5 ms·

There are two Americas, the one that HN folks inhabit and the underclass. The former is doing great. The latter has grown and shifted. I grew up in a rural co

There are two Americas, the one that HN folks inhabit and the underclass. The former is doing great. The latter has grown and shifted. I grew up in a rural community that was in the process of unraveling from a prosperous farming and light industrial area to a rural slum. There are zero operational farms in that area today. The one I worked for as a teen was in continuous operation since the Dutch colonial period. That’s an example of why the nihilism of MAGA is so appealing. The world is collapsing around many people. These issues are caused by demographics and macro trends. The laws have changed to facilitate generational wealth transfer, and that process will change the way the economy works and further fuel unrest. This stuff is unlikely to get fixed in my lifetime.

apsec112 2y ago
Since 2016, real (inflation-adjusted) wages have risen quickly for people in the bottom quartile, while for upper-income workers they've been stagnant. Obviously, most people on HN are still better off than manual laborers, but the gap has narrowed substantially (a big reversal from 1995-2015) and that's a good thing. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F377bd17a-7b46-498f-9aac-827f2b7c8c2f_2886x1843.png https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...
- lupire 2y ago
  That graph shows beginning of a recovery from large wage decreased of the last few years. Equality is nice, but the main story is that everyone is doing worse.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  I keep telling everyone I know about this and literally zero people believe me! So done with Americans finally getting into boom times and still feeling like it’s 2008. No one here ever wants to admit that they have it good.
  - uoaei 2y ago
    You are literally the person the article is about.
- marginalia_nu 2y ago
  I don't know if it's being done as a joke or what, but this is the exact sort of myopic focus on a single economic variable that is being criticized as failing to capture economic reality.
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    Yeah, we should be comparing spending power as a very slight upgrade to the metric of overall compensation. And I'm not even sure what this graph is supposed to be showing. The biggest difference is when he 1st quartile stagnates while the 4th quartile loses 4-5%. 95% of $200,000 is still a lot more than even a 100% increase in salary for $40,000. my most generous, lazy interpretation of this chart shows a whopping $15% increase in wages for the first quartile.
- Spooky23 2y ago
  Wages are tough in this segment because many households are dependent on external non-income benefits. Particularly Medicaid and particularly for children. So if your $16/hr job pops by 30%, the net impact on the household is much lower in many cases. For teen workers, it’s beer money. For single moms, it’s a net loss as costs for daycare and healthcare have increased 50%. All of this stuff is relative. I’m a tech exec in a large organization, and essentially live the same lifestyle as my parents, who were in “lower end” jobs relatively speaking in the 80s when I was little.
  - ebiester 2y ago
    This seems weird to me. What is your savings rate versus theirs? I say this because on the surface, the same feels true for me, but on closer inspection I spend money like water in ways they had tightly controlled. And yet, I have a higher savings rate than they did. (However, I don't have a pension.)
    - Spooky23 2y ago
      Probably similar, I’m an aggressive saver. The biggest difference is housing and healthcare. My healthcare expense is equivalent to their mortgage. My dad family healthcare coverage was $0 until I was in high school. The total cost of my, excellent health insurance is about $35k, which is 90% of the salary of my first professional job in 1999! Our policy with respect to healthcare is essentially a regressive tax on the working public. Rich people have a limited cost exposure, poor people get limited access to poor care, and everyone else gets increasingly expensive, lower quality care.
- netbioserror 2y ago
  Way to completely miss the anecdotal point about rural cultural decay. You can point to a chart showing rising wage growth all day, but if it's happening at the expense of long-lived communities being hollowed out, you're effectively celebrating peoples' destitution. It is incredible how Internet armchair technocrats will attempt to reduce human existence to a few equations and wonder why broader populations despise the Ivory Tower.
  - rangestransform 2y ago
    Rural existence is already subsidized by urban dwellers, I dunno what more they expect
    - datavirtue 2y ago
      I think it's the other way around.
    - vagrantJin 2y ago
      Please elaborate further on what you mean by the phrasing of "Rural existence is already subsidized...." I'm uncertain if I missed the sarcasm or perhaps more likely my lack of comprehension.
      - rangestransform 2y ago
        https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-rural-america-needs-cities/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-rural-america-needs-c... It’s not sarcasm, it’s reality
    - netbioserror 2y ago
      [flagged]
    - berniedurfee 2y ago
      Wow, I’ve never heard this sort of urban elitism before! Is it common?
- pessimizer 2y ago
  This is a bad interpretation of events, and an intentional ignoring of wealth gains. > Since 2016, real (inflation-adjusted) wages have risen quickly for people in the bottom quartile This "quick" wage growth, as you point out with your image, is on the order of 1 or 2% for the past few years, and was massacred by recent inflation i.e. if raising the minimum wage raised your standard of living, you've almost exactly kept up with inflation. Meanwhile, wealth amongst people who hold investments, a group that often includes upper-income workers, has massively increased during that time. The S&P has had a 130% adjusted return since 2016. The share of wealth held by the top 10% is as high or higher than it was in 2016.
- boppo1 2y ago
  >real (inflation-adjusted) wages lol. The whole point of this discussion is that our metrics are not properly measuring things. The reported inflation number is a joke. See: anything in life that matters like - a house - a car - an education - health care - raising a kid - basically any life-milestone but TVs and electronic toys have never been cheaper so it's all okay! Hedonic adjustment!
  - emseetech 2y ago
    | an education The community college in the area I briefly lived growing up was $17 a credit hour in 1997. Inflation adjusted that's $31.67 a credit hour. It's now nearly $140 a credit hour. Almost 4.5x more than inflation. For a community college.
    - lotsoweiners 2y ago
      Probably considerably cheaper than the University and you can always transfer after 2 years.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
- tarsinge 2y ago
  The global inflation is exactly the kind of insufficient metric the parent is talking about. What about salaries compared to necessities like food and shelter? Global inflation is only meaningful for upper income workers that have significant disposable income.
- yoyohello13 2y ago
  I'm sure those rural workers watching their towns disintegrate around them will be happy to know they are at least making a extra couple bucks an hour.
  - datavirtue 2y ago
    And all of it gets burnt up as soon as they break out of the work-eat-sleep routine and get confronted with the expenses of going on vacation or just going fishing.
nequo 2y ago
> There are two Americas, the one that HN folks inhabit and the underclass. > The former is doing great. This is at odds with what I've been hearing on HN and in adjacent places. For a year or two now, people have been saying that finding a job in tech has become much harder. Some say that it hasn't been this bad in a decade. Some say it hasn't been this bad since the dotcom bubble burst.
- api 2y ago
  It’s harder than it was a few years ago to find a six figure upwardly mobile job. This is a different world from the one where hundreds of thousands are committing suicide with fentanyl.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - johnnyanmac 2y ago
    I'd take any job, but very few bites outside of tech. So chasing that tech job is literally my path of least resistance.
- epolanski 2y ago
  Just because IT sector has lows, doesn't mean it's a bad one suddenly.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Generalizations are always only somewhat true. But what you're probably seeing is a reaction to the end of a period when, assuming at least a pulse and some vague familiarity with computers (and maybe some ability to navigate tech interviews), you could walk out of a job on Friday and have multiple offers within a week. This was basically never the norm with most professional jobs that could take months of job-hunting with no guarantee of a higher salary or not needing to move. I was very lucky over time and it always depended on professional connections. A lot of people got accustomed to a period that was nothing like the historical norm. I expect very few of them have taken fast food jobs which absolutely happened in 2001.
mistrial9 2y ago
> by demographics and macro trends. fully agree, and also taxation, access to credit and leverage for profitable assets, many legal loopholes.. Pickitty says in-part that rewards are disproportionately moving to capital assets, at the same time devaluing the fundamental components of life and liberty .. food stocks, common labor, political freedoms from taxation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty Intuition says that increased surveillance by law enforcement to produce convictions that cost money and time are economically crippling to building a middle class from a labor pool and small-holder individuals. A people without hope and progress become mired in common failure and produce a downward spiral of personal life, as described.
paulmd 2y ago
When the proverbial one-horse town/single-industry company town has the single-industry leave town, what exactly do you want anyone to do about it? We already shovel in far more tax dollars maintaining infrastructure for a handful of remaining occupants even when the economic activity no longer justifies the spend. What further burden, exactly, do you think the rest of the world owes ex-rural communities that have deindustrialized like this? I’ve been to places like this around here, where mining towns have dried up and there’s only a few early-20th-century dams marking anything at all. You have to drive into unmarked, un-google-mappable state land through the fire roads (the kind of thing that gets people killed-by-GPS out west) to even get there etc, and there used to be a whole town there once for the mines. Serious/honest question, what does the broader public really owe that miner? America needs to have some hard talks about what to do in these (extremely frequent) situations, because infrastructure can’t be an indefinite commitment once the communities that sustain it wither and shrivel away. And it sucks for the handful of holdouts who don’t want to leave, but the community itself is really already dead. If there are 30 people who don't want to leave their homes, do we keep paving roads and delivering US mail and maintaining hundreds of miles of power lines for the 30 people who won't leave? That's maybe viable when it's a rare situation, but it's not, anymore - America is folding back inwards after over-expanding during the railroad and industrial eras. There are a lot of "railroad towns" where the trains no longer stop, so to speak. And once "the mine dries up", and those arteries stop pumping, people move on. What do we do about the ones who won't? Society is probably "in the hole" (net economic activity) to the tune of millions of dollars of infrastructure per resident, perhaps tens of millions in some cases, over their lifetime. A lot of these places literally have population density of sub-1-person-per-sq-mile, there are whole regions with sub-10. It's gauche to say it, but at the end of the day everyone knows there is a number when it's worth it and a number when it's not - just like statistical value of life. And at some point, if the taxpayer is kicking in tens of millions of dollars of artificial subsidy, it's becoming a lifestyle choice that we choose to subsidize. By all means offer them a great deal to buy their property and bulldoze it... but at the end of the day we can't keep paving roads onto mountains just because 10 people don't want to move. That is an economic termite right there - and they would use far less charitable terms to describe the situation, if the tables were reversed. I feel for people who have to leave their lives behind etc, but infrastructure isn't a suicide pact either. It's not a permanent, lifelong commitment even when the fundamentals on the ground totally change - and not everyone is a legacy homeowner to begin with. http://travelthemitten.com/landmarks/redridge-steel-dam-an-engineering-landmark-in-houghton-county/ http://travelthemitten.com/landmarks/redridge-steel-dam-an-e... https://99wfmk.com/redridge-michigan/ https://99wfmk.com/redridge-michigan/ > Nothing beside remains. Round the decay > Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare > The high and lonely hills stretch far away.
ryandrake 2y ago
> That’s an example of why the nihilism of MAGA is so appealing. The world is collapsing around many people. And this is what I don't get about current US politics. MAGA = Republicans. The Republican party is the party of generational wealth transfer. The Republican party is the party of elite businessmen lording over the working class. The Republican party is the party of all the economic forces that are unraveling rural communities and turning them into slums. They're voting for and supporting the very politicians who are "collapsing the world" around themselves. But why? It's not just idle nihilism. They're one of the most actively engaged political demographics in recent memory. Is the Culture War so important/motivating to these people that they are willing to help implement their own economic destruction?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ncallaway 2y ago
  The people implementing the economic destruction are promising a silver bullet to instantly fix everything. The people who promise modest, incremental improvement are much less appealing in that environment.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  You shouldn't confuse your stereotypes of people for actual people. > The Republican party is the party of generational wealth transfer. I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. The Republican party is half the country. "Demographic data compiled in the 2016 and 2020 elections showed that the top 40 percent of income earners preferred the Democratic candidate for president (Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden) over the Republican (Donald Trump), signifying a sizable coalition shift from where the party was in the previous decade." https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-being-party-rich-could-cost-them-2024-election-1806747 https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-being-party-rich-could-co... "Some recent US figures on the distribution of income by party: 65 percent of taxpayer households that earn more than $500,000 per year are now in Democratic districts; 74 percent of the households in Republican districts earn less than $100,00 per year. Add to this what we knew already, namely that the 10 richest congressional districts in the country all have Democratic representatives in Congress. The above numbers incidentally come from the Internal Revenue Service, via Bloomberg, and are likely to be more reliable than if they came from Project Veritas via theblaze.com." https://www.thenation.com/article/society/democrats-rich-party-obama/ https://www.thenation.com/article/society/democrats-rich-par... > The Republican party is the party of all the economic forces that are unraveling rural communities and turning them into slums. All of them? "For decades, the Republicans were seen as the party of big business. Their support for low taxes and light regulation was manna to executives eager to raise profits and avoid government entanglements, and chief executives and big companies were reliable funders of Republicans up and down the ballot. "Mr. Trump has frayed those bonds. Four years ago, few major chief executives supported Mr. Trump during his first campaign. And throughout his time in the White House, executives from many of the company’s biggest brands publicly sparred with the president on everything from gun control to climate change to immigration. "'I can’t remember a time when the business community has spoken out so strongly in opposition to an administration on so many important issues,' said Rich Lesser, chief executive of Boston Consulting Group." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/business/republicans-business-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/business/republicans-busi... > Is the Culture War so important/motivating to these people that they are willing to help implement their own economic destruction? This is the culture war. You're doing it right now.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
I'm doing awful, personally. But I guess my industry is an exception among exceptions. Still feels bad.

apsec112 2y ago

Since 2016, real (inflation-adjusted) wages have risen quickly for people in the bottom quartile, while for upper-income workers they've been stagnant. Obviously, most people on HN are still better off than manual laborers, but the gap has narrowed substantially (a big reversal from 1995-2015) and that's a good thing. https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F377bd17a-7b46-498f-9aac-827f2b7c8c2f_2886x1843.png https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_pr...

lupire 2y ago
That graph shows beginning of a recovery from large wage decreased of the last few years. Equality is nice, but the main story is that everyone is doing worse.
Der_Einzige 2y ago
I keep telling everyone I know about this and literally zero people believe me! So done with Americans finally getting into boom times and still feeling like it’s 2008. No one here ever wants to admit that they have it good.
- uoaei 2y ago
  You are literally the person the article is about.
marginalia_nu 2y ago
I don't know if it's being done as a joke or what, but this is the exact sort of myopic focus on a single economic variable that is being criticized as failing to capture economic reality.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  Yeah, we should be comparing spending power as a very slight upgrade to the metric of overall compensation. And I'm not even sure what this graph is supposed to be showing. The biggest difference is when he 1st quartile stagnates while the 4th quartile loses 4-5%. 95% of $200,000 is still a lot more than even a 100% increase in salary for $40,000. my most generous, lazy interpretation of this chart shows a whopping $15% increase in wages for the first quartile.
Spooky23 2y ago
Wages are tough in this segment because many households are dependent on external non-income benefits. Particularly Medicaid and particularly for children. So if your $16/hr job pops by 30%, the net impact on the household is much lower in many cases. For teen workers, it’s beer money. For single moms, it’s a net loss as costs for daycare and healthcare have increased 50%. All of this stuff is relative. I’m a tech exec in a large organization, and essentially live the same lifestyle as my parents, who were in “lower end” jobs relatively speaking in the 80s when I was little.
- ebiester 2y ago
  This seems weird to me. What is your savings rate versus theirs? I say this because on the surface, the same feels true for me, but on closer inspection I spend money like water in ways they had tightly controlled. And yet, I have a higher savings rate than they did. (However, I don't have a pension.)
  - Spooky23 2y ago
    Probably similar, I’m an aggressive saver. The biggest difference is housing and healthcare. My healthcare expense is equivalent to their mortgage. My dad family healthcare coverage was $0 until I was in high school. The total cost of my, excellent health insurance is about $35k, which is 90% of the salary of my first professional job in 1999! Our policy with respect to healthcare is essentially a regressive tax on the working public. Rich people have a limited cost exposure, poor people get limited access to poor care, and everyone else gets increasingly expensive, lower quality care.
netbioserror 2y ago
Way to completely miss the anecdotal point about rural cultural decay. You can point to a chart showing rising wage growth all day, but if it's happening at the expense of long-lived communities being hollowed out, you're effectively celebrating peoples' destitution. It is incredible how Internet armchair technocrats will attempt to reduce human existence to a few equations and wonder why broader populations despise the Ivory Tower.
- rangestransform 2y ago
  Rural existence is already subsidized by urban dwellers, I dunno what more they expect
  - datavirtue 2y ago
    I think it's the other way around.
  - vagrantJin 2y ago
    Please elaborate further on what you mean by the phrasing of "Rural existence is already subsidized...." I'm uncertain if I missed the sarcasm or perhaps more likely my lack of comprehension.
    - rangestransform 2y ago
      https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-rural-america-needs-cities/ https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-rural-america-needs-c... It’s not sarcasm, it’s reality
  - netbioserror 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - berniedurfee 2y ago
    Wow, I’ve never heard this sort of urban elitism before! Is it common?
pessimizer 2y ago
This is a bad interpretation of events, and an intentional ignoring of wealth gains. > Since 2016, real (inflation-adjusted) wages have risen quickly for people in the bottom quartile This "quick" wage growth, as you point out with your image, is on the order of 1 or 2% for the past few years, and was massacred by recent inflation i.e. if raising the minimum wage raised your standard of living, you've almost exactly kept up with inflation. Meanwhile, wealth amongst people who hold investments, a group that often includes upper-income workers, has massively increased during that time. The S&P has had a 130% adjusted return since 2016. The share of wealth held by the top 10% is as high or higher than it was in 2016.
boppo1 2y ago
>real (inflation-adjusted) wages lol. The whole point of this discussion is that our metrics are not properly measuring things. The reported inflation number is a joke. See: anything in life that matters like - a house - a car - an education - health care - raising a kid - basically any life-milestone but TVs and electronic toys have never been cheaper so it's all okay! Hedonic adjustment!
- emseetech 2y ago
  | an education The community college in the area I briefly lived growing up was $17 a credit hour in 1997. Inflation adjusted that's $31.67 a credit hour. It's now nearly $140 a credit hour. Almost 4.5x more than inflation. For a community college.
  - lotsoweiners 2y ago
    Probably considerably cheaper than the University and you can always transfer after 2 years.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
tarsinge 2y ago
The global inflation is exactly the kind of insufficient metric the parent is talking about. What about salaries compared to necessities like food and shelter? Global inflation is only meaningful for upper income workers that have significant disposable income.
yoyohello13 2y ago
I'm sure those rural workers watching their towns disintegrate around them will be happy to know they are at least making a extra couple bucks an hour.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  And all of it gets burnt up as soon as they break out of the work-eat-sleep routine and get confronted with the expenses of going on vacation or just going fishing.

nequo 2y ago

> There are two Americas, the one that HN folks inhabit and the underclass. > The former is doing great. This is at odds with what I've been hearing on HN and in adjacent places. For a year or two now, people have been saying that finding a job in tech has become much harder. Some say that it hasn't been this bad in a decade. Some say it hasn't been this bad since the dotcom bubble burst.

api 2y ago
It’s harder than it was a few years ago to find a six figure upwardly mobile job. This is a different world from the one where hundreds of thousands are committing suicide with fentanyl.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  I'd take any job, but very few bites outside of tech. So chasing that tech job is literally my path of least resistance.
epolanski 2y ago
Just because IT sector has lows, doesn't mean it's a bad one suddenly.
ghaff 2y ago
Generalizations are always only somewhat true. But what you're probably seeing is a reaction to the end of a period when, assuming at least a pulse and some vague familiarity with computers (and maybe some ability to navigate tech interviews), you could walk out of a job on Friday and have multiple offers within a week. This was basically never the norm with most professional jobs that could take months of job-hunting with no guarantee of a higher salary or not needing to move. I was very lucky over time and it always depended on professional connections. A lot of people got accustomed to a period that was nothing like the historical norm. I expect very few of them have taken fast food jobs which absolutely happened in 2001.

mistrial9 2y ago

> by demographics and macro trends. fully agree, and also taxation, access to credit and leverage for profitable assets, many legal loopholes.. Pickitty says in-part that rewards are disproportionately moving to capital assets, at the same time devaluing the fundamental components of life and liberty .. food stocks, common labor, political freedoms from taxation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Piketty Intuition says that increased surveillance by law enforcement to produce convictions that cost money and time are economically crippling to building a middle class from a labor pool and small-holder individuals. A people without hope and progress become mired in common failure and produce a downward spiral of personal life, as described.

paulmd 2y ago

When the proverbial one-horse town/single-industry company town has the single-industry leave town, what exactly do you want anyone to do about it? We already shovel in far more tax dollars maintaining infrastructure for a handful of remaining occupants even when the economic activity no longer justifies the spend. What further burden, exactly, do you think the rest of the world owes ex-rural communities that have deindustrialized like this? I’ve been to places like this around here, where mining towns have dried up and there’s only a few early-20th-century dams marking anything at all. You have to drive into unmarked, un-google-mappable state land through the fire roads (the kind of thing that gets people killed-by-GPS out west) to even get there etc, and there used to be a whole town there once for the mines. Serious/honest question, what does the broader public really owe that miner? America needs to have some hard talks about what to do in these (extremely frequent) situations, because infrastructure can’t be an indefinite commitment once the communities that sustain it wither and shrivel away. And it sucks for the handful of holdouts who don’t want to leave, but the community itself is really already dead. If there are 30 people who don't want to leave their homes, do we keep paving roads and delivering US mail and maintaining hundreds of miles of power lines for the 30 people who won't leave? That's maybe viable when it's a rare situation, but it's not, anymore - America is folding back inwards after over-expanding during the railroad and industrial eras. There are a lot of "railroad towns" where the trains no longer stop, so to speak. And once "the mine dries up", and those arteries stop pumping, people move on. What do we do about the ones who won't? Society is probably "in the hole" (net economic activity) to the tune of millions of dollars of infrastructure per resident, perhaps tens of millions in some cases, over their lifetime. A lot of these places literally have population density of sub-1-person-per-sq-mile, there are whole regions with sub-10. It's gauche to say it, but at the end of the day everyone knows there is a number when it's worth it and a number when it's not - just like statistical value of life. And at some point, if the taxpayer is kicking in tens of millions of dollars of artificial subsidy, it's becoming a lifestyle choice that we choose to subsidize. By all means offer them a great deal to buy their property and bulldoze it... but at the end of the day we can't keep paving roads onto mountains just because 10 people don't want to move. That is an economic termite right there - and they would use far less charitable terms to describe the situation, if the tables were reversed. I feel for people who have to leave their lives behind etc, but infrastructure isn't a suicide pact either. It's not a permanent, lifelong commitment even when the fundamentals on the ground totally change - and not everyone is a legacy homeowner to begin with. http://travelthemitten.com/landmarks/redridge-steel-dam-an-engineering-landmark-in-houghton-county/ http://travelthemitten.com/landmarks/redridge-steel-dam-an-e... https://99wfmk.com/redridge-michigan/ https://99wfmk.com/redridge-michigan/ > Nothing beside remains. Round the decay > Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare > The high and lonely hills stretch far away.

ryandrake 2y ago

> That’s an example of why the nihilism of MAGA is so appealing. The world is collapsing around many people. And this is what I don't get about current US politics. MAGA = Republicans. The Republican party is the party of generational wealth transfer. The Republican party is the party of elite businessmen lording over the working class. The Republican party is the party of all the economic forces that are unraveling rural communities and turning them into slums. They're voting for and supporting the very politicians who are "collapsing the world" around themselves. But why? It's not just idle nihilism. They're one of the most actively engaged political demographics in recent memory. Is the Culture War so important/motivating to these people that they are willing to help implement their own economic destruction?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ncallaway 2y ago
The people implementing the economic destruction are promising a silver bullet to instantly fix everything. The people who promise modest, incremental improvement are much less appealing in that environment.
pessimizer 2y ago
You shouldn't confuse your stereotypes of people for actual people. > The Republican party is the party of generational wealth transfer. I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. The Republican party is half the country. "Demographic data compiled in the 2016 and 2020 elections showed that the top 40 percent of income earners preferred the Democratic candidate for president (Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden) over the Republican (Donald Trump), signifying a sizable coalition shift from where the party was in the previous decade." https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-being-party-rich-could-cost-them-2024-election-1806747 https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-being-party-rich-could-co... "Some recent US figures on the distribution of income by party: 65 percent of taxpayer households that earn more than $500,000 per year are now in Democratic districts; 74 percent of the households in Republican districts earn less than $100,00 per year. Add to this what we knew already, namely that the 10 richest congressional districts in the country all have Democratic representatives in Congress. The above numbers incidentally come from the Internal Revenue Service, via Bloomberg, and are likely to be more reliable than if they came from Project Veritas via theblaze.com." https://www.thenation.com/article/society/democrats-rich-party-obama/ https://www.thenation.com/article/society/democrats-rich-par... > The Republican party is the party of all the economic forces that are unraveling rural communities and turning them into slums. All of them? "For decades, the Republicans were seen as the party of big business. Their support for low taxes and light regulation was manna to executives eager to raise profits and avoid government entanglements, and chief executives and big companies were reliable funders of Republicans up and down the ballot. "Mr. Trump has frayed those bonds. Four years ago, few major chief executives supported Mr. Trump during his first campaign. And throughout his time in the White House, executives from many of the company’s biggest brands publicly sparred with the president on everything from gun control to climate change to immigration. "'I can’t remember a time when the business community has spoken out so strongly in opposition to an administration on so many important issues,' said Rich Lesser, chief executive of Boston Consulting Group." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/business/republicans-business-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/15/business/republicans-busi... > Is the Culture War so important/motivating to these people that they are willing to help implement their own economic destruction? This is the culture war. You're doing it right now.

johnnyanmac 2y ago

I'm doing awful, personally. But I guess my industry is an exception among exceptions. Still feels bad.