GameStop, Bitcoin and the Commoditization of Populist Rage

Let's look at an example of where life is zero-sum, which also happens to be an important battleground that leads to more macro effects: wage negotiations. Clearly it's zero-sum: the firm produces some wealth, and many dollars that aren't paid to wages end up paid to someone with more power in the firm, such as an owner, major shareholder, or executive.

Now, when it comes to negotiating wages, in an oversaturated labor market, workers without a union are in a terrible bargaining position, as they basically have the choice: work or die. This leads to what we see today: horrible exploitation of the people with the least power in society. Lawmakers have, over the years, stripped unions of relative power. This is one of the choices I mentioned, where one group is immiserated precisely in order to let another group hoard more and more money. Now, sure, unions have downsides, and they can be corrupt, but on the whole, US wages have stagnated while production has increased since the 70s, when the US began its forceful destruction of labor power.

The only argument you can make in response is that the system as a whole has to be this way, or else, for example, talented executives won't step up to difficult tasks and things won't get done. I'm sure that, in some cases, this is true, but it's a trade-off, like most other things in economics, and the absolutist way that many people hold this, so that a lot of exploitation is justified to retain this, is murderously excessive, and not based on empirical evidence.

You're conflating two unrelated things:

1. American's poor understanding of conditions in the wider world, and of history.

2. How Americans feel about worsening conditions of poverty and health in America, or-- frankly-- how Americans feel about anything they feel is missing in their lives.

The times when Americans have implicitly conflated those things-- e.g., after WWII when a steep increase in depression among middle class women accompanied unparalleled prosperity in the middle class-- Americans actually prolonged their own suffering instead of ameliorating it. AFAICT, trying to "jolt" oneself out of depression by convincing oneself there's no good reason to be depressed is similar to trying to drink oneself out of alcoholism.

In fact, the idea, "You don't know how good you have it," is so hammered into the American psyche that one of the most popular Netflix series-- The Queen's Gambit-- is essentially an 8-hour long refutation of that idea from exactly that same time period. I'll save you the time-- that idea does not work.

Communicating with ignorant people by telling them about your experiences can be fruitful. Teaching your own coping strategies to people even though they are only experiencing first-world problems is graceful.

One-downmanship is simply not an effective tool to achieve either of those goals.