> the innovators (lords) capture the majority of the gains, and the 99% (serfs) get an awesome phone, a $4,000 TV, great original scripted television, and Mandalorian action figures delivered within 24 hours.
It's striking that the Bread and Games of the Roman Empire works out so well even today after that many more people are are comparatively well educated and should know better.
What makes be particularly sad is that 15 years ago I was confident that social media and smart phones will bring the printing press to the least advantaged, resulting in a more homogeneous society. The contrary has come true.
I think part of the blame lies with people themselves. Few are motivated to partake in civics, read studies, be literate in math and logical analysis. I understand that many aren’t given the opportunity, but I see that even those who are, few desire to take advantage of their freedom and would rather leave the operation and advancement of society to others.
Simply educating one's self requires no risk, just time. But no one wants to read the minutes of a city council meeting, or delve into the numbers behind issues. For example, it's telling to me that only a handful of US states offer parental leave, when I ask my family members in child rearing ages if they voted are not, they say no.
I know there were candidates who supported laws that would have benefited my family members, such as sick leave, parental leave, etc. I informed my family members who these candidates were. I even asked them what kind of life would they want for their daughters. But nevertheless, on voting day, none could muster the will to visit a polling booth or request an absentee ballot via mail. Yet it's not as if they are wealthy enough to forgo having jobs.
Time is money, so betting on action with no immediate benefit (reading a book, voting for the "correct" candidate from the wrong party) versus action with immediate benefits (the dopamine rush from playing a video game, or skipping voting to go to work/enjoy your day off) is risky, at least as far as Scumbag Brain is concerned.
In that vein, I don't believe laziness exists; just misaligned incentives. Intellectual, even emotional appeals tend not to work when people are insecure. You have to alleviate the insecurity somehow.
> What makes be particularly sad is that 15 years ago I was confident that social media and smart phones will bring the printing press to the least advantaged, resulting in a more homogeneous society. The contrary has come true.
we ended up with social media influencers that either bends to the highest bidder at the top, or will do anything for a bit of money or fame at the bottom.
On top of social media platforms having to also bend to the will of their advertisers and cut payments to content creators (ie: YouTube) to stay afloat.
Well I think the balance of power is at least changing on the media site. It's getting more and more difficult for traditional newspapers and media outlets to stay afloat, and (as much as it may be unpopular to some), social media, YouTube, blogs etc are probably going to replace it altogether at some point or another.
Whether that's a good or bad thing is another question entirely.
But social media and modern tech has certainly also created a bread and circuses style situation for a large percentage of the population too, and it's probably done quite a bit to dissuade people from actually voting or taking part in the political process as well (thanks to the availablity of 'feel good' outrages and tribal spats on Twitter and the likes)
> social media and smart phones will bring the printing press to the least advantaged, resulting in a more homogeneous society. The contrary has come true.
These things take time. It took centuries for the actual printing press to lead to a more harmonious society (viz. The Enlightenment), whereas its early effects were just as disruptive as those of modern-day social media. Crazy conspiracy theories galore.
“If the worker and his boss enjoy the same television program and visit the same resort places, if the typist is as attractively made up as the daughter of her employer, if the Negro owns a Cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, then this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the Establishment are shared by the underlying population.” (Herbert Marcuse, 1961).
(By the proper definition of "(social) classes", arguably it indicates both. Then again, Marcuse did not seem to have much appreciation for those widely shared "needs and satisfactions", or for the so-called "establishment" that has evolved (and is indeed constantly evolving) to meet them.)
Marcuse is using "classes" more in the traditional sense, social relations predicated (roughly) on ownership and control of society's gross productive capacity. But the point still rings true - in terms of media, for instance, there is a huge amount of overlap between what the "upper classes" and "lower classes" enjoy. Marcuse would have been very critical of the lifestyle and art produced by the culture industry today (see, for instance, his discussion on the sadness of seeing Freud in the drug store and Bach on the radio in the kitchen).
Average life span is falling for the first time in a century. It would be one thing if people were apathetic due to a comfortable life. The current situation is more akin to a frog in a pot of slowly heating water.
> It's striking that the Bread and Games of the Roman Empire works out so well even today after that many more people are are comparatively well educated and should know better.
What would you expect people to do? Most people want a peaceful life with their friends and family, passing their time pleasantly until they die. Sure, it would be nice to be a billionaire, but most people don't want that enough to do much about it (and rightly so, in my opinion, since the utility of money decreases rapidly the more you have).
Your comment implies a critique of what people want, but I can't make out a suggestion of what they should want instead. Yes, it would be great if more people were richer, yes, we should make that happen, but no, being a billionaire isn't really worth pursuing when you can be very happy with much less and without sacrificing two decades in the process for a shot at a lottery ticket.
> What would you expect people to do? Most people want a peaceful life with their friends and family, passing their time pleasantly until they die.
No they don't. Most people want success and to follow their passions when they're young, get knocked around a few times by life, get older and decide to chill out and focus on building their families instead.
They learn to be happy with what life has given them, which is generally a good thing, but it does not mean it's the only thing they've ever wanted.
The truth is somewhere in between. Despite rationalizing some lofty goals our choices reflect a bias towards comfortable, passive leisure. Success is complicated when food, lodging and procreation are already achieved. It's a lot of work for a mere peace of mind that some arbitrary milestones are achieved and these may not be a passion either.
Perhaps there is a mass passification about, and yet many individuals still manage to do great things growing up in these environments.
Blaming this on bread and circuses alone is as tone deaf as the article with regards to the problems with poverty in this nation. To be fair, there is a real limiting of opportunity as education is increasingly used as a caste delimiter. However the real issue still is financial insecurity:
* Consider that 1 in 5 people people today struggle with paying the rent and face rental insecurity (https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/rental-insecurity-...).
* Before you claim that they should be buying instead of renting, also consider that you have to have a good credit rating to buy (which automatically cuts off 1/2 of the population; average credit rating is 700: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/10/average-fico-score-hits-an-a...) and you have to be able to put down at least 10% which varies widely in the US (https://www.zillow.com/home-values/) but would probably require at least 20,000 in savings. If you have money in savings you probably don't have rental insecurity. In fact median net worth is $200 according to the last US survey here (https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf17.pdf), and mean net worth is _negative_. In short, the majority of people in this country can't afford to buy and they will not be in a position to buy anytime soon, if they are still worried about not getting evicted.
* Almost 14% of households in the US have food insecurity (https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...). That's nearly 1 in 7. So much for the "bread" part of the theory. You think any of those people can afford to invest in the stock market, create new businesses, or take on any risk that could threaten starvation of their families? Do you think they can afford to send kids to college without taking loans?
* And a voice on the internet, a printing press to the least advantaged? 89% of people have a computer at home, but that means at least 10% don't. That 89% number is so high because the stats include smartphones (https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...). Unless they go to the library to use the computer, they are not in the "public" internet discourse. And you better bet that all these categories are intersectional.
99% of serfs. Gah. There is still real poverty in this nation, people afraid of starving, people afraid of having nowhere to live, worried about underemployment, a laughable opportunity at higher education, no real way to climb up the social ladder, and it is not yet getting better. The imbalance is only being talked about because it is becoming increasingly difficult for the upper 80% who don't have these issues to perceive themselves as part of the 1%.
We have a collective based system, not an individual based one. So everybody goes to the same schools with the same curriculum with the same baseline opportunities.
It's not optimized for individual success at all. So the people who win are those who take individualized action above and beyond the norm.
If you do what everybody else does, you get what everybody else gets.
Except that schools are drastically different depending on your neighborhood, so poor kids have far less exposure to knowledge and mentoring that would allow them to succeed individually.
I taught science across the Chicago school system. One of my worst schools literally had 3 kids exceeding standards...only 3 out of 500. It's simply not on the children's shoulders alone, they need force multipliers like good teachers, computers, home stability, even food and sleep and safety from gang violence are not assured.
So, individual action is multiplied by opportunity and mentoring.
I'm convinced that the single most important issue is a stable home where the parents have the time and energy to engage in their kids education.
But any time I try to unpack this issue it becomes a seemingly impossible systemic problem. How can you possibly have time for your kids if your marriage isn't stable or you're working multiple jobs?
This leaves me equally convinced that we need to raise children as communities, tribes, villages, and not as individual families. But I have no idea how to make that happen.
> So everybody goes to the same schools with the same curriculum with the same baseline opportunities.
I went to a Jesuit high school, and, due to this, had far better advantages and outcomes than anyone else in the same socioeconomic background as myself. I didn't get here on any merit of my own and didn't really pay attention prior to high-school, I just became a step-son to someone willing to spend the money.
Even if you want to talk about public schools, you can't say that everyone is on the same footing due to a host of reasons: poorer neighborhoods tend to have higher rates of lead in their paint which negatively affects people in various ways; better teachers will self-select for "safer" or "better" areas; or children might go to school and be unable to pay for lunch, thus harming their education. The notion of same baselines opportunities is unfounded. Similar curriculums, as well, aren't true: AP classes, dual-enrollment in local colleges, &c. are all enhancements to the baseline curriculum.
> It's not optimized for individual success at all.
You presuppose that a school system should optimize for individual success, but I'm not convinced that optimizing for a more cohesive, civically-minded, and educated population wouldn't produce better outcomes. This hyper-focus on individuals seems to be tearing society at the seams--by not imagining ourselves as a part of a community, only as individual agents, our conception of nation and society crumbles. Your idea of education seems that it would only exacerbate the collapse of community.
> Affixing your own oxygen mask before helping others is a decent tagline for capitalism.
Not the point of the article, but this is a terrible tagline for capitalism. You put on your O2 mask before helping others not out of selfishness, but because if you don't, you literally won't be able to help others - you could be unconscious in a matter of seconds.
It is not necessary to be that economically selfish just in order to help others.
No, trickle-down would be one passenger affixing an entire airplane’s worth of masks and only then maybe detaching one or two for his favorite fellow passengers to use.
-Why are the number of seemingly remarkable people growing? It’s a moving window. As society’s body of knowledge grows, the youth will always be ahead because they can stand on the shoulders of those before them. When compared to their peers, the gap between what is remarkable and what is not is smaller.
—I disagree with the idea that the economy has any “goals.” I think it exists naturally, and what we call an “economy” is actually just the sum total of individuals deploying capital to get things they want.
Insisting we can engineer the economy (which is really just individuals, perverse incentives and all examined as an aggregate) in some way to solve a crisis of meaning for “unremarkables” misses the point, and I would even argue is very dangerous. Dangerous because as soon as the bottom 51% realize they can vote themselves the wealth of the top 49% we slide right down the slippery slope into socialism. Which has done nothing but decimate the human spirit of everyone who’s lived under it for centuries.
-Which brings up the next bit: the author correctly identifies a crisis of meaning (rising deaths of disparities) but incorrectly asserts that the issue is economic. The lack of social fabric in the western world is causing the despair spiral. You don’t get into dire emotional straits leading to opiate addiction if you’re simply broke, the key catalyst is often a lack of hope for the future & a lack of social support system in the community.
The purpose of "engineering" the economy is to avoid certain kinds of game theory issues that you end up with when you lack coordination. This isn't an ideological issue it's purely algorithmic.
Second to your point of "issue is economic"; final causes are tricky. But one of the reasons why people move is for economic reasons. Moving breaks up families in multiple ways. Money is the leading cause of divorce. Not to sound old school, You can have a pretty strong social fabric when there is a large middle class of the style of The 50s. Take away that steady single earner income and you might get a "lack of social fabric".
Given your use of retorical phases my guess is that your world view is founded on videos of Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson. There is a whole outside that shallow stream and I would encourage you to stick your toes in some deeper water.
The same author calculates the "degree ROI" of higher education by dividing the first-year salary by the annual tuition so the overall mathematical rigor is, to use the article's terminology, unremarkable.
That would be the case if the author had made the two lines start at the same place on the graph. But instead the author has the minimum wage line shrink down with the scale as the NASDAQ line appears.
> It’s never been easier to become a billionaire, or harder to become a millionaire.
I think this is factually incorrect on the second point. The US mints a net of about 300K millionaire households per year. (This means more than that on a gross basis as millionaire households who die off or who fall below the threshold are all replaced plus an additional 300K.) About 1 in 12 of US households are millionaire households up from about 1 in 20 in 1997. (In both figures I attempted to exclude the value and debt on primary residence)
The sad part is that being a mere millionaire household doesn't mean that much anymore. It provides around $40K per year in safe income or about 1.5x the federal poverty level for a family of 4.
That also assumes you’ve got a “liquid million” throwing off interest you can tap and spend. I bet a lot of those millionaire households don’t have liquid cash, but rather home equity, IRAs, and 401ks that total up to over $1mil but unless you’re of retirement age you can’t tap
Some people who were previously unremarkable are now remarkable like a whole slew of social media influencers and YouTubers. My favorite YouTuber has a normal unremarkable job but makes silly nail art videos with millions of views. There's little niches like of old Indian people making large amounts of food for poor kids.
Is it bad that now when I see a list of policy solutions for a problem, I automatically assume that even if it does have enough support, it will be hijacked and distorted by special interests to make problems with inequality and dysfunction even worse?
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 126 ms ] threadIt's striking that the Bread and Games of the Roman Empire works out so well even today after that many more people are are comparatively well educated and should know better.
What makes be particularly sad is that 15 years ago I was confident that social media and smart phones will bring the printing press to the least advantaged, resulting in a more homogeneous society. The contrary has come true.
I know there were candidates who supported laws that would have benefited my family members, such as sick leave, parental leave, etc. I informed my family members who these candidates were. I even asked them what kind of life would they want for their daughters. But nevertheless, on voting day, none could muster the will to visit a polling booth or request an absentee ballot via mail. Yet it's not as if they are wealthy enough to forgo having jobs.
Therefore, I must surmise it's simply laziness.
In that vein, I don't believe laziness exists; just misaligned incentives. Intellectual, even emotional appeals tend not to work when people are insecure. You have to alleviate the insecurity somehow.
we ended up with social media influencers that either bends to the highest bidder at the top, or will do anything for a bit of money or fame at the bottom.
On top of social media platforms having to also bend to the will of their advertisers and cut payments to content creators (ie: YouTube) to stay afloat.
Whether that's a good or bad thing is another question entirely.
But social media and modern tech has certainly also created a bread and circuses style situation for a large percentage of the population too, and it's probably done quite a bit to dissuade people from actually voting or taking part in the political process as well (thanks to the availablity of 'feel good' outrages and tribal spats on Twitter and the likes)
These things take time. It took centuries for the actual printing press to lead to a more harmonious society (viz. The Enlightenment), whereas its early effects were just as disruptive as those of modern-day social media. Crazy conspiracy theories galore.
What would you expect people to do? Most people want a peaceful life with their friends and family, passing their time pleasantly until they die. Sure, it would be nice to be a billionaire, but most people don't want that enough to do much about it (and rightly so, in my opinion, since the utility of money decreases rapidly the more you have).
Your comment implies a critique of what people want, but I can't make out a suggestion of what they should want instead. Yes, it would be great if more people were richer, yes, we should make that happen, but no, being a billionaire isn't really worth pursuing when you can be very happy with much less and without sacrificing two decades in the process for a shot at a lottery ticket.
No they don't. Most people want success and to follow their passions when they're young, get knocked around a few times by life, get older and decide to chill out and focus on building their families instead.
They learn to be happy with what life has given them, which is generally a good thing, but it does not mean it's the only thing they've ever wanted.
Perhaps there is a mass passification about, and yet many individuals still manage to do great things growing up in these environments.
* Consider that 1 in 5 people people today struggle with paying the rent and face rental insecurity (https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/rental-insecurity-...). * Before you claim that they should be buying instead of renting, also consider that you have to have a good credit rating to buy (which automatically cuts off 1/2 of the population; average credit rating is 700: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/10/average-fico-score-hits-an-a...) and you have to be able to put down at least 10% which varies widely in the US (https://www.zillow.com/home-values/) but would probably require at least 20,000 in savings. If you have money in savings you probably don't have rental insecurity. In fact median net worth is $200 according to the last US survey here (https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf17.pdf), and mean net worth is _negative_. In short, the majority of people in this country can't afford to buy and they will not be in a position to buy anytime soon, if they are still worried about not getting evicted. * Almost 14% of households in the US have food insecurity (https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...). That's nearly 1 in 7. So much for the "bread" part of the theory. You think any of those people can afford to invest in the stock market, create new businesses, or take on any risk that could threaten starvation of their families? Do you think they can afford to send kids to college without taking loans? * And a voice on the internet, a printing press to the least advantaged? 89% of people have a computer at home, but that means at least 10% don't. That 89% number is so high because the stats include smartphones (https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...). Unless they go to the library to use the computer, they are not in the "public" internet discourse. And you better bet that all these categories are intersectional.
99% of serfs. Gah. There is still real poverty in this nation, people afraid of starving, people afraid of having nowhere to live, worried about underemployment, a laughable opportunity at higher education, no real way to climb up the social ladder, and it is not yet getting better. The imbalance is only being talked about because it is becoming increasingly difficult for the upper 80% who don't have these issues to perceive themselves as part of the 1%.
It's not optimized for individual success at all. So the people who win are those who take individualized action above and beyond the norm.
If you do what everybody else does, you get what everybody else gets.
I taught science across the Chicago school system. One of my worst schools literally had 3 kids exceeding standards...only 3 out of 500. It's simply not on the children's shoulders alone, they need force multipliers like good teachers, computers, home stability, even food and sleep and safety from gang violence are not assured.
So, individual action is multiplied by opportunity and mentoring.
But any time I try to unpack this issue it becomes a seemingly impossible systemic problem. How can you possibly have time for your kids if your marriage isn't stable or you're working multiple jobs?
This leaves me equally convinced that we need to raise children as communities, tribes, villages, and not as individual families. But I have no idea how to make that happen.
I went to a Jesuit high school, and, due to this, had far better advantages and outcomes than anyone else in the same socioeconomic background as myself. I didn't get here on any merit of my own and didn't really pay attention prior to high-school, I just became a step-son to someone willing to spend the money.
Even if you want to talk about public schools, you can't say that everyone is on the same footing due to a host of reasons: poorer neighborhoods tend to have higher rates of lead in their paint which negatively affects people in various ways; better teachers will self-select for "safer" or "better" areas; or children might go to school and be unable to pay for lunch, thus harming their education. The notion of same baselines opportunities is unfounded. Similar curriculums, as well, aren't true: AP classes, dual-enrollment in local colleges, &c. are all enhancements to the baseline curriculum.
> It's not optimized for individual success at all.
You presuppose that a school system should optimize for individual success, but I'm not convinced that optimizing for a more cohesive, civically-minded, and educated population wouldn't produce better outcomes. This hyper-focus on individuals seems to be tearing society at the seams--by not imagining ourselves as a part of a community, only as individual agents, our conception of nation and society crumbles. Your idea of education seems that it would only exacerbate the collapse of community.
Not the point of the article, but this is a terrible tagline for capitalism. You put on your O2 mask before helping others not out of selfishness, but because if you don't, you literally won't be able to help others - you could be unconscious in a matter of seconds.
It is not necessary to be that economically selfish just in order to help others.
—I disagree with the idea that the economy has any “goals.” I think it exists naturally, and what we call an “economy” is actually just the sum total of individuals deploying capital to get things they want.
Insisting we can engineer the economy (which is really just individuals, perverse incentives and all examined as an aggregate) in some way to solve a crisis of meaning for “unremarkables” misses the point, and I would even argue is very dangerous. Dangerous because as soon as the bottom 51% realize they can vote themselves the wealth of the top 49% we slide right down the slippery slope into socialism. Which has done nothing but decimate the human spirit of everyone who’s lived under it for centuries.
-Which brings up the next bit: the author correctly identifies a crisis of meaning (rising deaths of disparities) but incorrectly asserts that the issue is economic. The lack of social fabric in the western world is causing the despair spiral. You don’t get into dire emotional straits leading to opiate addiction if you’re simply broke, the key catalyst is often a lack of hope for the future & a lack of social support system in the community.
Second to your point of "issue is economic"; final causes are tricky. But one of the reasons why people move is for economic reasons. Moving breaks up families in multiple ways. Money is the leading cause of divorce. Not to sound old school, You can have a pretty strong social fabric when there is a large middle class of the style of The 50s. Take away that steady single earner income and you might get a "lack of social fabric".
Given your use of retorical phases my guess is that your world view is founded on videos of Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson. There is a whole outside that shallow stream and I would encourage you to stick your toes in some deeper water.
Comparing relative changes is reasonable, but comparing $7.25 to NASDAQ 9,000 is nonsensical.
I think this is factually incorrect on the second point. The US mints a net of about 300K millionaire households per year. (This means more than that on a gross basis as millionaire households who die off or who fall below the threshold are all replaced plus an additional 300K.) About 1 in 12 of US households are millionaire households up from about 1 in 20 in 1997. (In both figures I attempted to exclude the value and debt on primary residence)
The sad part is that being a mere millionaire household doesn't mean that much anymore. It provides around $40K per year in safe income or about 1.5x the federal poverty level for a family of 4.
It all depends on how many years you plan to draw money out.