For the same reason that Hillary Clinton got nominated in 2016. Because too many politicians are completely out of touch with the movements, conditions and perspectives of working people. Where I live, grassroots organizers are doing all the hard work. I'm not talking about protesters. I'm talking about people who are building and connecting organically, who are facilitating workshops and popular education sessions,…
> This country would be a hell hole without the hard work This country is not a hell hole? That's a tough argument to make for a lot of people!
> political system to organise itself to reward work done How do you decide which work is valuable and which work isn’t?
Not OP, but my personal belief is that all work is valuable, otherwise it wouldn't be desired. I don't think it's a good exercise to decide how much it is worth, except to say that work that requires X unit of time should provide at a minimum an amount of compensation that allows a person to obtain a standard of living above the poverty line.
Sometimes someone's valuation of work is questionable. It may have had value to them, i.e. they paid someone to waste time out of pity, or their valuation could be wrong. They could pay someone to pray their stock prices increase not realizing it's useless.
There are much more obscure ways in which work can be entirely useless without anyone noticing, and plenty of ways people can end up with jobs that are pretty obviously a waste of time.
What a fantastic article; this might be the high point for my 2019 Hacker News reading. What clarity of vision. It is remarkable reflecting after an article like that on the complete inability of the US political system to organise itself to reward work done rather than access to the super-elite social circles. I'd love to know if this Julius fellow has a take on what mechanisms the 0.1% are using to drive the growin…
Economic growth increases the gap.
The only fix is working with other countries on inheritance tax and anti-tax evasion schemes.
The big ideological divide in families (usually between generations) is a serious symptom of our inability to really communicate and compromise. In large part these ideological groupings are meaningless and inconsequential. Mostly because it doesn't really matter, for most of the people the feedback is very much lost in the noise. (There's institutional inertia, states are big, changes are slow, Congress doesn't chan…
"The big ideological divide in families (usually between generations) is a serious symptom of our inability to really communicate and compromise. In large part these ideological groupings are meaningless and inconsequential." I think this is only true in very specific circumstances. Ideological divide can also mean disowning your child for being gay, which is why among homeless youth there's a disproportionate amount…
Agreed. Although, on a website made by a company that funds the bourgeoisie, i'd imagine most people here are frustrated.
> Although, on a website made by a company that funds the bourgeoisie
...in the hope that their venture,by some miracle, is the winning ticket to join the elite - usually by being "blessed" by an elite via a 6- or (preferbly) 9-figure acquisition
> My impression in recent years is that the middle class has real value in almost any society we had until now. The middle class really isn't any less powerful today. Near as I can tell what happened isn't that the middle class became less powerful, but that journalists in particular no longer find themselves in the upper middle class so they spread the perception that the middle class has lost its power because they…
"journalists in particular no longer find themselves in the upper middle class" For most of the history of journalism in the U.S., journalists were not in the "upper middle class". Journalism was a poorly paid working class job for most of the 20th century. Maybe a couple decades at the end of it different.
That low pay serves as a gatekeeping mechanism so poor people can't survive on that career. On the other hand, journalists have a disproportionate influence over public discourse, now tightly controlled by the elite class.
Or maybe it's the reverse, because the field has high prestige and impact, it attracts upper class children who don't need the salary, causing a downward pressure for journalist wages.
"The big ideological divide in families (usually between generations) is a serious symptom of our inability to really communicate and compromise. In large part these ideological groupings are meaningless and inconsequential." I think this is only true in very specific circumstances. Ideological divide can also mean disowning your child for being gay, which is why among homeless youth there's a disproportionate amount…
It’s illegal to disown children in the U.S.
Could you expand on this a bit? I’m not sure exactly what you are saying here, and on its face it doesn’t seem correct.
"journalists in particular no longer find themselves in the upper middle class" For most of the history of journalism in the U.S., journalists were not in the "upper middle class". Journalism was a poorly paid working class job for most of the 20th century. Maybe a couple decades at the end of it different.
That low pay serves as a gatekeeping mechanism so poor people can't survive on that career. On the other hand, journalists have a disproportionate influence over public discourse, now tightly controlled by the elite class. Or maybe it's the reverse, because the field has high prestige and impact, it attracts upper class children who don't need the salary, causing a downward pressure for journalist wages.
Idealistic professions done "for the greater good" typically struggle. These days, anyone with internet access can do low-paid writing through various services or publish their own thoughts via a blog or social media. There has been tremendous downward pressure on writing and many local papers have closed, among other things.
There's radical energy there, but here's the clincher: it will never turn into anything productive because the Republican propaganda machine has so effectively manipulated the working class into continuing to think that public services are their enemy . They will rant and holler about communism until the billionaires have milked them of their very last dollar, and then blame that on communism too. The very policies t…
Isn't there something patronizing, even patrician, about saying "the propaganda machine has so effectively manipulated the working class"? Why aren't their views as legit as yours or mine? There seems to me a great assumption in saying that they are "manipulated". Who isn't? This is the idea of false consciousness ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness ), and it has always seemed questionable to me. Who…
I know a lot of working class people, and their views are just as valid and often they are smarter/more well informed about some particular low level details of the way the economy/society operates. But without a college education in today’s complicated world its really hard to be a sophisticated consumer of information (even with one many fail) so working class people are more susceptible to manipulation by propaganda, oral information, conspiracy theories, availability heuristic etc. Being able to google something vs being able to search skeptically and critically are two different skills.