14 ms·

It is too easy to forget that when a person is employed at $100k-$200k per year in the Bay Area, you want things like stopping climate change, more parks, more

• perfmode 9y ago
  Racism and poverty are related.
  • muninn_ 9y ago
    Sure, care to elaborate or were you just doing a drive-by?
  • ferentchak 9y ago
    Agreed. If we address poverty it will remove most racism. Most racism is classism in disguise. Heck, most people confuse the two when they are being discussed. //edited to remove an extra 'in'.
    • refurb 9y ago
      Asian Americans have a higher per capita income than whites. Does that mean Asians are no longer discriminated against?
      • mkagenius 9y ago
        Probably all the more reasons to get discriminated. Racisms comes as different forms some are due to insecurity and some are due to false beliefs.
      • ragequitregrets 9y ago
        Is this under the assumption that whites aren't discriminated against? Because ooooooweeee is that a invalid assumption. Especially in this day and age. I feel as if I'm not allowed to talk anymore because my white male view is suppressing the minorities. And I'm not joking or being snarky, I've been made to feel this way through several racist (towards white people GASP!) remarks.
        • JoeAltmaier 9y ago
          'Remarks' is not the same as 'discrimination', just saying.
        • deleted 9y ago
          [deleted]
        • anigbrowl 9y ago
          I feel as if I'm not allowed to talk anymore I understand that. But have you considered the possibility that people in other categories have felt that way the whole time, and have only recently reached a level of confidence and/or frustration that they're willing to be openly dismissive of your viewpoint? Put another way, this not-so-great but relatively new reality for you has been the norm for many other groups of people and they're sick of it and have stopped playing along with it. That's not your fault, and indeed it is frustrating to be treated as a category member instead of an individual, but the discrimination those people previously experienced wasn't their fault either.
  • Mikeb85 9y ago
    Yes, and you can fix it by fixing poverty. Not by calling poor people racists.
    • Jtsummers 9y ago
      Poor people aren't racist (well, some are, racism knows no class boundaries), but many minorities are in poverty due to racist policies (or their families were pushed into poverty by said policies and the poverty cycle is incredibly hard to break out of, even if the policies have been largely removed or mitigated).
      • Mikeb85 9y ago
        So fix it then. There's this cycle in American politics of simply regurgitating talking points and not fixing problems. And yes, minorities in the US often live in poor neighbourhoods. But there's also a large, poor white working class too. Keep in mind that under Obama, the relative wealth (percent share of aggregate wealth) of minorities and the white working class actually decreased. While I have no doubt racist policies have contributed to the misfortune of some, when you look at wealth distribution in the US the problem is far bigger than most people think, and spans all races.
        • soundwave106 9y ago
          Ultimately the question is whether US politics can break out of their current tribalism. Agreed that it is not fair to throw around the racism word casually, but it is absolutely worth noting that both parties in the United States have used tribal type tactics (including racial-based appeals) to obtain votes from various groups. Regarding poverty, the GOP is currently (roughly speaking) an alliance between working class whites and business interests. Economically, the business interest side heavily dominates GOP policy at the moment. As far as poverty reduction goes, if you believe in either government oriented safety net solutions or other collective type structures (eg unions), this current political relationship sticks out like a sore thumb as being very counterproductive towards poverty reduction. Unfortunately, it appears that tribalism triumphs economic policy as a motivating factor at the moment. I will say an additional thought: With the recent vote in France, I am wondering if the situation is somewhat more dynamic and fluid than this paper lets on. The Netherlands and France were only mentioned in passing, but it seems like the recent result in France actually produced an "anti-establishment" movement that also happened to be "pro-globalization" and "liberal" (in the classic economic sense). This sort of "populism" doesn't seem to be reflected in the paper.
  • throwawaymanbot 9y ago
    Theres plenty of rich old white guys. They only vote GOP. Racist is an uncouth word to use in their opinion. But a spade is a spade! They are 100% Racist. (Small R however)
    • dang 9y ago
      Please don't post political flamebait here.
      • throwawaymanbot 9y ago
        Sorry Dang.
• Swizec 9y ago
  I for one support globalization because it's how me and all my friends escaped the fate of our parents. Working all your life for $20k/year in a tiny little country in Europe. Without globalization we'd all be fucked. If we could get skills and jobs that rival Bay Area or are in Bay Area from half the world away, why can't someone from Atlanta? What's stopping them? What, realistically, are the missinh opportunities for them compared to someone who couldn't even practically communicate in English until high school or so? Like, I'm sorry person from Atlanta, you were born in the land of opportunity. I had to not only get here first, but also realize that such a thing is even possible.
  • Mikeb85 9y ago
    So you were lucky (to be smart enough) to out-compete your peers and a bunch of Americans. By definition not everyone can achieve this success (as it's based on competition), so it does nothing to alleviate inequality on a scale that matters.
    • rubicon33 9y ago
      At what point do we reward human accomplishment instead of throwing it all away to "luck"? I hear this all too often nowadays that any kind of success can always be attributed to luck and therefor you have a moral obligation to those less "lucky" than you. Don't get me wrong - I agree with the moral obligation to help those less lucky than you. I don't always agree with the looseness in which the word "luck" is applied these days. The problem is if you look at basically anyone's life, there's always SOMETHING you can point to that was "lucky" compared to their peer(s). Yes, some more than others. But perhaps we can begin to give people the benefit of the doubt when they say they learned a difficult craft, and a new language, to lift themselves out of a shitty situation. It discounts his hard work to say it all came down to lucky brain genetics.
      • rayiner 9y ago
        Why do we need to reward people just for being the winners of the cosmic lottery? If you outperform what would be expected given your parental income, early education, intellect, and various other factors that are the result of mere chance, then maybe you should get a cookie. Otherwise, why celebrate the predictable outputs of predictable inputs?
• zer00eyz 9y ago
  >> When making $30k with absolutely zero hope of real increases in Atlanta being a warehouse worker for an industry that's disappearing, the same person would burn all those things down, I would have said to get $10k more per year. Today I would say, getting an extra year at $30k is enough. As someone who works in the bay area, I can throw a rock and probably hit someone who will give me a job in software engineering. For all of our collective complaints about how bad the interview process is, the reality is that we have choice and mobility. This is a big deal and your take on this is spot on!
• rainhacker 9y ago
  > global average wage is $2k ... not per month. Per year How much was it before Globalization ?
  • msimpson 9y ago
    Why are you trying to create a false dichotomy?
    • sjg007 9y ago
      It's a fair question. In China most people were peasant farmers with no opportunities. Now if we had fair trade between the countries, that might be better...
      • msimpson 9y ago
        No, it's a loaded question. But if you want to play, let us discuss the health of Chinese peasant farmers before and after globalization as well.
  • frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
    I think the point is, who cares? Globalization is trying to reach an equilibrium where our first world workers and those third world workers will earn the same wage. That's a terrifying proposition to anyone in the bottom three quarters of the US economy.
• mayukh 9y ago
  Sorry for the snark but this observation is obvious. 'Look at all these poor/fed-up/frustrated/mis-trained' people that are left out by globalization and capitalism' Or 'look at rising inequality' blah blah. What is the solution ?
• hkajshdf67 9y ago
  "Globalism produces beautiful iPads." That should read something more like "Our implementation of globalism, heavily curated to favor elite special interests, produces beautiful iPads." There's nothing inherent to globalism that requires it produce beautiful iPads. Beautiful iPads are more the result of purposefully crafted laws and policies, at the behest of special interests, for the purpose of growing their pile of coconuts faster than the rest of us can.
  • rayiner 9y ago
    Such as?
    • hkajshdf67 9y ago
      Which laws and policies? Assuming that's what you mean, it basically starts, in America, with the Constitution, which originally only allowed white male landowners a vote. Humans got together in a room and decided, based upon their knowledge and experience and opinions, who should be allowed to vote and who shouldn't. The Senate is basically doing that right now with healthcare; deciding in private who should have a say in what healthcare looks like. There's no subterfuge to any of it. It's all right there in our faces. Read the letters and writings of the Founder Fathers. James Madison in particular made it clear he felt that the new government should protect the rich from the poor. It leads directly into what we're seeing today. The poor shouldn't have healthcare or a living wage if the rich have to pay for it. Humans with certain ideas placed in their minds go into a room and craft policy with those ideas in mind.
• whazor 9y ago
  Good news is that outside of countries like USA and UK, there is a lot of improvement. Global average income is rising, more people are going to schools, and people are being connected to the internet. I wouldn't be surprised if there will be a huge rise in the amount of African software developers. They could compete with USA software companies in the global internet industry.
  • frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
    That's not good news for anyone in the USA or UK.
    • Kurtz79 9y ago
      If your plan for ensuring the continued wealth and competitiveness of your country and population relies on other countries not to develop, than possibly it's not a great plan.
      • deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      • frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
        My plan relies on politicians in the USA/UK considering the wellbeing of the workers in their country a priority over the wellbeing of workers in other countries and a priority over a small group of elite capital-holders. It's failing because they don't but that's a pretty sad statement about where we find ourselves politically.
      • PatentTroll 9y ago
        Not to mention a new population of knowledge workers will produce their own demand, so it's not a zero sum game by any means.
    • zghst 9y ago
      More people that are educated buying more products for their bigger homes use more gasoline for their bigger cars going to bigger parties doing more things advertised to them. It's all set up to thrive from these destructive economics and we're exporting it one by one to nations around the globe.
• ajmurmann 9y ago
  Reducing globalization reduces the size of the pie. The issue seems to be that we are distributing the pie too unevenly. Maybe we can fix that without shrinking the pie? It's true to many the economy feels like a zero sum have and that's how we get protectionism and xenophobia. Can we make everyone feel like they were benefiting from the pie growing without destroying the pie?
  • smallnamespace 9y ago
    The problem is that to redistribute the pie, you need a strong state that is able to fairly tax the rich. Right now it is trivial for the rich to avoid taxation by shifting their liquid wealth from place to place, and putting states in a race to the bottom on taxes for their more productive assets. That's why in order to build a factory, localities fall over one another to offer the most tax credits, and the owner ends up with zero taxes for a decade. Ironically, the cure to one of globalization's ills is a strong centralized world government. Good luck ever getting that taken seriously though. Europe's experience during the crisis shows that economic integration (mobility of capital, labor, and goods) without political integration is a recipe for disaster. Guess what? That describes the current world economy very well.
• api 9y ago
  I've started thinking of it this way: "It's better to reign in hell." Poverty is worse than most natural disasters and worse than most of the predicted consequences of climate change. I'm willing to bet that the infant mortality rate in Miami is lower during a category five hurricane than it is in a crushingly poor society in perfect weather. People will burn the world to escape poverty. It's better to reign in hell. Poverty is also relative due not only to the hedonic treadmill effect but to relative differences in cost of living. An American cannot even eat on $2k/year and in many places you need a minimum of $40k+ per year to afford basic housing. We have an inflationary economy, which means that anything not increasing is decreasing. You can plunge a first world person into poverty by just not inflating their wages for a while. Now add a ridiculous debt load and high unemployment. This is why we need to drop what I call "abstinence based environmentalism." The only hope that we have of evading a global environmental catastrophe is paradoxically to increase wealth and standard of living as much as possible. Not only does this make people open to conservation but it also reduces birth rates. Trying to deny wealth to conserve resources will have the paradoxical effect of promoting short term greed and increasing birth rates. It will also lead to conflict and destabilize the international political order, making large scale cooperation on global environmental challenges impossible. First world morons who romanticize poverty drive me nuts. These folks are either hopelessly naive, delusional, or crypto-elitist. I heard it put this way once: "Rap music comes mostly from poor inner city neighborhoods. That's why it's full of references to money and getting rich. Poor people know that money actually does matter. Only rich people can afford the luxury of not caring about money." I forget where I read that (years ago) but it's spot on.
  • ajmurmann 9y ago
    I'm not sure if it's not understanding poverty or actively not caring. The US is do divided that I think the sympathy level between the "elites" and "real America" might be so low that many actually care more about Manta Rays going extinct than people in there middle of the country having a life worth living. Who doesn't prefer seeing a Manta Ray over losing an election? I feel this might be the elephant in the room that nobody wants to talk about. We need to address this very badly.
  • zghst 9y ago
• manyoso 9y ago
  For me the real story here is that despite the ascendance of right wing populism the GOP in D.C. is doing the exact same thing it has always done : tax cuts for the rich while shrinking services for the rest. That and deregulating wall street. Sure, the GOP in D.C. doesn't give two pennies about climate change, more parks, more air, fair treatment, or the rest, but they also are doing nothing different that will substantially help the Atlanta warehouse worker either.
  • maxxxxx 9y ago
    That's the genius of the GOP. They can motivate the working class while pretty much every policy they make is against the working class.
    • throwawaymanbot 9y ago
      Not Genius, but kind of a cool but disgusting trick. And Karma is natures greatest boomerang.
    • manyoso 9y ago
      And when the hoi polloi start to catch on they just dangle some more red meat identity politics at them. "No, it isn't us, it is all the other people who are taking your American Dream away!" When you think about it, isn't it remarkable how well this works that a rich billionaire blowhard from New York City convinces the hoi polloi that he is one of them?
      • throwanem 9y ago
        This is much easier to accomplish - perhaps only even possible to accomplish - when the hoi polloi don't see any meaningful prospect of worthwhile change from the only other party that can get a candidate elected. As I find myself reiterating every time the subject arises here - it's not possible accurately to understand Trump's electoral victory without reference to the DNC's own internal politics and their gravely suboptimal effect on the party's 2016 nomination. Sanders vs. Trump would've been a much more interesting election, and its outcome much more in doubt, than what we actually got; as things were, the choice came down to more of the neoliberal, globalist, job-exporting same on the one hand, and a wild card who at least gave lip service to working-class folks' problems on the other. Granted, it's becoming increasingly clear that lip service is about all that candidate was prepared to give - but that still puts him ahead of his erstwhile opponent, who couldn't be bothered even with that much, not even when it became obvious that to do so would be tactically wise. You can blame people, if you like, for going with the sole candidate who at least pretended to give a shit about their problems. But what do you imagine it helps, to do so? Regardless of whether or not any individual finds it personally satisfying to despise people who voted in a way that individual does not like, those people did so vote, and here we all are as a result. Does recrimination really offer the most realistic prospect of a way forward that doesn't continue to steer our country along a course toward disaster?
• mozumder 9y ago
  The people against globalization aren't the poor making $30k/year. It's the middle-class making $80k-$100k/year doing routine work. Globalization does disproportionately affects the poor the most, but the poor still end up voting for globalist neoliberal Democrats because they offer social services that solve much of the economic disparity problem that globalization creates, such as food stamps, universal health care, college loans, subsidized housing, and public transportation. Meanwhile, the middle-class that actually votes against globalization completely ignores the fact that government offers these social services. Ultimately globalization is a must, as it just increases efficiency and cuts prices. Ain't no one going to pay $100 for a commodity shirt you buy at Wal-Mart. And I'm OK with society where a 1% exists. The 1% is what causes skyscrapers and high art to happen. You don't want a society where everyone is equal. It's the differences that makes us great, and in fact may be the central meaning of life. Why would anyone want to be the same as everyone else? You become unnecessary if you're the same bland chunk of ordinary matter as everyone else.
  • grasshopperpurp 9y ago
    There are degrees to things, and wealth inequality in the US is the worst it's been since right before the Great Depression. The idea that wealth inequality on this level is 'no big deal' is as stupid as it gets.
    • PatentTroll 9y ago
      OP sets up the straw man of "anybody against any inequality must be advocating perfect equality" - which is hogwash. By OP's logic, feudalism is perfectly fine because it accentuates the differences between serfs and kings. Or hell, even slavery is Ok. What reasonable people have to start to appreciate is that everything isn't black and white, there are shades of gray and we can have meaningful disagreements about where the lines are drawn.
      • mozumder 9y ago
        So then define exactly what's good and bad, and let me know why. I get that inequality has gotten worse, but has it put us in a unstable situation? Has society collapsed? Are the roads destroyed? Is average lifespan now 0? We have more billionaires, but we also have 22 million more people with health care due to Obamacare now. What metrics are you using, and why are those metrics more important than other metrics people might use. Until you can clearly define that, we might as well say the anti-globalists are trying to turn everyone into ordinary chunks of common matter.
• slothtrop 9y ago
  A decrease or outright stoppage of opportunistic immigration would help at lessening the gap within the country. This seems like an outright heretical thing to suggest. The GDP would suffer, but workers don't benefit the way they ought to anyway; wages aren't rising with inflation, the 0.1% keep the profits. All the while, worker supply increases just as automation is casting careers into obsolescence. We produce more than enough homegrown talent that struggles to find work - that should be priority number 1. Japan and the other Asian Tigers will be better off with a declining population, which they're well aware of, despite the fears about supporting a large centennial population. We should be doing the same rather than gouging ourselves, racing to the bottom. Now, this isn't an assertion I find 100% confidence in, but I'm leaning that way. I'm not sure it's realistically possible to mitigate immigration given the political will it would entail. But if I'm entirely wrong about the promised effects of immigration (as in, in the West TODAY), then I'd like to hear a good retort.
• grondilu 9y ago
  > If you can't give people a decent living first, they will revolt Nobody is supposed to "give them" anything. They are supposed to be responsible adults, and as such they are supposed to earn their living themselves. If for some reason they can not be satisfied with what they earn, and if they react by "revolting", that is with violence, then unfortunately the only sensible thing to do is to defend the rest of society against them. Poverty is not an excuse for crime, is it?
  • ashark 9y ago
    > Nobody is supposed to "give them" anything. They are supposed to be responsible adults, and as such they are supposed to earn their living themselves. The point is that the system shifted to "give" some people more, and "give" others less. The winners in these cases were, by and large, already better off than the losers, with the result that political power also shifted (further) in the winners' favor (this is all covered in the linked paper). The economic system we collectively create absolutely "gives" and "takes" from different groups, all the time. The notion that it's fine for one group to shift the rules to help themselves and harm others, but it's not fine for the harmed to try to retaliate (even via a voting-driven "revolt") is silly. Letting this go on will, right or wrong, definitely create more crime and, taken far enough and especially coupled by political power shifting toward economic beneficiaries, reliably create political violence (see: relative deprivation). You can be personally offended over how these people aren't "responsible adults" and take an expensive, weakly effective law-and-order approach, or you can try to do effective (even just from a not-unreasonable point of view!) things like redistribute part of the gains that some people receive from changing economic policy to those who are harmed by the same policy, through direct transfers or e.g. retraining programs, even if it offends your derived-from-first-principles sense of right and wrong that labels this as theft or something. Of course, if (taking a shot in the dark here) your view is that most of what's complex about economic policy (as e.g. the topics essential to the analysis in the linked paper) is accidental ("artificial", perhaps?) rather than essential ("natural"...) this will all come off as nonsense, I suppose. > If for some reason they can not be satisfied with what they earn, and if they react by "revolting", that is with violence, then unfortunately the only sensible thing to do is to defend the rest of society against them. Poverty is not an excuse for crime, is it? So no. That's not remotely the only sensible thing to do. [EDIT] punctuation
• k-mcgrady 9y ago
  >> When making $30k with absolutely zero hope of real increases in Atlanta being a warehouse worker for an industry that's disappearing, the same person would burn all those things down, I would have said to get $10k more per year. Today I would say, getting an extra year at $30k is enough to justify the burnings. I wouldn't generalise like that. There are a lot of lower earners who can also think big picture and there are also a lot of higher earners who only care about themselves.
  • geodel 9y ago
    Since low income earners are 1-2 order of magnitude more than high income earners. There can be lot of both variety (peaceful vs angry mob) and it will still lead very troubled times ahead.
• lazerpants 9y ago
  Excellent analysis, but I think you've missed one key point, relative income effect. It isn't just a willingness to burn things down in the face of stagnating wages in order to increase wages at the bottom, but is also latent knowledge that by burning things down that the wealthy need, the income gap may shrink, which would make lower income earners happier [0] due to relative income effect. [0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4041613/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4041613/ "We can now answer the question posed by the article’s title: Yes, your neighbor’s income does affect your happiness, but the income of your proximate neighbor has a different effect on your happiness than the income of your more distant neighbor does. Americans tend to be happiest when they live in a high-income neighborhood in a low-income region. In other words, the effect of residential income on individual happiness reverses from positive to negative with increasing geographic scale—a phenomenon we might call the geographic scale principle of income effects (Lee et al. [2008] argue, along the same vein, that the effect of residential segregation can vary by geographic scale)." Edit: a more recent source (https://hbr.org/2016/04/when-economic-growth-doesnt-make-countries-happier https://hbr.org/2016/04/when-economic-growth-doesnt-make-cou...)
• pfranz 9y ago
  There are two options: protectionism or implement policies to help/retrain everyone to give them a decent living. I'm not sure which you'd support, but I'd argue US Democrats, at a national level, have been pursing policies to help and retrain those workers. * American Jobs Act (2011) a 5.6-percent tax on all income over $1 million to pay for new “stimulus” spending by the government. failed 50-49 * Buffett Rule (2012) levy a minimum 30% tax on wealthier Americans. 45 Republicans voted not to end debate preventing it from being voted on. * Card Check (2009) would have made it easier for labor unions to organize and stay in power by making union elections by secret ballot obsolete. Instead, employers would be forced to recognize a union once organizers collected a majority of employee signatures. Scrapped by Democrats after the Republican minority threatened to filibuster. * Emergency Senior Citizens Relief Act (2010) older Americans would have collected an extra $250 in tax credits under the cost of living adjustment in Social Security, or COLA. Failed 53-45. * Minimum Wage (2014) federal minimum wage of $10.10. Democratic proposal filibustered by Republicans. * The “Public Option” (2009) Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., joined Republicans threatening to filibuster the health care bill. * Prolonging Bush Tax Cuts (2010) Senate Democrats tried twice to extend George W. Bush’s tax cuts only to middle-class Americans. Higher tax brackets would have returned to Clinton-era rates under their plan. Republican filibusters anything short of across-the-board cuts. (adapted from https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/636t5o/mitch_mcconnell_admits_the_rule_that_blocked/dfs96po/ https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/636t5o/mitch_mcco... because I dog-eared the post) To your Bay area worker, local politics vary greatly. Maybe the rhetoric and campaigning of the national party has pandered too much to this Bay area worker, but proposed policies aren't ignoring the rest of America. Maybe it's done because of fund raising?
• zghst 9y ago
  At that level, people also consume more than people at lower levels, using more water, releasing more Greenhouse gasses, etc. Your generalization assumes that people of lower classes has no consideration for the environment, which I think is extremely unfair. There are communities and cultures of people all over the US that really care about the environment passionately at every economic level, especially in Arizona, people are extremely concerned with not wasting water, keeping things clean, not using a lot of energy. Coming to the Bay Area, I was extremely surprised by how much water the appliances use, how much garbage my neighbors produce, people cook a lot less in the Bay Area, leading to much much more takeout boxes, plastic forks, etc. There could be tons of high income earners that live on a block and yet their neighborhood is littered with trash. The whole politics of environmentalism consumes much more than rich vs poor or who cares the most, all of our behaviors contribute to environment decline. The biggest issue is that we have a whole economy which defaults every transaction to with environmental decay, going to the mall, buying clothes, electronics. Our lifestyle is incredibly unsustainable and pushing Western way of life on other peoples around the world is not feasible.
• anigbrowl 9y ago
  I'm not making the point that the climate isn't worth saving, racism doesn't need solving if we can't fix poverty and "underemployment". I'm saying that we won't succeed unless we fix that ... first. Look, it's a chicken and egg thing. Poverty and lack of opportunity is often the consequence of racism and indifference to environmental factors. Build a factory, make money, contaminate the hell out of the area around the factory, move onto some other opportunity, let the factory close, and guess what's left behind? Unemployment, kids growing up in polluted in environments who then perform less well in education and employment and are either a) blamed for some lack of moral fiber or b) told they need to accept inferior conditions as a precursor to economic growth. Look, some problems in our world are natural and hard to overcome - volcanoes, earthquakes, diseases wwe don't understand, rocks that fall from the sky, bizarre and unpredictable weather events etc. etc.. But in the developed world we have got pretty good at measuring and mitigating such problems, overcoming basic existential insecurities, and turning our productive abilities to fun and exciting things like exploring space, creating immersive art, and so on - we know many ways to have Nice Things. A great many of the problems int he world are not the result of natural constraints or insults, but arise out of the prior economic and strategic choices we've made. The fault of globalism is not its aspirations to make the world a better place, which after all would directly improve living conditions for poor people by reducing the environmental and social stressors which make life difficult. The faults are twofold: a small number of parasitic capitalists who manipulate economic and political markets to enrich themselves to an extreme and obscene* degree at the known expense of those the least well-off, and the lack of a clear philosophical project beyond 'go shopping, buy more stuff, um, that's it.' * 'obscene' in the sense of a producer surplus that is so large it exceeds the capacity of the actor efficiently allocate it The conditions for perfect competition do not obtain in many markets, but pretending that they do allows for the inefficient concentration of wealth and it is collectively irrational to ignore this. Instead of a dogmatic market fundamentalism we should pursue equitable efficiency, seeking to maximize return on investment consistently across a distributed network (rather than merely considering the aggregate) while remaining cognizant of the limits of our observational capability. Instead of an empty consumerism which spends significant resources on the manufacture of desire in order to sustain demand we should instead be focusing on the reduction of barriers to supply. People in grinding poverty are not there because they were distracted by champagne-sipping elites into worrying more about the global carbon budget than their own economic agenda, they're in grinding poverty because capitalism (qua the individual accumulation of capital as an end in itself, and I include here social, political, and strategic military capital as well as mere cash) doesn't place a high value on their lives or life experiences and so does not allocate sufficient material resources to transform their situation.
• khana 9y ago
  IMO, mine own, this is the CORRECT NARRATIVE