2020 US Election (Part One)

[Farm Boy]

faired better

There's always, "by what measure?" And the answer generally gets termed in units of financial power and implicitly in how useful those persons made themselves in very specific ways. Because, I don't know, some form of combined godless worldview. "Service me" economy. Wipe my snowbird poop!

 

[Cloud_Strife]

It's a bit frustrating to hear how rural areas are suffering but yet ghey consistantly vote GOP, at some point these people need to do some introspection

 

[Lexicus]

And that may very well be true.

No, it's not. The situation in those places is the result of a lot of political choices that can absolutely be reversed or changed.

Life isn't, and never will be, great for everyone all the time.

Honest question: why'd you give my post a like when you evidently agree with Paul Krugman?

I recently heard about some reinvestment effort in some podunk town where they were retraining manufacturing workers for new skills. Dozens of people took courses to train for some new job in the area. And only ~1 of them got a new job doing that thing, with the rest having wasted their time and wasted tax payer money. The ones who said screw this and moved to the city faired better.

Sounds like typical liberal solution involving Market Forces that is foredoomed to failure.

It's a bit frustrating to hear how rural areas are suffering but yet ghey consistantly vote GOP, at some point these people need to do some introspection

I mean, I agree with you, but Democrats have nothing to offer these people either. At least the GOP speaks to their reactionary cultural concerns. Democrats offer, at best, "move to the city if you don't like it"

 

[Zkribbler]

Democrats have nothing to offer these people either.

Except healthcare
Clean air; clean water.
A living minimum wage,
Affordable higher education.
Social Security and Medicare.
Renewable energy.
Equal opportunities; equal voting rights.

 

[Arakhor]

But they believe that either they don't want those things or that it will only be other people who will lose them.

"I never thought leopards would eat MY face," sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party.

 

[Truthy]

No, it's not. The situation in those places is the result of a lot of political choices that can absolutely be reversed or changed.

I’ll cut to the chase: a ubiquitous motif of your writing and worldview is that almost every problem is the result of political choices and every problem can be solved with different political choices (namely, voting for socialist stuff). Without going into detail, it’s totally not how I see most problems or the world in general. To me, this outlook has its place, but it’s often an analytical trap.

In what sense is AI a political problem? Because DARPA? Because NSF grants? In what sense is politics going to solve AI-related problems? In what sense even can politics solve AI-related problems?

Honest question: why'd you give my post a like when you evidently agree with Paul Krugman?

I did like it but didn’t agree with a lot of it. Similarly, I liked Owen’s big post upthread (thought it was really good, in fact) but I either didn’t understand it fully or I disagreed with it.

Sounds like typical liberal solution involving Market Forces that is foredoomed to failure.

Yup, foredoomed _and_ bound to fail.
But yes:
Upstream: high-level industrial policy, investing in the future, investing in technology and ideas the market isn’t interested. This can target flyover country too.
Downstream: don’t screw too much with the labor market, it’s not going to work. Cities are ultra efficient labor markets. Make it easier for people to move to the cities, reduce barriers like rent control, invest in better public transport to make urban labor markets more efficient, etc.

Even Scandinavian paradises accept that labor markets are key.

mean, I agree with you, but Democrats have nothing to offer these people either. At least the GOP speaks to their reactionary cultural concerns. Democrats offer, at best, "move to the city if you don't like it"

All throughout human and American history people moved. We don’t live in a world where resources and labor markets will magically be awesome for everyone all the time. Problems suck and representative politics mandates we at least try to solve problems (doesn’t mean we will). But there’s a limit to this thinking and it’s intuitive if you don’t see everything as a political problems to solve with politics.

 

[Farm Boy]

So follows the motto of gilded ages: If the policies are wrong for the people, then the people need to change!

 

[Lexicus]

I’ll cut to the chase: a ubiquitous motif of your writing and worldview is that almost every problem is the result of political choices and every problem can be solved with different political choices (namely, voting for socialist stuff). Without going into detail, it’s totally not how I see most problems or the world in general. To me, this outlook has its place, but it’s often an analytical trap.

I know. It's because liberals don't really believe in human agency except in the most superficial and useless sense (e.g. "if you don't like where you're living, move!"). The foundational myth of liberalism is that human society is really no different from the animal kingdom and that it follows laws similar to those that govern the orbits of the planets. As such the scope of problems that can be solved by politics is small. In fact for liberals the ideal society is one where politics barely even exists because the market solves virtually all distributional questions. Depending on the degree of engagement with reality liberals will accept government policies are necessary to correct market failures.

All throughout human and American history people moved. We don’t live in a world where resources and labor markets will magically be awesome for everyone all the time. Problems suck and representative politics mandates we at least try to solve problems (doesn’t mean we will). But there’s a limit to this thinking and it’s intuitive if you don’t see everything as a political problems to solve with politics.

So, can you tell me what you know about US macroeconomic policy in the decades since World War II and how it has contributed to the labor market being awesome or not? Did you know, for example, that the US abandoned its nominal commitment to full employment and shifted the emphasis of macroeconomic policy to reducing inflation and that this had consequences? This was an explicit form of class warfare, designed to "discipline" working people with the threat of unemployment in order to reduce inflation. This kind of thing, and your evident ignorance of it, is why I push back so hard against your mechanistic worldview where humans contend in vain against the cosmic forces that produce unemployment and such.

 

[Truthy]

I know. It's because liberals don't really believe in human agency except in the most superficial and useless sense (e.g. "if you don't like where you're living, move!"). The foundational myth of liberalism is that human society is really no different from the animal kingdom and that it follows laws similar to those that govern the orbits of the planets. As such the scope of problems that can be solved by politics is small. In fact for liberals the ideal society is one where politics barely even exists because the market solves virtually all distributional questions. Depending on the degree of engagement with reality liberals will accept government policies are necessary to correct market failures.

No, it's because we believe in massively multifactorial models. We believe in a world where 7 billion people exist and make decisions that affect each other in ways beyond anyone's comprehension. We believe in emergence. We believe in spontaneous order. We believe in cultural evolution. We believe in technology. We believe in game theory. We believe in epistemology and cognitive compression. We believe in complexity.

You think you have some secret ingredient that makes you smarter than Paul Krugman and most other economists. Ah ha, you shout, it's just politics! Surely they never thought about that! Oh they know about that and they still disagree? Clearly, it's because they have bad politics.

You're just insisting on this one-variable model: everything's politics and if you disagree it's because of politics. How about some more variables?

So, can you tell me what you know about US macroeconomic policy in the decades since World War II and how it has contributed to the labor market being awesome or not? Did you know, for example, that the US abandoned its nominal commitment to full employment and shifted the emphasis of macroeconomic policy to reducing inflation and that this had consequences? This was an explicit form of class warfare, designed to "discipline" working people with the threat of unemployment in order to reduce inflation. This kind of thing, and your evident ignorance of it, is why I push back so hard against your mechanistic worldview where humans contend in vain against the cosmic forces that produce unemployment and such.

Yeah and you undermine the importance of this yourself: “nominal commitment.” And I'm not buying it was "explicit class warfare." Hardly anything ever is. There were reasons we wanted to limit inflation. There were millions of pros and cons. Economists argue about it ad nauseam to this day, but you prefer to ignore that because you diagnose them all as suffering from the disease of liberalism that obscures their comprehension of the one true way.

Regardless, and more importantly: I’m pretty darn sure we'd still be having massive globalization and automation problems if the oh-so-wise dialectically-aware government had permitted more inflation. Big complex outcomes are the result of gazillions of smaller variables and on, expectation, you get a small range of possible outcomes. Politics never knows all the smaller variables or even most of them.

 

[Socrates99]

Except healthcare
Clean air; clean water.
A living minimum wage,
Affordable higher education.
Social Security and Medicare.
Renewable energy.
Equal opportunities; equal voting rights.

Healthcare - I do my best to unwind the propaganda but considering how hard Democrats themselves fight against a UHS it's a seriously uphill battle. My father in law said sick people should just buy their own healthcare instead of raising rates for healthy people and I tried to explain how that's not how healthcare works and how itd be impossible and what happens if and when he gets cancer. Not totally sure my message got through. My wife is convinced the Cadillac Tax is why our health insurance has skyrocketed but when I told her it wasn't even in effect yet she didn't believe me. People don't educate themselves. Its painful to see.
Min wage - conservatives, especially rural conservatives are convinced an increased wage would only increase prices. They say this even when I point out that the big Trump tax cut was expressly given to allow for higher wages, at least that's how it was sold to the plebes. Again, my wife believes that if min wage hit 15 bucks the hospital she works at would never be able to find aides. I told her it should come out of the hospital CEOs 5million a year salary. Were in Michigan, 5 million is a boatload of money in most places but living expenses here are 17% below the national average.
Affordable higher education - again, not something many Democrats push hard enough for. With such weak sauce support it's hard to convince people it's good.
Social Security/Medicare - Biden has admitted hes open to cuts. Trump promised not to touch it. Good luck there.
Renewables - idiots believe what idiots believe. They think fossil fuels create jobs and are for "all of the above" even though truthfully renewables provide plenty of high paying jobs. Sad but true. Again Obama's "all of the above" approach undermined any superiority Democrats have here.
Equality - Republicans have been very good at crafting laws around this in a way that gives them plausible deniability.

TLDR: Democrats do a pretty rotten job of getting the correct message out. Likely because they're often just as corrupt.

 

[Lexicus]

You're just insisting on this one-variable model: everything's politics and if you disagree it's because of politics. How about some more variables?

"Politics" isn't even a variable, in this context it's shorthand for centering human agency rather than trying to pretend human society and activity can be described even in principle by a mathematical equation.

Yeah and you undermine the importance of this yourself: “nominal commitment.” And I'm not buying it was "explicit class warfare." Hardly anything ever is. There were reasons we wanted to limit inflation. There were millions of pros and cons. Economists argue about it ad nauseam to this day, but you prefer to ignore that because you diagnose them all as suffering from the disease of liberalism that obscures their comprehension of the one true way.

I would guess that I am more familiar with the economists' debates over the issue than you are. It is on the basis of that familiarity that I am calling it explicit class warfare. And I included the word nominal because the US government's commitment to full employment was never as strong as I think it should have been, but that does not diminish the importance of the policy changes that occurred in the late 1970s. That is ultimately why the labor market is squeezing people so hard. It's not to say that we would enjoy utopian abundance, it's to say that we would be living closer to what is described in this quote by Warren Mosler:

I just want to say a quick word about what a good economy is because it’s been so long since we’ve had a good economy. You’ve got to be at least as old as I am to remember it. In a good economy business competes for people. There is a shortage of people to work for business. Everybody wants to hire you. They’ll train you, whatever it takes. They hire students before they get out of school. You can change jobs if you want to because other companies are always trying to hire you. That’s the way the economy is supposed to be but that’s all turned around.

Before you jump to any conclusions you should understand that Mosler is a billionaire investor with overall political views much closer to yours than to mine.

I’m pretty darn sure we'd still be having massive globalization and automation problems if the oh-so-wise dialectically-aware government had permitted more inflation.

Well, yes, this is a strawman. This kind of 'rebuttal' is also why I am guessing you are not so familiar with the economists' debates. Finally, just in passing, "globalization" refers to a related, but distinct, set of policies and choices which were also intended pretty explicitly to reduce worker power.

 

[rah]

Renewables - idiots believe what idiots believe. They think fossil fuels create jobs and are for "all of the above" even though truthfully renewables provide

Every time I drive through rural areas in the midwest now, I see a lot of wind farms.

 

[Farm Boy]

They're ugly and they stretch for mile upon mile. At least they seem useful. They could be worse. They could be Naperville.

 

[rah]

There have to be some jobs associated with them or at least some farmers are getting paid for the land usage.

 

[Farm Boy]

There's a contract for land usage, yes. They don't really seem to advertise. I think they're alright. They do seem to work on them every now and again. Not like super often. I don't know anyone who does, so I'd guess the maintenance range of crew is probably what, several states? Dunno.

 

[Socrates99]

Every time I drive through rural areas in the midwest now, I see a lot of wind farms.

They are, especially in Iowa if you've ever driven across that state. It still comes back to Obama's "all of the above" strategy. Sure he subsidized renewables but he also allowed expanded fracking and opened up the Arctic to drilling. Democrats don't really represent renewables and, save for a select few, haven't done a good job of debunking the myth that we can actually do just fine with a huge reduction of fossil fuels.

Still just comes back to that fact that Democrats aren't fighters. Its half the reason a shouty disheveled curmudgeon is doing as well as he is. Lefties are aching for a fighter.

 

[Traitorfish]

They're ugly and they stretch for mile upon mile.

I think this is the great aesthetic tragedy of wind farms: they only seem ugly to people who live in the countryside, but those are also the people who have to live with them.

 

[Lexicus]

I think this is the great aesthetic tragedy of wind farms: they only seem ugly to people who live in the countryside, but those are also the people who have to live with them.

The other tragedy is that I can't ride around and around on the blades in real life like I can in Just Cause 3.

 

[rah]

Aesthetically more pleasing than a nuclear or coal plant.

 

[Farm Boy]

Those are much smaller. It's sort of like living in a demented forest of children's toys. You figure it'd get better once the sun goes down and you can't see them, but then they all blink in unison like ranks of Cyclopses.

The best you can hope for is to try to tune them out, but if you're within a quarter mile or so of one, you realize they aren't quiet either.