5 ms·

I have my own pet theory - based on nothing - that we're seeing the political consequences of massive income inequality. If you're at the bottom of the heap wat

I have my own pet theory - based on nothing - that we're seeing the political consequences of massive income inequality. If you're at the bottom of the heap watching massively wealthy individuals controlling a large portion of your daily life while accumulating more and more wealth for themselves, populism is really appealing! You get to watch people who think they're better than you (see comments in this very thread about how this is about "education" and "ignorance") squirm and sweat because things aren't going the way they think they should.

charlesu 6y ago
I think you’re right. But what people don’t realize is the the rich and the even the upper class aren’t stuck with this country and generally don’t feel much allegiance to it. They can benefit from lax regulation and low taxes and political turbulence and simply leave when things get out of control. It’s fun watching elites squirm but they have an exit plan. Most Americans can’t. They don’t have the skills or the money to go anywhere else. Using your politics to troll the elites is very much an example of cutting off your nose to spite your face. I wonder how long it’ll take for people to realize that.
- germinalphrase 6y ago
  While they certainly would have the resources “to go anywhere else” - where would all these very rich people actually want to go? Where can they maintain a high status lifestyle while also enjoying low taxes? Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems like a mighty short list and, hence, an empty threat.
  - charlesu 6y ago
    It depends on the threat. If the United States actually descends into any real chaos they can and will bail. For now, they can just move to their second home in Montana. But if gets bad, they’ll leave. They always do.
    - germinalphrase 6y ago
      Sure. Which is true of all people. You don’t have to be rich to flee violence. I guess my question relates more to the idea that the US has a “business friendly” economic regime and any change to that status quo is going to cause the very rich to leave. I’m sure a few will move to Monaco (as suggested by the other poster) but I’m not super convinced there are a bunch of viable alternative places to live.
  - nemo44x 6y ago
    > Where can they maintain a high status lifestyle while also enjoying low taxes? Monaco.
    - mellavora 6y ago
      And skiing in Andora.
    - malandrew 6y ago
      I would also say that cold places are also a good option relatively speaking as they aren't very forgiving if you can't provide yourself with a warm home through the winter. This is why rampant poverty such as tent cities tend to migrate to cities with warmer or at least moderate climates. Norway, Iceland, Canada, etc.
      - nemo44x 6y ago
        I guess it sort of makes sense that it appears much of the homelessness in Canada clusters around Vancouver since it is far more mild than the Eastern portion of the country.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  It's worse than that. Modern day populists usually don't harm the elites, and don't benefit anybody but the poorest segment of society. Many don't even benefit the poorest segment, only harm everybody but the elite. Modern populism is just a set of lies, where they harm poor people on less visible ways to make money available to distribute, most of it to the elites, and a small share back but on very visible ways. It is not the elite that sustain governments nowadays, so it can't really be any different.
- eli_gottlieb 6y ago
  >But what people don’t realize is the the rich and the even the upper class aren’t stuck with this country and generally don’t feel much allegiance to it. Spicy take: the nationalist branch of populist voters are very aware of this, and are actively exploiting it to make the internationally mobile professional class suffer.
  - charlesu 6y ago
    Seems like a bad strategy. America’s technological and cultural relevance depends on the internationally mobile professional class.
    - eli_gottlieb 6y ago
      When you put it before the voters as America's relevance to the international order versus their houses, jobs, and communities, they're gonna choose the latter.
    - charlesu 6y ago
      > When you put it before the voters as America's relevance to the international order versus their houses, jobs, and communities, they're gonna choose the latter. It’s sad because they’re not getting those things through nationalism either. In fact they’ll lose international relevance and their homes, jobs, and communities because of the folks selling them nationalism.
- newen 6y ago
  So what if they leave? The Federal Reserve is in the United States, so is the political power, the military, the banks, the land, the factories, etc, etc, etc. The US government can tax US citizens from anywhere in the world. The government can print or redistributed as much money as they want. A few people leaving a country and taking some gold with them won't matter in the end.
free_rms 6y ago
My related theory is that it's a decoupling of politics from material outcomes. Both parties are under the control of professional classes who don't actually need to care about the material outcomes for them. David Brooks type Republicans supported a "tax cut" which raised their taxes. Woke liberals want different TV characters represented while knifing Bernie Sanders in the back. The professional classes have the privilege to engage in culture war, and it's what the parties respond to because that's the donor base. Actual policy and material outcomes are irrelevant to everyone across the spectrum.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  Oddly, Linebarger (a professional propagandist who, to my knowledge, went 1-1, winning WWII and losing China) claims good propaganda is the opposite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24373042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24373042 > "Most enemy themes are beyond reach, especially those of inter-ideological warfare. The Nazis and Russians made the best propaganda against each other when they got down to the basic necessities of life, not when they were trying to weave finespun theories about each other's way of thinking or of life." but on the other hand, Linebarger was aiming at a much wider[1] population than a donor base. [1] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Page_150 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Pag... > "The first thing to do with the hypothetical man is to make him fit the kind of person who does get propaganda. In dealing with China, for example, it would be no use to take a statistically true Chinese, who lived on a farm 1.3 acres in size, went to town 5.8 times a year, had 3.6 children, and never read newspapers. The man to be set up would be the reachable man, the city, town or village dweller who had an income 2.1 times greater than that of the average in his county, who owned 1.7 long coats, and who shared one newspaper with 6.8 neighbors. Take this lowest-common-denominator of a man who can be reached by enemy propaganda and by yours. Name him the Propaganda Man. (Realistically speaking, modal and not arithmetical classes should be set up.)"
  - free_rms 6y ago
    I mean, if we're talking about the Eastern Front, the basic necessities of life were a lot more stark there than they are in 21st century America, right? "These people are coming, and they're gonna kill and rape everyone" is a pretty easy propaganda pitch on material grounds. That's a very interesting quote about the reachable person in an agricultural society. It's worth noting that after taking power, one of Mao's highest priorities was raising the literacy rate.
JackMorgan 6y ago
These researchers would agree with you, so it's not exactly a fringe idea. I think it's not more commonly discussed because most people aren't used to doing root cause analysis that spans several steps. It's easy to just assume the other side is filled with uneducated fools or truly evil people than it is to keep asking "why" repeatedly and come to conclusions. Also it makes sense that both major US parties are mostly filled with wealthy people, so if they can keep "the poors" fighting about orthogonal issues, the two parties can stay in power. https://www.noemamag.com/welcome-to-the-turbulent-twenties/ https://www.noemamag.com/welcome-to-the-turbulent-twenties/
hash872 6y ago
The article notes that democratic backsliding is a global phenomena, particularly in the G-20. Seeing as countries with much less wealth/income inequality than the US are experiencing the same trend, that kind of disproves this theory. There have been populist revolts in countries with a pretty low Gini, most recently Chile which is in the middle of the pack inequality-wise for Latin America. Basically, this is a popular but demonstrably wrong theory. I recommend reading Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri for a deeper explanation of how the Internet Age enables rolling, continuous populist revolts that have inchoate goals and accomplish little
- claudeganon 6y ago
  With a longer view of history, we can remember that invention of mass printing led to a huge uptick in conspiracizing and sectarian violence across Europe. While widespread literacy proved a long-term good, it was quite a rough ride from start to finish.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- mistermann 6y ago
  > Basically, this is a popular but demonstrably wrong theory. Knowing whether income inequality has some effect on the popularity of populism in a particular country cannot be "(dis)proven" one way or the other based on low-dimensional observations of (alleged) behavior and motivations of people in another country. Each individual person holds an incredibly complex set of beliefs in their heads that drive their actions. Some people go to school to learn some things about human behavior and cognition, and then get jobs hypothesizing about the causal underpinnings of human behavior, and then broadcast these hypotheses to the world from where they are picked up and stored in other minds, which then also proceed to hypothesize about other things based on the aggregate of information (of which this is only a small part) they have consumed in the past. These hypotheses, the ideas the mind conjures from thin air, seem largely indistinguishable from reality, but this is a clever illusion that (allegedly) arose out of millions of years of evolution. Seeing speculative beliefs in other people is easy, seeing them in oneself is not so easy - or so psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy would have us believe.
steve76 6y ago
Glut of entry level. Glut of retirees. Big barrier of entry because professions demand knowledge. Once that's crossed, wealth is highly accessible.
kryogen1c 6y ago
> massive income inequality. If you're at the bottom of the heap watching massively wealthy individuals controlling a large portion of your daily life this is a perfect microcosm of the confusion about inequality (you didnt say inequality but MASSIVE inequality, but the magnitude is not important). the inequality premise is non-causal to the actual problem, which you yourself immediately state: control. the issue is not inequality, but the loss of ability to transition from low to high income. inequality is a necessary, sufficient, and desired outcome of any system - by definition. we should be fighting generational inequality, not inequality itself. the system needs to encourage mobility and allow for potential maximization. its ok that there are poor neighborhoods, but its not ok that poor neighborhoods have gang, drug, crime, and school quality problems. equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. chasing down outcome inequality is murder-suicide. marxists and communists have killed hundreds of millions of their own people in the last two centuries.
api 6y ago
A quote from 2016 that I heard agrees with your thesis: "I can't throw a Molotov cocktail through the window of the White House, but I can throw a Donald Trump." Many view him as a "fuck you" candidate and like him precisely because the majority of the elite and the political process doesn't. They don't care if he does a lot of damage or even acts against their interest because it's not like anyone was paying attention to their interests beforehand anyway.
sk2020 6y ago
I would think that income inequality in terms of real wealth (food, shelter, pocket-sized entertainment-rectangles) is not as bad as it seems in nominal terms, especially when you look outside the US. The ability for trades and unskilled labor outside of the US to take advantage of arbitraging wage differences across national boundaries has never been greater. Outsourcing and insourcing labor is much easier than it was in, say, 1964. For many countries, remitted wages are a source of income which has lifted many from extreme poverty. I think you could observe some of the biggest changes in quality of life over the last 60 years in places where wage arbitrage is popular. Of course, by extension, the larger your hiring pool, the less pressure there is to increase wages. Also, I think many studies on inequality assume things like stocks are all worth face value, which is optimistic to say the least. Stock valuation has almost everything to do with faith in a bigger fool and almost nothing to do with tangible benefits. GOOG, for example, has a market cap of >$1T, now ask yourself, how did it come that there are even USD 1T in existence? Were they printed? Can you touch them? Did Eric Schmidt hold the poor up by their ankles and steal $1T one pocketful of quarters and dimes at a time? Or maybe, just maybe, these numbers are all just make-believe. At least, I think it's not as simple as people who live in the suburbs must have wronged some particular voting block and should be punished.

charlesu 6y ago

I think you’re right. But what people don’t realize is the the rich and the even the upper class aren’t stuck with this country and generally don’t feel much allegiance to it. They can benefit from lax regulation and low taxes and political turbulence and simply leave when things get out of control. It’s fun watching elites squirm but they have an exit plan. Most Americans can’t. They don’t have the skills or the money to go anywhere else. Using your politics to troll the elites is very much an example of cutting off your nose to spite your face. I wonder how long it’ll take for people to realize that.

germinalphrase 6y ago
While they certainly would have the resources “to go anywhere else” - where would all these very rich people actually want to go? Where can they maintain a high status lifestyle while also enjoying low taxes? Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems like a mighty short list and, hence, an empty threat.
- charlesu 6y ago
  It depends on the threat. If the United States actually descends into any real chaos they can and will bail. For now, they can just move to their second home in Montana. But if gets bad, they’ll leave. They always do.
  - germinalphrase 6y ago
    Sure. Which is true of all people. You don’t have to be rich to flee violence. I guess my question relates more to the idea that the US has a “business friendly” economic regime and any change to that status quo is going to cause the very rich to leave. I’m sure a few will move to Monaco (as suggested by the other poster) but I’m not super convinced there are a bunch of viable alternative places to live.
- nemo44x 6y ago
  > Where can they maintain a high status lifestyle while also enjoying low taxes? Monaco.
  - mellavora 6y ago
    And skiing in Andora.
  - malandrew 6y ago
    I would also say that cold places are also a good option relatively speaking as they aren't very forgiving if you can't provide yourself with a warm home through the winter. This is why rampant poverty such as tent cities tend to migrate to cities with warmer or at least moderate climates. Norway, Iceland, Canada, etc.
    - nemo44x 6y ago
      I guess it sort of makes sense that it appears much of the homelessness in Canada clusters around Vancouver since it is far more mild than the Eastern portion of the country.
marcosdumay 6y ago
It's worse than that. Modern day populists usually don't harm the elites, and don't benefit anybody but the poorest segment of society. Many don't even benefit the poorest segment, only harm everybody but the elite. Modern populism is just a set of lies, where they harm poor people on less visible ways to make money available to distribute, most of it to the elites, and a small share back but on very visible ways. It is not the elite that sustain governments nowadays, so it can't really be any different.
eli_gottlieb 6y ago
>But what people don’t realize is the the rich and the even the upper class aren’t stuck with this country and generally don’t feel much allegiance to it. Spicy take: the nationalist branch of populist voters are very aware of this, and are actively exploiting it to make the internationally mobile professional class suffer.
- charlesu 6y ago
  Seems like a bad strategy. America’s technological and cultural relevance depends on the internationally mobile professional class.
  - eli_gottlieb 6y ago
    When you put it before the voters as America's relevance to the international order versus their houses, jobs, and communities, they're gonna choose the latter.
  - charlesu 6y ago
    > When you put it before the voters as America's relevance to the international order versus their houses, jobs, and communities, they're gonna choose the latter. It’s sad because they’re not getting those things through nationalism either. In fact they’ll lose international relevance and their homes, jobs, and communities because of the folks selling them nationalism.
newen 6y ago
So what if they leave? The Federal Reserve is in the United States, so is the political power, the military, the banks, the land, the factories, etc, etc, etc. The US government can tax US citizens from anywhere in the world. The government can print or redistributed as much money as they want. A few people leaving a country and taking some gold with them won't matter in the end.

free_rms 6y ago

My related theory is that it's a decoupling of politics from material outcomes. Both parties are under the control of professional classes who don't actually need to care about the material outcomes for them. David Brooks type Republicans supported a "tax cut" which raised their taxes. Woke liberals want different TV characters represented while knifing Bernie Sanders in the back. The professional classes have the privilege to engage in culture war, and it's what the parties respond to because that's the donor base. Actual policy and material outcomes are irrelevant to everyone across the spectrum.

082349872349872 6y ago
Oddly, Linebarger (a professional propagandist who, to my knowledge, went 1-1, winning WWII and losing China) claims good propaganda is the opposite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24373042 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24373042 > "Most enemy themes are beyond reach, especially those of inter-ideological warfare. The Nazis and Russians made the best propaganda against each other when they got down to the basic necessities of life, not when they were trying to weave finespun theories about each other's way of thinking or of life." but on the other hand, Linebarger was aiming at a much wider[1] population than a donor base. [1] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Page_150 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Pag... > "The first thing to do with the hypothetical man is to make him fit the kind of person who does get propaganda. In dealing with China, for example, it would be no use to take a statistically true Chinese, who lived on a farm 1.3 acres in size, went to town 5.8 times a year, had 3.6 children, and never read newspapers. The man to be set up would be the reachable man, the city, town or village dweller who had an income 2.1 times greater than that of the average in his county, who owned 1.7 long coats, and who shared one newspaper with 6.8 neighbors. Take this lowest-common-denominator of a man who can be reached by enemy propaganda and by yours. Name him the Propaganda Man. (Realistically speaking, modal and not arithmetical classes should be set up.)"
- free_rms 6y ago
  I mean, if we're talking about the Eastern Front, the basic necessities of life were a lot more stark there than they are in 21st century America, right? "These people are coming, and they're gonna kill and rape everyone" is a pretty easy propaganda pitch on material grounds. That's a very interesting quote about the reachable person in an agricultural society. It's worth noting that after taking power, one of Mao's highest priorities was raising the literacy rate.

JackMorgan 6y ago

These researchers would agree with you, so it's not exactly a fringe idea. I think it's not more commonly discussed because most people aren't used to doing root cause analysis that spans several steps. It's easy to just assume the other side is filled with uneducated fools or truly evil people than it is to keep asking "why" repeatedly and come to conclusions. Also it makes sense that both major US parties are mostly filled with wealthy people, so if they can keep "the poors" fighting about orthogonal issues, the two parties can stay in power. https://www.noemamag.com/welcome-to-the-turbulent-twenties/ https://www.noemamag.com/welcome-to-the-turbulent-twenties/

hash872 6y ago

The article notes that democratic backsliding is a global phenomena, particularly in the G-20. Seeing as countries with much less wealth/income inequality than the US are experiencing the same trend, that kind of disproves this theory. There have been populist revolts in countries with a pretty low Gini, most recently Chile which is in the middle of the pack inequality-wise for Latin America. Basically, this is a popular but demonstrably wrong theory. I recommend reading Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri for a deeper explanation of how the Internet Age enables rolling, continuous populist revolts that have inchoate goals and accomplish little

claudeganon 6y ago
With a longer view of history, we can remember that invention of mass printing led to a huge uptick in conspiracizing and sectarian violence across Europe. While widespread literacy proved a long-term good, it was quite a rough ride from start to finish.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
mistermann 6y ago
> Basically, this is a popular but demonstrably wrong theory. Knowing whether income inequality has some effect on the popularity of populism in a particular country cannot be "(dis)proven" one way or the other based on low-dimensional observations of (alleged) behavior and motivations of people in another country. Each individual person holds an incredibly complex set of beliefs in their heads that drive their actions. Some people go to school to learn some things about human behavior and cognition, and then get jobs hypothesizing about the causal underpinnings of human behavior, and then broadcast these hypotheses to the world from where they are picked up and stored in other minds, which then also proceed to hypothesize about other things based on the aggregate of information (of which this is only a small part) they have consumed in the past. These hypotheses, the ideas the mind conjures from thin air, seem largely indistinguishable from reality, but this is a clever illusion that (allegedly) arose out of millions of years of evolution. Seeing speculative beliefs in other people is easy, seeing them in oneself is not so easy - or so psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy would have us believe.

steve76 6y ago

Glut of entry level. Glut of retirees. Big barrier of entry because professions demand knowledge. Once that's crossed, wealth is highly accessible.

kryogen1c 6y ago

> massive income inequality. If you're at the bottom of the heap watching massively wealthy individuals controlling a large portion of your daily life this is a perfect microcosm of the confusion about inequality (you didnt say inequality but MASSIVE inequality, but the magnitude is not important). the inequality premise is non-causal to the actual problem, which you yourself immediately state: control. the issue is not inequality, but the loss of ability to transition from low to high income. inequality is a necessary, sufficient, and desired outcome of any system - by definition. we should be fighting generational inequality, not inequality itself. the system needs to encourage mobility and allow for potential maximization. its ok that there are poor neighborhoods, but its not ok that poor neighborhoods have gang, drug, crime, and school quality problems. equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. chasing down outcome inequality is murder-suicide. marxists and communists have killed hundreds of millions of their own people in the last two centuries.

api 6y ago

A quote from 2016 that I heard agrees with your thesis: "I can't throw a Molotov cocktail through the window of the White House, but I can throw a Donald Trump." Many view him as a "fuck you" candidate and like him precisely because the majority of the elite and the political process doesn't. They don't care if he does a lot of damage or even acts against their interest because it's not like anyone was paying attention to their interests beforehand anyway.

sk2020 6y ago

I would think that income inequality in terms of real wealth (food, shelter, pocket-sized entertainment-rectangles) is not as bad as it seems in nominal terms, especially when you look outside the US. The ability for trades and unskilled labor outside of the US to take advantage of arbitraging wage differences across national boundaries has never been greater. Outsourcing and insourcing labor is much easier than it was in, say, 1964. For many countries, remitted wages are a source of income which has lifted many from extreme poverty. I think you could observe some of the biggest changes in quality of life over the last 60 years in places where wage arbitrage is popular. Of course, by extension, the larger your hiring pool, the less pressure there is to increase wages. Also, I think many studies on inequality assume things like stocks are all worth face value, which is optimistic to say the least. Stock valuation has almost everything to do with faith in a bigger fool and almost nothing to do with tangible benefits. GOOG, for example, has a market cap of >$1T, now ask yourself, how did it come that there are even USD 1T in existence? Were they printed? Can you touch them? Did Eric Schmidt hold the poor up by their ankles and steal $1T one pocketful of quarters and dimes at a time? Or maybe, just maybe, these numbers are all just make-believe. At least, I think it's not as simple as people who live in the suburbs must have wronged some particular voting block and should be punished.