Interesting article. I pretty much agree with most of the political and economic points, but one thing that’s palpably absent is an analysis of the structural patterns and habits inherently imposed by technologies, beyond their ties to the political economy.
So many of the systems and technologies for discourse we engage with have reduced the amount of content presented on a given topic at a given time down to the smallest micron possible. Even this “essay” is just a list of bullet points, each of which alone is a thesis that’s probably worth significant reflection and elaboration, but that’s simply not the dominant modality anymore. We’ve come to expect, and only make room for, bite-sized discourse. This helps ensure we remain in our internet bubbles and never develop the critical stances and motivations necessary to drive toward change because we don't make room for the complexities and nuances that inevitably arise when exploring any topic seriously.
The technologies we use to engage in discourse today establish patterns that are anti-discourse. They only support a vapid form of commentary, “takes”, reactions, but hardly discourse. Twitter has an extremely compressed character limit. Facebook is limited to similar snippets of information. Tiktok and Instagram reduce discourse to series of images with at most small snippets of text. Furthermore, there is no “program” as there was with television—we’re completely free to sporadically jump between a thousand different topics at will, ensuring the 21stcentury schizoidization of our brains really takes hold.
I agree. “The medium is the message” comes to mind [0]. I think it has something to do with broadcast media of all kinds.
When reading works from before the broadcast era, I remember authors would somehow try to converse with the reader with via their writing style as in the writer acknowledged the existence of a reader in their writing explicitly (“Dear Reader”) or via a narrative (the narrative style of Plato) and acknowledged that the reader was somehow capable of responding and that the writer could listen. Over time, writers started acknowledging that the reader was one amongst many (“Dear readers”), but still capable and worthy of being conversed with. Moving further along, wartime recruiting posters are what comes to mind of when I think of broadcast media when there is a short message often written in the imperative: the reader exists and expected to do something, but has no avenue or agency to discuss the message. There are examples and counter-examples of the styles I mentioned, but my observation has been that the prevailing writing style has changed from expecting/demanding a two-way conversation to a sort of “speaking at each other not to each other” unless negotiated differently otherwise.
I took the "numbered theses" format as being a deliberate reference to the Central European writing tradition to which you allude, e.g., Benjamin's theses on history, or Marx' theses on Feuerbach. Writing in the "merciless telegram style" implies that the reader is expected to fill in the gaps with their own store of knowledge and their own effort. Like modern mathematical writing, it's more about "high bandwidth" scholar-to-scholar dialogue than explication for a broad audience. Taken in this light, it's has the opposite intent of compressing down to "hot takes" (sparking internal dialogue with the reader vs. sparking lazy emotional acceptance of the argument).
Or maybe she's just a lazy writer who clicked "numbered paragraph," who knows.
All true, but while listing all the reasons for being depressed, it curiously misses the state of the environment.
And by that I don't just mean climate change. The terrifying truth of our time is that we are destroying life on this planet at an unprecedented rate; all life: not just megafauna but insects as well as forests, etc., in exchange for... building parking lots.
We make the world lonelier and uglier and there is zero solution in sight.
Responses to climate change have not yet begun, we have not started to modify our behavior in any meaningful way. But much more importantly, climate change is but one problem, not the only problem. If climate change was solved today, it would maybe postpone the apocalypse for a little while, but it would not make us happier.
Switching to less CO2-emitting energy sources doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things; if we use an electric truck to build a parking lot in the middle of a forest, we may emit a little less CO2 while doing so, but eventually we will still have replaced a piece of forest by a slab of concrete, and in the process destroyed life and made the world uglier.
The "loss of meaning" results from the awareness that what we're doing is not just pointless but evil, and we have no alternative.
I do not understand why this is downvoted. I see a fatalism in my peers that causes incredible stress. I think of animals that won't breed in captivity when there's too much noise or not the right food, but instead attack each other and self-harm.
We have high stress, lots of convenient unhealthy food, lots of noise and light, long hours, and the awareness that the planet is getting more hostile to human life. Of course we're biting and scratching each other, performing self-harm, and not reproducing.
I think this is under-calling both how miserable people were before the modern era and the remarkable impact good birth control has had on modern society. Suddenly there is lots of free time and a lot more choices to make than there were even 50 years ago and all the choices have unsatisfying outcomes. We live in a world that is too complex to understand, and people keep screaming that everything is about to collapse (which, in fairness, may be correct).
People have identified that both the traditional roles - child rearing and working very hard all day - are not much fun. Human society and morale doesn't cope well with hedonism. There aren't obvious alternatives. I don't see how a specific social theory could overcome these practical realities. Unusually, I don't really see economics as a factor here - everyone is, by historic standards, absurdly wealthy. Even most poor people.
Materially, maybe , but judging by the way people live in rural communities even today, it's closer to the truth that they were happier overall, as they had a social support net, more socializing than they can handle and more time in nature. It's a qualitatively different life than urbanized domestication
Most of us feel it. It's real. Don't let anyone gaslight you. You aren't sick: our culture is sick. (For those alone and struggling).
Social alienation is the source of much mental illnesses. Poverty itself isn't the source of most people's misery. Our society is our preservation matrix. If we cannot reproduce or at least contribute to something beyond ourselves that bears the promise of persisting, we are left alone with death.
This lonely dance with death, which I have danced for years as a poor housebound reclusive, can cause a disintegration of mind. I suspect the brain tries to rewire itself so it can find a new interpretation of life...one in which it finds a way of surviving in isolation. Many delusions can arise as a result. Also, mystical and religious experiences are common under such conditions. I've experienced them. Many strange things happen to the mind when we feel like we are connected to nothing that will preserve us. It's an unnatural, or abnormal state, which humans cannot ordinarily adapt to. We are microrganisms part of the macroorganism of society. Being alone is utterly abnormal and the brain isn't equipped to deal with it.
American culture makes the poor feel like trash. That's why so many of us become crazy lunatics, drug addicts, or vengeful people. It's the social alienation and isolation that condemns most of us.
However, this condition is not limited to the poor. Even rich people feel alienated. In fact, wealth often turns every relation into a suspicious one--is she just using me for my money? Everyone craves the sense of belonging that comes from genuine love, but it's hard to find. So we see many wealthy people, famous people, the most connected, also feeling disconnected.
Rich or poor, what matters most is feeling connected. We have a connectivity problem. One that leaves many individuals left alone to dance with death. This is what is causing the modern malaise above all things...however, the material conditions discussed by the author ultimately contribute to this disconnection.
Love is the answer, but this solution is so profound that we can hardly comprehend it. In the absence of understanding, we spend billions on psychoactive drugs and label people as "mentally ill" instead.
I believe in hard work, sacrifice, and family… ideals and virtues that have provided solace and guidance to humanity for our entire existence.
It seems to be the hyper-online types that reject traditional values that are the most depressed and apocalyptic in their mindset. Myself - I look outside and the sun is shining, my kids are playing, everything is good in the world to me.
> All meritocratic platforms are winner-take-all, with the top 1% of performers collecting a vastly disproportionate share of rewards.
Even if you simulate an economy where every participant starts out with the same amount of money, and all trades are completely random, over enough trades the participants' wealth will still end up in a power-law distribution.
This seems to be a basic principle of biology which fractally translates to entire societies. Piketty's data shows that historically, the curve was flattened only when the economy itself was upended, i.e. after wars. We need to engineer peaceful ways that violently rearrange the economy. A parallel money system like cryptos might have been used for that, but so far it has done the opposite
A top 1% on it’s own is not a problem. It is the power they have over everything to not only keep things that way but make life worse for everyone else. For example by lobbying for laws that help corporations not people.
> Even if you simulate an economy where every participant starts out with the same amount of money, and all trades are completely random, over enough trades the participants' wealth will still end up in a power-law distribution.
>How can the world get better if no one is steering?
Did it get better when somebody was steering? hitler was a strong and popular leader. Democracy is about people being self-governmed, not about having a strong leader
Individualism is the ultimate goal of this Enlightenment era that we are still part of. The goal was to take away the power from the monarch and the collective, and empower the individual, and our civilization is succeeding at it, but our politics do not adapt. There is a reason why social democracy is unpopular in europe now: younger generations realized it was an unsustainable ponzi scheme. Our future is individualist, but our politics is hopelessly centered on the worship of The Leader
There is no proof of social democracy being unpopular in Europe.
The only relevant political movements that advocate against social democracy are mainly extreme right wing. Even those are not growing - and usually collapsing afterwards - because of their individualistic approach to society but because of their appeal to people that feel migration is not good, that climate change doesn’t exist, etc.
Also, every time I read about “social democracy being a Ponzi scheme” along the demographics argument I feel an urge to remember that social democracy isn’t only the pensions system. Healthcare, education, infrastructure aren’t Ponzi schemes neither feasible from a pure individualistic approach.
Are our societies ready for a real democracy, that is a direct vote on all issues type of self-governing rule where anything can be put up to a vote including votes for execution of members of the society?
What if the one steering didn't need to be a person? What if it was an idea or an ideology? Are we better off in a world devoid of purpose? Or did we never truly have purpose? Did our past generations delude themselves into thinking that they did? Or did we delude ourselves into thinking that our past generations did have purpose?
In the states we feel like we're just coming into perspective on social democracy. Can you tell me a bit more about why it doesn't work? (genuine question) I'd like to think I sharply understand the differences between communism and socialism - and social democracy - and that some of my older family members confuse these all as the same thing. Why is social democracy unpopular in Europe?
Hard not to see parallels with the end of the Roman empire. We know we could do better, we can't be bothered trying very hard and we'd rather moan about the good old days. All it needs is the more motivated (not very) barbarian hoarde to decide they'll do the social reconstruction we won't.
Edit: I actually place great faith on coming generations. The kids are alright.
Oh gosh. If anything, we're entering a golden age. Yeah, climate change is going to be a real pain. But nothing really more than that on a civilization scale. Global poverty is at an all time low, hunger has never been lower, overall health is the best it's ever been, education is going great globally, we've never been more equitable between the genders, our access to clean water is the highest ever, etc. And all these metrics are just going to get better, more or less.
I don't really see a gap between the value placed on labor by the traditional left and the new ethic of anti-work. The difference lies in alienation. The old style predated Fordism and valued the manual trades, and those were/are the "jobs" where you still find individual workers largely in control of their own economic fate. When that kind of autonomy is taken away (or surrendered), what remains is anti-work and bullsh*t work and quiet quitting.
> But our society has conditioned us to believe that consumption and status are the only things that provide happiness: the smartest children of our generation are going to Stanford and MIT to join Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and FAANG
I take slight issue with this framing. Why is there an implicit assumption that these really smart kids end up working at these places because they’re deluded that money and status are all that provide happiness? I’m sure there are lots of people on HN that work at these places/know lots of people that work at these places, and I’m willing to bet that a significant portion choose to work there because it’s intellectually stimulating for them. Sure, you can argue that too much value accumulates to these jobs for reasons outside of their control, but I think the assumption that that’s why they’re doing it is wrong.
This also ties in with the article’s mention of the general public resentment towards tech, see how widely used the derisive term “techbro” is used in online discussions. There’s this perception that everybody in tech is only in it for the money, and they enjoy using their smarts to exploit everybody else. I’ve been hit with this from people I know personally, and it’s insulting.
I think one just has to acknowledge there are no feasible solutions to these problems. The actual solution is to let the next generation do a better job, and believe that they can. Unfortunately, as people live and work for longer, the cycles get more drawn out and some generations lapse with no impact.
I keep thinking about these topics. The constant rants, the food waste, the bs jobs.. I see a few ideas but it seems i'm too radical (I believe people enjoy heavy activities as long as they're rewarding intrisically and socially)
Even people in the top 10% are making basically nothing. This was taken two years ago, but I would suspect the current situation is the same or worse. I'm not sure how to fix this, but I think something should be done. People in the top 1% or 0.1% should make more per month than someone in the top 10%, but the difference shouldn't be this stark.
In the 80s Thatcher and Reagan broke down trade barriers and ceded government power to banks and corporations. This created a consumer world driven by debt, where everything was assessed by utility. Politics essentially “became a wing of management, saying that it could stop bad things from happening instead of imagining how things could be better.”
Consumer debt has fallen since the peak in 2007-2009 or so.
Rather spending seems to be driven by the wealthy, upper-middle class, who don't need as much debt to consume and boost the overall economy.
Now politics feels like pantomime, with both parties bickering over social issues while neither has the political will to meaningfully affect the economy. Curtis: “Online psychodramas create waves of hysteria that make it feel like the world is transforming. In fact, nothing actually changed in the last four years. Trump made himself a pantomime villain, and we booed rather than imagine an alternative.”
Agree. I think the power of the federal government to affect change peaked in 2001-2008 or so, first with massive buildup homeland security and defense apparatuses following 911, and then in 2008-2009 during the financial crisis . After that the federal government has significantly stopped having influence as far as policy is concerned. Rather, much if its power is through administrative functions, like the FBI , NSA, IRS, SEC, etc.
Money became our religion, and now money is starting to run dry, as the world’s largest economies slow in their growth. Both democracies and dictatorships are in a moment of crisis.
Money is like a religion, but scant evidence to suggest it's running dry. As stocks and home prices boom since 2020, there is more wealth than ever before.
Purchasing power hasn’t changed in the past 40 years, according to the Pew Institute: “Today’s real average wage (that is, the wage after accounting for inflation) has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And what wage gains there have been have mostly flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers.
Again, you have to look at the top 10% or so. That is where the purchasing power is coming from...stuff like Disneyland tickets, NFL tickets, lifted trucks, expensive elective cosmetic procedures, home renovations, and so on.
All meritocratic platforms are winner-take-all, with the top 1% of performers collecting a vastly disproportionate share of rewards. Look at Substack and Onlyfans. This is not a conspiracy engineered by anyone: when anyone is allowed to compete, a small percentage of people tend to capture most of the profit.
It's been like this for a long time, and recent trends have only accelerated this. The Ivy League is more importent and competitive than ever before; Covid has not changed this at all. Same for top 50 schools overall. Same for high stakes testing, math competitions, top tech & finance jobs, etc...everything more competitive and difficult. More people applying, fewer people getting in. Winners get bigger and bigger, whether it's top Substack content creators or Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.
The American dream, the idea that anybody could make a good living for themselves and their family through nothing but hard work, has become far less realistic. You know the Steinbeck line about how Americans think they’re temporarily embarrassed millionaires instead of exploited proletariat. But they don’t believe that anymore, do they?
It's still realistic if you have a high IQ, choose a good career, and have good work ethic...people in tech, consulting, finance, healthcare, law, etc. making record income even after accounting for student loan debt and inflation. (The so-called school to career STEM pipeline.) Reddit 'FIRE' subs are full of such individuals, in their 20-40s, doing just that, with not uncommonly millions of dollars. But for those at the middle/left-side of the IQ distribution, maybe not so much. They tend to rely more so on lottery-like systems of success/promotion compared to more meritocratic ones. https://greyenlightenment.com/2022/03/19/losers-iq-and-the-l...
This clearly isn’t true, since people obviously aren’t free: they’re controlled by socioeconomic circumstances.
And also biological constraints, like again, IQ. But I have also read many stories on Hacker News and Reddit of people born in the lower-middle class or worse circumstances rising up due to high intelligence and getting scholarships and landing decent-paying jobs.
If productivity grows primarily because of enabling capital, the proceeds from this growth will accrue more to the owner of capital than the laborer, roughly proportional to the contribution of each.
The problem is that human capital has saturated for many people. This is borne out by stagnating gains in education.
If productivity gains occur mostly because of technology with little human input, then that further bifurcates society between owners of that technology and everyone else. This does not help alleviate the modern malaise.
People are quick to point out the dropping of the gold standard, the end of cheap fossil fuels, the neoliberal economic changes, etc. that all occurred during the 1970s, and those all matter. But there's another factor which is that educational outcomes began to stagnate.
I don't think returning productivity growth to the postwar rate would have as much of an effect as it did then, because more of the productivity growth would be because of technology with concentrated ownership rather than broad gains in human ability.
Tech and automation alone will not work. You'll need to change the laws to cater for the redistribution because the jobs will dry up while the capitalists reap the benefits and only give conditional, token sums.
I was taking this article seriously until I arrived at the Terrence McKenna bit. His opinions are highly subjective, based on personal experience with drugs, and they aren't a compelling, testable, or comparable line of thought. Not to mention that TM is pretentious as hell and basis his whole outlook on life on doing loads of DMT (he hardly talks about anything else).
That's not fair, he also talked about doing loads of mushrooms.
Quote is in number 14 if anyone wants to read it themselves. You'll also see that the Ayn Rand quote mentioned in the sibling comment comes with critical commentary.
"So then the people who don't do psychedelics say 'well this is something it's like channeling or all this other stuff'. No it isn't, because we are not like those people. I mean, I maintain this rigorously, that our bit is intellectual rigor, not airheadedness. We're willing to put as much pressure on the ideas as you want we just believe in fairness. So, that it's not ipso facto that there's no such thing as elves. It's that if you think there are elves, prove it to me! Well, then the problem is that the skeptic, the critic, says, 'well the notion that are elves is just, you know, you're sadly deluded. You're living in your own private Idaho.' But then, you say, 'well, the proof of the pudding is a 15-minute DMT trip. Are you willing to carry on this criticism after having made the experiment, sir?' I mean, we're not like UFO enthusiasts. We're not telling you to stand in cornfields in the dead of night and pray. No, no, this will work! This will work on you, you the reductionist, you the doubter, you the constipated egomaniacal father-dominator. It'll work! And they say at that point 'You know, you are a menace, is what you are!'.
The bullshit jobs and authenticity reference wasn't enough to write the guy off as a butthurt marxist doing more harm than good because he won't be pushing the actual incremental improvements we need for our system of free markets that actually works relatively well? He is going to have some grandiose reimagining of the system from some base principles (that are wrong).
voidhorse|3 years ago
So many of the systems and technologies for discourse we engage with have reduced the amount of content presented on a given topic at a given time down to the smallest micron possible. Even this “essay” is just a list of bullet points, each of which alone is a thesis that’s probably worth significant reflection and elaboration, but that’s simply not the dominant modality anymore. We’ve come to expect, and only make room for, bite-sized discourse. This helps ensure we remain in our internet bubbles and never develop the critical stances and motivations necessary to drive toward change because we don't make room for the complexities and nuances that inevitably arise when exploring any topic seriously.
The technologies we use to engage in discourse today establish patterns that are anti-discourse. They only support a vapid form of commentary, “takes”, reactions, but hardly discourse. Twitter has an extremely compressed character limit. Facebook is limited to similar snippets of information. Tiktok and Instagram reduce discourse to series of images with at most small snippets of text. Furthermore, there is no “program” as there was with television—we’re completely free to sporadically jump between a thousand different topics at will, ensuring the 21stcentury schizoidization of our brains really takes hold.
tareqak|3 years ago
When reading works from before the broadcast era, I remember authors would somehow try to converse with the reader with via their writing style as in the writer acknowledged the existence of a reader in their writing explicitly (“Dear Reader”) or via a narrative (the narrative style of Plato) and acknowledged that the reader was somehow capable of responding and that the writer could listen. Over time, writers started acknowledging that the reader was one amongst many (“Dear readers”), but still capable and worthy of being conversed with. Moving further along, wartime recruiting posters are what comes to mind of when I think of broadcast media when there is a short message often written in the imperative: the reader exists and expected to do something, but has no avenue or agency to discuss the message. There are examples and counter-examples of the styles I mentioned, but my observation has been that the prevailing writing style has changed from expecting/demanding a two-way conversation to a sort of “speaking at each other not to each other” unless negotiated differently otherwise.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message
aoki|3 years ago
Or maybe she's just a lazy writer who clicked "numbered paragraph," who knows.
bambax|3 years ago
And by that I don't just mean climate change. The terrifying truth of our time is that we are destroying life on this planet at an unprecedented rate; all life: not just megafauna but insects as well as forests, etc., in exchange for... building parking lots.
We make the world lonelier and uglier and there is zero solution in sight.
Responses to climate change have not yet begun, we have not started to modify our behavior in any meaningful way. But much more importantly, climate change is but one problem, not the only problem. If climate change was solved today, it would maybe postpone the apocalypse for a little while, but it would not make us happier.
Switching to less CO2-emitting energy sources doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things; if we use an electric truck to build a parking lot in the middle of a forest, we may emit a little less CO2 while doing so, but eventually we will still have replaced a piece of forest by a slab of concrete, and in the process destroyed life and made the world uglier.
The "loss of meaning" results from the awareness that what we're doing is not just pointless but evil, and we have no alternative.
JackMorgan|3 years ago
We have high stress, lots of convenient unhealthy food, lots of noise and light, long hours, and the awareness that the planet is getting more hostile to human life. Of course we're biting and scratching each other, performing self-harm, and not reproducing.
roenxi|3 years ago
People have identified that both the traditional roles - child rearing and working very hard all day - are not much fun. Human society and morale doesn't cope well with hedonism. There aren't obvious alternatives. I don't see how a specific social theory could overcome these practical realities. Unusually, I don't really see economics as a factor here - everyone is, by historic standards, absurdly wealthy. Even most poor people.
seydor|3 years ago
Materially, maybe , but judging by the way people live in rural communities even today, it's closer to the truth that they were happier overall, as they had a social support net, more socializing than they can handle and more time in nature. It's a qualitatively different life than urbanized domestication
archhn|3 years ago
Social alienation is the source of much mental illnesses. Poverty itself isn't the source of most people's misery. Our society is our preservation matrix. If we cannot reproduce or at least contribute to something beyond ourselves that bears the promise of persisting, we are left alone with death.
This lonely dance with death, which I have danced for years as a poor housebound reclusive, can cause a disintegration of mind. I suspect the brain tries to rewire itself so it can find a new interpretation of life...one in which it finds a way of surviving in isolation. Many delusions can arise as a result. Also, mystical and religious experiences are common under such conditions. I've experienced them. Many strange things happen to the mind when we feel like we are connected to nothing that will preserve us. It's an unnatural, or abnormal state, which humans cannot ordinarily adapt to. We are microrganisms part of the macroorganism of society. Being alone is utterly abnormal and the brain isn't equipped to deal with it.
American culture makes the poor feel like trash. That's why so many of us become crazy lunatics, drug addicts, or vengeful people. It's the social alienation and isolation that condemns most of us.
However, this condition is not limited to the poor. Even rich people feel alienated. In fact, wealth often turns every relation into a suspicious one--is she just using me for my money? Everyone craves the sense of belonging that comes from genuine love, but it's hard to find. So we see many wealthy people, famous people, the most connected, also feeling disconnected.
Rich or poor, what matters most is feeling connected. We have a connectivity problem. One that leaves many individuals left alone to dance with death. This is what is causing the modern malaise above all things...however, the material conditions discussed by the author ultimately contribute to this disconnection.
Love is the answer, but this solution is so profound that we can hardly comprehend it. In the absence of understanding, we spend billions on psychoactive drugs and label people as "mentally ill" instead.
seibelj|3 years ago
It seems to be the hyper-online types that reject traditional values that are the most depressed and apocalyptic in their mindset. Myself - I look outside and the sun is shining, my kids are playing, everything is good in the world to me.
jamesgreenleaf|3 years ago
Even if you simulate an economy where every participant starts out with the same amount of money, and all trades are completely random, over enough trades the participants' wealth will still end up in a power-law distribution.
seydor|3 years ago
quickthrower2|3 years ago
wanderingmind|3 years ago
PontifexMinimus|3 years ago
True, but more so today than 50 or 100 years ago.
seydor|3 years ago
Did it get better when somebody was steering? hitler was a strong and popular leader. Democracy is about people being self-governmed, not about having a strong leader
Individualism is the ultimate goal of this Enlightenment era that we are still part of. The goal was to take away the power from the monarch and the collective, and empower the individual, and our civilization is succeeding at it, but our politics do not adapt. There is a reason why social democracy is unpopular in europe now: younger generations realized it was an unsustainable ponzi scheme. Our future is individualist, but our politics is hopelessly centered on the worship of The Leader
darccio|3 years ago
The only relevant political movements that advocate against social democracy are mainly extreme right wing. Even those are not growing - and usually collapsing afterwards - because of their individualistic approach to society but because of their appeal to people that feel migration is not good, that climate change doesn’t exist, etc.
Also, every time I read about “social democracy being a Ponzi scheme” along the demographics argument I feel an urge to remember that social democracy isn’t only the pensions system. Healthcare, education, infrastructure aren’t Ponzi schemes neither feasible from a pure individualistic approach.
DeWilde|3 years ago
Or did you mean something else?
emptyparadise|3 years ago
thrwawy74|3 years ago
ggm|3 years ago
Edit: I actually place great faith on coming generations. The kids are alright.
notsapiensatall|3 years ago
If we are in a Rome scenario, the good news is that we probably won't live long enough to see the real collapse.
Balgair|3 years ago
https://upgrader.gapminder.org/
PontifexMinimus|3 years ago
Putin thought he could be that horde. He is failing, and failing badly, in Ukraine.
euroderf|3 years ago
md2020|3 years ago
I take slight issue with this framing. Why is there an implicit assumption that these really smart kids end up working at these places because they’re deluded that money and status are all that provide happiness? I’m sure there are lots of people on HN that work at these places/know lots of people that work at these places, and I’m willing to bet that a significant portion choose to work there because it’s intellectually stimulating for them. Sure, you can argue that too much value accumulates to these jobs for reasons outside of their control, but I think the assumption that that’s why they’re doing it is wrong.
This also ties in with the article’s mention of the general public resentment towards tech, see how widely used the derisive term “techbro” is used in online discussions. There’s this perception that everybody in tech is only in it for the money, and they enjoy using their smarts to exploit everybody else. I’ve been hit with this from people I know personally, and it’s insulting.
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
Gatsky|3 years ago
agumonkey|3 years ago
svnpenn|3 years ago
Even people in the top 10% are making basically nothing. This was taken two years ago, but I would suspect the current situation is the same or worse. I'm not sure how to fix this, but I think something should be done. People in the top 1% or 0.1% should make more per month than someone in the top 10%, but the difference shouldn't be this stark.
cercatrova|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
[deleted]
paulpauper|3 years ago
Consumer debt has fallen since the peak in 2007-2009 or so.
https://i0.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/...
Rather spending seems to be driven by the wealthy, upper-middle class, who don't need as much debt to consume and boost the overall economy.
Now politics feels like pantomime, with both parties bickering over social issues while neither has the political will to meaningfully affect the economy. Curtis: “Online psychodramas create waves of hysteria that make it feel like the world is transforming. In fact, nothing actually changed in the last four years. Trump made himself a pantomime villain, and we booed rather than imagine an alternative.”
Agree. I think the power of the federal government to affect change peaked in 2001-2008 or so, first with massive buildup homeland security and defense apparatuses following 911, and then in 2008-2009 during the financial crisis . After that the federal government has significantly stopped having influence as far as policy is concerned. Rather, much if its power is through administrative functions, like the FBI , NSA, IRS, SEC, etc.
Money became our religion, and now money is starting to run dry, as the world’s largest economies slow in their growth. Both democracies and dictatorships are in a moment of crisis.
Money is like a religion, but scant evidence to suggest it's running dry. As stocks and home prices boom since 2020, there is more wealth than ever before.
Purchasing power hasn’t changed in the past 40 years, according to the Pew Institute: “Today’s real average wage (that is, the wage after accounting for inflation) has about the same purchasing power it did 40 years ago. And what wage gains there have been have mostly flowed to the highest-paid tier of workers.
Again, you have to look at the top 10% or so. That is where the purchasing power is coming from...stuff like Disneyland tickets, NFL tickets, lifted trucks, expensive elective cosmetic procedures, home renovations, and so on.
All meritocratic platforms are winner-take-all, with the top 1% of performers collecting a vastly disproportionate share of rewards. Look at Substack and Onlyfans. This is not a conspiracy engineered by anyone: when anyone is allowed to compete, a small percentage of people tend to capture most of the profit.
It's been like this for a long time, and recent trends have only accelerated this. The Ivy League is more importent and competitive than ever before; Covid has not changed this at all. Same for top 50 schools overall. Same for high stakes testing, math competitions, top tech & finance jobs, etc...everything more competitive and difficult. More people applying, fewer people getting in. Winners get bigger and bigger, whether it's top Substack content creators or Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon.
The American dream, the idea that anybody could make a good living for themselves and their family through nothing but hard work, has become far less realistic. You know the Steinbeck line about how Americans think they’re temporarily embarrassed millionaires instead of exploited proletariat. But they don’t believe that anymore, do they?
It's still realistic if you have a high IQ, choose a good career, and have good work ethic...people in tech, consulting, finance, healthcare, law, etc. making record income even after accounting for student loan debt and inflation. (The so-called school to career STEM pipeline.) Reddit 'FIRE' subs are full of such individuals, in their 20-40s, doing just that, with not uncommonly millions of dollars. But for those at the middle/left-side of the IQ distribution, maybe not so much. They tend to rely more so on lottery-like systems of success/promotion compared to more meritocratic ones. https://greyenlightenment.com/2022/03/19/losers-iq-and-the-l...
This clearly isn’t true, since people obviously aren’t free: they’re controlled by socioeconomic circumstances.
And also biological constraints, like again, IQ. But I have also read many stories on Hacker News and Reddit of people born in the lower-middle class or worse circumstances rising up due to high intelligence and getting scholarships and landing decent-paying jobs.
Good article...a lot of food for thought.
andrewmutz|3 years ago
The problem is that productivity is growing too slowly.
Fixing the problem requires far more technology and automation than we have delivered.
jackcosgrove|3 years ago
The problem is that human capital has saturated for many people. This is borne out by stagnating gains in education.
If productivity gains occur mostly because of technology with little human input, then that further bifurcates society between owners of that technology and everyone else. This does not help alleviate the modern malaise.
People are quick to point out the dropping of the gold standard, the end of cheap fossil fuels, the neoliberal economic changes, etc. that all occurred during the 1970s, and those all matter. But there's another factor which is that educational outcomes began to stagnate.
I don't think returning productivity growth to the postwar rate would have as much of an effect as it did then, because more of the productivity growth would be because of technology with concentrated ownership rather than broad gains in human ability.
oreally|3 years ago
peatfreak|3 years ago
bandyaboot|3 years ago
Is possible to think some parts are good and other parts not so good?
travisjungroth|3 years ago
Quote is in number 14 if anyone wants to read it themselves. You'll also see that the Ayn Rand quote mentioned in the sibling comment comes with critical commentary.
Re: testability
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mf0fLKjCKHA&t=73s
"So then the people who don't do psychedelics say 'well this is something it's like channeling or all this other stuff'. No it isn't, because we are not like those people. I mean, I maintain this rigorously, that our bit is intellectual rigor, not airheadedness. We're willing to put as much pressure on the ideas as you want we just believe in fairness. So, that it's not ipso facto that there's no such thing as elves. It's that if you think there are elves, prove it to me! Well, then the problem is that the skeptic, the critic, says, 'well the notion that are elves is just, you know, you're sadly deluded. You're living in your own private Idaho.' But then, you say, 'well, the proof of the pudding is a 15-minute DMT trip. Are you willing to carry on this criticism after having made the experiment, sir?' I mean, we're not like UFO enthusiasts. We're not telling you to stand in cornfields in the dead of night and pray. No, no, this will work! This will work on you, you the reductionist, you the doubter, you the constipated egomaniacal father-dominator. It'll work! And they say at that point 'You know, you are a menace, is what you are!'.
snapplebobapple|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
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