101–110 of 144 posts
The problem is not that wages are growing too slowly, that is the symptom. The problem is that productivity is growing too slowly. Fixing the problem requires far more technology and automation than we have delivered.
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I believe in hard work, sacrifice, and family… ideals and virtues that have provided solace and guidance to humanity for our entire existence. It seems to be the hyper-online types that reject traditional values that are the most depressed and apocalyptic in their mindset. Myself - I look outside and the sun is shining, my kids are playing, everything is good in the world to me.
You feel well connected through your family. That's all people really need. As you say, your children are your world. Some people don't have this family structure. Many come from broken homes with no good role models to look up to. They mimic their parent's maladaptive behaviors and end up in bad relationships. The degenerative cycle repeats. Many of these broken homes were the result of economic devastation or cultu…
It’s another to actively reject traditional structures like hard work and family. There is a sizable cohort of online-types that actually thinks society would be better if the government ran everything, work was outlawed, rich people went to jail, and all manner of extremely insane ideas that they blame their own problems on. They actually think the world is ending because of global warming, democracy is under attack, and doom scroll every day reading horrible nonsense that will never happen.
I would argue the human condition is to think everything is failing and the apocalypse is coming at any moment. This a frequent phenomenon throughout history and every generation has this narrative. However instead of religion now it’s environmental destruction but I see that as another type of religion.
Narcissism is rampant throughout society and no one wants to feel any pain or have to struggle whatsoever for success. We live in the greatest time that ever existed and some people are more miserable than ever.
I choose to be happy and appreciate what life offers rather than despair at things I can’t control and ultimately don’t matter.
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Because inequality beyond a certain excess makes a system unstable, and given the chance, even wealthy people would rather be wealthy in a stable world than an unstable world. There is not only one power distribution, there is a whole set of them.
Can you refer to any evidence that inequality makes systems unstable? There is no reason that I can think of for that. OnlyFans looks pretty stable, in fact. And It doesn't make sense that a political system gets unstable when some people get wealthy. Political systems fall apart when large numbers of people can't afford food (an issue which has nothing to do with equality).
Actually, many wars and rebellions in history have been due to some kind of inequality, whether perceived or real, when individuals or groups were motivated to fight to seek redress. And wars are very much unstable.
>How can the world get better if no one is steering? Did it get better when somebody was steering? hitler was a strong and popular leader. Democracy is about people being self-governmed, not about having a strong leader Individualism is the ultimate goal of this Enlightenment era that we are still part of. The goal was to take away the power from the monarch and the collective, and empower the individual, and our civ…
I think this is under-calling both how miserable people were before the modern era and the remarkable impact good birth control has had on modern society. Suddenly there is lots of free time and a lot more choices to make than there were even 50 years ago and all the choices have unsatisfying outcomes. We live in a world that is too complex to understand, and people keep screaming that everything is about to collapse…
> how miserable people were before the modern era Materially, maybe , but judging by the way people live in rural communities even today, it's closer to the truth that they were happier overall, as they had a social support net, more socializing than they can handle and more time in nature. It's a qualitatively different life than urbanized domestication
My wife and I currently suffer from the more socializing than we can handle.
But this requires people to care for religion, which again is a self imposed change people have decided on.
We can criticize Reagan and thatcher till the cows come home. However to claim we are living in their utopia is false. Their utopia was highly religious and would not allow the shifting social norms we have seen in the past few years. The article is actually quite irresponsible in only bringing up thatcher and Reagan's economic revolutions while failing to bring up the sexual revolution.
> All meritocratic platforms are winner-take-all, with the top 1% of performers collecting a vastly disproportionate share of rewards. Even if you simulate an economy where every participant starts out with the same amount of money, and all trades are completely random, over enough trades the participants' wealth will still end up in a power-law distribution.
This seems to be a basic principle of biology which fractally translates to entire societies. Piketty's data shows that historically, the curve was flattened only when the economy itself was upended, i.e. after wars. We need to engineer peaceful ways that violently rearrange the economy. A parallel money system like cryptos might have been used for that, but so far it has done the opposite
Hard not to see parallels with the end of the Roman empire. We know we could do better, we can't be bothered trying very hard and we'd rather moan about the good old days. All it needs is the more motivated (not very) barbarian hoarde to decide they'll do the social reconstruction we won't. Edit: I actually place great faith on coming generations. The kids are alright.
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The problem with income inequality is that the people at the top are actively stealing money from everyone else. Elon isn't out there building rockets. He just gets the rockets that other people made automatically and for free. This is the case with literally every billionaire. So, yeah, I'm envious. I'd like my stuff back.
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> how miserable people were before the modern era Materially, maybe , but judging by the way people live in rural communities even today, it's closer to the truth that they were happier overall, as they had a social support net, more socializing than they can handle and more time in nature. It's a qualitatively different life than urbanized domestication
Our family lives in a major urban metro. We go to a traditional urban church. We have everything you mentioned. No diss to our rural brethren, but rurality is not a prerequisite to this life. Most city people problems are of their own choosing. My wife and I currently suffer from the more socializing than we can handle. But this requires people to care for religion, which again is a self imposed change people have de…
Self-imposed? People can't just choose to beleive in God, and most religions like their adherents to sincerely beleive in their stuff.
> All meritocratic platforms are winner-take-all, with the top 1% of performers collecting a vastly disproportionate share of rewards. Even if you simulate an economy where every participant starts out with the same amount of money, and all trades are completely random, over enough trades the participants' wealth will still end up in a power-law distribution.
True, but more so today than 50 or 100 years ago.