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> By and large most of us did not predict it, so I'm not so sure. Please, economists have been predicting this for awhile. Read someone like Piketty, he prese

> By and large most of us did not predict it, so I'm not so sure. Please, economists have been predicting this for awhile. Read someone like Piketty, he presents a plethora of evidence that inequality is reaching the levels of the gilded age, and that era wasn't exactly devoid of strife, political change, wars, etc... The only people who are surprised are those who are too distracted by their own insular worlds to see what's happening around them.

pillowkusis 9y ago
Taleb addresses this too. Of course somebody DID predict it. I don't know if that means the event is, in general, "predictable." If you put 1 million people in a room and told them to randomly guess what events would occur next, someone would predict correctly. The question is, should WE (as a society) have predicted this? Did reasonable application of our knowledge permit us to know this? I don't know the answer to that question.
- Mikeb85 9y ago
  > The question is, should WE (as a society) have predicted this? Did reasonable application of our knowledge permit us to know this? I don't know the answer to that question. Not everyone is an expert in all fields. This is the domain of economists, sociologists and political scientists. Certainly many of them did predict this, there's a ton of data to support their theories and predictions. The problem is that if you're one of the people who are comfortable with the status quo, you're not going to be paying attention to these things, much like a labourer in the south likely doesn't care about the stock market or happenings in the venture capital markets in the Bay Area. The truth is that it's the media and political class who let us all down, by ignoring the experts and working class.
  - geodel 9y ago
    > The truth is that it's the media and political class who let us all down, by ignoring the experts and working class. I'd say they listened to experts who are ideologically like them e.g ivy league elites, the ones mostly benefitted by globalization.

pillowkusis 9y ago

Taleb addresses this too. Of course somebody DID predict it. I don't know if that means the event is, in general, "predictable." If you put 1 million people in a room and told them to randomly guess what events would occur next, someone would predict correctly. The question is, should WE (as a society) have predicted this? Did reasonable application of our knowledge permit us to know this? I don't know the answer to that question.

Mikeb85 9y ago
> The question is, should WE (as a society) have predicted this? Did reasonable application of our knowledge permit us to know this? I don't know the answer to that question. Not everyone is an expert in all fields. This is the domain of economists, sociologists and political scientists. Certainly many of them did predict this, there's a ton of data to support their theories and predictions. The problem is that if you're one of the people who are comfortable with the status quo, you're not going to be paying attention to these things, much like a labourer in the south likely doesn't care about the stock market or happenings in the venture capital markets in the Bay Area. The truth is that it's the media and political class who let us all down, by ignoring the experts and working class.
- geodel 9y ago
  > The truth is that it's the media and political class who let us all down, by ignoring the experts and working class. I'd say they listened to experts who are ideologically like them e.g ivy league elites, the ones mostly benefitted by globalization.