Why should the citizens of a country be in favor of an economic policy that screws them in return for making the richest .001% of the population richer, and raising the standard of living for foreigners living in a mud huts to being slaves in a factory? This was apparent all along, but the people voicing these concerns were ignored or marginalized by the one sided economic voices in the media...
So to part 2:
The problem is that the economists you hear on the news telling you what needs to be done are wrong worse than 50% of the time (austerity, free trade with countries that don't have equivalent economies, you name it). In the US after Trump (who I mostly disagree with) started calling out Carrier for closing a US factory to offshore the production, I heard a couple economists taking about how if carrier didn't move all their production offshore no one would be able to afford an AC unit.
To which, I was frankly shocked. central AC units, which are mostly assembled from 3rd party components, many of which are already made in china/etc (unless you get lucky with a us built emerson/copeland compressor) are extremely high margin businesses. The assembly costs in the US are a tiny fraction of the installed price of a AC unit (which are dominated by your local AC installer). Worse, prices rarely decline when production is off-shored, rather the savings tend to go back to the execs and majority share holders. Or worse, are used to buy or block smaller more efficient competitors.
So, for a news organization to not vet this before allowing some doomsday economist to come on and talk about how the price of AC units are going to spike if carrier isn't allowed to fire a bunch of $20/hour employees in favor of a bunch of $5/hour ones, while playing tax games with the profits (aka book the majority of the profits outside of the US to avoid taxes) is just insane. Heck carrier has a gross profit margin of > 50% (its higher than Apple!).
Bottom line, I think pretty much everyone I know is now trained to disbelieve anything heard on the news from a self proclaimed economist.
And yes , the citizens of a country should not be in favour of a policy that transfers the lions share of the gains to the 0.01 %.
But overall , a liberal global order has been a good thing.
I blame the greed of the elites for (potentially) killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Greed is a powerful addiction. The elites won't stop trying to concentrate more and more wealth at the top, even when they know it will increase the chance of something like Brexit actually happening (which cut their wealth, at least temporarily, considerably).
Addition is powerful because it's addictive.
So next time you negotiate your salary, or try to make more bonus at the end of the year, I want you to think about your addiction to greed. You just want to concentrate more and more wealth at the top, even when you know it will increase the chance of something like Brexit. Clearly that's your motivator.
If that doesn't work for you, try coming up with a more realistic model or how wealth actually moves, and what motivates people. Parables about the seven deadly sins make for entertaining and convincing story telling, but are not good models for reality.
Even in the US, 34K a year is a living wage in some parts of the country while in others its extremely hard to survive. Beside the obvious cost of living expenses for house, transportation, food, there is also the question of, how your making the 34k a year. If you can earn it in less than 40 hours a week you have time to supplement your income growing a garden, fixing your own car, or spending time tutoring your children. OTOH, if it takes 80 hours a week to earn that then you pretty much have to pay people to take care of all the little things you could be doing yourself.
And yes let's say I make $100,000/year. Would I or most others be happy with it? Surprisingly, no. They probably want to make a little more to get a boat, or even a bigger saving for their children.
> rather the savings tend to go back to the execs and majority share holders.
If so, start your own AC company and undercut them since there's so much margin. As for me, I don't believe it for a second.
The Internet didn't break this dynamic, it's just another media in the end (regarding the press) with a louder audience for the same ideas. Moreover the fragmentation of countries into regions doesn't follow from that. It comes from national politics. National politics that just get votes and support from following point #1. And inevitably leads to a blaming game (they are a lot of Nigel across Europe).
I might be wrong and I don't have time to word my opinions like I would, sorry. Just my 2ç in the wee hour of morning.
Ah. Strikes everywhere in Belgium today.
You can say anything online and that widens the scope of what is considered acceptable discourse.
Notice how the media tries to black out Trump's insanity but it gets so much attention on social media that they're forced to cover his tweets.
Completely not true. They air hours upon hours of uncut press conferences. They could easily summarize the press conference in a 90 second piece ("Chris Christie endorsed Donald Trump today..."), but they don't.
I think you'll find this book interesting:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jan/09/net-delusion-m... http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/books/review/Siegel-t.html...
https://www.amazon.com/Net-Delusion-Dark-Internet-Freedom/dp...
> But the internet allows people on the so called fringe to see that they may not be the fringe after all.
Not really, the internet also has that loudest voice syndrom.
> You can say anything online and that widens the scope of what is considered acceptable discourse.
Or you get drowned in an endless sea of information, a dot in the noisegraph.
> Notice how the media tries to black out Trump's insanity but it gets so much attention on social media that they're forced to cover his tweets.
Can't comment on that as I don't live in the US :/ but it's an interesting point. How effecient can they really be at hiding something vs ignoring it.
What? They love covering him because they get so many viewers. Hell, they're partially the reason he catapulted into the limelight--had they treated his antics the same as the other politicians' he'd have received far less air time than he has so far.
As someone who grew up in the Rust Belt, I think #3 hits the nail on the head. For as long as I can remember, the area where I grew up has been struggling economically (it was hit hard by waves of factory closings starting in the 1980's). None of the politicians from either party seemed to care.
Now suddenly there's a politician who seems to care about this issue, has a real shot at being President, and is different enough from the usual run of politicians that he may be paying the issue more than lip service and may actually be able to effect change.
For a lot of people, this is a powerful motivation to get out and vote for him despite his obvious flaws, especially when his opponent is not only as "establishment" as they come, but her husband literally brought us NAFTA.
To (3) I would add a "prisoner's dilemma" dynamic -- theoretically it's better if every country "cooperates" and gives all their effort to putting the benefit of the world as a whole above the benefit of their country (that's the vision of globalization). But if some countries "defect" and focus on themselves first, then whoever "cooperates" feels exploited (and not wrongly so). A lot of people I know feel like some countries (especially China) are defectors in this game and we shouldn't be suckers, so despite the theory, the practical thing to do is look out for ourselves first.
Farage is clearly fascist, and has been for many years. His fascism was identified while he was at school and it hasn't decreased since then. (Albeit it he no longer marches through villages singing Hitler Youth songs.)
http://www.channel4.com/news/nigel-farage-ukip-letter-school...
About as relevant as Cameron's pig fucking...
I post a link to his past because his present - leading a fascist party using fascist tactics - is so obvious it doesn't need linking.
Where is your evidence that he "really did" this?
Before you say "Did you read the article I linked to!" - yes, I did.
1) What's the significance of circles? Do they represent voting districts or something like that?
2) What does the size of a circle represent? Is it the population of a district, perhaps on logarithmic scale?
3) Does the position on the x-axis represent how strongly that district was for remain or leave?
Of course, you could give the link to the original source too, Google Image Search shows nothing yet.
Also , acting on emotion rather than reason and whipping up extreme sentiments against outsiders are the harbingers of fascism.
Can you even give a definition without looking it up?
* He wants small gov't * He believes in democracy * He does not support ccontinuing costly wars and meddling in other countries affairs * I'm not sure he's suppressed any political groups
Both sides are acting on extreme emotions these days, and on the other side of the coin, the outsiders are people who disagree with liberal policies.
5) this is a correction.
Is the UK unique in having pro-immigration, anti-immigration parties? It boggles my mind, and doesn't get discussed much even in the UK. (I suppose Trumps incoherence, and lack of walking the talk, is actually very similar, now I think about it).
I especially agree with your #2, but I warn most people will disagree. It's so foolish to think the Internet does not mean anything. I'm so disappointed when I travel somewhere and people mock my desire to secure a SIM card as quickly as possible. Why is it so frowned upon to connect to the Internet?
As long as your life is visibly improving , you don't mind that some people are doing insanely well. But it's much harder to stomach when you're struggling to get by.
People are disappointed. Even this vote , is actually a vote of dissatisfaction against the status quo. They just managed to direct enough of that anger against the EU.
I'd like to suggest the following three hypotheses and hear what you guys think :
1. As growth slows , liberal democracy ceases to be the status quo. It's much easier for a demagogue to whip up sentiments against the "other" when people feel that they have been left behind.
2. The media has always been a gatekeeper and helped keep the more extreme voices out of mainstream discourse. The internet breaks this dynamic and now disaffected majorities can coalesce across regional boundaries within a country.
3. The Western working class has realised that globalisation doesn't seem to be raising everyone's living standards. It's more of an equalisation where large numbers of people in Asia are lifted into the middle class while the western working class stagnates.
This diagram shows a clear class divide in the voting: http://i.imgur.com/SneDXWa.png
I don't have much more data to back these up so I'd be interested hearing any thoughts / anecdotes about such things around where you live.