8 ms·

Who cares about those? Definitely not the new American left.

by wait_a_minute 6y ago

lallysingh 6y ago
Because it's definitely a zero-sum game.
- wait_a_minute 6y ago
  The new American left does treat it as a zero sum game. That is why they focus on disparities instead of universal programs that would eliminate the largest absolute amounts of poverty and suffering.
  - germinalphrase 6y ago
    What falls in the bucket of “universal programs”?
    - eli_gottlieb 6y ago
      Basically, go check if Bernie Sanders supports it. If so, it's probably a universal program. Not a guarantee, but a very good heuristic.
  - tharne 6y ago
    Zero sum thinking is probably the most central tenet of the broader philosophy of the American left. That's why there's so much talk of "disparity" or "inequality" vs. actual improvements to standards of living and quality of life. Almost all economic growth creates inequality for the simple reason that the more wealth there is, the more potential you have for skew. In China, for instance, there was much less income inequality back in the 60's but I don't think too many folks want to go back to those days. Similarly, I don't really care how much a CEO makes, I care about my own quality of life. To hear the new American left tell it though, we'd be better off all being equally poor instead of generally wealthier with a big differences between individual incomes.
    - jjoonathan 6y ago
      40 years ago, if you looked at the preceding 40 years of economic growth in the US, the reality was "a rising tide floats all boats." Today, if you look at the preceding 40 years of economic growth in the US, the reality is "rich get richer, poor get poorer." Clearly, magic capitalism beans aren't the only ingredient in an economy that improves everyone's lot. My theory is that the other key ingredient is growth. Growth is chaotic and stirs money around, it's one of the precious few strong market forces that pushes towards equality rather than winner-take-all, even though it does so purely on entropic grounds and isn't strong enough to actually arrive anywhere near the maximum-entropy state. Of course, once the growth stops, the market settles out again, and the real question is how to deal with that. "Try to stimulate growth at all costs" just creates bubbles. It's a tough question, but whatever the answer is, I'm pretty sure it involves stirring money around, and I'm pretty sure big monied interests are going to fight it tooth and nail out of self-interest.
    - ryandrake 6y ago
      > Similarly, I don't really care how much a CEO makes, I care about my own quality of life. Your quality of life depends very much on how much other people make. It's all relative. If the average income in an area goes up by 50% but your own income only goes up 5%, then you are worse off than you started, because prices for everything will rise with the market. If you don't believe me, look at Bay Area housing. Inject a couple thousand new millionaires into an area and tell me things don't become worse for the existing modest-income people. On a percentage basis, the world is zero sum. If someone else captures (or creates) an additional 1% of something, that comes at the expense of 1% collectively from everyone else.
      - tharne 6y ago
        > On a percentage basis, the world is zero sum This is circular statement. Percentage is defined as a fraction of a some specified thing, so of course it's fixed. Ten percent of something is ten percent no matter how big or small that thing gets... Anyway, I'm still not following your reasoning here. If you cut everyone's salaries where I work by 50% and only cut mine by 20%, that's still a bad day for me, even though I'm getting a bigger share of the total compensation paid out. People can argue about whether or not, or to what extent, wealth should be redistributed, but zero sum thinking is a bad path to go down and completely ignores humanity's ability to better its lot through innovation, trade, etc. It's a depressingly pessimistic worldview that prioritizes taking from others instead of creating things that others find valuable. At it's core it's a selfish ethos.
  - eli_gottlieb 6y ago
    There isn't one American Left. The liberals do as you often say. The socialists often focus precisely on "universal programs that would eliminate the largest absolute amounts of poverty and suffering."
    - malandrew 6y ago
      universal programs only eliminate the largest amounts of poverty and suffering if they are self sustaining long term. Any universal program that undermines the work that funds the universal programs in the first places is a threat to sustainability. The Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela and China under Mao are all examples of places that went with universal programs and policies that ultimately undermined the revenue streams supporting those programs.
- free_rms 6y ago
  In the context of Harvard's ~1,000 admissions a year, it's definitionally a zero-sum game.
webmaven 6y ago
Classism may not be quite as "trendy" as racism or sexism right this minute, but I think you'll still find plenty of interest in the topic (and it's intersections with the others) on the left.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- syshum 6y ago
  >>I think you'll still find plenty of interest in the topic (and it's intersections with the others) on the left. Please provide examples because I am not aware of any.
  - sct202 6y ago
    Interest in the topic is what drove the popularity around books like Hillbilly Elegy and tons to articles in NYT and WaPo after the 2016 election about poor white people and what were the challenges that they were facing and motivations.
    - xyzzyz 6y ago
      You mean the ones which explained that the poor whites are actually privileged racists, who are too lazy to learn to code?
      - cycrutchfield 6y ago
        Ah yes, this is the level of insight in comments that I come to Hacker News for. Excellent work.
  - pelliphant 6y ago
    maybe the problem here is "american left" vs "other countries left". In "other countries left" the left tag is defined by this topic (and this topic alone). So, for someone not from america, your statement is a bit weird...
- 6y ago
Press2forEN 6y ago
As unfortunate as it may be, they still benefit from systemic racism and must be held just as accountable as their wealthy counterparts.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- staticautomatic 6y ago
  https://harpers.org/archive/2019/12/lefty-lingo/ https://harpers.org/archive/2019/12/lefty-lingo/
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
asdf9240 6y ago
There is a very great portion of the American left that cares about economic status. I do believe that admissions should factor in socioeconomic status rather than just race, gender, etc., but believing this does not require me to generalize a very wide reaching political stance.
- wait_a_minute 6y ago
  It isn't generalizing a political stance, but summarizing the dominant narrative given to us by the media and what I call the new American left. If the narrative was mostly about economic status, we would hear more about that and about universal programs. Rather than disparities and identity politics.
  - helen___keller 6y ago
    > If the narrative was mostly about economic status, we would hear more about that and about universal programs Like.... Universal healthcare? One of the most (perhaps THE most) discussed topics at democratic presidential debates? Just because neither Bernie nor Elizabeth Warren didn't win the nomination doesn't mean that their ideas aren't part of the left.
    - skinnymuch 6y ago
      I thought Warren backed away from full Universal for all Health insurance. From my outside look, it didn’t appear as if Warren was actually that progressive. One random example — endorsing Biden (and Hillary which possibly is about identity politics) were both political moves not seeming to be of someone close to a progressive like Bernie. — Many poorer people already get Medicaid which is quite good. If that was expanded a bit more to slightly higher incomes and [conservatives] states couldn’t deny so many people who should get it. That would be many times cheaper than Medicare for all. It would help the most marginalized. Millions of people on good Medicaid right now could actually see their health insurance worsen under some universal health measures.
      - 6y ago
amznthrwaway 6y ago
> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys the curiosity this site exists for.
Barracoon 6y ago
The "new American left" wants universal health care, college education, housing, and a clean environment. All of those issues affect lower-income whites just as much as any other racial group.
- torstenvl 6y ago
  Universal college education is a huge disadvantage to lower-income people of all races and ethnicities, especially those in rural areas.
  - stevens32 6y ago
    Wait.. what? Mind explaining this?
    - torstenvl 6y ago
      What's to explain? Universal college education cannot be done without tax increases, and increasing taxes on the rural working class to pay for a program that doesn't benefit them is a huge disadvantage to them. If I'm a 21yo man in North Dakota working the oil fields to support my young family, how would you expect me to react to the idea of increasing my taxes so that white collar kids don't have to pay as much?
      - intended 6y ago
        Well tax your rich and corporations more - education is singularly able to propel people out of poverty. For your tax increase you get a way out of poverty. Tanstafl. Frankly though- the American education problem is just people talking about the loss of manufacturing jobs at two degrees removed.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        torstenvl 6y ago
neilparikh 6y ago
Is your claim that the "American Left" has decided to sacrifice the poor whites to help other races? If it is, it's not really an accurate claim. It's poor Asians who've taken the largest brunt of affirmative action, while Whites have remained relatively neutral in their standing.
- malandrew 6y ago
  It's probably both groups, asians and poor and middle class whites. If the winning narrative is racial diversity by proportion of population, you now find yourself largely in competition with people of your own race for one of the coveted spots, which means that the smart tactic is to find a way to exclude a subset of your own racial group that you're not part of so you have less competition. Liberals making conservatives personas non-grata means they have half as many people to compete with for a coveted spot at the top of the pyramid of power.
- hindsightbias 6y ago
  I think it’s all Asians, not just poor. Now, it won’t matter and Asians will be eligible for only 5% of the pie. Anyone poor won’t have the means to play the subjective system, and any left/liberal admin officer/provost in the Ivy’s knows that. Champagne corks are flying tonight.
  - memexy 6y ago
    What exactly is the benefit of these exclusionary tactics in your opinion? If there is indeed some conspiracy over excluding certain groups what could the administrators possibly gain from conspiring like this?
    - hindsightbias 6y ago
      Most rich people are white and most legacies are rich whites. More rich, more legacies, more donations, more buildings, more grants, more money for the polo team. More opportunites for you to mingle with rich folk, curry favors. Rich whites were less threatened when they could game the system, but once Asian Americans began to become overly represented per capita academically and Affirmative Action lawsuits on descrimination against Asians began working up the courts... problem solved now. There’s no outright conspiracy, these people know their position and what’s best for them. They’re probably not bad people but they’re not going to give away what they’ve got.

Who cares about those? Definitely not the new American left.

lallysingh 6y ago

Because it's definitely a zero-sum game.

wait_a_minute 6y ago
The new American left does treat it as a zero sum game. That is why they focus on disparities instead of universal programs that would eliminate the largest absolute amounts of poverty and suffering.
- germinalphrase 6y ago
  What falls in the bucket of “universal programs”?
  - eli_gottlieb 6y ago
    Basically, go check if Bernie Sanders supports it. If so, it's probably a universal program. Not a guarantee, but a very good heuristic.
- tharne 6y ago
  Zero sum thinking is probably the most central tenet of the broader philosophy of the American left. That's why there's so much talk of "disparity" or "inequality" vs. actual improvements to standards of living and quality of life. Almost all economic growth creates inequality for the simple reason that the more wealth there is, the more potential you have for skew. In China, for instance, there was much less income inequality back in the 60's but I don't think too many folks want to go back to those days. Similarly, I don't really care how much a CEO makes, I care about my own quality of life. To hear the new American left tell it though, we'd be better off all being equally poor instead of generally wealthier with a big differences between individual incomes.
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    40 years ago, if you looked at the preceding 40 years of economic growth in the US, the reality was "a rising tide floats all boats." Today, if you look at the preceding 40 years of economic growth in the US, the reality is "rich get richer, poor get poorer." Clearly, magic capitalism beans aren't the only ingredient in an economy that improves everyone's lot. My theory is that the other key ingredient is growth. Growth is chaotic and stirs money around, it's one of the precious few strong market forces that pushes towards equality rather than winner-take-all, even though it does so purely on entropic grounds and isn't strong enough to actually arrive anywhere near the maximum-entropy state. Of course, once the growth stops, the market settles out again, and the real question is how to deal with that. "Try to stimulate growth at all costs" just creates bubbles. It's a tough question, but whatever the answer is, I'm pretty sure it involves stirring money around, and I'm pretty sure big monied interests are going to fight it tooth and nail out of self-interest.
  - ryandrake 6y ago
    > Similarly, I don't really care how much a CEO makes, I care about my own quality of life. Your quality of life depends very much on how much other people make. It's all relative. If the average income in an area goes up by 50% but your own income only goes up 5%, then you are worse off than you started, because prices for everything will rise with the market. If you don't believe me, look at Bay Area housing. Inject a couple thousand new millionaires into an area and tell me things don't become worse for the existing modest-income people. On a percentage basis, the world is zero sum. If someone else captures (or creates) an additional 1% of something, that comes at the expense of 1% collectively from everyone else.
    - tharne 6y ago
      > On a percentage basis, the world is zero sum This is circular statement. Percentage is defined as a fraction of a some specified thing, so of course it's fixed. Ten percent of something is ten percent no matter how big or small that thing gets... Anyway, I'm still not following your reasoning here. If you cut everyone's salaries where I work by 50% and only cut mine by 20%, that's still a bad day for me, even though I'm getting a bigger share of the total compensation paid out. People can argue about whether or not, or to what extent, wealth should be redistributed, but zero sum thinking is a bad path to go down and completely ignores humanity's ability to better its lot through innovation, trade, etc. It's a depressingly pessimistic worldview that prioritizes taking from others instead of creating things that others find valuable. At it's core it's a selfish ethos.
- eli_gottlieb 6y ago
  There isn't one American Left. The liberals do as you often say. The socialists often focus precisely on "universal programs that would eliminate the largest absolute amounts of poverty and suffering."
  - malandrew 6y ago
    universal programs only eliminate the largest amounts of poverty and suffering if they are self sustaining long term. Any universal program that undermines the work that funds the universal programs in the first places is a threat to sustainability. The Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela and China under Mao are all examples of places that went with universal programs and policies that ultimately undermined the revenue streams supporting those programs.
free_rms 6y ago
In the context of Harvard's ~1,000 admissions a year, it's definitionally a zero-sum game.

webmaven 6y ago

Classism may not be quite as "trendy" as racism or sexism right this minute, but I think you'll still find plenty of interest in the topic (and it's intersections with the others) on the left.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
syshum 6y ago
>>I think you'll still find plenty of interest in the topic (and it's intersections with the others) on the left. Please provide examples because I am not aware of any.
- sct202 6y ago
  Interest in the topic is what drove the popularity around books like Hillbilly Elegy and tons to articles in NYT and WaPo after the 2016 election about poor white people and what were the challenges that they were facing and motivations.
  - xyzzyz 6y ago
    You mean the ones which explained that the poor whites are actually privileged racists, who are too lazy to learn to code?
    - cycrutchfield 6y ago
      Ah yes, this is the level of insight in comments that I come to Hacker News for. Excellent work.
- pelliphant 6y ago
  maybe the problem here is "american left" vs "other countries left". In "other countries left" the left tag is defined by this topic (and this topic alone). So, for someone not from america, your statement is a bit weird...
6y ago

Press2forEN 6y ago

As unfortunate as it may be, they still benefit from systemic racism and must be held just as accountable as their wealthy counterparts.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
staticautomatic 6y ago
https://harpers.org/archive/2019/12/lefty-lingo/ https://harpers.org/archive/2019/12/lefty-lingo/

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

asdf9240 6y ago

There is a very great portion of the American left that cares about economic status. I do believe that admissions should factor in socioeconomic status rather than just race, gender, etc., but believing this does not require me to generalize a very wide reaching political stance.

wait_a_minute 6y ago
It isn't generalizing a political stance, but summarizing the dominant narrative given to us by the media and what I call the new American left. If the narrative was mostly about economic status, we would hear more about that and about universal programs. Rather than disparities and identity politics.
- helen___keller 6y ago
  > If the narrative was mostly about economic status, we would hear more about that and about universal programs Like.... Universal healthcare? One of the most (perhaps THE most) discussed topics at democratic presidential debates? Just because neither Bernie nor Elizabeth Warren didn't win the nomination doesn't mean that their ideas aren't part of the left.
  - skinnymuch 6y ago
    I thought Warren backed away from full Universal for all Health insurance. From my outside look, it didn’t appear as if Warren was actually that progressive. One random example — endorsing Biden (and Hillary which possibly is about identity politics) were both political moves not seeming to be of someone close to a progressive like Bernie. — Many poorer people already get Medicaid which is quite good. If that was expanded a bit more to slightly higher incomes and [conservatives] states couldn’t deny so many people who should get it. That would be many times cheaper than Medicare for all. It would help the most marginalized. Millions of people on good Medicaid right now could actually see their health insurance worsen under some universal health measures.
    - 6y ago

amznthrwaway 6y ago

> Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. That destroys the curiosity this site exists for.

Barracoon 6y ago

The "new American left" wants universal health care, college education, housing, and a clean environment. All of those issues affect lower-income whites just as much as any other racial group.

torstenvl 6y ago
Universal college education is a huge disadvantage to lower-income people of all races and ethnicities, especially those in rural areas.
- stevens32 6y ago
  Wait.. what? Mind explaining this?
  - torstenvl 6y ago
    What's to explain? Universal college education cannot be done without tax increases, and increasing taxes on the rural working class to pay for a program that doesn't benefit them is a huge disadvantage to them. If I'm a 21yo man in North Dakota working the oil fields to support my young family, how would you expect me to react to the idea of increasing my taxes so that white collar kids don't have to pay as much?
    - intended 6y ago
      Well tax your rich and corporations more - education is singularly able to propel people out of poverty. For your tax increase you get a way out of poverty. Tanstafl. Frankly though- the American education problem is just people talking about the loss of manufacturing jobs at two degrees removed.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - torstenvl 6y ago

neilparikh 6y ago

Is your claim that the "American Left" has decided to sacrifice the poor whites to help other races? If it is, it's not really an accurate claim. It's poor Asians who've taken the largest brunt of affirmative action, while Whites have remained relatively neutral in their standing.

malandrew 6y ago
It's probably both groups, asians and poor and middle class whites. If the winning narrative is racial diversity by proportion of population, you now find yourself largely in competition with people of your own race for one of the coveted spots, which means that the smart tactic is to find a way to exclude a subset of your own racial group that you're not part of so you have less competition. Liberals making conservatives personas non-grata means they have half as many people to compete with for a coveted spot at the top of the pyramid of power.
hindsightbias 6y ago
I think it’s all Asians, not just poor. Now, it won’t matter and Asians will be eligible for only 5% of the pie. Anyone poor won’t have the means to play the subjective system, and any left/liberal admin officer/provost in the Ivy’s knows that. Champagne corks are flying tonight.
- memexy 6y ago
  What exactly is the benefit of these exclusionary tactics in your opinion? If there is indeed some conspiracy over excluding certain groups what could the administrators possibly gain from conspiring like this?
  - hindsightbias 6y ago
    Most rich people are white and most legacies are rich whites. More rich, more legacies, more donations, more buildings, more grants, more money for the polo team. More opportunites for you to mingle with rich folk, curry favors. Rich whites were less threatened when they could game the system, but once Asian Americans began to become overly represented per capita academically and Affirmative Action lawsuits on descrimination against Asians began working up the courts... problem solved now. There’s no outright conspiracy, these people know their position and what’s best for them. They’re probably not bad people but they’re not going to give away what they’ve got.