un and Putin, GOP praise of Victor Orbon of Hungary).
As much as age has given me perspective to realize most alarm is overstated, I can't help but think this is going to end very, very badly.
What we are experiencing is acceleration. Left-wing accelerationists want to bring on capitalism's end-stage calamities in order to foster a revolution that will overthrow the bourgeoisie. Right-wing accelerationists think that worsening economic conditions will trigger some sort of white-nationalist boogaloo garbage. I'm not an accelerationist, for my part, but it's pretty clear to me that acceleration is happening. Capitalism has been in objective decline for decades, but now the decline is happening faster than most of us ever imagined.
There's an inevitable sequence to this sort of thing. Capitalism becomes corporate capitalism ("Stage 2") due to business consolidation. This requires the proliferation of middle management positions, both to curtail inefficiency and to prop up a middle class (preventing overthrow) while small businesses die, so what you get is an evolution into managerial capitalism. ("Stage 3") At this point, bureaucratic diversions make it hard to know what is happening, and few people--least of all the overpaid boneheads on top, who can't tell when they're being lied to--know if their managers (or consultants) are any good, so this leads to reputation capitalism ("Stage 4") in which there is no such thing as truth--there is only what people say, and power resides in the ability to control what others say. (In other words, might makes right.) This leads to widespread, deliberate misinformation that proliferates; the system begins to shake, but the nature of post-truth capitalism ("Stage 5") allows it to preserve its own stability, for a little while longer, if it can convince a large number of people that they're either already winning (bourgeois false consciousness) or destined to win (fascist fuckery). This isn't hard at all, in a world where nothing means anything, and in which the convincing telling of lies is the surest path to prestigious jobs and high incomes.
We now live in a world where having a national reputation is necessary just to get an average job--hence the pathological obsession of the young with fame and "influencers"-- and in which admission to the most prestigious universities is as competitive as it has ever been but the product is the worst it's ever been. We have the right wing using fascism to win; we have the left wing diverted into callout-culture identity politics and virtue signaling instead of actual change. The dysfunction of capitalism can no longer be contained. We have stagflation now and will see worldwide food riots in a year or two. Read up on the Russian 1990s if you want to know what the capitalistic world (which is now the entire world) is in for.
Is everything falling apart? It's hard to say. It'll get a lot worse in the short term, but humans and human civilization are resilient.
Yesterday I made the comment "everything is collapsing underneath" though there's context etc. I think the better way to say it. "Is everything falling apart for the USA?" Yes indeed. Most other countries have problems.
Sure Sri Lanka has the same problems. Sure the middle east just went through the same problems and some states are still enduring civil war. Though from what I can tell it's mostly the USA in this 'falling apart' situation. Canada is certainly not far behind.
>“The story of Babel,” Haidt writes, “is the best metaphor I have found for what happened to America in the 2010s, and for the fractured country we now inhabit. Something went terribly wrong, very suddenly. We are disoriented, unable to speak the same language or recognize the same truth. We are cut off from one another and from the past.”
The political polarization starting pre-existed social media. This started late 90s or for sure early 2000s with GWBush. Bush knew something from his father's reign. He could play identity as a victim. So he would pretend to be a yokel and when the elites would make fun... it told every yokel that Bush was the only option. Obviously he never passed laws or tried to 'fix' something for yokels. It was shallow identity politics but identity politics breeds more identity politics.
The democrats then needed identity politics of obama. It's an inevitable scenario, 'first black president' will eventually happen in history and inevitably it would be toxic with identity politics. The rest is history, Trump is a symptom. Biden is a symptom.
>By “here” I mean a time when a big change in information technology has implications for social structure too dramatic to play out without turbulence. In Nonzero I discussed a number of such thresholds, including the invention of writing and the invention of the printing press.
Blaming social media is not legitimate in my opinion; social media will be what fixes this. The fix to the USA falling apart is free and open discussions between the camps. This is what Elon is planning to do with twitter.
He's a billionaire and will be the world's first trillionaire, ONLY if the USA doesn't fall apart. He has a vested incentive/interest to help make this not happen.
>One grievance that drove support for Donald Trump in 2016 was that American coastal elites felt more connected to elites in other countries than to their fellow Americans in the heartland.
Which is for sure true. The reality is that they are still the same team. You can enjoy F1 over Nascar. You have to still realize you're on the same team. When the left-wing attacks the right-wing. You can't take actions that harms your own team. Eventually that team breaks and here we are.
Elons "graph" only shows the left moving away, like they were running away from the globalists lovin satanist-migrants. Or maybe just climate scientists?
This entire "blaming wokeism" is just identity tribalism form the other side. How come you fail to realize ...
Well, the big reason I'm skeptical is that the group of people who don't like "wokeism" seem to have pretty diverse identities. It's hard for me to see many similarities between irreligious business magnate Elon Musk, vaguely Catholic political blogger Andrew Sullivan, and my full time Baptist preacher cousin-in-law - I'm not sure I could identify any other policy question they all agree on.
I don't want to necessarily defend "woke" as a term, but if you pinned me down, I'd say the difference between woke and left is that Noam Chomsky isn't woke. He thinks free speech is very important and signed onto a famous letter on the topic of "cancel culture" and why it's bad. I don't think he has or would identify as anti-woke, but the general phenomenon of ideological capture in mass communications is something he's always talked about and opposed at length.
So you agree with me, that left and woke is not the same thing.
Whats odd thou is, (1) there is no clear definition of wokeism, like its an arbitrary stereotype used by demagogues and (2), that woke is often displayed on the other side of right/conservative. This makes it a strong indicator of propaganda. A surface, people can project their negative emotions to, which is another red flag in terms of populism. Even you used it indirectly, to refer to your peers "not liking woke", which is why i asked.
I am not defending wokeism too. One core value of the left is equality and solidarity. When you define wokeism as some LGBTQ-stuff, it would be just a subset of these values. So being woke does not make you left.
This is my answer to, what is the difference between woke and left.
On one level, sure, I'm definitely with you. The term "woke" is vague, subject to toxic stereotyping, and it'd be nice if people didn't use it.
But I don't think we can overlook the pressures that push people towards it. The problem is that a lot of movements that get grouped under "woke" self-identify with vacuously positive labels that can't be negated. If I go around telling people "anti-racism is bad", they're going to think I mean "racism is good", and they're not going to believe me when I clarify that I'm referring to specific policy ideas promoted in books such as Ibram X. Kendi's famous How to Be an Antiracist. Unless you're talking to people who are so politically engaged you can name-drop specific authors to start with, I'm not sure what term other than "woke" you could use.
I was about to write "The Problem we both have is mislabeling" but then i realized that we dont have the same problem.
From my perspective, conservatives/rights often stand out with blatant and harmful falsehoods. Even in your last post is a central self contradiction.
>movements that get grouped under "woke" self-identify with vacuously positive labels that can't be negated
>If I go around telling people "anti-racism is bad", they're going to think I mean "racism is good"
Looks like your "anti-racism is bad" statement is not meant to be negated. I think, what you meant is "racism is bad but what you are doing is too", which, from my perspective, is not equivalent to "anti-racism is bad". Your mistake here is, that you use their "racism"-label and invert it, to make it suit you. By doing so, you reduce the conversation to labels and discard similarities between you (which is actually the most harmful part).
A slight difference in phrasing is deciding if i agree or disagree with you. Is it my fault or yours?
"Anti-racism is bad" is meant to be negated. It would be totally reasonable for someone to respond by saying "well, I actually think anti-racism is good, and here's why".
There's a risk of labels getting in the way, no doubt. But there's a lot of things that seem straightforwardly impossible to reason about without labels. How could we discuss what the abstract principles of race relations in the US should be without identifying and naming the major strains of thought on that topic?
Black people were discriminated in the US from the beginning. This discrimination continued long after civil rights reforms in public and private institutions.
Even if you could magically eliminate racism in every human brain on earth with a snap of your fingers, the socio-econimic factors, inherited from the beginning would continue to be disadvantageous for blacks. So the racism back then, even when not present in minds today, would persist. This is called systemic racism, because we discriminate indirectly, not by skin color but by education, vocabulary, human capital in general. And on top, racism will of course prevail in minds.
From that, you can easily advocate for some sort of compensation, some kind of counter discrimination, anti-racism.
I find that term troublesome too, because you actually asking for support for all poor people, not just blacks, but i would never call it a ideological label and bad, because i can see the reason behind it. Using it as a label and associating it with (group) identity is unfortunate but not my mistake.
"woke" has a clear definition and origin in black activism. Like a lot of concepts from black activism, it became co-opted by well meaning white liberals, encompassing many other forms of progressive activism and eventually became more about virtue signalling than productive activism, much less black allyship.
Then, like so many other progressive and left-activist terms, it got co-opted again and inverted by the right into a general pejorative, indicating nothing other than mockery and caricature of the left. But it definitely came from somewhere and it at least used to mean something.
It's fundamentally a difference about the economy and the value of material change vs. cultural change. The left proper wants liberation for all oppressed groups, including the largest, the working class. Leftists recognize that groups that are more marginalized under capitalism/imperialism (national/ethnic minorities, etc.) will benefit disproportionately, but want a rising tide for everyone (except the bourgeoisie). That is to say, leftists have a commitment to intersectionality and the liberation of those with marginalized identities, but the fundamental, sine-qua-non thing that makes one a leftist is anti-capitalism.
The woke "left" is different; it's largely a phenomenon of the petit bourgeoisie, and is not opposed to capitalism, or oppression more generally; the woke instead want representative members of generally marginalized groups to be proportionally represented in the existing power structures, without any significant change to those power structures. The reason the woke come off as so strident and belligerent is that membership in the professional-managerial class (PMC) is increasingly precarious, and US educational/cultural institutions overproduce people with the qualifications for entry into/maintenance of that class position, relative to the dwindling size of that class.
> Blaming social media is not legitimate in my opinion; social media will be what fixes this. The fix to the USA falling apart is free and open discussions between the camps. This is what Elon is planning to do with twitter.
I’m skeptical that he can fundamentally change the incentives that make social media amplify extremist views over moderate views. “The other side is terrible” will always get more engagement than “we should work together”, even with validated identities.
>I’m skeptical that he can fundamentally change the incentives that make social media amplify extremist views over moderate views.
I'm skeptical that someone who unironically uses the phrase "woke mindvirus" has any such intent. There's a reason right-wing accounts are flooding the platform now and everyone else is running for the hills, and it isn't because Elon makes both sides equally welcome or unwelcome. He's clearly picked a side.
I'd really encourage you to take a step back and think about how deeply the attitude of extreme-vs-extreme conflict pervades this comment. You say "everyone else is running for the hills", but I don't think you'd claim that 100% or even 25% of left-wing Twitter users have left the platform today. Is it true that the "wokeness" debate is such a big issue you can't use a social media platform run by someone who doesn't agree with your stance, or have the incentives of social media tricked you into seeing it as a totalizing conflict where nobody can agree to disagree?
>You say "everyone else is running for the hills", but I don't think you'd claim that 100% or even 25% of left-wing Twitter users have left the platform today.
Sorry, I forgot where I was posting for a second. It was an idiom, not an attempt at a mathematical proof.
The point is that only one side suddenly feels unwelcome and the other suddenly feels very welcome.
>Is it true that the "wokeness" debate is such a big issue you can't use a social media platform run by someone who doesn't agree with your stance,
No. I just don't look forward to the flood of edgelord Nazi shitposters, bots and harassment I predict Elon (and, Trump's probable reinstatement) will draw to the platform, nor do I particularly want to use a platform whose owner considers my views to be akin to a plague. I will, as long as it remains feasible to block accounts I have no interest in.
>or have the incentives of social media tricked you into seeing it as a totalizing conflict where nobody can agree to disagree?
I didn't take over Twitter because I felt it needed to be liberated from the "woke mindvirus." Elon is bringing the totalizing conflict, I just want to read my feed in peace.
What do you think Voat, Gab, Parler, Rumble, WeMe, Truth Social, Gettr and numerous other "alternative" platforms formed in the last few years were all about? Conservative safe spaces are a whole market segment now.
I will grant you it must be difficult trying to voice your opinion as a conservative in a liberal space, but there are countless examples of conservative safe spaces and running away from those platforms, or they just never join them in the first place.
>I’m skeptical that he can fundamentally change the incentives that make social media amplify extremist views over moderate views. “The other side is terrible” will always get more engagement than “we should work together”, even with validated identities.
There have been a ton of Elon doubters over the last 10 years.
I hope he is successful. We must get people back to the same team.
He said if he’s successful, that both the far left and far right would be equally unhappy, has he made any kind of statement to suggest his goal is to “get people back on the same team”? I.E. his goal is to get people to trust the platform, not each other.
>He said if he’s successful, that both the far left and far right would be equally unhappy, has he made any kind of statement to suggest his goal is to “get people back on the same team”? I.E. his goal is to get people to trust the platform, not each other.
Basically what he just said is that he won't be allowing violence or calls to violence.
When you boil down or remove the perjorativeness of 'extremism'. You can have a borderline extreme opinion on abortion. Either on right the right side that no abortion should be allowed or on the left side of 'abortion should be allowed even after birth' Neither of these are extremist positions though.
Extremism comes down to not being willing to entertain the other side and the requirement of using violence to solve the political divide. Those are far extreme positions.
I think we can all agree that violence isn't the answer and if some violent extremist from either side has been censored. Nobody will actually care.
I'm actually curious to push on your idea that "we can all agree that violence isn't the answer". Because I think there are more and more people who think it is the answer. I would guess you're saying the vast majority rather than all (Sorry if this sounds pedantic but it's not meant to be).
Also, is it ok to call for violence if your next tweet says that you were joking? I do not think there is not agreement on what a violent extremist is.
>I'm actually curious to push on your idea that "we can all agree that violence isn't the answer".
Survivors always universally agree violence isn't the answer. I'm not saying literally 100% of people are opposed to violence. Will Smith just ruined his reputation and ended his career with violence.
> Because I think there are more and more people who think it is the answer. I would guess you're saying the vast majority rather than all (Sorry if this sounds pedantic but it's not meant to be).
The federal government has many responsibilities but 2 of the fundamental ones.
1. Military and police to prevent all violence. Government gets full monopoly over violence.
2. Borders to define where violence isn't allowed.
Fundamentally the government who represents everyone is the 'all'. Obviously it's more complicated than that because violence is allowed in some examples. Boxing -> MMA for example, but my understanding is that it's well regulated.
Even more complicated yet, there will always be a portion of every society who wants to kill. It's an evolutionary thing that Joe Rogan likes to call Chimp Brain. For whatever reason they are wired to the point they need to kill. Imagine the helicopter scene from full metal jacket: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S06nIz4scvI
Those people exist. Even in Ukraine right now. There are Russian soldiers who are doing this. Everyone is the enemy and needs to be killed. Stupid ukraine for whatever they did to force me to be there. I'm going to punish ukrainians equally, they all need dying.
These people are going to push toward violence. You have to proactive to avoid this.
>Also, is it ok to call for violence if your next tweet says that you were joking? I do not think there is not agreement on what a violent extremist is.
Great question, and what is the 'correct' solution? I dont care about the next tweet but perhaps you are banned until you delete the tweet? Commonly that's what twitter already does.
Unfortunately there is a disagreement over calls for violence. It's difficult to find examples of calls for violence from the right wing. Obviously that is well censored. Yet there's lots of examples from the left-wing that go unpunished. The entire 'punch a nazi' thing from the left is insidious and bad.
The context is that this is an off-the-cuff comment during the early part of the Maga kid Nick sandman story. The truth hadn't come out yet. That is to say that nick sandman was completely innocent and now rich after multiple settlements by media who smeared him. Obviously a ton more verified checkmarks called for violence toward the maga kid. Lets not even mention the number of non-checkmarks who never had their call to violence ever censored.
That maga hat represented much more than the situation really did.
> The fix to the USA falling apart is free and open discussions between the camps. This is what Elon is planning to do with twitter.
Nice, now you just have to convince the MAGA Republican and the BLM Democrat to have an open discussion, when each of them prefers to listen to their own social bubble. Good luck with that...
Or you need people to realize that MAGAs and BLMs are a small minority of the general population. You need the media to behave like adults and stop pitting one side against the other for clicks/views. You need companies to stop caving to outraged people on Twitter.
>Nice, now you just have to convince the MAGA Republican and the BLM Democrat to have an open discussion, when each of them prefers to listen to their own social bubble. Good luck with that...
A russian cosmonaut spit on Elon when he suggested he was going to build a rocket that can be recovered and refueled. Called him insane and it can't be done. Well... don't know if you're keeping a score card...
How many short sellers of tesla lost an awful lot of money? Elon is quite the force to reckon with.
While I am not MAGA, republican, BLM, nor democrat. I have had conversations with all of those. They are all reasonable people who will listen to what you have to say.
I think there's certainly some conversations that are possible even now but so many off limits topics that are what need to be discussed. That's an easy first fix.
>American coastal elites felt more connected to elites in other countries than to their fellow Americans in the heartland
>When the left-wing attacks the right-wing
This is part of the problem. When you casually define the left as "coastal elites who are out of touch" and the right as "Americans in the heartland who are uncared for", you are taking a real problem and reframing it as "all left-wingers vs all right-wingers". You are making people feel attacked who are not in the group you are trying to criticize. People (on both sides) do this to each other constantly (though they have been since prehistory - it's just particularly bad in the US lately).
It's interesting the consequences of this as well. There are policies being changed without a mindset of urban vs rural. Where a policy that makes sense in a urban point of view is catastrophic to rural communities. "If you think the world is overpopulated, leave the city."
Political policies like carbon tax for example disproportionately harm rural people. Some dude living in downtown toronto taking the subway is basically getting a pay cheque from the government at the expense of rural folks who must drive a low mpg pickup truck. What you think farming can be done in a econobox? https://metro.co.uk/2015/03/28/udder-disgrace-cops-find-cow-...
In fact, if you know a bloc of people support your policies and another doesn't. Figuring out of a system which transfers wealth to your supporters at the expense of your political opponents is an ideal system.
The problem though is that we in a country are the same team. Attacking 1 side is never beneficial. Urban folks attacking farmers with carbon taxes? Ok well how's that food inflation working out? Attacking oil workers with carbon taxes? How about the gas prices?
>People (on both sides) do this to each other constantly (though they have been since prehistory - it's just particularly bad in the US lately).
It's interesting as well to imagine how to solve this in the USA. Lets say Elon fails or even makes this worse and he deletes twitter. It just doesnt exist anymore.
How do you bring both sides back together without blood being shed?
You cant do nothing, it's actively becoming worse right now. Act now or else.
It's certainly not going to be solved by more censorship and removing free speech. In fact, censorship is a new thing. Free speech has been around for plenty long to know it's not causing it. My hypothetical also assumes reduction in censorship by elon failed.
So as president happytoexplain of the independent party. How do you bridge the divide? How do you bring people back together?
You might try to go nationalism. Tell everyone they are Team America, that the fight isnt with each other. Build some foreign enemy for people to rail against. At the same time go around ending all the wars the USA involved in. End wars that the USA arent even involved in. Reduce tension, reduce war exhaustion. Make sure people's economic situation is as good as possible because of high correlation between violence and economic situation. Reduce the poor mindset in general, tackle it directly.
I’m not convinced social media will fix things. IF we could have conversations with each other, and discuss nuance, it would help. However, it’s turned into a tool to just shout knee-jerk memes at each other and demonify the other side. I don’t see any honest real discussions happening among people who disagree. It’s just fanning the flames that will burn us all.
> This is what Elon is planning to do with twitter.
The only things Elon is planning to do with twitter is to silence his critics, become a Rupert Murdoch style figure, and keep manipulating stock prices.
If it makes anyone feel any better, Musk's Twitter acquisition reminds me of Buffett's acquisition of Berkshire Hathaway -- he did it because he was assmad and is likely to take a bath on it.
(as the twitter picture is getting a bit of thought)
The depiction of the right remaining where it is from 2008 to 2021 is misguided at best. The party of George Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney is the same as the GOP today is incorrect.
I believe that this depiction only makes sense for Elon if a different right endpoint is used - where the right is closer to Ron Paul and the left is instead the caricature at the extreme that the comic portrays.
It wouldn't surprise me if the Democratic Party has shifted to the more authoritarian end of the Y axis of the political compass - increased regulation in the wake of corruption and the increased power of corporations.
However, that completely ignores the shift of the the majority of the rest of the Republican Party to the top right corner.
This chart only makes sense for Elon if the right end is held constant at the libertarian and the left end changes, but ignores the rise of the authoritarian right along with any of his changes.
>The depiction of the right remaining where it is from 2008 to 2021 is misguided at best.
As I mention here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31206510 it has been objectively measured. There have been quite a number of leftist political commentators who recently have been offended that they are labelled right-wing now. Bill Maher or Russel Brand for examples.
Carlos Maza before his disgrace wrote on the subject @vox and he basically argued that obama and truman were the same politically. That's rather insane, sure they did start a bunch of wars and bomb countless civilians. I on the otherhand don't recall Obama threatening to draft the people in a union on strike into the war. I also suspect truman and obama's stances on immigration are slightly different LOL.
Dont get me wrong. I can certainly see both parties moving left. LGBT rights are a key example. There's nothing wrong with moving left.
>The party of George Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney is the same as the GOP today is incorrect.
I would agree.
George W Bush for example actively voted against gay marriage. Even planned to make a constitutional amendment to protect marriage from homosexuals. He banned homosexuals from boy scout. I can just imagine how horrified Bush is about it being Scouts now. Even was of the opinion that it's not possible to commit a hate crime toward a gay.
Do you feel this new republican party is going the right direction of LGBT rights? I think so. I applaud Trump here.
>I believe that this depiction only makes sense for Elon if a different right endpoint is used - where the right is closer to Ron Paul and the left is instead the caricature at the extreme that the comic portrays.
I think that's kind of the point. Objectively the far right hasn't changed much at all. In fact the common argument is that the far right has moved slightly left since that time. Which on 1 issue I clearly show the shift. Not the other way around like you suggest.
>It wouldn't surprise me if the Democratic Party has shifted to the more authoritarian end of the Y axis of the political compass - increased regulation in the wake of corruption and the increased power of corporations.
Bill Maher I believe made this point. That the left has gone so far left that everything to the right of them look right wing. You can identify this by seeing democrats like you say here.
Political compass was questionable for some time, but it's interesting to see it here. They are offensively wrong for canadian politics.
If you see your entire political spectrum as right-wing authoritarian. That's a problem with the graph. If you're going to produce a poor graph like this you have to justify it. They dont.
The failure largely speaking is that the left vs right false dichotomy. But political compass is also self-biasing from a far left position.
Hawkins in left libertarian should be bottom left corner. The graph is biased by that much.
In a way the political polarization is visible in those graphs. It's also interesting to see why. They do the analysis by finding answers to questions. "What is your stance on abortion, gun rights, etc." and then plot.
But if you self-biased based on your own political beliefs by only asking certain questions. Then you end up showing your bias and not the political plot of politicians.
>However, that completely ignores the shift of the the majority of the rest of the Republican Party to the top right corner.
Elon very clearly understands what is wrong. I would put money on a bet that he understand better than I do.
The censorship and failure in communication have produced echo chambers which artificially pushed the left-wing toward the far left. Afterall what happens if the left-wing only talks to the left wing? Of course their discourse without dissent will shift left. We haven't measured it, but right-wing echo chambers would do the same thing.
What do you think the consequences will be when the right-wing shifts far right? Elon wants to fix the problem before this happens.
> There have been quite a number of leftist political commentators who recently have been offended that they are labelled right-wing now. Bill Maher
Was never a leftist, or a political commentator with any coherent ideology at all. AFAICT, he was only ever painted by some as a leftist because of the Right painting everyone who wasn't in lockstep with the racist war fury of the early 00s as “leftist”, and because being a comedian when the Republican Party was at a local maximum of control, for a while all the easy targets for his contrarian humor were in the Right.
And he’s evolved on the positions that got him perceived as leaning left then, becoming more positive retrospectively on the Iraq War, more Islamophobic over time, etc., more openly supportive of foreign dictatorships in general.
Brand I’ve not paid much attention to, but he never struck me as particularly leftist, either.
>Was never a leftist, or a political commentator with any coherent ideology at all.
He labels himself a leftist. His views are commonly left of center. He lives in leftyville california. He went to Cornell which doesn't produce republicans. I watched him on politically incorrect, but I only see the odd show here and there since he went to real time on hbo. I would say he's a lefty. I very much doubt there's any air of caricature in his public persona. I do believe he has been legitimate in his beliefs. Better yet makes tons of funny jokes.
If on the subject of political polarization of the left-wing has you saying Bill Maher is right wing. I rest my case.
>Brand I’ve not paid much attention to, but he never struck me as particularly leftist, either.
Like I know Bill Maher is left of center. Brand is left of him.
Lets not forget the bernie bros who are suddenly right wing as well, joe rogan, jimmy dore, kenosha shooter guy.
The point to take away. If you think "the right" are racist war fury and islamaphobic. You should leave your country. There's somewhere else that is better for you. "the right" are your fellow countrymen, they are on your team. Do you know of lots of your country people that you like are moving somewhere? Europe, Japan/Korea? Australia? Germany? Perhaps you should reach out to them. See if it's really better?
> Elon tweeted this yesterday ... He has a vested incentive/interest to help make this not happen.
Then why is he Tweeting nonsense cartoons that only serve to divide people?
I mean, the right has stood still for the past 13 years? This perception is part of the problem. Notwithstanding actual studies (tweeted in reply to that comment) show the exact opposite has happened -- that the left has moved leftward slightly while the right has lurched further to the right 4x further, we know the right has moved far right since 2008 because of January 6 2021. That's proof positive that a problem exists with right-wing extremists, and to just pretend otherwise strikes me as dishonest on Musk's part.
The far right went from tea party curiosity in 2008 to full blown anti-democratic, paramilitary, conspiracy lunacy in 2022. We had an unbroken track record of 44 peaceful transfers of power until 2021, when the former president and his party plotted to overthrow the newly elected government by force. We are now learning as texts are being leaked, they spent the entirety of Nov-Dec 2020 texting each other illegal strategies to prevent Biden from assuming office on 1/20/21, and then tried very hard to implement those strategies, including going so far as having constructed bogus legal theories and a faux-constitutional process to attempt to legitimize their efforts. And of course, purposefully fomenting an insurrection and gleefully watching as it unfolded.
And you can't even say it's the fringe because that wing of the party has literally taken over the GOP. If you don't believe me, ask any of the conservatives who have left the GOP citing how far right it's moved. People will cite AOC as the most radical leftist they can think of, and even her Green New Deal is fundamentally grounded in the ideals of capitalism. Not very radical leftist if you ask me. Where are the actual radical leftists in Congress, espousing an end to American democracy, the monetary system, and capitalism? You can't find them because they're not there.
So given all that, for the new owner of Twitter to tweet that conservatives have moved absolutely nowhere in the past 13 years, shows just how completely out of touch he is with the political climate.
(for anyone looking to reply that the left has move left, I will not contest that, but the point of the cartoon is that the left has exclusively moved left while everyone else has stayed the same. This is objectively not true.)
The point is not mostly about economic axis, but the cultural one.
In the economic axis, you could argue that at least a certain part of the Republicans has moved to the left. The emergence of the New Right [1][2] speaks to that. Or Trump's shtick of being against "unfair" free-trade deals. Or that Republicans are now the party of the working class.
> People will cite AOC as the most radical leftist they can think of, and even her Green New Deal is fundamentally grounded in the ideals of capitalism. Not very radical leftist if you ask me.
That's what I think is strange. Same thing happens in my country, some people say that our country is turning into a far-leftist woke-nation. Even though center-right parties are in majority and most elected on the left aren't even really far-left, just Social Democrats or Greens.
Redistributing wealth and laundering taxpayer money is standard politics, not radical at all. The point is making is that she’s not a radical leftist. Insofar as you consider the GND to be redistributive it’s not doing so in a way that actual radical leftists would support. So how is she a radical leftist then?
> The GND is not about being green, it's about redistributing wealth
No idea what the GND does and what they proclaim, the Greens I mentioned are the ones in my country, which isn't the US. As far as I understand nothing else than Reps and Dems matter anyways.
> AOC is a radical
I don't think so, but that could also be due to me not being from the US.
Lots of things my country does would be wrongfully labeled as socialist, communist or radical in the US.
So its no susprise to me that AOC gets labeled as radical in the US, even though she still seems pretty tame to me.
I do welcome that she's more left than what I usually hear from Democrats.
EDIT: In order for you to understand me a bit better - If I'd be able to vote in the US, I would've voted for Bernie Sanders.
No joke, I agree on the vast majority of things he says. I say vast majority because I assume there are things he thinks that I don't know and see different. Else, everything I hear from him is basically what I think, give or take some small adjustments.
You could call me a Socialist, and I would be fine with it. However, I would never support an authoritarian or non-democratic system. In my opinion my country has the best political system which currently exists, so I feel fortunate for that. Still, I don't find it to be perfect. Too much lobby-ism, aka. corruption. Too much influence by industries. At least everyone has a vote and everyone can technically start a process to bring change.
Healthcare, critical infrastructure, essentials and maybe more should belong to the people of a country. The US seems to be a country belonging to those who own the most of it. Businessmen, politicians and so on. Markets have to be regulated and controlled. Tax avoidance is no different to me than tax evasion. Yada yada, feel free to ask more questions about my opinions, but I guess this is a good start.
No, gender dysphoria has existed since like forever. But it's certainly not a good sign when our institutions try to indoctrinate us with gender ideology. [1]
The day it really becomes "the science" is the day I will lose hope in the rest of the apparatus. Lysenkoism [2] be damned.
[1]: And by that I mean believing that we should behave as if there are no differences between biological females and MTF, or that it's all just a "social construct", or that we have a moral duty to "deconstruct" all social constructs which interfere with some ideology.
What’s it like to have such strong feelings about gender?
I don’t have that, the idea that it’s all just a social construct is so embedded in the way I see the world, I just don’t see how anything about sexuality or biology are immutably connected to gender identity. To me the two are completely divorced from each other.
Interesting, doesn't that Lia Thomas photo [1] make you laugh (or make you angry if you care about college swimming)? [2]
> To me the two are completely divorced from each other.
Some of it certainly could be. But insisting that it's all just a social construct makes it hard to explain things which are prevalent and similar across different cultures. (e.g. females growing their hair, or them being generally "cleaner", or intonation differences, etc.)
Or even more broadly, the fact that males and females of different cultures can be attracted to each other, even though the exact gender expressions might be different.
I can observe that Gender is one of the strongest social constructs that we have. But I think most of the ideas around them; Men shouldn’t cry, women are better caretakers; are not inherent, they’re a function of inertia. You can probably find more examples of people who don’t fit the mold in one way or the other than people who do.
Also, women not being “woman enough” for sports has been an issue prior to the idea of transition. See Surya Bonaly and Caster Semenya
Note: No, reddit isn't a good source, but It was the first one that i found. Searching for Camille Paglia and transgender you will find more information about it..
what is your biggest worry for society? Also...what does society mean to you, and would you consider in the context of your reply that there may be different perspectives and possibly multiple societies simultaneously so perhaps clarifying your scope of society and it's impacts.
Climate change, wealth gaps, and both combined. (Richer people can escape the effects of climate change more easily). I fear that wealth will become even more important, furthering the gap between classes even more.
> what does society mean to you
Depends on what context. Of course for my direct political environment, people living in the same country as I are the biggest society I can lump together. But I'm not very nationalistic so I try to think about what's best for people globally. I think the most important society to me is all humans on earth. Else, every nation or group just looks after themselves.
> would you consider in the context of your reply that there may be different perspectives
Yes, but - I fail to see what group of people transsexuality would be the biggest danger to. Even when it goes against your world-view or religion, there is no harm done at all when someone is transsexual. It just goes against ones opinions.
That's why I disagree heavily with the sentiment that "when men turn into women, that is a sign that the end is near". If transsexuality is more dangerous to a person than climate change, social injustice or other big topics, it really just does feel like fear-mongering and blaming arbitrary boogeymen for what's going wrong at the moment.
I'd like to see numbers backing it up either way. I'm center left leaning and I largely distrust journalism these days. I don't consistently read any news source and assume appropriately relevant and significant information will filter it's way to me from my network. It's worked well so far and I've managed to keep my biases moderate. It also let's me more easily filter out bs since I'm not consistently immersed in it.
"Slightly Left" but the only journalist you trust is Rachel Maddow? That is a very interesting take, I have never heard Maddow described as anything remotely resembling slightly left, only as a caricature of the extreme left.
That's pretty funny. On many topics, the whole spectrum of acceptable political thought has been compressed in the US (and much of the west) so that you're either a little bit pro-business ("extreme left") or very pro business ("extreme right"); a little bit pro military ("extreme left") or very pro military ("extreme right"). Radical ideas are allowed to exist only as long as they don't stop the flow of money. Hence the current focus on culture war over anything else.
There are lots of reasons to be distrustful of “Silicon Valley”. No need for conspiracy theories, and being afraid of e.g. Facebook or Twitter is not necessarily irrational.
Media are a bit complicated. I feel a couple of militant outlet have managed to poison the pool by putting in our collective consciousness something like “yeah, we are biased, but all media are biased and we admit it, therefore we are more honest than the others”. That is very worrying as well.
Generally for different reasons though in my (anecdotal) experience
The left thinks silicon valley/social media has taken too light of a touch dealing with hate speech, racism, conspiracy theories, etc. and has enabled more radical/loony/violent people to increase their reach and support
The right thinks silicon valley/social media has been taking moderation too far and that their speech is being censored or their audience artificially limited to prevent them from reaching more people
These statements are probably a bit too generalised, but it does remind me of how many people in the UK see the BBC (the left says it's too conservative, the right say it's too liberal)
I understand the fight your picking, but really this isn't that much of an argument. "Mainstream media" makes mistakes. It has perspectives that leak through into interpretation. It has blindspots in coverage. But mainstream journalists almost to a fault genuinely view their job as bringing important facts to their audience, and they care about getting things right. That's just not true of the partisan press on the right, and you know it as well as I do. Let's actually measure:
Here are the biggest three headlines I see at nytimes.com right now:
"West's Resolve to Block Russia Grows Amid Fears of a Protracted War"
"Likelihood of Trump Indictment in Manhattan Fades as Grand Jury Wraps Up"
"Piles of Garbage, No Showers: What Lockdown in China Looks Like"
All seem eminently plausible, reasonably descriptive of the content in the article, and (except arguably the China article) not written from an argumentative perspective. I'd happily read any three of these articles and "trust" their content (I did read the Ukraine one).
Here are the three biggest headlines at foxnews.com, fetched within a few seconds of the list above:
"President Biden's close relationship with Hunter associate who led company with China ties exposed"
"Liberals lose it after Elon Musk's tweets about the Democratic Party"
"GOP rep grills Biden's secretary of state over Ukraine 'lies'"
Every single one is written from a decidedly partisan perspective. One contains a value judgement ("lose it"), one uses deceptive quotes to be able to call something a "lie" without evidence (someone else called it a lie, Fox technically didn't), the other is a guilt by association fallacy.
I don't trust a single one of those things to give me the whole story, and I'd be shocked if even partisan republicans did. If I want to know what's "really" happening on any of those issues I know a-priori that I need to find more sources, because this one isn't giving me the whole truth. Giving you the whole truth, essentially, isn't what Fox views as its "job" in the same way that the Times does.
>But mainstream journalists almost to a fault genuinely view their job as bringing important facts to their audience, and they care about getting things right.
What you call "mainstream media" I call "corporate media". And some journalists may feel that way however clicks, eyeballs, and stickiness take priority over their views. There’s too much competition for traditional media outlets to survive without adopting techniques that were once unthinkable. Corrections are rarely issued these days and edits are done in an almost stealthy manner. I had to stop following the Twitter accounts that tracked these changes because it became an endless stream of tweets.
The days of Tim Russert, David Broder, Jim Lehrer, Ted Koppel etc. are long gone. I would consider Matt Taibbi[1] one of the last journalists that followed in their footsteps but he is definitely not corporate and barely mainstream. Taibbi left Rolling Stone and uses Substack which has been attacked by the NYT, and others, as alt-right and misinformation which I find ironic coming from the paper that published Judith Miller’s WMDs propaganda. Even Jason Calacanis referred to Taibbi as a “right guy” on one of the recent All-In podcasts even though Matt is an ardent Sanders supporter. The Blob doesn’t like it when you don’t toe the line.
Corporate media is dead to me even though the vast majority of it is "Left".
>I understand the fight your picking, but really this isn't that much of an argument.
Really? I don't watch Fox News or any corporate media and you assumed I did. You might be shocked to learn that I worked in the Clinton administration and voted for Obama!
I don't understand the bit about Taibbi. While he has some background as a general journalist, the overwhelming majority of what he writes these days is opinion work. More or less by definition, he has a perspective that colors his interpretation, and he wants to convince you that he's right.
When you say you "trust" a broad news organization I generally expect you mean that you take what they report to be a reasonable representation of the truth and that they aren't hiding things from you or otherwise spinning the interpreation.
When you say you "trust" an opinion journalist, really all you mean is that you agree with them[1]. Taibbi doesn't give you the whole story on anything! He gives you his perspective. This is what he wrote yesterday, for example: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/savor-the-great-musk-panic?s=r Now, sure, you might agree with that take. But you wouldn't hand this to your grandpa if he asked what all this stuff he was hearing about The Twitter was about.
[1] Personally I find that brand of anti-anti-right leftist journalism really tiring. Taibbi takes shots against the center left that draw eyeballs from people who want to see those libs suffer and in broad service to entities (yes, including the Russian government) that oppose them. I can't think of the last time I saw him write about a problem that I, personally, would like to see solved. Instead he writes about the other problems (some of them legitimate) with people who are trying to solve the problems I do care about. Where is Taibbi on climate regulation? Where is Taibbi on income inequality? Where is Taibbi on police violence? Where is Taibbi on increasingly criminalized women's health care? Damned if I know either. But I know where he stands when the libs are upset about Twitter!
There isn’t much of a lobby on the radical left that can compete with the Murdoch empire. Yeah, you can pick some communist newspaper with strange views, but nothing close to Fox in the US or the Mail or the Daily Express in the UK.
He's been wrong 100x more than he's been correct. He spends the entire day spouting random garbage, and you can cherry-pick the 10 pieces of garbage that happened to be true.
> For millennia every human has known what a woman and a man is, now even supreme court justices in American don't know.
Oh, they do know - but it’s currently politically impossible for anyone other than the most fearless of iconoclast to say, as to declare oneself critical of innate gender identity being both real and far more socially significant than biological sex is possibly the worst heresy anyone can commit on social media at the moment.
It was actually John Money who formed the basis of modern so-called Gender Theory by his twisted experiments on twin boys who he abused so thoroughly that they ended up taking their own lives. Check out the book "As Nature Made Him: The Boy who was Raised as a Girl" by John Colapinto
Perhaps, but consider the words of those great gender theorists, The Kinks, in their hit song, "Lola" - boys will be girls and girls will be boys; it's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world.
From broad brain traits like sexual orientation down to smaller ones like spatial perception or emotional intelligence, a young brain has certain development windows in which a trait or ability can get more or less developed. You could even add in personality traits like competitevness or deference once you associate it with a gender role.
With "female brain structure" i mean traits that are commonly overrepresented in what you might see as a regular woman. I know its inaccurate but so is the opposite, by saying there are only 2 genders and men are all men. Gender is a spectrum in many dimensions and my example of male physique and female brain structure is just a simple counter example against this.
The latest research doesn't really show that though, more that there is so much overlap between what were previously considered typically male and female differences in structure, such that this whole "female brain in a male body" hypothesis doesn't have the evidence to support it.
It's so exhausting hearing constant anti-trans rhetoric from all sorts of places that any support at all is nice to see. I am so tired of being a scapegoat and it's becoming terrifying because it doesn't seem to be slowing down. If anything, it seems like the world is becoming less tolerant. I frequently wonder where I can move -- if anywhere -- where my existence will not be questioned regularly.
(You may say: avoid social media, but... it's really everywhere. I don't use social media except for Hacker News.)
Yeah, the thing which bothers me the most is that people don't even try to educate themselves.
What do you think my reaction was, when I first heard of trans-people as a young teenager? Of course I laughed a bit and wondered why people think that genders are fictional and why a man would ever be able to be a woman.
But with time I got more curious, educated myself, thought about it, and I think I understand it pretty well now.
Others just seem to hop on a bigoted bandwagon and don't even try to understand.
I think the most important part is educating others, discussing this topic. But this also requires the uninformed person the be open to change their mind. I've had 2 discussions I can remember, one with my SO and the other with my best friend. Both in a way used the same arguments as a bigot would use, just in a curious and innocent way, if you know what I mean. After talking to them they seemed to get what it's about.
I have yet to talk to a trans-person in real life about this topic, but so far I think I understand it well enough in a way that I can talk about it to others.
---
> I frequently wonder where I can move -- if anywhere -- where my existence will not be questioned regularly
As sad as it is to admit, I think that's not possible. That's not even a specific issue for you I guess, lots of people get questioned about their race, sexuality, class, even if they're generally somewhere with more acceptance. Focus on people who accept you, don't get pulled down too much by haters and be proud of yourself.
> If anything, it seems like the world is becoming less tolerant
I think a large part is that trans seems to be the new topic. Race and homosexuality has been talked about, of course still not everyone is on board or agrees, but everyone knows these topics and has probably made up their opinion. With transexuality I feel that lots of people just don't know what it really is, which doesn't mean that they wouldn't accept it if they knew it. That doesn't help you at all of course, and I hope that you will once feel like you've been accepted for who you are by our societies. But I think there's still a long way to go. Stick to good people, try to educate neutral people, ignore bad people as long as you can.
All of this is coming from a white cis-male, so all I can do is try to be empathic. I wish you all the strength you need, don't give up!
> Yeah, the thing which bothers me the most is that people don't even try to educate themselves.
Nuance is really important. I mean, I even agree with some of the concerns from social conservatives about transitioning and self-identification and "social contagions" and such. We should try to understand as well as we can, and not push anything on people they may not have felt themselves. It's important to not tell someone they're trans, pushing an identity onto them. There are discussions to be had.
... At the same time, though, that's not the whole story, as some social conservatives would have one believe, and those are not a reason to dismiss trans people. I remember having "gender dysphoria" feelings from a young age. It wasn't about dresses, or barbies, or whatever. I was uncomfortable taking my shirt off to go swimming, assuming my chest was more like my mother's or sister's than my father's or brother's. My genitals just seemed foreign to me. It got worse through puberty as these "male" features became more real.
If you'd thrown me on a deserted island with no culture, I would've still had gender dysphoria.
How do we make life comfortable for people who share in my experience? How do we make puberty less traumatic and do as much as we can to help them feel "normal"? These are questions that social conservatives dismiss as not real problems, but they were real problems for me.
---
> What do you think my reaction was, when I first heard of trans-people as a young teenager?
When I was a teenager, there was no talk of trans people, anywhere. It was an unheard of topic. I still had the feelings I did.
When I first heard of them when I was a little older (~20), it was amazing to finally know I wasn't alone in the feelings I shared. I booked an appointment with a licensed mental health therapist the next month to talk about it. On the rise of awareness of trans people, I thought, "Good! They won't have to go through quite what I went through." Today, I worry they're worse off than it being unknown like it was for me.
What ended up making me feel notably better was estrogen. It was strange how well it worked, although I still had distress over my physical features until I was fully transitioned. Now that I am... my gender dysphoria is cured. I still enjoy the same hobbies, listen to the same music, read the same books, play the same video games, and even dress in a similar style. I just don't have distress over my physical features anymore. Like getting treated for any other medical issue, the treatment made the issues I experienced go away. Now the only time I feel distress is when I hear people calling for the death of trans people or blaming societal ills on us.
I don't know why I'm writing all of this, so I'm going to stop here.
---
> so all I can do is try to be empathic.
I really appreciate it. All of us do. It means a lot.
> I wish you all the strength you need, don't give up!
No. I copied the person I was replying to's formatting because I thought it improved readability, and if there is any similarity in phrasing, it is coincidental.
> concerns from social conservatives about transitioning and self-identification and "social contagions" and such. We should try to understand as well as we can, and not push anything on people they may not have felt themselves.
100%. We have to approach this topic not only by accepting it, but also by sincerely discussing certain aspects of it. No teen should undergo surgery because of peer-pressure. On the other hand, teens who are certain that they're trans should receive the help they deserve. Difficult to navigate, but doable.
> If you'd thrown me on a deserted island with no culture, I would've still had gender dysphoria
That's something I have always wondered, and I know that the question is hypothetical, so its up to you to answer - Let's say we live in a world where gender roles and norms don't exist. People visit the doctor they need to see, but socially, people just are who they are. Would gender dysphoria still be a thing?
> Today, I worry they're worse off than it being unknown like it was for me
I know what you mean, that in a way they have a bigger spotlight on them. On the other hand, we have way more knowledge about this topic and newer generations are more open about it, so I don't think its that bad.
> I don't know why I'm writing all of this, so I'm going to stop here.
Was really interesting for me to read about your experience, but I see that a site like HN is probably not the best site for such deeply personal things. Would be really interesting to hear more about your experience. Maybe another time.
> most 'trans women' keep their penises intact, and continue to enjoy using them as a man would. These are men with a sexual fetish, not women.
Disagree, fully. Thinking that genitals define your social gender is exactly the wrong thing to do. If a Trans-Woman wants to keep her genitals as they are, then she should, and this doesn't have an effect on her gender.
If she wants to undergo surgery - fine.
Saying that Trans-Women who "keep their penises" are just men with a sexual fetish is in my opinion a very wrong and mean opinion to have.
> no one is trying to change sex or biological genders
Except when they let men compete in women's sports. So if I have to choose between the new lefty version of gender, or what we had before, I'm going to choose the old way because it didn't result in comically ridiculous outcomes like that.
This is such a tired canard. Biological sex is an imprecise and discriminatory proxy for physical performance, and we can do better. Professional boxing already includes an additional objective measure—weight class—to improve match fairness. So not only is it possible to find a better discriminator, there is already one proven approach that can be used as a starting point today.
Furthermore, using biological sex as the discriminator in sport doesn’t just create unnecessary conflict for intersex and trans players, it also excludes cis-gendered people who are talented, love sport, but just didn’t win the genetic lottery. Dividing leagues by metrics other than gender gives everybody more opportunity to participate. Again, going back to boxing, if the only metric were gender, most or all of the people outside heavyweight class wouldn’t be participating at all.
Finally, I would also argue that team sport is more interesting when greater varieties of people with different strengths and weaknesses can play together. If we designed video games the way we run most sport leagues, matches would be split up into tanks vs tanks, dps vs dps, support vs support. Congratulations, you’ve made things “more even” by separating everyone using superficial physical traits, and lost most of the interesting dynamics of pitting different strengths against different weaknesses.
That's all very well in theory, but what classes would you use to replace sex in practice?
For example, in a recent women's swimming competition, Lia Thomas, who is male, was permitted to compete on the basis of his gender identity claims.
Do you consider gender identity to be a reasonable method of categorization? Because that is the specific problematic issue here, not whether different attributes than sex could be used in general.
"For example, in a recent women's swimming competition, Lia Thomas, who is MALE, was permitted to compete on the basis of HIS gender identity claims"
At least address her with the correct pronouns, that's the least you could do in such a discussion.
I hope my comment is not interpreted as arrogant, my point is that even if we are discussing biological sex that is no reason to strip people from their preferred (social!) gender.
I understand the point you are making, but I feel that using a female pronoun while discussing Thomas being male would have been the more jarring linguistic choice, given the subject.
I know what you mean. But pronouns which relate to social gender can be differentiated from sex/biological gender.
To rewrite your original comment, "Lia Thomas, who was born male, was permitted to compete on the basis of her gender identity claims" would be a fine and understandable statement, I think.
When talking about the person Lia Thomas, we are talking about a woman. She's Lia Thomas. Yes, she was assigned male at birth and her biological gender is male, but the person is female.
Again, I am maybe a bit petty, but I think this is exactly one of these important aspects when talking about transsexuality.
I'm not really disagreeing with what you're essentially saying, just trying to make a point about transsexuality.
Thomas has said himself, that he does not care about pronouns, as long as he gets to destroy women sports, so I don't understand why you're so offended on his behalf.
Having said that, of course he's not a woman. No doctor in the world would disagree with me on that. You're deluded by some kind of ideology which puts even Idiocracy to shame. Snap out of it.
> Thomas has said himself, that he does not care about pronouns, as long as he gets to destroy women sports
Source?
> don't understand why you're so offended
I'm not offended, why else would I mention multiple times that I'm being petty, but trying to make a point and start a conversation about transsexuality.
> Having said that, of course he's not a woman. No doctor in the world would disagree with me on that
Yet another person who doesn't understand the difference between sex and gender and instead decides to belittle me. Nothing I haven't experienced yet, still disappointing.
I see your point, but I think one has to take the context of the conversation into account too.
In a social situation involving a transgender person, it's considered polite to use pronouns that won't exacerbate any gender dysphoria they may feel. I would think that most of us have done this at some point, as a kindness.
However if we're discussing a controversial public figure, and the topic is sex versus gender identity, I feel it makes more sense to use pronouns that match up with material reality, for the sake of clarity.
Granted, sports is a topic which we haven't really figured out yet. I'm also thinking about it a lot, how we could shape sports competitions, or if we leave the categorizations as they are etc. I don't have a definitive solution or answer to that.
But - What you describe doesn't really happen that often and its made a bigger issue than it really is. Yes, it happens. Yes, some do seem to maliciously abuse it. Yes, we should talk about it and really chew it through. As long as you really mean the first word you used, 'Except', then I am fine about your comment. If you use sports as an argument or excuse not to accept trans sexuality or changes to gender roles, norms etc., then I fully disagree.
Granted, sports is a topic which we haven't really figured out yet.
We figured it out long ago, and there were no problems before the gender studies majors got involved. Biological males and biological females should compete separately whenever there are significant physical differences between the sexes that affect outcomes. "Gender identity" is utterly irrelevant in this context.
I don't even know what it means to 'accept' someones sexuality or not. It doesn't affect me so I don't consider it my business. What I am saying is that if a model produces a ridiculous outcome, like men competing in women's sports, it's probably not a good model.
Gender identity is more like an improper set of body-drivers in the brain. To use a comparison from computers, if you put AMD hardware in your computer, but install an nVidia driver, the video card likely will not work as intended since your computer is missing some of the information needed to use all its features.
Similarly, the brains of trans people tend to have the wrong "drivers" for their body, which causes dysphoria.
Since we don't have fine-grained control over brains, we cannot "reinstall" the right driver, and it's a lot easier to fix the hardware. E.g. just as putting in the proper nVidia card to match the driver will fix the problem in a computer; adding estrogen/testosterone and maybe some surgeries allows the brain-drivers to communicate with the body correctly.
Differences in "transition completeness" make perfect sense in this way. If most of your drivers map to "female" equipment, but the "penis driver" is working properly, you have dysphoria about everything but that.
(Evidence from brain studies agree that there are variations in brain structure in trans people.)
That analogy just comes across as trans propaganda. The brain is not separate from the body, it is part of the body. There's not any hardware/software divide like we have in computing, that could have this 'body drivers' concept make any biological sense.
I don't understand why people who clearly are traitors to the USA are able to get by with it. In the 1950's they would have been immediately arrested and tried for supporting facist countries. Now they are beloved.
This isn't limited to the USA. With the rise of globalism, the sovereignty of nations has been eroding in favor of a one-world government, whether those nations go with it willingly or have it imposed on them. Warfare is now primarily conducted from within, beneath the surface.
In America, there's definitely been a breakdown of belief in its own institutions. Far more people are skeptical of things like journalism and Silicon Valley; it really wasn't that long ago that the former was constantly salivating over the latter, but now it's more of an openly vulture-carrion relationship because that caters to public sentiment. People who I would consider "normies" even don't trust law enforcement and the FBI anymore (not that they ever should have). Even the education system from K12 to college is increasingly being seen as a joke and an outright racket. We also went from the President being a more respected position to one deserving of relentless tabloid gossip. Even if one's "guy" is in office, I don't think we feel the same about it the way we did even as recent as Obama, and his administration was when we really began to see the social cracks forming.
Civilization ebbs and flows, but I think the current sentiment is unprecedented in my lifetime. This is not a high point by any stretch of the imagination, and while I see "everything is collapsing" to be hyperbolic, it seems inevitable that many things we thought were rock solid are in a transition period where either they will reform or one day be replaced with force of some kind.