9 ms·

It's always interesting to see rich liberal cities like San Francisco because there is really no middle class. You are either making lots of money in IT or som

• godzillabrennus 11y ago
  Detroit is a city historically run by Democrats and is a very affordable. Chicago is relatively affordable and historically is run by Democrats. There will continue to be going to be growing levels of income inequality as automation continues to increase. Either we focus on solving that (Minimal Viable Income sounds like a plan) or we face a true million man March on DC. Something has to change.
  • gedy 11y ago
    Problem with these "million man marches", and other mass movements is, even when they are successful, one oppressive elite is just replaced by another.
    • ajmurmann 11y ago
      Even more reason to preempt it.
  • masterleep 11y ago
    Detroit is more or less a smoking crater at the moment, and Chicago is a smoking crater to come. For that you can thank the wise, forward-thinking stewardship of the Democrats.
    • godzillabrennus 11y ago
      In Chicago and it's far from a smoking crater to come. The university system is great and let's not forget that Ruby on Rails was born here.
      • brobinson 11y ago
        DHH lived in Denmark when he created the first version of Rails. He didn't move to the US until the end of 2005. He was employed by a Chicago-based company, though.
        • sotojuan 11y ago
          He still is but he lives in Spain now.
          • brobinson 11y ago
            By "was" I meant "was at the time" (in regards to when Rails was created). Interesting that he left for Spain. I did not know that!
      • vibrato 11y ago
        Let's hope the universities don't shut down, then. That certainly wouldn't bode well for the surging homicide rate.
    • SwellJoe 11y ago
      That's a simplistic interpretation of the facts. Detroit is a burned out shell of a city for a wide variety of reasons; very few of those reasons have much to do with local politicians. Trade agreements at the national level probably tell as much of the story as any individual element. But, strategic failures of US car makers also plays a role. And, a rapidly evolving global economic environment also plays a role. Certainly there has been mismanagement of the city of Detroit, sometimes on an absurd and possibly criminal scale. But, to chalk it all of to "Democrats did this" is...well, it leaves a whole lot of the story out. Note that I'm not a Democrat and not defending politicians in any general case. But, I do think it's silly to make the claim that local Democrats caused Detroit's decline, when there are clearly so many other factors in the story.
      • ScottBurson 11y ago
        Okay, but isn't it fair to say that making the unions too powerful was a key part of the story? That ultimately greatly damaged Detroit's ability to compete on the world stage. Not to say that the automakers weren't also badly run -- they were. There's an NPR piece about NUMMI that puts some great color on the situation -- ah, here it is [0]. See especially "Act Two", where GM completely muffs bringing the NUMMI success to the rest of the company. [0] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/561/transcript http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/561/t...
      • ktRolster 11y ago
        Certainly there has been mismanagement of the city of Detroit, sometimes on an absurd and possibly criminal scale. But, to chalk it all of to "Democrats did this" is...well, it leaves a whole lot of the story out. That's true, because if mismanagement caused a city to collapse, then San Francisco would be a ghost town by now. There are stinky things in city hall.
    • spamizbad 11y ago
      Oh please. Democrats dominate those areas because the Republican party has made the conscious decision to not engage city dwellers[1]. Instead, they're used as a foil against suburban voters- who, incidentally, are demanding more "urban-like" amenities from their local government (Like robust walkable downtowns, bike paths/lanes, green space, and non-chain stores) As for rural voters... they have no national platform, with both parties disengaged. It's really a battle between the city and the suburbs. [1] "New York Values" is a pejorative yet "Small Town Values" denotes virtue.
      • pjc50 11y ago
        "New York Values" is a dogwhistle for Jewishness. Similarly "urban" has been used to mean "black" so much that it's hard to just talk about cities.
        • burfog 11y ago
          oh come on It's actually about values: guns, abortion, God, gays... Jewishness is but a teeny tiny part of that, and this mostly because of things that aren't directly related to the faith. We don't see too many Jews protesting outside abortion clinics and complaining about gay marriage.
    • cozzyd 11y ago
      That 70-story high rise apartment building being built across the street is certainly a harbinger of doom. Chicago has its problems, but it has one of the most vibrant downtown's in the country (and unlike NYC, Boston, DC, or SF, it's affordable to the middle class)
  • ktRolster 11y ago
    If 'un-affordability' caused million man marches, then we'd already have seen a dozen of them in San Francisco. The solution, building more housing, is simple, well-known, and obvious, but the people who live there don't want it because it will hurt their property values. It's a classic case of entrenched power vs newcomers.
  • adrenalinelol 11y ago
    I have trouble imagining a policy resembling basic income being politically feasible in the U.S. People who rely on the major entitlement programs already in place (medicare, medicaid, and social security) have very humble lifestyles, and despite this nearly all the political dialogue around these programs is reduction of benefits. A concept like basic income would require the government to collect more taxes on an order of magnitude greater than it already does; I really don't see that happening in our current political climate.
  • x0054 11y ago
    I love it how all the comments to your post center about the infighting between democrats and republicans, and no one wants to talk about the hot potato that is automation. I am not sure if MVI would even be enough at this point. I strongly believe that we are heading for a complete, world wide, economic collapse within the next 30 years. The collapse will not be caused by our failure to correctly apply our current economic theories, but the complete invalidation of the basic economic principles on which those theories are based. To be clear, I am not arguing that capitalism is an invalid theory right now, but it will become invalid with automation, and very soon. And before people rebut this argument with: "this has happened before, and people will just get education and find better jobs" I challenge you, please do, tell me, what job will you get when the robot/AI replaces you? The answer isn't to fear the future though, but to embrace it and figure out how to make it work for everyone. It's a little hard to do that, and to have this conversation, when the overwhelming majority of people refuse to consider this inevitability as even a possibility and dismiss it. Oh well, rent over.
    • pessimizer 11y ago
      This is a fantasy. Productivity growth is catastrophically low, and over the last 40 years has averaged about half of what it was in the 30 years before - and since the crash in 2008, been slower than at any time after WWII. http://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm http://www.bls.gov/lpc/prodybar.htm https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2015/wp15116.pdf https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/2015/wp15116.pdf It's global: https://www.conference-board.org/data/economydatabase/ https://www.conference-board.org/data/economydatabase/ "An alarming result from this year’s estimates in The Conference Board Total Economy Database(TM) is that the growth rate of total factor productivity (TFP), which measures the productivity of labor and capital together, continues to hover around zero for the third year in a row, compared to an average rate of more than 1 percent from 1999-2006 and 0.5 percent from 2007-2012. The challenge on TFP growth is widespread across the globe. Most mature economies including the United States, the Euro Area and Japan show near zero or even negative TFP growth. In China, TFP growth has turned negative, and in India it is just above zero, at 0.2 percent. Both in Brazil and Mexico TFP growth continues to be negative, respectively at -2.3 and -1.7 percent."
• drfuchs 11y ago
  SF was liberal decades before it was rich. Makes you wonder about possible causality.
  • pron 11y ago
    I don't think Thomas Frank would view the kind of rich SF is as a positive. It is more unequal than rich -- unequal with a peculiarly liberal flavor -- and I believe he would agree to causality (relating to the "new kind" of liberalism).
    • TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
      "Liberal" has always been a word so loaded with ambiguity it's practically meaningless. Socially liberal is not the same as economically liberal is not the same as politically liberal is not the same as anti-authoritarian is not the same as Democrat. (And so on.) In fact I think the argument comes down to four positions: I want as much as possible and I don't see why I should care about anyone or anything else I want as much as possible but I suppose I have to care a little about other people because otherwise the non-winners will kill me and eat me Exploiting other people is morally wrong Exploiting other people creates economically and politically disastrous network effects so it's important to allow people the economic freedom to move beyond exploitation They should be clearly distinct. But in the US they're all tinged with rhetoric of crusading personal heroism and slightly manic social signalling, so it can be paradoxically hard to tell them apart.
      • ktRolster 11y ago
        Socialism is another of those words. If you say, "that country is socialist" no one has any idea what you're talking about, you have to explain it. So better to use a different word in the first place.
• jessriedel 11y ago
  > because there is really no middle class. You are either [X] or [Y] Do you actually think some important distribution is bimodal, or are you just describing your mental categorization?
  • jkaptur 11y ago
    I'm no expert, but I just searched "income distribution in san francisco" and found [1]. The chart labelled "Distribution of median household income in 2013 (number of people)" indicates a multimodal distribution of income. The smallest bar on the chart is the 50k-60k bucket - a traditional "middle class". Of course, there's plenty to quibble about. I've never heard of city-data.com. Maybe this distribution looks more normal if you don't bucket everyone >200k together. But I'm curious where you were headed with your comment. Is there a more important distribution that I just didn't find? [1] http://www.city-data.com/income/income-San-Francisco-California.html http://www.city-data.com/income/income-San-Francisco-Califor...
    • jessriedel 11y ago
      The bar plot available at your link isn't helpful. It's not just the $200k+ group: the width of the income buckets jumps around from bucket to bucket ($60k-$75k, then $75k-$100k), so of course it has weird structure! My point is that whenever people start mentally divvying up the population discretely (introverts vs. extroverts, rich vs. poor, etc.), this is almost always a mistake; it's a projection of their mental map onto reality, when in fact the variable under discussion is almost always smoothly distributed.
      • Maarten88 11y ago
        I thought it was very helpful: in my mind a healthy society would have some sort of bayesian distribution in income, where most of the people would fall into the middle, few would be rich and few would be poor . These charts look nothing like that.
        • jessriedel 11y ago
• deleted 11y ago
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