A consequence of worshipping money. Even a human is valued by the amount of money they make or what they can afford.
Other societies have agreed that there are some fundamental things that they will all share the burden for collectively and the rich are going to contribute a larger share towards those collective resources. Thus, humans are not reduced to what they make but how they live and what their values are. Happy faces sharing a dining table, celebrating large families and friendships that last a lifetime.
It's not protestant work ethic. It's ass on fire, all the time for 70 years (save 18 years before college) and hoping you don't meet a "man-made" disaster like healthcare disaster, divorces, bankruptcies, lawsuits, prisons (completely ignoring natural disasters).
Really hitting at least one disaster in your life seems almost inevitable, and the system is waiting there to profit from you.
I'm definitely of the more socialist bent, in that I know that if people around me aren't healthy and safe, everyone is more at risk. But I feel in the minority these days.
We only feel alone because both parties are bought and owned by multi-nationals, and don't give a shit about what most people want. First Past the Post ensures a 3rd party will cause carnage if it ever did rise, splitting the vote and not electing the candidate most voters would prefer.
Look at Wolf PAC in Connecticut closing 26 points of a 36 point gap by beating the streets with 500 volunteers[1], or Bernie in West Virginia going to town hall after town hall and talking to people about the very real issues that affect their lives.
We can convert the "unwinnable" "red" states if we only dare put in the effort to beat the streets and call people, have one on one interaction and talk about issues that matter. Jobs, healthcare, workers rights, when you connect to people, even if you disagree with a person about "divisive" issues, they can often feel you are out there fighting for a better future for them and their family.
So get out there, go join Wolf PAC, Our Revolution/Woke, go to a Womens Day protest, a BLM protest and fight for a better future. If we take action, we can create change!
0 - http://www.gallup.com/poll/191504/majority-support-idea-fed-...
1 - http://www.mediaite.com/online/the-message-we-want-to-send-i...
The US system was ok in the 18th century but now it's a relic. Some things don't age well.
Definitely we need to get rid of First Past the Post, but while our parties are polarized, they are both far to the right of the vast majority of voters.
> What if I like guns but I want universal healthcare?
That is actually fairly common. Gun control can be done in a nuanced way, and we can have more guns with few instances of gun violence esque Switzerland if we train our populace to properly secure and disarm their guns when not being actively used.
Comparatively, people like my great grandfather thought it was fine to leave a dozen or more loaded guns of varying types all throughout the house. Not great when a shotgun falls out from behind the stove and nearly gets ya.
> What if I want a smaller government but I also want great environmental policies?
Hard to do, small gov't = small town corruption if you look at areas that take this approach.
> The US system was ok in the 18th century but now it's a relic. Some things don't age well.
Definitely, we need to update our antiquated political system.
Would a law requiring guns to be safely stored (i.e. in a safe) be acceptable? I assume the gun lobby would scream at the thought, but what would the majority think?
Likewise, would a national register and limits (i.e. every serial number is bound to a person in a national registry, the number of registered weapons to an individual is limited, and carrying a weapon not in the registry is a felony) - would that be acceptable?
I think all these countries with tons of guns e.g. Switzerland, Nordics, Canada, the key is they are to a large part hunting weapons. Hunters are usually completely fine with keeping their guns, or in some cases just vital parts of each gun, in a safe. This however means you can't keep a handgun in your bedside drawer, for example. But that's no problem - no one is using guns for "protection" anyway. I think the difference to the US is that in the US people still believe in using weapons for personal protection. Not being able to carry guns outside or have them lying around the house then sort of removes the ability to use them for protection.
I consider myself a pragmatic Libertarian, so my personal political views don't really align with either of the major parties, but are definitely more conservative in terms of limited federal government than most of the rest of the world view, exceptions to essential infrastructure, which to me includes water, power, communications/internet, transportation, preserving public lands, and education (though in need of some revision). As to corrupt local governments... those are easier for local citizens, and even states to address. Of course historically that hasn't always worked out so well.
In the end, what keeps Germany from being corrupted vs. Belgium... the States in the U.S. are slightly more coupled than the EU nations, but it's not too dissimilar, discounting the same language for the most part here.
And, although it's not mandated by law, gun owners do tend to keep records on private party sales. Nobody wants to be in the situation of "we found this Glock at a crime scene, and it appears to be yours?" and not be able to provide evidence to the contrary.
So a registry doesn't really offer any real utility... except to confiscate those weapons down the road.
If you want to promote safe storage, the best solution would be a tax benefit for buying safe-storage equipment. Gun safes are expensive, at least if you want something that can't be crowbarred open in a few minutes.
Something else that I would love to see, and stealing a page from the Swiss, is universal gun education.
There are more guns than cars in the United States, and I find it negligent that not every American learn not just gun safety, but also how to safely store, handle, and yes, fire a gun -- even if they never plan on owning one.
Yes, a tax benefit seems like something you would probably need to add to a bill requiring safe storage, just to get it past lawmakers and special interest groups.
> Something else that I would love to see, and stealing a page from the Swiss, is universal gun education
That sounds like a good idea. Not sure if having it mandatory even for never-to-be gun owners is the best use of resources, but at least having it as a requirement for a license sounds reasonable - just like driving.
Being a Swede we have (and had) mandatory gun education. For men at least. Same thing in Switzerland. Conscription! (now everyone is again elgible for conscription but far from everyone will be required). So that problem is at least solved in countries with conscription armies. Obviously, neither Sweden nor Switzerland ever trained everyone in gun safety but there is mandatory training before ever using a gun at least, because the licenses require it. So owning a gun for hunting requires passing an exam, Military obviously includes a lot of training, and owning a gun for sports of personal protection is simply not a concept.
Personally, I think it would do a lot to connect Americans from different walks of life. I know a lot of people in SF that have no idea what rural California looks like, and that works the same way in the other direction.
As far as licensing goes, that's off the table for historical reasons, and also why I say that we should make gun education universal.
Pretty much every gun control law in the United States, starting after the Civil War, and up to and including California's Assault Weapons Ban and Open Carry Ban, have been primarily to limit gun rights for the poor, and for minorities. It's why the laws are so patchwork, and make so little sense.
So, given that history, public education is the most sensible way to promote responsible gun culture and firearms safety, without imposing the licensing burden that is still used today as a means of discrimination.
George Carlin puts it best, "America was founded by a group of Salve owners on the premise that all man are created equal."
My observation is that America is the land of law & order as every illegal & unethical practice becomes law. Its owned by 1% and wages war for the 1% in the pretext of spreading the seeds of democracy.
The thing that worried me the most as a non-American is that people around the world think that America is a democracy and all the "bad dudes"(corrupt self-interested 1%), gain power in America and try to impose their will on rest of the world by using Hollywood, CIA & US defence force.
What are the consequences of each of these choices and who is the right person to make them? There is no perfect voting/political system - all of them have side effects.
Worse is subjective in this arena. So what are your metrics? What do you define as better? I'm not terribly keen on prop rep, for example - I think it actually gives too much power to extreme parties. Maybe you disagree. Maybe you think it would be better? If so, why?
Notably, Brexit was caused by the small party UKIP stealing votes from the Conservatives, and then by Lib-Dem voters fleeing to Labour because they previously teamed up with the Conservatives. So a leftward shift of voters, sent the result rightward, giving the Conservatives a clear victory which meant they had to deliver a referendum that they never thought they'd have to.
Too late now to change it, but it seems likely the UK wouldn't be tearing itself apart at the moment with a better system.
lower quality of healthcare
Not overall, but arguably yes for people with perfect healthcare plans at the moment. I think that everyone having 90% "rated" healthcare is better than a split of 0%/50%/100% by wealth bracket.
Increased government spending
Yes. Absolutely - you have to tax people the money that would otherwise go to insurers and spend it as an insurer. Since the US currently spends the highest proportion of GDP on healthcare for incredibly unequal healthcare you can decide for yourself whether even big government could manage to be less efficient.
Increased chances of corruption
No.
Creating a moral hazard of not working to earn what is consumed
Sure. It's a problem when there's zero cost involved in healthcare - something many systems struggle with. Often in european countries you'll see some kind of excess/copay so people have a little "skin in the game" before using the system. The UK uses waiting lists and gateway doctors (GPs) to assess need.
Rationing of healthcare on a basis of need, rather than wealth seems smarter to me from a population basis.
There are many healthcare systems, all have trade offs. Most of the first world is unconvinced that the current American system is optimal
On the very top end of healthcare? Maybe, but countries with public healthcare aren't doing too bad on that side either. On average? The quality is insanely higher. Until budget gets cut because some dimwit thought it would be a good idea to stretch their resources thin.
>increased government spending
Covering everyone costs money, yes. But considering the amount of money that is already being invested by the US govt. into health care and the abysmally poor results it gives, it can't really be worse.
>increased chances of corruption
Very little. And it solves lobbying, doctors being paid by companies, etc. It's usually a net positive.
>creating a moral hazard of not working to earn what is consumed
Screw that. People have a right to live decently, even without earning it. That's why we made societies. That's why we keep elders alive, and not immediately send them off to the glue factory as soon as they retire, that's why we keep children and feed them and teach them until they're able to be a useful member of that society. In most sensible systems, their education is largely free too.
No. US does not have better health care indicators than other countries with similar development levels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_quality_o...
> increased government spending
Maybe... But you will spend much less overall on healthcare, so it'll be a net positive for normal working Americans.
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.PCAP?year_high_de...
> increased chances of corruption
Countries with better healthcare than the US also have less corruption perception. I'm not suggesting public healthcare causes that, but it certainly does not cause the opposite.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
> creating a moral hazard of not working to earn what is consumed
Moral hazard "occurs when one person takes more risks because someone else bears the cost of those risks". How does this affect healthcare?
We know that a lot of diseases have a strong genetic factor, so moral hazard isn't an issue there.
Of course, behavior is also an important factor. But working insured Americans are already subject to moral hazard (since they're on a group policy, their disproportionate costs are already supported by others). Medicare and Medicaid recipients are also already subject to moral hazard.
So moral hazard will be created for uninsured people and people on an individual policy, for behavior induced health problems. If that's a deal-breaker for you, you should be against federally funded healthcare.
Would likely have cost less, reduced redundant agencies and staff, and had a chance at making things better.
While our emergency system is often at the point of creaking it at least isn't anywhere close to American levels of having to deal with what should be primary care problems. There's also the massively real hazard of what happens when you have a large proportion of the population who can't access basic healthcare, for instance a greatly increased communicable disease risk. Then there is the economic cost of people unable to work, or work as well, due to potentially treatable medical conditions or bankrupted by medical bills. On a purely economic basis there is a case for universal healthcare.
How much of this "creaking" is intentional underfunding or political meddling by politicians looking for a payday from American medical insurance companies when they ruin another nations healthcare is debatable.
It's very similar to recent Trump moves of putting people who hate what a government department does in charge of that same government department. Jeremy Hunt the former Health Secretary previously called for the NHS to be replaced with an insurance system. So how can you trust that he's not trying to achieve that goal by crippling the existing system?
The Lyft story of a driver who still takes rides while in labor wouldn't be "controversial" in Europe, it would be universally appalling. I don't think any corporate PR, however clueless, would even think of telling it.
It was never a right in the US, although it's true that Obamacare brought us closer to that ideal.
The crazy thing is that if you want one of those high paid jobs where you work all day and all night then you don't even get those first 18 years.
I worked at such a job and an easy majority of my colleagues went to universities that require high achievements at the school level.
In the best case you get your first 14 years.
A large minority of my colleagues went to secondary schools with highly competitive admissions and another minority had achievements that require a very early start (olympiads, olympics, college sports, etc.).
Many of these people started when they were between 6 and 10 years old.
This was fine in America for a long time, but
1) As colleges degenerate from being an intellectual addition, to a pre requisite for jobs well paying or not
2) several classes of jobs disappear, especially those which could be done by common sense and training
It results in posers. People who are high functioning, cynical and clear about what it takes to live a decent life.
I probably point it out a lot on HN and other places - but you see this in action in India and China (and other developing nations).
Very few people actually are interested in doing math or math derived work all the time, but if they don't society and the jobs market will be unmerciful.
So they pretend. They hate it, assume everyone else is pretending, and go through the basic motions required to get to the other side.
These are the people who are badly affected by the whole process. The ones who would not have been happy becoming engineers, lawyers or olympiads.
But that's the game, and people will always play it.
At least in the Anglosphere, elite colleges were elite finishing schools before they were tickets to middle class elite jobs. I'm not sure that they are degenerating in the way that you imply.
It's also not clear to me that academic pursuits are somehow better than commercial pursuits. They're certainly not better for society.
> Very few people actually are interested in doing math or math derived work all the time, but if they don't society and the jobs market will be unmerciful.
I feel like I know more people who are interested in doing math, but are not doing math because the job market is not kind to those who do math. Indeed I am one of those people. I do agree that I took a somewhat cynical approach.
Replacing math with CS would make more sense in the context of the conversation. There are many 18 year olds today who are saying "I guess I'll study computer science".
When I took the first semester CS course at my alma mater the class size was roughly 300 students. Now it's regularly 1200+.
I disagree -- if money was truly worshiped, why would discussing salary be taboo? I think it has more to do with things like a just-world hypothesis [0] run amok, a long-term political trend in decreasing union power, and a lack of awareness about exactly how much surplus value is being siphoned away before the average person sees any of it.
I mean, "stop worshiping money" almost feels like victim-shaming. To the extent that the average person worships it, it's because they didn't have it in the first place.
Your employer, however, is happy to keep all that money.
This is why we need unions. Because as a single person, you have absolutely zero leverage over your employer. Sadly, fear on each side is what makes the agreement work, properly.
* Applies more as you go down the chain of responsibility, or salary. Needless to say, software developers are not doing that badly in the grand scheme of things.
Perhaps worship isn't the right word- it's more akin to fetishization. The religious right does a similar thing with sex, with similar results.
The Nordic countries have had an extreme Protestant majority ever since the Reformation. In 1950s Finland, 95% of the population was a member of the national Lutheran church! That's practically everyone.
At the same time, these 95% Protestant societies were heavily unionized, built up strong social safety nets, and offered long vacations, public health care and other worker-friendly policies.
So it seems too simple to blame the dysfunctionalities of the American work environment on reformed Christian ethics -- at least, the Nordic example shows that a different, more employee-friendly interpretation of the same ethic is possible.
It's not the same protestant ethic. In nordic countries most are counted as members of a church nominally still today, but they hardly believe in anything. Only 20% or polled Danish even say they believe in Christ for example, another 20% states they are atheist, and the majority is totally indifferent.
The US got all the religious hardcodes, calvinists, the Puritans, Quakers et al, and let the define the national ideology beyond the church, and piled an Old Testament mentality on top of it.
Even today when the nordic countries have mostly atheists or totally indifferent nominally religious people, the US has a large population deep on Old Testament.
>At the same time, these 95% Protestant societies were heavily unionized, built up strong social safety nets, and offered long vacations, public health care and other worker-friendly policies.
In the forties and fifties, that is post war world II, the US was "heavily unionized" too. It was the golden era of the unions. But that (influenced by the tradition of leftists and labour rights activists in the US and the post war boom in the economy) didn't last long (e.g. after McCarthy), whereas in nordic countries, if not the unions themselves, those "safety nets" and worker-friendly policies remain respected.
Even more interesting because I consider Netherlands the closest you get in Continental Europe to a Scandinavian country (socially/economically speaking).
May be protestantism is the origin of this kind of work ethics, probably exacerbated by american history (colonising a new world, carving a new place for themselves in a barely-known land...).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S...
You get a very skewed perception of reality reading human-interest pieces, because nobody wants to read an article about someone who is doing better than them in every way, having more fun too, and is going to act like a douche and crow about it to the news media. And if you have half a brain, you don't want that article to be written about you.
Personally, I'm doing my best to get to a point where I can feel good in an outfit I've had for years, feel good with a cheap haircut, feel satisfied reading and meditating to relax and being able to leave work at work and sleep soundly no matter the occurrences of the day. Judge me by the way I treat you not by the number of zeros in my bank account.
The above quote from wikipedia article on mobility in the US [1] highligts an important point. The US as the land of opportunity is clearly a false image, since you have a lower chance of climbing out of poverty there than in a lot of other countries.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the...
Instead, for too long the ideology that The Market is perfect and self-regulating and automatically works for the greater good, while Government/taxes/regulations/unions are all evil, has triumphed.
Working to find a good balance is so much more difficult and so much less attractive than believing in a very well narrated oversimplification. But, instead of working in that direction (the good balance), lots of people are opting to believe in even worse oversimplifications - the ones that populists all over the West are spreading. Not an easy situation to fix.
edit: Sarcasm on HN is a bad idea. Obviously earning 400x a worker's wage is bullshit, there's no amount of work that justifies that.
I don't think it's unfair, or that there's too much capitalism, but it's the nature of the system. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ig_qpNfXHIU
edit: Sarcasm on HN is a bad idea. Obviously earning 400x a worker's wage is bullshit, there's no amount of work that justifies that.
Well, look at what Steve Jobs did for Apple. Regardless of whether he would've done that if he was paid less, how many workers was he worth? The natural follow-up question is then, why not pay them what they're worth?
One reason CEOs are paid so much is to prevent them from making short-term decisions that optimize their stock price at the expense of long-term planning. If their entire compensation is tied to the stock price, there's no incentive for any CEO to try to do better than increase the stock price at any cost.
The seriously rich get to chose how much they want to work, if they want to work at all. Surely you know that?
Edit: sarcasm is best perceived when the argument leads ad adsurdum. Now people at the top working very hard and taking risks happens all the time and your "Surely you don't believe that?" could have been just an arrogant attitude, so your sarcasm was hard to spot. But I'm glad to hear it was just sarcasm :)
I don't think that's obvious, but let's stipulate that it's true.
While there may be no amount of work that justifies it, there is an amount of ownership that justifies it.
Not everyone is a up-the-ladder CEO that gets placed into a firm and then rent-seeks for a few years while waiting for a golden parachute. Some people founded their firms and reap the financial gains directly from what they've built - and if that is 400 or 500 or 600x what the janitor makes, so be it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protestant_work_ethic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S...
Competition is good. Aristocracies are not [1] [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the...
It is currently more profitable to have very large sums of capital itself (and invest this in other capital, financial instruments etc), than to work, no matter how hard you work.
As such you have to work even harder than that or drop out of the game entirely. Systemically, the correct winning strategy is already to have huge sums of capital. I'm not sure if there's a half-measures strategy for starting with only a little capital: perhaps it's primarily luck, as it is for most/all big investors?
But there's certainly no strategy for beginning with only sweat equity and having that turn efficiently into capital, so the 'protestant work ethic' is a mighty sad and inappropriate thing to have right now. I think the combination of this ethic and huge capital holdings is largely a thing of the past, and can hold people back from larger wealth because they're looking for ways to expand that involve work, and this competes against more efficient, purer capital strategies based around pure capital manipulation (which is strongly incentivised, for instance with tax incentives).
Currently?
And why would "how hard you work" play any role?
A surgeon doing 20 hour shifts gets way untold times less money than e.g. Tim Cook or some absentee CEO -- as their pay, not as their returns from capital investments.
And let's not compare a miner who risks their life (and lungs) underground with some cushy executive.
http://www.businessinsider.com/harvard-upward-mobility-study...
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHNONAG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M0829BUSM065NNBR https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/AWHAETP
More people simply don't work. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
Consumption (note: figure adjusted for inflation) has only increased.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A794RX0Q048SBEA
Looks like that protestant work ethic/capitalism/etc is working pretty well for us.
(As for the per capital consumption, does it add mr. Gates with Joe Average? Even so I'm sure they will be an increase in Joe Average's consumption, but is that because Joe Average has more buying power than a worker in the 60s, or because they have to spend more to stay afloat, as everything's more expensive, and they don't have much cushion left in the bank?)
Even so I'm sure they will be an increase in Joe Average's consumption, but is that because Joe Average has more buying power than a worker in the 60s, or because they have to spend more to stay afloat, as everything's more expensive,
That's definitely not the case, since the numbers I cited are adjusted for inflation.
To determine whether average Joe has more buying power, simply compare the goods and services available to him to those of his parents. That's a clear win - when I was a kid, avocados were an expensive luxury to be consumed only once in a while, and I was often bored with nothing to read.
Inflation adjustment doesn't take into account costs that are prevalent in an era but totally absent in another: like internet access, cellphone bills, and such. Nor how much one not puts into their retirement account / savings to spend on daily needs.
If it was just supposed to be relative to the past, we would all be content for living better off than the pilgrims. Who needs a fridge, for example, when they didn't have any either? So, if we have fridges now and stuff, and even the garbage man has a cellphone, it's all dandy.
Empirically, people older than you that have lived throughout those decades know the numbers a bogus as an indicator of purchasing power, whether they were inflation adjusted or not. One could buy a house with a regular blue collar job as a household's single earner back in the 50-60s. Today, and for a few decades, not so much. Same for things such as college education. You could pay for it back in the day by working laughable gigs by today's standards.
So whether you can have "avocados" or not, if you can't as easily have a house, an education, or a steady job, is a moot point.
Note how: "after adjusting for inflation, today’s average hourly wage has just about the same purchasing power as it did in 1979, following a long slide in the 1980s and early 1990s and bumpy, inconsistent growth since then. In fact, in real terms the average wage peaked more than 40 years ago: The $4.03-an-hour rate recorded in January 1973 has the same purchasing power as $22.41 would today".
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-wor...
I'm glad you've agreed with me that life has done nothing but get better. We're all winners, whereas by modern standards our parents were all losers.
As for the other things you bring up, basically none of the facts fit your story.
Homeownership has ranged from 64% to 69% since the 60's, but houses are twice as big.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership_in_the_United_S...
http://www.realtor.org/RMODaily.nsf/pages/News2007032701?Ope...
Apparently there's no difficulty owning a home.
College enrollments (as a % of new graduates) has done nothing but climb.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/images/2010/ted_20100428.png
Note how: "after adjusting for inflation, today’s average hourly wage
That's because we get more non-wage benefits and fewer dollars per hour. Real compensation per hour has done nothing but rise.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/COMPRNFB
Why not google these facts before making nonsensical arguments?
Only in the sense that being a loser with a cellphone makes you a winner over a winner in the 60s without a cellphone.
But I don't think "availability/access to gadgets and avocados" is of primary concern when one considers whether "life getting better" over access to housing, steady employment, healthcare access, savings, and other such things.
An example of this "winning":
In 2015, when researchers Ann Case and Angus Deaton discovered that death rates had been rising dramatically since 1999 among middle-aged white Americans, they weren't sure why people were dying younger, reversing decades of longer life expectancy.
In a follow-up to their groundbreaking 2015 work, they say that a lack of steady, well-paying jobs for whites without college degrees has caused pain, distress and social dysfunction to build up over time. The mortality rate for that group, ages 45 to 54, increased by a half-percent each year from 1999 to 2013.
http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/03/23/52108333...
>College enrollments (as a % of new graduates) has done nothing but climb.
That's the problem of numbers, they say nothing without context.
Though this one is so obvious I'm not sure it's worth discussing.
Isn't it obvious for example that college enrollments have mainly climbed because getting by (getting a job above minimum wage) without one is not as easy as it was in decades past, and are thus becoming de facto mandatory?
Remember those "middle age despair deaths" I mentioned above? "But whites with college degrees haven't suffered the same lack of economic opportunity, and haven't seen the same loss of life expectancy."
And isn't it also obvious that this "climbing of college enrollments" is happening only with increased student debt (from even 0 back in decades past), that has reached enormous amounts for millions of people?
If people in the 40s and 50s has a gun in their head to get a college degree to find a job, and if they took huge loans to be able to afford it, then they would have the same percentage of "climbing college enrollments" too...
>That's because we get more non-wage benefits and fewer dollars per hour. Real compensation per hour has done nothing but rise.
Yeah, wonder what these millions of working class losers are complaining about... Entitled scum, the whole lot of them...
I'm sorry you feel that reduced status for white people is a problem, but we just need to accept that we're no longer automatically at the top of the heap. I similarly agree that the lack of work and easy ability to be idle is harming people's psyches. But this is a totally different problem.
Not an American, not a horse in the white males losing their status race, etc.
So don't particularly care for the weaselly "frame his sending this link as racism/white anger" angle ("I'm sorry you feel that reduced status for white people is a problem").
The issue pointed to is increased unemployment and scarce of blue collar jobs. It takes some twist it to turn it into some "reduced status for white people" problem in the sense of racist rhetoric. In fact it's a totally irrelevant reading, if not purposefully bad.
Reduced status as pertaining to white vs other races is irrelevant to whites losing their blue collar jobs. Whites could be getting less unemployment and still lose their status as superior to other races in American society, or they could lose their jobs and still retain their racist/top-of-the-heap status (and in fact racism often increases when unemployment rises -- just ask the Weimar republic. Germans were never poorer, but they sure increased their "top of the heap" status over jews).
And of course it's not just for white people -- it's just the demographic the research focused on. As if blacks for example have no issues with lack of blue collar jobs and lack of degrees (two things mentioned in the article). It's just that for blacks, premature deaths like mentioned in the article (and worse) have always been common, and nobody bats an eye.
I'm merely pointing something your "we're winning vs decades past" idea forgot, and which affects tons of people.
http://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/5FB2/production/_...
You seem to be focusing on whites when they are the exception. Weird.
I'm also not sure why you are discussing a lack of jobs now. Wasn't the original topic that we work too hard? And what evidence do you have that we lack jobs?
Given that virtually all of your factual claims have been disproven, I think you need to offer some evidence before I take this seriously.
Yes it does. Have you looked at how the BLS calculates the market-basket they use for CPI calculations? It's determined by actual spending by actual people on actual goods. This information is public:
"Knowing that consumers are constantly offered new items to include in their market basket, how do changing market baskets influence the CPI? The answer is not unambiguous and depends on the importance of the change in terms of total expenditures by consumers."
The CPI calculation does take into account "new expenses", but in a backwards way from what I asked for above and for the reverse purpose (to hide the negative changes).
Instead of just adding something like a cell contract into the "new necessities" in the basket, they substitute lesser goods instead of comparing like for like across periods, as if it's reflecting a difference in what people want to buy (aka the "burger vs steak" substitution) instead of what they can afford to buy. They have even long substituted home owning costs for rent. So, yeah, "it's not inflation", it's just a declining standard of living instead of a fixed (or progressing) one.
As you conceded above, that would be pretty cheap.
Just curious: Do those graphics take into account the people that don't work as 0h? or has the working hours not gone up among those who do work?
> Looks like that protestant work ethic/capitalism/etc is working pretty well for us.
Judging by economic growth and consumption, may be. And those might be good metrics.
But are you happier for it? Are you enjoying the rewards of your hard work?
Not trying to imply you aren't, by the way. And I say "you" because I'm a westerner, but not from the anglosaxon sphere and I don't see quite the same work ethic around me, although not too different either.
"Average weekly hours relate to the average hours per worker for which pay was received and is different from standard or scheduled hours. Factors such as unpaid absenteeism, labor turnover, part-time work, and stoppages cause average weekly hours to be lower than scheduled hours of work for an establishment. Group averages further reflect changes in the workweek of component industries. Average weekly hours are the total weekly hours divided by the employees paid for those hours."
I don't know how to measure how much happier I am as a result. Happiness measurement - particularly across cultural boundaries - is more or less meaningless.
Actually, that's testable, to a degree ...
The largest and most potent concentration of "the protestant work ethic" produced switzerland, which is the nicest and best place on earth.
I don't think too much PWE is our problem.
The UK has Protestantism as an official state religion and yet it has the NHS, mandatory paid holidays etc.
In fact the Church of England if often jokingly called the closest thing a church has to atheism.
Don't conflate nominal state religions with actual ideas at play in citizen's heads...
To me, it just seems like too many see that initial hamster wheel and jump on without thinking much about things. Then again, they lack proper education. I'm not even sure if it's about teaching them how to trade and invest, instead people need to be taught how to think critically and break out of the victimization trend. Then again, I'm not sure if that will help things much either.
If it became mainstream it would just mean more volatility which for me.. volatility is a good thing. Yet were not even close to that, not many trade. Which is fine too, adaptability is key. I think the "you can't" stuff really flows out to other areas of the economy, e.g. starting up etc. So we get into this thing were people don't even try, or they try and fail once and don't bother getting back up. Granted, having a family etc is problematic .. though I do know someone who failed thrice starting businesses while being a mother of 5. That has to be pretty challenging and seeing her persevere tells me many more can be successful if they get past the initial hurdles.
If that were possible, then it would also be possible for no-one to ever have to work, which might be possible in the future, but not right now.
If you're going to brag online about your investment performance, post your anonymized brokerage statements. Otherwise, you're just another person who's full of it.
Maybe we just have too much of that protestant work ethic?