5 ms·

It’s different this time around. The sheer complexity of society makes it hard to ascertain exactly the true nature of the situation. People who voted for trum

It’s different this time around. The sheer complexity of society makes it hard to ascertain exactly the true nature of the situation. People who voted for trump aren’t even aware he’s part of the problem of wealth inequality. They aren’t even aware wealth inequality is the problem. At worst we will get an angry mob stampeding the White House with no real direction or objective. Are rich people the problem or is it the government? They may have a feeling "something" is wrong, but they aren't sure what it is or who to blame, or they may think that nothing is wrong and life is just hard.

piva00 2y ago
Not only complexity per se, I'm firmly on the camp of Byung-Chul Han's take on the lack of unifying narratives in the contemporary age. Living through the information age I do subscribe to his views of information being only additive, incapable and incomplete to form overarching narratives for us to hinge on. Recommend the read of "Psychopolitics", "The Crisis of Narration", and "In the Swarm", those books eloquently described feelings I've had since the social media boom of mid-2010s. We are living through a data totalitarianism, missing overarching concepts in the noise of never-ending additive data that never concludes into a larger concept for us to grasp, just pure bombardment of more information without having any respite to put all of that together in a sense of deeper knowledge, to understand the world we are actually living in.
- stoneman24 2y ago
  It’s possibly a clear strategy (“flood the zone”) by some people to cause the conflict and confusion. I read recently a comment that in media “sex used to sell but now rage and outrage are more effective”. Start the fire and exploit the situation for their own benefit. So many people outraged but very few offering any context or insightful suggestions. Assisted by social media insane demand for controversy and dispute ( even without bad actors tweaking the algorithms), there seems very difficult for the sane rational voices to gain attention.
  - piva00 2y ago
    I think it can be both, a strategy but also an emerging property of social media. In "In the Swarm" he talks exactly about the outrage-driven engagement when calling it out as "shitstorm": > "The shitstorm," writes Han, "represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication." This phenomenon, he states, is also a cause for the lack of proper politicking in the era of digital communication, since everyone can participate in a fleeting "shitstorm" there's no lingering narrative to keep the discourse on, internalise it, and enact change; people just move from shitstorm to shitstorm, each outrage is very ephemeral, and shit-flinging cannot enact any change or deeper discourse about the root causes that caused said shitstorm. Again, information is just additive and leaves no space for closing back on itself in a more general concept to be discussed about. The "flood the zone" strategy seems to just attach itself to this quality of digital communication, using the ephemeral, narrativeless information to continuously drive an agenda, moving our attention into an ethereal moving target, we never get any sense of closure. > "Meanwhile, the public, the senders and receivers of these communications have become a digital swarm -- not a mass, or a crowd, or Negri and Hardt's antiquated notion of a "multitude," but a set of isolated individuals incapable of forming a "we," incapable of calling dominant power relations into question, incapable of formulating a future because of an obsession with the present. The digital swarm is a fragmented entity that can focus on individual persons only in order to make them an object of scandal.
    - gilbetron 2y ago
      Thanks for the links to the books, I'll definitely read them as they seem to perhaps describe the feeling I've been feeling. I think the whole MAGA movement was able to succeed because it was one of the only cohesive (ish) movements focused on ancient strategies of fear and hate.
      - kennysoona 2y ago
        > I think the whole MAGA movement was able to succeed because it was one of the only cohesive (ish) movements focused on ancient strategies of fear and hate. That and red states having an aversion to education.
- alexashka 2y ago
  My unifying vision would be a few bullet points: - People who are cruel are not fit to make important decisions in human society - The most important quality in a human's life is dignity - There needs to be a return to spirituality and philosophy, away from religion and tribalism These ideas if contemplated and thought through on an individual and collective levels would undo much of what makes modern living unpleasant and bring about some wonderful new perks :)
wesapien 2y ago
The memecoin stuff is just chefs kiss. Now he wants to impose tarrifs while not having the local production capacity. The citizens will pay for that. The rich will get the tax cuts and funding while everyone else will get austerity and be required to pull up your bootstraps.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  Then, you can always blame the libtards and the Bidens harder.
  - ninetyninenine 2y ago
    It’s not about liberals or conservatives. When a poor person votes for a ultra rich person that it is completely against the poor persons self interest because the rich person will make policy to favor himself as a rich person rather then others as poor people. I hate extremist liberalism too and this is completely orthogonal to that.
    - actionfromafar 2y ago
      Of course it is. But the instinct from those who voted this budget through, will be to blame The Other, doesn't matter much who or what or even actually existing.
  - wesapien 2y ago
    At this point, the results clearly show it doesn't matter whether it's a Republican or Democrat regime. They both cannibalized the middle class and all this drama between them are effectively for show. Both parties and their donors benefit very well regardless of their party, particularly the defense, finance, pharma, and tech industries.
timewizard 2y ago
> They aren’t even aware wealth inequality is the problem. It seems like a symptom. Primarily because "wealth management" does seem to be a skill. So the expectation would be that even if you equalized all wealth tomorrow and suddenly educated everyone to the same level in it's management then in a very short time a large imbalance would again be created. > but they aren't sure what it is or who to blame, It's impossible to acknowledge that both of you are most likely equally wrong but just in different directions? If you worked together you'd get much further yet you can't even grant them basic personal agency. What a bummer. Inequality abounds.
- ahaferburg 2y ago
  > in a very short time Citation needed. This seems highly implausible. Wealth is mostly inherited, and amassed over generations. The wealthy become more wealthy because they already have wealth. If you take that away, all those wealth management skills matter a lot less.
  - quacksilver 2y ago
    Lots of rich people become poor as well, maybe its just that few people see a celebrity or multimillionaire going bankrupt and disappearing from the public view or their decedents blowing their inherited money on designer goods, cars, gambling alcohol or an expensive spouse who loves them for their money as particularly notable. "from rags to rags in three generations" etc...
bargainbin 2y ago
Because the wealth is unequal, sure, but look at how much better the human quality of life is compared to even 50 years ago. What is wealth when everyone is fed, watered and entertained? Only stating this as an explanation to why there has not been a civil revolution. People are still dying in poverty with no way to escape every day, and we need to address it.
- mandmandam 2y ago
  > the wealth is unequal, sure Do you really understand just how unequal it is? Most Americans vastly underestimate it [0]. And that's from 2013; inequality has rapidly worsened since. Do you understand the effects of that inequality? > look at how much better the human quality of life is compared to even 50 years ago. I don't think this is true. There is quality of life in owning a house, a family house. There is quality of life in having job security. There is quality of life in feeling safe letting your kids go outside in an urban environment. There is quality of life in not having record proportions of your populace behind bars. There is quality of life in being able to weather illness without filing for medical bankruptcy. There is quality of life in being able to support a family with an average wage. Etc. 0 - https://web.archive.org/web/20191016221950/http://www.people.hbs.edu/mnorton/norton%20ariely%20in%20press.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20191016221950/http://www.people...
  - Epa095 2y ago
    Yeah, but did they have microwave ovens and Netflix? /s
  - abnercoimbre 2y ago
    I admire your restraint while responding. Saying "at least you're not a feudal lord's slave!" is the most uninspiring argument by the intellectually lazy status quo apologists. (I'm sure the parent isn't in this category, so I'm speaking in general.)
  - gonzobonzo 2y ago
    > Do you really understand just how unequal it is? But the above blog post and study you linked to are misleading as well. For instance, wealth gets vastly skewed by age. The average net worth for people 65-75 is almost 10 times the average net worth of someone under 35[1]. For anyone who knows anything about investing, this isn't very surprising. Steady investment will cause people's savings to grow drastically from when they start to when they retire. A vulgar look at the numbers can have people saying "person A has 10 times the wealth of person B!", without considering that person B will also reach the level of person A when they get to the same age. That's not to say that age alone would simply explain all of the inequality in society, but it's a major factor and an example of why you need to actually dive into the data rather than running with the baseline numbers. When it gets ignored it's likely people are pushing a polemic and aren't genuinely interested in what's happening. [1] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/average-net-worth-by-age https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/average-net-worth...
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> They aren’t even aware wealth inequality is the problem. "Wealth inequality" in the sense that there are several billion people and the net worth of each and every one of them is not exactly the same? That can't be it. "Wealth inequality is increasing over time" seems like it could be a bad thing, but if that's the problem then what's the cause? Let's consider how that happens: When you buy something for $100, part of that money goes to labor (the employees who made or distributed it etc.) and part goes to capital (the investors who own the company). Employees generally spend all of their income, so that's not an issue. As it turns out, so do most investors, by population count, because most businesses are small businesses. The owner of the local salon might be getting a dividend from the place but she's using that to buy groceries. Then there's Larry Ellison. Screw that guy, am I right? Somehow that asshole has more money than it would take to buy the entirety of Boeing with enough left over to buy General Motors and Halliburton put together. And he's not spending it fast enough to make the number go down instead of up. But wait, how did that happen? He definitely didn't end up with $200B by investing $100 in the Dow and letting it compound for 50 years. His company did, however, get billions of dollars in government contracts and in general makes its money by selling copyright licenses to its 50 year old database software. In fact, if you look at the list of companies minting all of these billionaires, they're almost all tech companies, relying on a government-granted copyright monopoly that originally expired after 14 years. And if you look at the ones that aren't tech, they're drug companies (another government-granted monopoly and an industry that has thoroughly captured the regulators) and finance companies (possibly the only industry with more regulatory capture than medicine). From this we can notice a trend. You get billionaires when the laws impair competition in their industry and the industry consolidates into megacorps. So that's the cause. That's what you need to prevent.
- alexashka 2y ago
  This is an excellent post. I think the competition idea works at the level of a country if people by and large play by the rules (a big if). It does not work at the level of macro economics. If you (as a country) insist on competition and absence of mega corps in your country while a country next to you subsidizes mega corps that outcompete your smaller companies - you will lose. Thus in a world of competition, every country will strive to get nuclear weapons to be able to compete militarily and then given that we're human, we will have conflict sooner or later and it will result in nuclear holocaust. If you think fair enough but nuclear holocaust is just the price we pay and it's worth it to continue doing competition, then alright. I don't think it's worth it, so there needs to be a fundamental re-think how we approach these problems. --- Regarding wealth inequality specifically - I agree with Aristotle who made the distinction of Aristocracy vs Oligarchy. Aristocracy being the rule of the few for the common interest and Oligarchy being rule of the few for the interest of the rulers. Somebody will rule, it's the intention and overall direction that matters. I'm not sure that just re-distributing wealth addresses the problem - it does strike me as something an Aristocracy would surely do if one were to appear, so that much is well and good.
sumedh 2y ago
> People who voted for trump aren’t even aware he’s part of the problem of wealth inequality. Its just amazing as an outsider to see the other side calling Trump voters they don't understand what they voted for.
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  I mean if you’re rich I’m not referring to you. I’m referring to poor people who voted for trump. Also I’m not referring to people who voted for the lesser of two evils.
  - sumedh 2y ago
    Democrats will probably lose the next election again with that attitude.
  - mlrtime 2y ago
    I can't believe that people still parrot this take. This is exactly why Democrats lose, the attitude that "we know whats best for you" will always lose. You should just stop it.
    - ninetyninenine 2y ago
      I’m not a democrat
machiaweliczny 2y ago
Problem Is government as they should know exactly what is wrong - that is their job

piva00 2y ago

Not only complexity per se, I'm firmly on the camp of Byung-Chul Han's take on the lack of unifying narratives in the contemporary age. Living through the information age I do subscribe to his views of information being only additive, incapable and incomplete to form overarching narratives for us to hinge on. Recommend the read of "Psychopolitics", "The Crisis of Narration", and "In the Swarm", those books eloquently described feelings I've had since the social media boom of mid-2010s. We are living through a data totalitarianism, missing overarching concepts in the noise of never-ending additive data that never concludes into a larger concept for us to grasp, just pure bombardment of more information without having any respite to put all of that together in a sense of deeper knowledge, to understand the world we are actually living in.

stoneman24 2y ago
It’s possibly a clear strategy (“flood the zone”) by some people to cause the conflict and confusion. I read recently a comment that in media “sex used to sell but now rage and outrage are more effective”. Start the fire and exploit the situation for their own benefit. So many people outraged but very few offering any context or insightful suggestions. Assisted by social media insane demand for controversy and dispute ( even without bad actors tweaking the algorithms), there seems very difficult for the sane rational voices to gain attention.
- piva00 2y ago
  I think it can be both, a strategy but also an emerging property of social media. In "In the Swarm" he talks exactly about the outrage-driven engagement when calling it out as "shitstorm": > "The shitstorm," writes Han, "represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication." This phenomenon, he states, is also a cause for the lack of proper politicking in the era of digital communication, since everyone can participate in a fleeting "shitstorm" there's no lingering narrative to keep the discourse on, internalise it, and enact change; people just move from shitstorm to shitstorm, each outrage is very ephemeral, and shit-flinging cannot enact any change or deeper discourse about the root causes that caused said shitstorm. Again, information is just additive and leaves no space for closing back on itself in a more general concept to be discussed about. The "flood the zone" strategy seems to just attach itself to this quality of digital communication, using the ephemeral, narrativeless information to continuously drive an agenda, moving our attention into an ethereal moving target, we never get any sense of closure. > "Meanwhile, the public, the senders and receivers of these communications have become a digital swarm -- not a mass, or a crowd, or Negri and Hardt's antiquated notion of a "multitude," but a set of isolated individuals incapable of forming a "we," incapable of calling dominant power relations into question, incapable of formulating a future because of an obsession with the present. The digital swarm is a fragmented entity that can focus on individual persons only in order to make them an object of scandal.
  - gilbetron 2y ago
    Thanks for the links to the books, I'll definitely read them as they seem to perhaps describe the feeling I've been feeling. I think the whole MAGA movement was able to succeed because it was one of the only cohesive (ish) movements focused on ancient strategies of fear and hate.
    - kennysoona 2y ago
      > I think the whole MAGA movement was able to succeed because it was one of the only cohesive (ish) movements focused on ancient strategies of fear and hate. That and red states having an aversion to education.
alexashka 2y ago
My unifying vision would be a few bullet points: - People who are cruel are not fit to make important decisions in human society - The most important quality in a human's life is dignity - There needs to be a return to spirituality and philosophy, away from religion and tribalism These ideas if contemplated and thought through on an individual and collective levels would undo much of what makes modern living unpleasant and bring about some wonderful new perks :)

wesapien 2y ago

The memecoin stuff is just chefs kiss. Now he wants to impose tarrifs while not having the local production capacity. The citizens will pay for that. The rich will get the tax cuts and funding while everyone else will get austerity and be required to pull up your bootstraps.

actionfromafar 2y ago
Then, you can always blame the libtards and the Bidens harder.
- ninetyninenine 2y ago
  It’s not about liberals or conservatives. When a poor person votes for a ultra rich person that it is completely against the poor persons self interest because the rich person will make policy to favor himself as a rich person rather then others as poor people. I hate extremist liberalism too and this is completely orthogonal to that.
  - actionfromafar 2y ago
    Of course it is. But the instinct from those who voted this budget through, will be to blame The Other, doesn't matter much who or what or even actually existing.
- wesapien 2y ago
  At this point, the results clearly show it doesn't matter whether it's a Republican or Democrat regime. They both cannibalized the middle class and all this drama between them are effectively for show. Both parties and their donors benefit very well regardless of their party, particularly the defense, finance, pharma, and tech industries.

timewizard 2y ago

> They aren’t even aware wealth inequality is the problem. It seems like a symptom. Primarily because "wealth management" does seem to be a skill. So the expectation would be that even if you equalized all wealth tomorrow and suddenly educated everyone to the same level in it's management then in a very short time a large imbalance would again be created. > but they aren't sure what it is or who to blame, It's impossible to acknowledge that both of you are most likely equally wrong but just in different directions? If you worked together you'd get much further yet you can't even grant them basic personal agency. What a bummer. Inequality abounds.

ahaferburg 2y ago
> in a very short time Citation needed. This seems highly implausible. Wealth is mostly inherited, and amassed over generations. The wealthy become more wealthy because they already have wealth. If you take that away, all those wealth management skills matter a lot less.
- quacksilver 2y ago
  Lots of rich people become poor as well, maybe its just that few people see a celebrity or multimillionaire going bankrupt and disappearing from the public view or their decedents blowing their inherited money on designer goods, cars, gambling alcohol or an expensive spouse who loves them for their money as particularly notable. "from rags to rags in three generations" etc...

bargainbin 2y ago

Because the wealth is unequal, sure, but look at how much better the human quality of life is compared to even 50 years ago. What is wealth when everyone is fed, watered and entertained? Only stating this as an explanation to why there has not been a civil revolution. People are still dying in poverty with no way to escape every day, and we need to address it.

mandmandam 2y ago
> the wealth is unequal, sure Do you really understand just how unequal it is? Most Americans vastly underestimate it [0]. And that's from 2013; inequality has rapidly worsened since. Do you understand the effects of that inequality? > look at how much better the human quality of life is compared to even 50 years ago. I don't think this is true. There is quality of life in owning a house, a family house. There is quality of life in having job security. There is quality of life in feeling safe letting your kids go outside in an urban environment. There is quality of life in not having record proportions of your populace behind bars. There is quality of life in being able to weather illness without filing for medical bankruptcy. There is quality of life in being able to support a family with an average wage. Etc. 0 - https://web.archive.org/web/20191016221950/http://www.people.hbs.edu/mnorton/norton%20ariely%20in%20press.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20191016221950/http://www.people...
- Epa095 2y ago
  Yeah, but did they have microwave ovens and Netflix? /s
- abnercoimbre 2y ago
  I admire your restraint while responding. Saying "at least you're not a feudal lord's slave!" is the most uninspiring argument by the intellectually lazy status quo apologists. (I'm sure the parent isn't in this category, so I'm speaking in general.)
- gonzobonzo 2y ago
  > Do you really understand just how unequal it is? But the above blog post and study you linked to are misleading as well. For instance, wealth gets vastly skewed by age. The average net worth for people 65-75 is almost 10 times the average net worth of someone under 35[1]. For anyone who knows anything about investing, this isn't very surprising. Steady investment will cause people's savings to grow drastically from when they start to when they retire. A vulgar look at the numbers can have people saying "person A has 10 times the wealth of person B!", without considering that person B will also reach the level of person A when they get to the same age. That's not to say that age alone would simply explain all of the inequality in society, but it's a major factor and an example of why you need to actually dive into the data rather than running with the baseline numbers. When it gets ignored it's likely people are pushing a polemic and aren't genuinely interested in what's happening. [1] https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/average-net-worth-by-age https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/finance/average-net-worth...

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

> They aren’t even aware wealth inequality is the problem. "Wealth inequality" in the sense that there are several billion people and the net worth of each and every one of them is not exactly the same? That can't be it. "Wealth inequality is increasing over time" seems like it could be a bad thing, but if that's the problem then what's the cause? Let's consider how that happens: When you buy something for $100, part of that money goes to labor (the employees who made or distributed it etc.) and part goes to capital (the investors who own the company). Employees generally spend all of their income, so that's not an issue. As it turns out, so do most investors, by population count, because most businesses are small businesses. The owner of the local salon might be getting a dividend from the place but she's using that to buy groceries. Then there's Larry Ellison. Screw that guy, am I right? Somehow that asshole has more money than it would take to buy the entirety of Boeing with enough left over to buy General Motors and Halliburton put together. And he's not spending it fast enough to make the number go down instead of up. But wait, how did that happen? He definitely didn't end up with $200B by investing $100 in the Dow and letting it compound for 50 years. His company did, however, get billions of dollars in government contracts and in general makes its money by selling copyright licenses to its 50 year old database software. In fact, if you look at the list of companies minting all of these billionaires, they're almost all tech companies, relying on a government-granted copyright monopoly that originally expired after 14 years. And if you look at the ones that aren't tech, they're drug companies (another government-granted monopoly and an industry that has thoroughly captured the regulators) and finance companies (possibly the only industry with more regulatory capture than medicine). From this we can notice a trend. You get billionaires when the laws impair competition in their industry and the industry consolidates into megacorps. So that's the cause. That's what you need to prevent.

alexashka 2y ago
This is an excellent post. I think the competition idea works at the level of a country if people by and large play by the rules (a big if). It does not work at the level of macro economics. If you (as a country) insist on competition and absence of mega corps in your country while a country next to you subsidizes mega corps that outcompete your smaller companies - you will lose. Thus in a world of competition, every country will strive to get nuclear weapons to be able to compete militarily and then given that we're human, we will have conflict sooner or later and it will result in nuclear holocaust. If you think fair enough but nuclear holocaust is just the price we pay and it's worth it to continue doing competition, then alright. I don't think it's worth it, so there needs to be a fundamental re-think how we approach these problems. --- Regarding wealth inequality specifically - I agree with Aristotle who made the distinction of Aristocracy vs Oligarchy. Aristocracy being the rule of the few for the common interest and Oligarchy being rule of the few for the interest of the rulers. Somebody will rule, it's the intention and overall direction that matters. I'm not sure that just re-distributing wealth addresses the problem - it does strike me as something an Aristocracy would surely do if one were to appear, so that much is well and good.

sumedh 2y ago

> People who voted for trump aren’t even aware he’s part of the problem of wealth inequality. Its just amazing as an outsider to see the other side calling Trump voters they don't understand what they voted for.

ninetyninenine 2y ago
I mean if you’re rich I’m not referring to you. I’m referring to poor people who voted for trump. Also I’m not referring to people who voted for the lesser of two evils.
- sumedh 2y ago
  Democrats will probably lose the next election again with that attitude.
- mlrtime 2y ago
  I can't believe that people still parrot this take. This is exactly why Democrats lose, the attitude that "we know whats best for you" will always lose. You should just stop it.
  - ninetyninenine 2y ago
    I’m not a democrat

machiaweliczny 2y ago

Problem Is government as they should know exactly what is wrong - that is their job