Providing a public forum by itself isn't bad, of course. The algorithms driving that infinite-scrolling news feed and recommendations list definitely are, at this point.
In the situation where federal government has the clout it does, people feel slighted when they are not in the majority, and may find anarchy better than living under rules they don't like.
Or other issues of too many small governments, such as road networks, or regional transit.
Anyhow, mobility is lower today than in recent American history, both in terms of costs but also in terms of desire. Decades ago moving around for a job was normal; it was a common motif in film and television. These days politicians literally run on platforms supposedly preserving your ability to never have to move. We expect jobs (and governance) to come to us, rather than the other way around.
There’s downsides though. Toyota put a plant in Ontario because it would take too long to turn assembly instructions into LEGO like instructions. Literacy was too low in Mississippi or wherever.
The arguments that ultimately challenged the model and led towards utilitarianism and free trade occurred much later, in the 18th century - Bentham, Smith, Mill, etc. By this time the colonial project in the South was well underway, with established stakeholders under the plantation model; and so the argument proceeds that the ideals of merchantalism have held more staying power there than elsewhere, even as the institutions have changed. The North, in contrast, had fewer ties to bonded labor, and so made a smoother transition into capitalist thinking.
He wrote it when he decided to take a nationwide road trip in the early '60s, and it captured a lot of interesting anecdotes about the birth of modern American lifestyles.
One of those was Steinbeck's fascination with "mobile homes", which are the pre-fab houses that you see in trailer parks. When he took his road trip, they were starting to get popular with factory workers. If/when a town's factories shut down, the workers could easily move their homes to where there was work, and he mentioned seeing a lot of them being moved along the highways.
But you don't see that very much these days. It seems like people prefer to stay where they are and demand or wait for the work to come back to them, even when they live in mobile housing.
There's a lot to be said about the value of a community, but I think this sort of stagnation reflects a precipitous decline in the US' appetite for all sorts of risk over the past few decades. Look at how children are raised, at how strangers are treated, at how slowly new developments proceed.
I dunno. It's hard to argue against conservativism in these sorts of situations, because nobody wants to see more child abductions or worksite accidents. But it's hard to deny that we've collectively lost "It", or whatever you want to call that drive to create a city on a hill to provide a beacon of hope and improve humanity's general wellbeing.
A brief, unscientific look at data from https://www.nam.org/state-manufacturing-data/ suggests that northern manufacturing output has been increasing nowhere near as fast as the south, but I’d love to see better data suggesting otherwise
Yes, the growth in Southern states is greater. But growth rates don't say much; apropos HN, an upstart can easily enjoy quadruple digit growth rates while the dominate players only see single digit growth, even when there's no reason to doubt their continued dominance. Nonetheless, for manufacturing the story is definitely changing, because of politics (e.g. Japanese car manufacturers and Airbus being incentivized to open plants in the Deep South), because of automation (easier to relocate plants to rural areas), and because there's less cheap labor in the north (possibly a cause, not only a consequence, of changing migration patterns).
I couldn't quickly find any links that broke down manufacturing by value-add or by technology--I suspect by that measure Northern states tend to still dominate in manufacturing, the same way the U.S. still does well in upmarket manufacturing viz-a-viz cheaper nations. But that's more of an educated guess; I don't remember ever seeing any data directly on point.
People don't move for jobs any more? When did this happen, to what extent, and what's the source of the information?
In percentage terms it doesn't seem that large, there's some complexity to the trends when comparing short- and long-distance moves, and of course the primary cause is assumed to be our transition from an industrial to service oriented economy, as well as the closing of the Western frontier (e.g. end of the Cold War and loss of defense jobs put an end to the great California migration). But I think the trends are amplified in our cultural expectations, which is why I brought up the shift in film and television narratives, which makes it apparent even for people who never lived in the 1980s, when migration began to wane. Obviously people still move for work, just not as much they used to. Likewise, the notion that you can and could move to improve your economic position isn't gone, it's just relatively diminished.
Perhaps you could elaborate on what you gleaned from this. It does have information about work related moves, but I'm not going to digest it tonight.
The first impression I get is that the proportion of people moving for work has gone up, while the overall number of people moving has gone down, but presumably population increased, so it seems to me that the relevant question is which trend is winning?
Having an opinion kind of implies you have looked into it, however I don't mind doing some arithmetic later.
[Edit] It seems to say the proportion of people moving for work has increased, while the total has decreased. I can't see there's enough information to figure out the net change. When I ask for a source, I mean, I don't see it here.
Maybe looking on a .gov site for census data would be more fruitful, but you could also be candid about where your opinion comes from, which doesn't require doing a lot of research for the benefit of anonymous strangers.
Something that I try to remember when I feel defensive about possibly not having a good argument for something is that I can defuse it by simply explaining how I convinced myself and letting go of overthinking what would convince others.
In any particular year people tend to mine the longer trends for evidence related to whatever is most interesting at the time, thus the millennial angle in the Curbed article, or the extended discussion of the Great Recession in the Brookings paper, but if you go down the rabbit hole, both in the data sources and the academic discourse, discussions about the larger trend come into the foreground. Anyhow, I was asked for some links about the trend in work relocations, and I provided some, trying to balance my own sincerity and convenience. The millennial and Great Recession sidetracks notwithstanding, the prima facie evidence is right there. Who cares what graph they're showing? I provided the links for the words, not the pictures, and the heading of that article says "After 40 years of steady declines in domestic migration, mobility has hit a new all-time low". (Anyhow, if the graph presented the only reasons people moved, it would only make my point stronger.) Follow the primary sources, even (or especially) if you're driven by incredulousness--nothing can motivate hours of sleuthing like Internet rage. That's what makes the Internet so great.
Sometimes I catalog useful links to primary or important secondary sources, but I don't really have any at hand for this topic. There's nothing particularly disputable or even (IMO) counterintuitive about the trend except for the implications, but in this case you merely challenged the basic assertion that people are moving less for work.
Is that your motivation, to produce "Internet rage"?
It’s reasonable to believe that an overall declining mobility rate means that people aren’t moving for jobs.
One interesting note in that data- it appears intracounty moves declined much more quickly than inter-county moves. I suspect that the increasing ubiquity of personal automobile ownership helped drive that decreasing mover rate, as it enabled more work opportunities to be within reasonable distance of peoples existing accommodation (and moving sucks).
At the same time, it didn't provide detailed information.
So when you have trends going in opposite directions, you can't say a priori if they cancelled out.
People are clearly moving less; if the information posted is accurate, more of the moves are for work.
But why can't we start by examining the source of the opinion? My instinct was that it is ill-founded, but who knows if I am right, because I was guessing.
What is the reason that you believe people are moving less for work in the first place? It doesn't take research or debate tactics to simply say "this is what convinced me".
Arguably, it's one of the risks of democracy that motivates anarchists. (Now, there's a case to be made that anarchy also risks devolving into mob rule by a different path than non-anarchic democracy does, but they still aren’t the same thing.)
I think the idea is that if you don't like where the majority is going, within a particular community or group, you move to a different group, or found one yourself, so you will be part of a group which is doing what you want.
It is however anarchy (the term), which is much older, and used to convey precisely lack of order and mob rule.
No, it's ochlocracy; there's a reason the same people who named anarchy made a separate word for it.
Anarchy is lack of rule - not the same as anarchism (the ideology and ideal for self-government), as several oppressors can and are still at play in a state of anarchy, or everybody might be fighting each other and there can be constant power shifts...
Ancient Greeks used the term with this meaning, not to describe some anarchist utopia.
So ochlocracy is like the people turning into a mob carrying pitchforks. They are the law...
Anarchy - in the ancient Greek sense - is like there's no state and no all-encompassing rule of law to turn to. It's the "law of the jungle".
True anarchy can only exist in very low density situations where population is very low and very sparsely settled. Let’s say fewer than 5 people per square mile actual (not average) on good land. One or fewer would be better. Rural Siberia -Yakutiya, Rural Mongolia. Colonial era trappers and such when they were not in town.
DENNIS: I told you. We're an anarcho-syndicalist commune. We take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week,...
ARTHUR: Yes.
DENNIS: ...but all the decisions of that officer have to be ratified at a special bi-weekly meeting...
ARTHUR: Yes, I see.
DENNIS: ...by a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs,...
ARTHUR: Be quiet!
DENNIS: ...but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more major--
ARTHUR: Be quiet! I order you to be quiet!
It’d be an idealized primitive culture -technology will produce power relationships. So will density (water rights, hunting rights, fishing rights, etc)
The difference is academic, of course, so long as the current level of power relationships in society is well above what even the liberal democracy advocate would consider "optimal".
I have never heard any articulation of how the minimum can actually be zero that is anything other than a straw man.
I think that anarchism is an idea that necessarily leads to minarchism. Once you get to minarchism, the debate is then back to ‘what is legitimate power?’ which is the perennial question.
I'm going to start out with the disclaimer that I am not personally opposed to all power relationships in the very broad sense used by some anarchists. I believe that there are universal natural rights, including both self-ownership and property, and that people have a right to enter into ongoing power relationships with others so long as they do so voluntarily of their own free will. So instead of "power relationships" the rest of this comment will use the term "force" or "aggression"—by which I mean power relationships involving violations of the individual's natural rights without their freely-given consent, except as a proportional defensive response to actual or imminent aggression by the other party. This is more-or-less the standard libertarian, anarcho-capitalist, or voluntaryist definition of aggression.
With all that said, the answer depends on whether you're talking about the minimum amount which is actually present or the minimum amount which can be considered "legitimate". It would be nice for both to be zero, of course, but I think we both agree that some amount of aggression is inevitable in practice—we aren't likely to eliminate all violent crime, for example, no matter how hard we try. The minimum amount of "legitimate" power, however, is trivial to simply define as zero. We are under no obligation to consider any act of aggression legitimate.
The distinction between anarchism and minarchism lies in how much aggression is deemed legitimate, not how much is present. The anarchist recognizes that aggression exists but does not consider any aggression to be legitimate, even when the goal is to reduce the overall level of aggression. The minarchist is willing to sanction a certain amount of aggression in order to achieve what they consider to be a greater good.
In my opinion the minarchist approach is neither principled nor pragmatic. It makes you an accessory to the aggression, normalizes it, and sets the stage for others to argue that ever increasing acts of aggression can be justified "for the greater good". Humans readily justify atrocities on the basis that a society organized "the right way" would somehow be free of violence or other ills. It doesn't work out well in practice. Better to aim for no aggression and consistently oppose such acts wherever you may find them rather than making exceptions.
Anarchy means no established order / ruler -- there can be tons of ad-hoc ones.
The whole idea of laws being ruled unconstitutional is that there are some things that even the majority can't do.
> This is not a conscious act. It's more like gravity. Gallivanting glaciers. Or weather.
I'm saying it's naïve to believe this, along with the other incidents mentioned within the article, aren't intentional. As if the west is immune to concerted censorship efforts and the only explanation is unconscious bias.
In decades past they could exist peacefully, insulated by a natural inability to communicate. An inability to rub against each other.
But now we are in the age of communication. We have the internet. The sensitivity and power of the hive has grown vastly. It touches much that it never touched before. Various ideological groups are now crowding each other. Grinding cheek and jowl. A thousand new "threats" become apparent. A thousand new demands for quelling.
So now we see more of that inter-ideological friction happening.
This is not a conscious act. It's more like gravity. Gallivanting glaciers. Or weather.
Charles Fort examined this phenomenon a bit. Check out his "Book of the Damned" for more on that.