4 ms·

If you go look, you will have a hard time picking a 50 year period in history, where everything was going well, a nice clean "vision" was neatly laid out and ev

by qnix 10y ago

If you go look, you will have a hard time picking a 50 year period in history, where everything was going well, a nice clean "vision" was neatly laid out and everyone got on board and did their bit. Just ask your parents and grandparents. It never happened. And they didn't have to deal with zillion different over-optimized, hyper efficient propaganda machines pumping fear into the ether 24*7, and they will still tell you times were chaotic. But they survived and things got better.

refurb 10y ago
This is a great point. It seems like human nature to look back with rose colored glasses. I hear people say how great the US was 20 or 40 years ago. Do a search for news back then and you'll see the same doomsday news article and constant fretting for the future of the country. It was so bad you'd think the world was falling apart. I always liked this view: "The world is falling apart!" "When was the last time it wasn't?"
api 10y ago
You are excluding the middle. It wasn't perfect back then by any stretch, but it was possible to make a good living and all economic growth and innovation was not hyper concentrated in less than five unaffordable coastal cities. If you live in one of these places and have not spent time in the interior you don't get it. For an example look into the first, say, ten companies to offer viable home computers. They were in places like Albaquerqie (MITS), Dallas (Tandy), Philadelphia (Commodore), Atlanta (Compucolor), Boca Raton (IBM's PC group), etc. as well as Apple and a few others in the Bay Area. Today they would just about all be in SF/SV with maybe one token in Seattle. Everything is like that. Regular jobs leave the interior for other countries or are replaced by automation, while high end jobs all go to to LA, NYC, SF, Seattle, and Boston. I am in LA and grew up in Cincinnati and am as guilty as the next person. It's hard to swim against a torrent. When I go back there I see people stockpiling guns and talking about the new record for heroin deaths. Young people talk about escaping. This is also bad to a degree for people in rich coastal cities since all this is driving real estate hyperinflation there. No jobs or unaffordable housing: pick one. For average people things have become tangibly worse. It started in the 70s, accelerated after 2001, and became a visceral downward spiral after 2008. Trump and Sanders talked about this. Nobody else cares or even sees the problem.
- breatheoften 10y ago
  Colorado is pretty nice. You are oversimplifying and by doing so basically disguising an argument that seems to be that more wealth should be transferred from coastal cities to the interior. How about the interior elects some reasonable governments, engages in trying to educate their populace, put some regulations in so they can build some decent communities and try to attract talent -- how about the interior starts trying to compete rather than blaming their woes on the federal government while seeking to increase their outsized (and poorly managed) federal handouts (which gets funneled disproportionately toward their tiny economic elite because of their states rights motivated insistence on the freedom to form corrupt local governments.)
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    >How about the interior elects some reasonable governments, engages in trying to educate their populace, put some regulations in so they can build some decent communities and try to attract talent -- how about the interior starts trying to compete rather than blaming their woes on the federal government while seeking to increase their outsized (and poorly managed) federal handouts (which gets funneled disproportionately toward their tiny economic elite because of their states rights motivated insistence on the freedom to form corrupt local governments.) Well, this also requires that the Feds enforce antitrust law.[1] [1] -- http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-bust/ http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-...
facetube 10y ago
There's some surprisingly-literal survivorship bias here.
alphonsegaston 10y ago
I'd actually disagree. The post-war era until the collapse of the Soviet Union had a pretty clearly delineated narrative, regardless of how truthfully we adhered to its precepts(or even how reprehensible they were in retrospect). I think it's only once we embraced the intellectual indulgence of the "End of History" that we set ourselves up for failure. As Authoritarian Capitalist regimes rose to world power in the 90s and 2000s, we failed to see them as a threat to our democratic institutions (having wrongly conflated Capitalism and democracy), until they were at our doorsteps

by qnix 10y ago

refurb 10y ago

This is a great point. It seems like human nature to look back with rose colored glasses. I hear people say how great the US was 20 or 40 years ago. Do a search for news back then and you'll see the same doomsday news article and constant fretting for the future of the country. It was so bad you'd think the world was falling apart. I always liked this view: "The world is falling apart!" "When was the last time it wasn't?"

api 10y ago

You are excluding the middle. It wasn't perfect back then by any stretch, but it was possible to make a good living and all economic growth and innovation was not hyper concentrated in less than five unaffordable coastal cities. If you live in one of these places and have not spent time in the interior you don't get it. For an example look into the first, say, ten companies to offer viable home computers. They were in places like Albaquerqie (MITS), Dallas (Tandy), Philadelphia (Commodore), Atlanta (Compucolor), Boca Raton (IBM's PC group), etc. as well as Apple and a few others in the Bay Area. Today they would just about all be in SF/SV with maybe one token in Seattle. Everything is like that. Regular jobs leave the interior for other countries or are replaced by automation, while high end jobs all go to to LA, NYC, SF, Seattle, and Boston. I am in LA and grew up in Cincinnati and am as guilty as the next person. It's hard to swim against a torrent. When I go back there I see people stockpiling guns and talking about the new record for heroin deaths. Young people talk about escaping. This is also bad to a degree for people in rich coastal cities since all this is driving real estate hyperinflation there. No jobs or unaffordable housing: pick one. For average people things have become tangibly worse. It started in the 70s, accelerated after 2001, and became a visceral downward spiral after 2008. Trump and Sanders talked about this. Nobody else cares or even sees the problem.

breatheoften 10y ago
Colorado is pretty nice. You are oversimplifying and by doing so basically disguising an argument that seems to be that more wealth should be transferred from coastal cities to the interior. How about the interior elects some reasonable governments, engages in trying to educate their populace, put some regulations in so they can build some decent communities and try to attract talent -- how about the interior starts trying to compete rather than blaming their woes on the federal government while seeking to increase their outsized (and poorly managed) federal handouts (which gets funneled disproportionately toward their tiny economic elite because of their states rights motivated insistence on the freedom to form corrupt local governments.)
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  >How about the interior elects some reasonable governments, engages in trying to educate their populace, put some regulations in so they can build some decent communities and try to attract talent -- how about the interior starts trying to compete rather than blaming their woes on the federal government while seeking to increase their outsized (and poorly managed) federal handouts (which gets funneled disproportionately toward their tiny economic elite because of their states rights motivated insistence on the freedom to form corrupt local governments.) Well, this also requires that the Feds enforce antitrust law.[1] [1] -- http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-bust/ http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-...

facetube 10y ago

There's some surprisingly-literal survivorship bias here.

alphonsegaston 10y ago

I'd actually disagree. The post-war era until the collapse of the Soviet Union had a pretty clearly delineated narrative, regardless of how truthfully we adhered to its precepts(or even how reprehensible they were in retrospect). I think it's only once we embraced the intellectual indulgence of the "End of History" that we set ourselves up for failure. As Authoritarian Capitalist regimes rose to world power in the 90s and 2000s, we failed to see them as a threat to our democratic institutions (having wrongly conflated Capitalism and democracy), until they were at our doorsteps