The Wall Street comments are a bit vague/nebulous, but the amount we've spent on unnecessary war-mongering even after Vietnam is a relatively obvious problem that apparently is no longer obvious, now that we lost our "anti-war" party (the formerly anti-war Democrats).
Our bureaucratic programs at home are enough to dig us into a deep financial hole (war-mongering wasn't the source of Greece's problems), but with the added trillions wasted on building old weapons to perpetually blow up and rebuild bridges (not to mention the magnitude of the atrocities committed by the US), we are truly buried financially.
He probably doesn't even know about the CIA's less publicized warfare in Central/South America and the financial/other consequences of the drug war on our own citizens and especially on our neighbors.
War in the US is essentially corruption rearing its ugly head. American political elite can't make money through local corruption because there are too many controls in place. So instead they make money by attacking and looting other countries through under the table, or even over the table, business deals. As Smedley Butler said, war is a racket. Americans are getting robbed and at the same time cheering on their politician robbers. Support our troops, yeah!
..but but without frequent wars how are we going to run a welfare state for big corporations that produces artifacts with no natural demand. How are we supposed to channel tax payer's money to them so that they can share some of them back by employing people
His comments only cover the past 30 years. CIA coups and secret wars mostly stopped in the early 90's. Now they use other means to destabilize south american economies.
Many economies in the South destabilize themselves due to bad leadership and the elite trying to enrich themselves at the expense of the system and the people.
> Many economies in the South destabilize themselves due to bad leadership and the elite trying to enrich themselves at the expense of the system and the people.
It's a gross falsehood to claim that US interventions in Latin America have not contributed significantly to the rise of military dictatorships (many of which were installed or supported by the US at one point) and cartels (funded by our drug war). But good thing we were there to overthrow the dictator General Noriega (whom we had previously installed).
But there has been American meddling, so not sure what hypothetical scenario you are trying to play with...? The countries that are furthest from America's destructive reach / the least "meddled" with are Chile and Argentina, and surprise surprise, those are the most economically and socially stable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin_American_countri...
Regardless, the spillage of violence and the far-reaching effects of our drug war have had a lasting effect on the entire region.
He forgot celebrity worshipfulness and the consumer culture.
The machine that produces celebrity/consumerism today is a hyper efficient over optimized machine.
He is basically saying people didn't get what they need.
And that's because the celeb/consumerism machine's only job is to keep giving people what they want.
What they need has nothing to do with it. Whether its Obama or Trump, Zuckerberg or Musk, subprime mortgages or iphones it's all about what people want and not need.
The advertising industry (which includes general media) have a lot to answer for there. They've been "programming" 2 to 3 generations now to just buy stuff and pay attention to people making the most noise for attention.
Not having had a TV in the house for over 8 years now, I was reintroduced to the world of free to air TV during our Christmas holidays when we went away for a month and stayed with friends who were avid TV watchers.
Been that long since I had seen a TV advertisement, and I was astounded at the how banal and low brow most advertising is these days. I seem to remember a time when ads were clever and creative, but the ones I kept seeing with monotonous regularity were nothing more than quick sound bites ordering people to go buy junk or watch more crap. Everything was really disjointed and jarring to me - I actually came across a couple of shows that I wanted to watch, but they never seemed to get started - every few minutes there was an interruption telling me what else I "couldn't miss" watching, which are just more shows that will in turn have interruptions to watch other shows. Oddly, my friends who owned the TV didn't seem to see a problem.
Really makes me wonder if TV audiences these days are just conditioned to have such a short attention span and are used to being forced fed suggestions like this. Or perhaps they are so hardened to it that advertising companies have to just blast short messages to them with all the subtlety of a drone strike?
Time for humanity to take control back over their time and attention, otherwise it will just be "All glory to the Hypnotoad"...
> I was astounded at the how banal and low brow most advertising is these days. I seem to remember a time when ads were clever and creative, but the ones I kept seeing with monotonous regularity were nothing more than quick sound bites ordering people to go buy junk or watch more crap.
No, the ads were bad 8 years ago, too. You just remembered the clever ones because they were your only reason to tune in to the Super Bowl.
I blame the news organizations. Self-appointed gatekeepers of truth. I stopped watching mainstream news many years ago, before I lost my TV, because it was so bland and distorted and a tremendous waste of time. Not in a fun way.
And after experiencing several horse races, I decided to stay away from the election news cycle, too. I voted in both the primary and the general, and my choices for both lost, but it was so pleasant to know everything I needed to know about the presidential candidates such a long time in advance.
I am with you. The attention economy has all kinds of unintended side effects that don't seem to have any great solutions.
And its not just advertising most entertainment/propaganda/marketing is designed to just get an instant reaction. No contemplation necessary. Kind of like porn.
And if we have to be honest hacker news is very similar. Nobody needs this much news.
You hit the nail on the head. The ads I saw didn't seem to elicit any thought or feedback or discussion. It was more like "Here - go do/watch this. I'll be back shortly to tell you again soon!". Almost like training a dog. Rote repetition and ever increasing sense of urgency and the fear of missing out.
A clear case of over promising and under delivering - and yet my friends seemed to be content with lapping that up rather than questioning it or making moves to reject it. It really is like those dystopian stories where humans are enslaved by the messages emanating from their TVs. Honestly, I felt like taking a shower after each TV watching session...
I've been home a month now, and not missing having a TV one iota!
~Not having had meat in the house for over 8 years now, I was reintroduced to the world of eating meat during our holidays when we went away for a month and stayed with friends who were avid meat eaters.
~Been that long since I had eaten meat, and I was astounded at the how banal and low brow most meat options are these days. I seem to remember a time when meat meals were clever and creative, but the ones I kept eating with monotonous regularity were nothing more than quick bites causing people to go buy junk or eat more crap.
~Everything was really disjointed and jarring to me - I actually came across a couple of meals that I wanted to eat, but they never seemed to get started - every few minutes there was an interruption telling me what else I "couldn't miss" eating, which are just more meals that will in turn have interruptions to eat other meals. Oddly, my friends who eat meat didn't seem to see a problem.
~Really makes me wonder if meat eaters these days are just conditioned to have such a short attention span and are used to being forced fed suggestions like this. Or perhaps they are so hardened to it that advertising companies have to just blast short messages to them with all the subtlety of a drone strike?
~Time for humanity to take control back over their health and environment, otherwise it will just be "You're vegetarians, who cares what you do?" (o)...
i think steak is gross now and i have friends who have said the idea that they could start to dislike meat, if they stopped eating it, was reason to keep eating it
reminds me of rush, "What you say about his company,
Is what you say about society"(i)
Perhaps, or perhaps I just saw a bad selection and missed the good bits. But overall, my impression was also that the ads of old seemed to explain, or showcase the product in question a little. Current ads seem to sometimes even fail to explain exactly what it is they are selling. The product or message tends to get lost in the panicky sense of urgency and flashy 'in your face' noise and light.
This all may be true, but I think the more fundamental problem is the ignorance of the average American about how their government works. A former Supreme Court justice lays it out in this prescient video from 2012: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWcVtWennr0. People are frustrated with their government but don't understand how to fix it.
The argument he's putting forth is so incredibly vapid and simple-minded that it's a stunning indictment of the lack of vision of a supreme court judge into the American zeitgeist.
Americans understand the basic concept of the vote. A freaking six year old understands it. There are leaders, and they sycophantically grovel for the favor of the public, which the public gives freely in exchange for the politician promising to give them their hearts' desire. And then the public may or may not get what they want. If the politician cannot appropriately explain the reasons for this, they are dumped and the next sycophant is wrung through.
That's about all they know, and all they need to know, because the people should not have to lobby their government in a democracy, the democratic leaders should already know what the people want and achieve it on their behalf, and in general do good for the people. But that is not what happens in America.
Here, our political leaders don't serve the people. And the people know that. But the people can't do anything about it. And the reason they can't do anything about it is the people voted their way into this mess. Trying to vote their way out will just result in exactly the same thing.
What the former Justice is saying is, the biggest problem in politics and public life is people don't understand how the legislative and judicial and executive processes work. But people do not need to know how this works, they merely need to voice their opinions and vote. And half of the people do vote. The other half don't vote either because they can't, or because they know what the result of voting is.
The American democracy in the 20th and 21st century is an artisanal machine which produces a specific output. Votes and labor go in, and money comes out. But the machine is designed to mostly spit out money which can only be used by corporations and rich people; only a small percentage of that comes out in a form usable by the people. The people know their votes are mostly meaningless, but it is their only tangible method left to express their discontent. So they support the system that produces an awful result because it's the only way they can express that the machine produces an awful result.
I think the people see this contradiction, and I think this is why so many do not vote: it's like complaining that your shoe hurts and then putting it on again to see how it will fit.
His point is that if the voters don't have any knowledge about how government works, they can't evaluate (or check) politicians' explanations for the reasons that they did or did not get what they wanted. And the effect of this ignorance is that there's no reason for politicians to be accountable to voters or voters' interests.
With first-past-the-post and no critical thinking in the electorate, "it's the other guys' faults" is an adequate explanation. Unsurprisingly, 98% of Congressional incumbents continue to get re-elected while Congress as a whole has an approval rating in the low teens.
This doesn't sound like a very sound argument at all, though. The people know they are being lied to. What good is it going to do to 'check' the explanations they are given when they know they are false?
Instead of dealing with a liar after they fail to deliver, we have voted in someone we know is lying before they even take office. Trump is a habitual liar, and the only thing that all Trump supporters have in common is that they claim the opposition lies. We've passed the point where being informed will help. We are now in "Fuck it, pass the crytal meth" territory.
Just electing a new president isn't enough to effect change: we saw that with Obama. People need to understand the role of congress as well. This attitude of "we keep electing liars and they keep failing to deliver" shows a poor understanding of how our democracy actually works -- that's the whole point the former justice is trying to make in the video.
Can you help educate me, then? The people vote for representatives. And then....? Exactly what part of the process are people not doing, or not understanding? Is there some extra step involved?
People tell their elected representatives what they want all the time. And people get ignored all the time. This is because the democratic process in our country is not simply citizens and politicians, it is also special interest groups, corporations, and a super-rich class whose interests supercedes the people's. And within the process, there are people who are paid to influence politicians for all sorts of groups, from citizens to corporations to foreign countries. Politicians have to weigh all of this, which is very difficult.
But as far as the citizens, who are the subject of the justice's comments, are concerned, they only need to vote. Requiring all the citizens to be involved in political action committes just to, for example, retain their basic civil liberties or stay out of foreign wars for oil, is ridiculous. So, what is it i'm missing?
The people vote for representatives. And then....?
The next step is to watch what your representative is actually doing, let them know if you disagree with it, and vote them out if they consistently act against your interests. Most people don't call members of congress very often, and when they do, things do happen.
You can look at the recent news about the House Ethics Committee for an example: “I can tell you the calls we’ve gotten in my district office and here in Washington surprised me, meaning the numbers of calls. People are just sick and tired,” Rep. Walter B. Jones (R-N.C.) said of the simmering outrage over the proposed change. “People are just losing confidence in the lack of ethics and honesty in Washington.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/gop-to-start-on-amb...)
If you attempt to call your representative's office in DC, either nobody will pick up, or someone will pick up just long enough to quickly talk loudly over you and tell you they do not take calls about your district's issues there, and to call your district's home office.
So you try to find a number for your home district office. If you can find it and call it and try to talk to someone, you will usually either be put on hold, or they will try to find someone for you to talk to, who usually won't be there. So they take a message. The message, written on a post-it note, is filed under "feedback", and not looked at again unless they need to compile a list of popular talking points.
If you are seriously involved in local politics, there are opportunities to meet them in person and tell them about your issue. People with enough time to travel to where their rep is just to tell them how they feel are called "people with no life", unless they do it for a living, in which case they are called "lobbyists". But lobbyists talk with green pieces of paper, and reps hear that a lot louder than people in their district complaining to an intern on the phone.
Yes, it's true that enough vocal opposition can turn a rep toward doing what people want. But it takes too much time and energy and special attention and focus to constantly have to hammer one specific point home to a rep just to get them to do what they said they were going to when you elected them. If they are doing the people's will, usually they lose their re-election funding, or are undone by their party's political machine, or a different one.
The best you can ever hope for is that your party, who is not in the majority, will back your rep, who is not the head of any important congressional committee, on an issue that is against the interests of people with a lot more money and influence than you, so that someone can say they tried to pass a bill. All of that hinging literally on the word of a stranger who told you they'd give you everything you want if you would just give them a job and trust them.
The ethics committe thing is a good example. Everyone, on both sides of the aisle, got flooded with calls because the very superficial idea of limiting or removing an ethics committee seems like a bad idea. What it turned out to be was newly elected officials trying to remove roadblocks to getting changes made so they could reform the system, but people are reactionary and stupid, and that change sounded bad, so they stopped it. What's funny is the party leaders who had been there forever predicted that reaction and told the junior members not to vote that way, because they're good at reading popular sentiment and predicting reaction. Now the old stalwarts look good and the newly elected reps look bad. All because citizens got involved in politics.
> because the people should not have to lobby their government in a democracy, the democratic leaders should already know what the people want and achieve it on their behalf.
I'd agree that people aren't any less knowledgeable now as they were as the former justice describes 'in his day'. I'd even give that it's not the most pressing issue, however, I think it's a far cry to expect a politician just inherently want to/do good for the people.
Any system left unchecked gets warped. It's just as much the citizen's civic duty to pay attention as it is the politician's to do good for the people.
I'm not an American and I don't really understand why you say this. Only a small percentage that the machine produces comes out in a form usable by non-rich people? Then what's, for example, Obamacare, which seems to be a system that finally resembles how health insurance works in many European countries? And isn't that same Obamacare under fire by lots of people who think that the machine shouldn't support the people and that everybody needs to support themselves instead of taking a piece of tax money?
Obama care removed some barriers for those with pre existing conditions and forced young healthy people to sign up to pay for it under threat of tax penalty, it didn't collectively negotiate drug prices with insurance companies or provide universal coverage, the way UK, Canada, etc do.
No, Obamacare only pretends to resemble European-style healthcare. In fact, it merely forces everyone to sign up with private health insurance companies. Which still take their huge profits.
This is how healthcare is set up in Switzerland and the Netherlands.
It is just an implementation issue how payments (through tax or otherwise) are routed. In a system that involves market forces, the key thing is that if everybody is insured, including the healthy, the cost per person comes down.
Yes, and private health insurance companies have profits so huge that they're pulling out of the insurance markets left and right and saying "sorry, we're just not interested in this business anymore!" Arizona's had it worst – many places there are on their last insurer – but that's just a taste of the phenomenon.
The premium hikes are paying for the treatment of the "uninsurable" and chronically ill. Even the profitable for-profit insurers are only running margins of 3%, maybe 4% in a good year. You could turn them all nonprofit and it wouldn't really help premiums. (And people tried! Look at the health-care co-op collapses in Colorado, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, New York, Nevada and Tennessee, and Oregon, as well!)
If we want to compare apples to apples, national healthcare doesn't work in Europe. It works in a variety of individual countries within Europe, some of which are imperiled. (And Canada has a population a tenth the size of the US.) Some of those countries have culturally homogenous well-educated populations smaller than the United States illegal immigrant population, so there's a demographic difference. That said...
Euro health care, writ large, works in the sense that "this is a substantial tax on our national incomes and possibly contributes to an economy which continues to suffer low growth rates and youth unemployment rates regularly in excess of 25% – and given the Euro crisis on top of that there may be some ugly cuts in the future, especially in places that aren't Germany." (Canada's health care at least has less of that problem.)
These national health care systems generally deal with cost control for the chronically ill and the elderly by rationing care through waiting lists for various operations... or, in the case of the Netherlands, by building a culture which pushes the elderly into assisted suicide.
(This is as opposed to the US who has historically dealt with them by making them pay for their own care, but has recently switched to dealing with them by hiking everyone's health care premiums to the point of unaffordability.)
Don't think I'm pitching solutions here!! I've just got buckets of cynicism for everyone!
> Some of those countries have culturally homogenous well-educated populations smaller than the United States illegal immigrant population, so there's a demographic difference.
Dogwhistle for "can't have nice things because blacks". Notwithstanding the relative homogeneity of their populations (the US is well down the list BTW), what difference should it make?
> Dogwhistle for "can't have nice things because blacks"
Eh. To constrain it deliberately to white people, think "established prosperous modern family, maybe WASPs or atheists, living in the Washington, D.C. suburbs with two stable incomes, commute on the Metro" vs, oh, "army veteran in a community in rural Appalachia which is reeling from the end of coal mining and wreaked by both prescription painkiller abuse and obesity, heavy smoker... local no-name church is the main community center ... considering a job driving a truck."
"Inner city African-American community" or not is but a small portion of this class of differences. Copenhagen vs Aeroskobing is a smaller gap than New York City vs Beards Fork, WV.
Except that's not how Obamacare works at all! It involves an expansion to Medicaid and Medicare, which are huge failures, and the forcing of healthy Americans into the health insurance market. In fact it has nothing to do with healthcare at all; it only has to do with health "insurance" as if by forcing more money into the system we'll somehow fix it. Because what the American health insurance industry - of which a very small part is healthcare, since even hospitals are putting most of their effort into getting as much money out of the public and private "insurance" schemes as possible - really needs to be "fixed" is more money! I use scare wires around "fixed" because, from the point of view of those running it, the health insurance industry is better than it's ever been.
In very general terms, the majority of the American populace does not think about politics in terms of rhetoric. They think in terms of jobs, moral values, and pride. You can see this in every corner of American life, in the highly educated upper classes and the poor, in the suburbs and the inner cities and rural farms.
Things like "Obamacare" don't mean anything to them. It's just some crap the people on the TV talk about. If it can be explained to them in a way that it's anti-job, anti-moral-values and anti-pride, they will vote against it. And vice versa.
But the major problem with the system here is most people find Congress and politics in America in general to be corrupt. That's why they elected Trump. He's not a politician. He's so far not a politician that half of the people who voted for him don't agree with what he says. But he said he would get them jobs. And support their moral values. And re-instill their pride in America. That is all they want, and he says he will give it to them, so they vote for him. In this way, they understand perfectly how the American political system works.
Obamacare was a pet project of a particular group's vote (again, people voted and they got what they wanted, essentially). But Obamacare can be dismantled over the same amount of time it was put into place. It has nothing to do with the American political machine's output; it was more of an accident.
In general, the political landscape here is very opposed to socialist programs like this. Medicare and Medicaid were extremely controversial in their time in the 60's - people went much crazier over the idea of those than Obamacare. But Republicans (who are the primary opposition to these programs) have actually expanded them over time. It's best not to think about how the machine works. Social programs are a red herring. Logically, a large group of people paying into a system that would lower your health care costs and save you money would be a boon, but it isn't seen this way here. It won't grow your wallet as quickly and simply as a tax cut.
Honestly, the details of each party's arguments are immaterial. Each party makes promises and people vote primarily with their wallets in mind. The idea that they would receive less money or pay more tax is inconcievable, partly because of how low wages and savings are and how high student loans are and how the economy has tanked etc etc. Every year, the rich (and corporations) get richer while the people do not. That's the big pink elephant everyone is aware of, and they know voting won't change anything, but they have no other choices.
The machine produces money in different forms, and the form made for the consumption of the general public is regulated to be very small. Most of it goes to corporations and the rich. I don't think people have really grasped this concept, and so they can't really attempt to change it. So their votes continue to not count for much, which they recognize, so they don't vote.
In the past, the machine worked differently. Instead of votes and labor, it was "empire" and labor that produced money, and because "empire" involved looting other lands that the people didn't live in, they kind of reaped the benefits. There was more money to go around, so people didn't notice how small a part of the pie they really got, or they were just socially conditioned to it with things like class rule.
In an American Democracy, we removed the old class rule and replaced it with a system of voting for a group of individuals who would maintain the illusion of a lack of class rule, as a sort of proxy for the upper class. It works really well because nobody seriously talks about reform or rebellion here. Theoretically, it is completely possible for the people to self-determine huge shifts in how the country works. That somehow frees us up to not care that we don't actually control how the country works. (We technically do, but in practice the rich and corporations who use the political puppet proxies to administrate the nation are actually in control)
I apologize for rambling. I don't get to talk politics much.
the even more relevant problem is the ignorance of the average American about how their banking system works, especially as it quietly steals over decades the marginal value of the working person's dollar and throws it in huge chunks at the feet of the 1% - bankers, through first crack at low interest rates and other more blatant mechanisms like TARP, government contractors, scientific researchers who get to exercise patents on what they're already being paid to do by the public. Of course the government throws some of the most impoverished a bone (with lots of paperwork) and 'redistributes' using taxation to keep the illusion that they are doing something about it.
Jack Ma is very protective like China, if Americans / rest of the world was like that, chances were unlikely that China could grew so much.
Also, by any measures, China is cheating right now and trying to minimize the capital bubble risk created by the government ( loans that are not payed back with worthless warranties eg. Failed buildings, subsidized shipping, manipulated / protected stocks,... ). Let's see what the future brings.
PS. If downvoted, please explain why and if you have ever travelled to China :)
It's always about the choice between short-term vs long-term benefits, or between us and them, or rich and poor. When people don't act as if other people (or even themselves, in the future) are connected to them, they make bad choices in the long term. On personal terms it's a battle between temptation and moral action.
It's basically a problem of strategy in games (here, the game being well-being). There are two main strategies: optimize for low level features (immediate benefit) or high-level features (what you should do in order to succeed). Companies battle the same choices, often very rich and successful ones optimizing for short term instead of long term, as if they expect to close shop in a few years.
The main purpose of politics should be to balance the focus between short and long term strategies, but short term relies on corruption and long term on consciousness, so it's an uphill battle. It's also called principle of "delayed gratification" - few can handle the rigors of it.
With the new Trump administration we should prepare for a lot of short-term based choices that ignore the long-term consequences.
He is not a neutral source of information, but his views might be interesting to read because of his unique bias. He has a perspective on the world which is very different from most other sources I read.
The idea that the US's economic problems are due to war expenditures is just plain silly.
The economic golden age for the US was during the cold war, when the country spent 6-10% of its gdp on the military. Then the cold war ended, and military expenditures have been below 4% most of the time, but the US economy has done worse. Oh, and China has boomed at the same time it has been engaging in a huge, expensive military modernization program.
I am not saying high military expenditures produce economic prosperity, just that they don't prevent it (unless they are much higher, as the Soviet Union's were).
So... hindsight is 50/50. Anyone can look back and say what someone shouldnt have done and be "correct" but other action would have resulted in a different unknown outcome.
It is cool that theres a dialogue about this at such a forum and spearheaded by a respected individual, but its nowhere near new information. Without an alternative its also just non-constructive criticism.
I don't know if "free market actors" is exactly the right way to describe the two things he talks about. War is certainly not a function of the market, Wall Street is kind of a grey area that uses the language of free markets to describe something that is an odd state-empowered cartel. Clearly the bailout was not a "free market" event.
So...I don't think he is implicitly or explicitly saying anything about China's authoritarian regime. It wasn't free markets that lost the money he's speaking of. And, there wasn't a trade of that money for political freedoms and economic opportunities. The American people just got a bad deal out of their government and their financiers. They didn't buy freedom with that money, they just got fleeced.
He is not comparing China or any other specific country to the US. He is giving his views on where the US could have done better.
Yes, you should read this in the light of him being a successful Chinese businessman, but he is not saying that Chinese people live better than US people.
I think it might be much more than $2 trillion the US spent on wars. Remember Sept 10th 2001? Donald Rumsfeld said on this day, they can't find out how they spent $2.3 trillion.
This is the thinking of someone that lives in a country with a philosophy that puts country before individuals.
By almost every and any measure, we are all better off than 30, 40 or 50 years ago - Chinese, Americans, Indians, Europeans, almost everyone. There IS a subset within those places that has benefited less, or even gone backwards, no doubt.
But even for those people, what is the economic value of the wonders of the modern, internet and mobile phone age? When for the cost of an internet connection, people have access to millions of free flash games? Is that a better life than 1970s Harlem? I'm not sure either way, but it is a lot closer run thing that life is worse for the "losers" of globalization than people realize, and that is the comparison for the small minority that have missed out in the modern world, not the mean or median experience.
The only way people are worse off is if they compare the best of 1960s living - e.g. have only the husband work, own a 4 bedroom house in the burbs, make a decent salary without a degree - and ignore the things missing that are present in the modern lifestyle. Because in the 1960/70/80s west, people ate only basic food (nothing "foreign" like Thai or Indian), very few had cable TV, and went out at most once a week to the movies. They never bought an espresso, never owned a modern electronic device like a computer, never got to use the internet to settle an argument or play a computer game, unless they were extremely well off and got to play Pong circa say 1980.
If that sounds like a life people prefer - a big house, no lifestyle, no electronics, basic cable if lucky and only white people food - then I reckon most people could live like that even today if they so chose. But man, that isn't a life I'd be happy with. Not even slightly.
If that is "losing" - better lifestyle, better food, better (and cheaper) entertainment and slightly smaller living conditions and more people working, man, "winning" would have been insanely good.
We eat less fresh food, we are less healthy, we are less happy, we are less able to go out in the woods or to the beach, because the woods have been logged or otherwise privatised in such a way that they are no longer accessible
. The products we own and buy are of lower quality, they break more quickly. But that lower quality has not caused their price to drop tremendously. There are fewer Americans with the capital to sustain themselves, aka fewer small business owners who are able to make a living without having to find employment from some larger firm. And that directly results in reduced freedom for everyone, because there is less choice both in the employment sector and in the sector of choosing who you buy from.
And the only thing you have to offer is shitty cat videos with 30 second advertizements before 2 minutes of user created content.
Oh, and your stupid GDP. You know what the GDP measures? It is value transfer economics. It measures how many times money passed back and forth between two parties. If there weren't taxes you and I could spend all day passing $20 bills back and forth and our collective GDP would be higher than that of Switzerland. Completely meaningless number.
Ah nostalgia. Lower quality products? Let's just look at cars: the Pinto, the various AMC junk heaps; even my beloved first car, a VW Beetle (1969). All were horrible compared to what is available for today.
Let's look at PCs. I bought an Apple ][c in 1984 for $1400. That's almost $3300 adjusted for inflation. And that was a POS compared to what you can get for $300 today.
Culture? Let's look at what most people considered culture; TV. There were 3 main channels, all showing the same type of monolithic news, and sitcoms that were horrible. Today we have a multiverse of shows that inform and entertain. Yes, there's still crap on the tube, but you have far more options.
Education? When I graduated, college was for the highest achievers. Today, everyone is expected to go, and it's far easier to attend.
Race relations? We have a long long way to go, but compared to the early 70's? Racism was just the way things were then; America was extremely whitebread.
Acceptance? I had a friend hang himself in high school because he couldn't deal with the pressures of being in the closet. Today, we still have a long ways to go with LGBTq affairs, but we've progressed a lot.
Nostalgia is warm and fuzzy, but it puts blinders on us.
I dissagree. I know of a number of famillies who used to have a small business, grow their own veggitables, and sell some vegitables on the side. However, the price of food, and the simple services of that these people provided has dropped, due to mass production, and those famillies were forced by lack of money, to change their lifestyles. They had to either sell land or take up a full time job elsewhere which meant that they no longer had time to live the way they used to.
And even if it is caused by choice, I still think that it is better to look at reality than to look at choice. For example, during the totalitarian "comunist" state in the Czech Republic (I live here now) there were many free or low cost oportunities to join youth groups and play sports, go sking ect. and yet people still felt very restricted in their ability to do activities they enjoyed. It was illegal to "gather" in any more than a small number of people, and so planning a hiking trip with your friends could get you a visit from the secret police. Isn't it mearly a matter of choice that many people chose to skirt the law, rather than taking advantage of the many publicly planned youth outings?
The price of food has dropped, but the price of fresh food has risen.
If you live in LA, unless you have the time to go out to one of the farmers markets, its not even possible to buy fresh food. The "fresh" food in the stores isn't fresh. It is usually weeks or even months old. Sometimes it has been on a ship across the ocean stored in a special atmosphere, maybe it "looks fresh" but it isn't. I grew up in Seattle, things are a bit better there, but you still have to drive out of your way to find fresh food. The concept of fresh and the concept of supermarket are just incompatible.
But as you said, fresh food is available in farmer's markets. And if the price of fresh food has risen, it should be possible to make a living growing and selling it.
Except that the majority of people don't seek out fresh food.
It might be possible to make a living growing and selling it, but it is actually quite unrealistic that a sizable portion of the population could choose to start doing so. %100 of the land in the US is owned now. Its not like the fronteir days when anyone who wanted to start a farm could just go out west. If 1 million americans wanted to start a fresh foods farm within driving distance of a city, that wouldn't be possible. The price of land would skyrocket. And that would only be one third of one percent of all Americans. Not even a significant shift. What if 20 or 30 million Americans wanted to make that transition. Is that economically possible in todays world? What if the government were to give anyone who wanted to start a familly farm a million dollars to buy land. Would it be possible then? I don't think so. I think that it isn't about choice. I think that it is litterally impossible for our society to change without the fundamental ideas regarding property rights or urbanization changing.
"So it's not lack of land that stopped them." You're missing a sense of timescale here. For a long time the number of familly farms has been decreasing all across the country. Recently, it has become possible to make a living selling fresh food if you live within driving distance of a city where you can sell the food for a premium. The high cost of a fresh head of letuce in LA in 2016-17 doesn't help a small time farmer in rural Colorado in the 90s.
That's true. It is a good question. And its the question we should be asking. We should be trying to debug this problem, rather than pretending that it is a non-problem.
I personally don't see my own anti-capitalistic views as being a matter of politics or political direction. I see the problems posed as being similar to aging or the need to find better forms of transportation. No one argues that aging is good. Everyone agrees that the outcome of aging is bad, people get slower, less inteligent, suffer and die. That is bad... I see the current outcome of American globalist capitalism to be similar. Obviously, the outcome sucks. Most people are unhealthy, unhappy, there are advertizements everywhere, we are destroying the earth, and living in smelly toxic concrete filled cities. I'm not a communist, or a socialist, or a progressive, I'm an engineer who is baffled by a huge problem that I don't know how to solve. I am totally baffled by the huge number of people who seem to question whether these problems are real. Its like if this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13419352 was full of people writing that "well you can point to some problems with aging, but really, we're all better off getting old and dying". My response would be similar, it would be like WTF? I don't have a solution to American corporate globalism and the problems it causes, I don't have a solution to aging either, but I want a solution to both.
You are also not the OP who I origionally responded to. thisnotmyacc wrote "By almost every and any measure, we are all better off than 30, 40 or 50 years ago - Chinese, Americans, Indians, Europeans, almost everyone." And that is pretending we have a non-problem and that our society is functional.
Edit:
I think that it is worse than just a problem with human nature. As I wrote, previously, I think it is economically non-possible for Americans to choose to go back to growing local food. %100 land is owned, and most owners are not selling, the price of land is high, and most Americans cannot afford to buy that land. Perhaps charging large farms land rent (aka, only charging land rent to large corporations) would help https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism but I'm not sure if I believe that democracy is capable of implementing any sort of reform non-corruptly.
I think we're talking about different things. You're talking about being self-sufficient small farmers; I'm just talking about eating healthy and exercising.
People could certainly choose to do that if they wanted to.
I don't think that they could. Because in order to be able to buy fresh food, you need a suply of fresh food, and where is that fresh food going to come from, if not from small time farmers? And if it is impossible for a large number of people to become small time farmers, then if more people choose to eat fresh, the price of fresh food will only rise to the point where they no longer have the choice to do so.
That society telling you that staying in your couch watching TV is is good. Proof: it feels good, and everybody does it so it must be. And I spend much hours at a job, so I better use these dollars.
Oh, and American capitalism has promised us hoverboards, moon colonies, AI that can talk to me and make me feel loved, and a cure for cancer. None of that has come about.
>> "people ate only basic food (nothing "foreign" like Thai or Indian), very few had cable TV, and went out at most once a week to the movies. They never bought an espresso[...]"
So your argument is that getting to eat foreign foods, watch cable TV, go to the movies more often and drink espresso is much better than owning a house, not having a mountain of student debt, and having a well paid, secure job? Don't forget that most people don't have savings and when they lose their job (which happens often these days) it can take a long time to find a new one. Often too long. Most people would prefer the security of the past than the foreign foods and espresso of the future and if it was 1960 and you explained to me that was our future I wouldn't believe it could get that bad.
That's a really crap excuse for inequality. The rising tide of technology has lifted all boats, but the political and economic system has systematically neglected working people. Fairness and technological progress aren't mutually incompatible. We don't have a choice between 1960s society and modern life, but a choice between modern life in an unfair system and modern life in a fair one.
Inequality on the other hand is quite a natural concept, as in you see it everywhere in nature and the universe.
There is no known process happening in nature that is trying to achieve "fairness".
Temporary stability and equilibrium on the other hand is achievable. And technological progress is naturally inequality increasing/destabilizing to such systems.
Tigers in nature don't just grow sharper claws or canines to be "disruptive". It happens only in response to an increase in the number of prey. Which usually happens in response to more grass on the plains. Which is in response to more rains and so on.
If the tiger starts evolving hunting efficiency at a faster rate than the deer evolves defensive features like speed, hearing etc the tiger will kill more and the entire system will soon breakdown. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVOHgztZ3XI
So to say "fairness and technological progress aren't mutually incompatible" is just not true.
What's imaginary is the idea that competitive advantage is always a good thing. The reality - as you say - is that too much competitive advantage leads inevitably to logistic collapse.
In humanity's case, the logistic collapse regularly leads to cultural extinction, and it's not impossible now for it to lead to physical extinction too.
The real problem is that competitive advantage is a very poor substitute for collective intelligence. we have an economy of competitive individualism, but we've yet to imagine an intelligence economy where growth is explicitly measured in increased collective insight and foresight.
So what you are saying is that some humans are tigers and some are their preys.
Humans: the first massively cannibal species.
In fact, most developed mammals develop societies and specially in many apes these are quite egalitarian. In the same way as developing tools and understanding nature in order to adapt to it was key to the success of humans, I believe that the ability to cooperate and to feel for each-other via empathy is key as well.
Your mechanistic view of evolution and nature disregards all social aspects of human existence. It is unscientific and and excuse to support oppressive systems and the predatory behaviors that are putting the planet and humans themselves at risk.
Nature does not "disrupt", nature adapts and evolves. It creates symbiotic systems that enable long processes in which life, this weird mechanism constantly energy into movement, can happen. It created humans, with the abilities to discern, associate, help each other and pursue happiness. Your cannibalistic view of society is not gonna remove our "natural" thrive to build societies worth living in from the rest of us.
I was responding to "fairness" and technological progress being able to exist side by side.
To talk about achieving fairness one must first accept it is a story we tell ourselves. A story that we collectively hardly ever agree upon and a story that needs improving.
There is nothing unscientific about that (which is why I posted the link) and there isn't any reason to feel insecure about it. Only after accepting that can the story improve.
In the 60s things were pretty awesome. Gas, cars, housing and tuition were all way cheaper. Minimum wage was about $20/hr in inflation adjusted dollars. Labour unions were strong, there was a labour shortage. You could show up in a new city with $20 in your pocket and have a decent job and a place to live by the end of the week. A high school education was enough to for one person to comfortably raise a family of 4. Obesity rates were 1/4 what they are today. Life was so fucking easy the hippies happened, because you could literally just drop out and everything would be okay.
China, who asks not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country has lifted 650 million people out of extreme poverty in the last quarter century and raised the average wage 5x. America is in far too much a state of clusterfuck to be criticizing China for any reason, they've got their shit together and we need to go to rehab. Take the reigns, China, you guys are the global superpower now, your nation is run by engineers and ours is run by a demagogue and various special interest groups.
> China, who asks not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country
China doesn't ask, China tells you. And if you don't like it, well, too bad. If you really don't like it, they have plenty of prisons you can rot in forever, or until your organs are harvested and sold.
> your nation is run by engineers
No, it's run by corrupt, unelected insiders who don't give a damn about freedom (speech, religion, assembly - take your pick) the environment, or much else than maintaining their positions and enriching themselves through shady deals and helping out their friends.
Those are certainly examples of countries that have gone backwards in income and life expectancy over some of the recent years. However, the vast majority of countries have seen huge increases in average income and life expectancy over the last 100 years, 50 years, etc.
All 3 of those countries have experienced civil wars. I don't think that disproves GP's point.
Also, how does the west benefit from instability? This kind of thing is said by conspiracy theorists a lot but it's never made sense to me. Less oil, natural gas and other exports.
I think the basic point of the article is that "the west" is not benefiting from the choices it makes.
It's like asking how the prisoner's benefit in the prisoner's dilemma. They each try to maximise their own utility and in doing so, because of the way the system is set up, they do worse than if they had co-operated.
I'm pretty sure the point made wasn't that the west benefits from the instability in that region, but that western policies have caused, or at least made worse, that instability. Which one may or may not agree with, but I think one should address the actual argument being made.
It's hard to link American foreign policy to American economic policy, though. Iraq wasn't about oil (this time at least, I don't know anything about the Gulf War) and neither were Libya or Syria. Perhaps the argument is that rich countries can afford to go on overseas adventures, though? That perhaps if America were poorer she'd spend more time cleaning her house and less time making a mess of other people's?
I don't buy it. American intervention is down from it's glory days :/ of the '60s and '70s, violent deaths are down worldwide, and other countries are getting rich along with the US.
(Now that I reread the above comments, I guess it's more likely the point was just that "We should also mention a negative thing about America for balance," in which case this is all just argument for argument's sake.)
According to Wikipedia[1], the biggest U.S. arms companies employ ~700.000 people, so I don't think you need to be a conspiracy theorist when you deduct from this that, if world peace were to settle to the globe it would mean less jobs for the people, less tax income for the government and less profit for the industry. Although most of the sales for these companies come from the U.S. government, according to TIME the export business isn't exactly pocket-change either[2].
> the biggest U.S. arms companies employ ~700.000 people
Which is about one-half of Walmart's employee base, but the USA doesn't base its foreign policy on the whims of the Walton family.
What's more persuasive about the military-industrial-government complex is that most of its leaders emerged from the same universities and think-tanks. Essentially they share the same viewpoints and philosophies and can pull the appropriate levers in the domains that the control and they freely move from one domain to another.
> Which is about one-half of Walmart's employee base,
This doesn't take away the fact that there is interest in having these companies operating in the future.
> but the USA doesn't base its foreign policy on the whims of the Walton family.
If by "the USA" you mean the government, yes you are right, because it doesn't have to. Companies as big as Walmart, Lockheed Martin, McDonald's are fully capable of influencing the 'outside world' by their own means.
" we are all better off than 30, 40 or 50 years ago - Chinese, Americans, Indians, Europeans, almost everyone."
Health isn't one area .. "Public health experts say the rising white death rate reflects a broader health crisis, one that has made the United States the least healthy affluent nation in the world over the past 20 years." ~ http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2016/04/10/a-new-d...
I think I have a bit more of a globalist perspective. I understand that incomes in the West have stagnated, but hundreds of millions of people across the world have risen out of poverty. It helps that my wife is Chinese and I've seen first hand the incredible transformation of that country. Looking at the world as a whole, the situation for the majority of the population is vastly better now than it was back in the 70s and 80s. It's almost miraculous.
Could the West have done anything different to preserve or advance worker incomes? I really don't think so. In theory all those manufacturing jobs in China could have been kept in the US or Europe, but I don't think that would actually have made anyone better off. The goods produced that way would have cost a lot more, to the workers as well as everyone else. Trade barriers are a conscious decision to make your economy less efficient and raise costs for all of the population in order to subsidize a few. It's not as if everyone working in manufacturing in the West became unemployed either - unemployment is no higher than it was in the 80s and the employment rate is actually higher.
As for the crash in 2008, yes it sucked but I believe it was inevitable. Where was the political pressure to reduce mortgage lending before 2008? Where was the popular pressure to reduce mortgage relief and reign back loans to home buyers that would have prevented the sub-prime crisis? There wasn't any. Instead all the popular and political pressure was on relaxing loan criteria, opening up access to 105% mortgages and expanding access to credit. The banks were doing exactly what the people and their elected leaders were demanding that they do. That doesn't excuse any wrong-doing or relieve anyone of responsibility for their actions, but lets be realistic. All the popular pressure was leaning hard towards boosting the credit bubble and an eventual collapse. Bank leaders should have better managed their portfolios and more responsibly managed their risks, but that would have at best delayed the inevitable.
So yes, the Dick "Deficits don't matter" Cheney attitude cost the USA a lot and exacerbated the bubble and it's collapse, but the wars are really a footnote to the overall economic picture at the 30 year level. The global economy and expanded and diversified. We live in a world with dramatically less poverty than 30 years ago. In 1981 52% of the world lived in poverty, now it's 22%. That's a stunning achievement.
> I think I have a bit more of a globalist perspective. I understand that incomes in the West have stagnated, but hundreds of millions of people across the world have risen out of poverty.
This line is pure propaganda. And you've internalized and are now repeating it as your own.
The propaganda contains a false assumption. That for people in China to not be totally poor the working/middle class in the US need to regress economically. Note the very wealthy got wealthier at the same time incomes stagnated for everyone else. And economic security declined.
> That for people in China to not be totally poor the working/middle class in the US need to regress economically.
I clearly, explicitly stated that I don't think that's the case.
I don't think the rise of China has really cost much in the way of working/middle class incomes. I think that's largely due to increasing automation, but rising inequality is certainly part of the equation.
"By almost every and any measure, we are all better off than 30, 40 or 50 years ago - Chinese, Americans, Indians, Europeans, almost everyone. There IS a subset within those places that has benefited less, or even gone backwards, no doubt."
I think you could doubt this for European and Americans. Yes, you have scientific progress. You can afford a hand-held super computer now. You can afford a car with 150 HP. You may get treatment for a disease that would have killed you 30 years ago. But:
- 50% youth unemployment rate in Spain?
- Out of control house prices due to asset price inflation?
- Central Banks Zero interest rates with unknown consequences.
- And ever rising retirement age due to basically bankrupt retirement funds (yes, we live longer too)
- Out of control health care costs in the US
- Totally out of control big brother regulations
Once you were able to buy a house, a car, health insurance and raise kids with a single income.
You're attacking a straw man. Jack Ma didn't say that things have gotten worse, only that we've engaged in unwise actions. I think that's certainly true. Our lives today may be good, but they would be so much better if we hadn't spent $2T fighting wars in the middle East.
You obviously weren't around in the 70s. Here are a few corrections (there are more, obviously),
>Because in the 1960/70/80s west, people ate only basic food (nothing "foreign" like Thai or Indian),
#We often used to eat Chinese food, Indian food and Italian food in the early 70s. I also remember eating Lebanese fast food occasionally too. We lived close to a Chinese restaurant but preferred a takeaway in the next suburb.
>very few had cable TV, and went out at most once a week to the movies.
#I went out to the movies more then than I did now. I remember seeing Stat Wars, ET, Close Encounters and a host of other movies. However, this is an odd measure of happiness in my view.
>They never bought an espresso, never owned a modern electronic device like a computer,
# seriously? The Commodore PET and a few other home computers were around in the 70s.
>never got to use the internet to settle an argument or play a computer game, unless they were extremely well off and got to play Pong circa say 1980.
#Read up on BBS culture (bulletin boards). Plenty of average joes were on there (girls and guys in case you were wondering). I met many women face to face through BBS boards back then. Early nerd girls were fantastic, like my wife!
Now let me give you some examples of modern culture.
1. My local paper has only had one picture of a boy in the last few months (vs dozens of girls). In the 70s, this was always balanced in my local paper and would have been labelled as extremely sexist but no longer is labelled as sexist. Yes, I have hundreds of archived photos from the 70s to prove it. I understand this imbalance is now called "equality" when it's a significantly skewed ratio, according to the overwhelming majority of MSM (media).
2. People could be whatever they want, not this modern politically correct horse shit that encourages extreme sexism.
3. The media in the 70s would never point the finger at little boys being the root cause of domestic violence (see 1800 respect, a government Department who saturated prime time TV with aggressive ads to bully young boys in a manner that shocked most non-sexist people I have spoken to), nor would people in the 70s refuse to acknowledge male victims and female perpetrators of crimes. Yet, it's common today.
4. An average guy (eg. Matt Taylor) would never have been viciously attacked by the media (like The Verge) for wearing a shirt designed by a woman in the 70s. There are plenty of examples of similar aggressive and unfounded attacks in the last 10 years in MSM, all targeting one gender.
I could raise many more points about how screwed up and aggressively sexist we've become. Culturally, the 70s had many advantages over today that are far more important than something flippant like an espresso machine.
In the 70s: Tolerance was ahead of today (look at 70s ads on YouTube for some examples. I really like "care for kids" and "life be in it" as examples of excellent diversity and inclusiveness, despite accusations to the contrary by a very dishonest gender based group starting with F (as in F for fallacy). Social freedom was ahead of today. Open a newspaper from the 70s and you will see far more open mindedness and far less sexism than you do today. It saddens me when I look back because I realise many of the social freedoms we've lost.
No generation is perfect, but, the last 10 years have been terrible for freedom, respect and sexism. I can't think of a decade that comes even close to the lows of today. See code.org and find me an educational institution in the last 50 years that was even close to that sexist. I'm yet to find one, despite code.org toning down the sexism significantly in the last six months. It's still worse than anything from the 70s/80s/90s that I have found.
Our bureaucratic programs at home are enough to dig us into a deep financial hole (war-mongering wasn't the source of Greece's problems), but with the added trillions wasted on building old weapons to perpetually blow up and rebuild bridges (not to mention the magnitude of the atrocities committed by the US), we are truly buried financially.
He probably doesn't even know about the CIA's less publicized warfare in Central/South America and the financial/other consequences of the drug war on our own citizens and especially on our neighbors.