Hacker News Reader

Comment by jelly | Hacker News Reader

Those are certainly causal explanations for the data, but once those phenomena are here they impact people's expectations. Change in expectations is clearly what the author is focusing on. For example, the emergence of the rust belt leaves a lot of unemployed men - the impacted parts of society won't continue to expect the same work ethic and commitment from their men 40-50 years later.

View on HN

As in, "In the past young men could look to the example of their fathers, who had well-paid automotive manufacturing / steel mill / electronics assembly jobs that allowed them to care for their families and even put a downpayment on a small home, but now they have no such examples and no such expectations of moving into that kind of position at adulthood."

Okay, that's an expectation issue. Why is the author ignoring the change in conditions that led to that change in expectations?

From what I've seen, there's an entire industry of conservative economists Like Arthur Laffer and Larry Kudlow (to name a mere two, there are entire billionaire funded thinktanks like AEI dedicated to this) to deny the reality of the issues you mention, not unlike scientists paid to deny Climate Change or Tobacco's cancer links. And because of this, conservatives don't even believe that such issues exist.

whats the solution? people in poor countries will work 60-70 hrs a week for a fraction of the pay

There’s also a couple of billion people in Asia who think the exact same way as the author about families and culture. I’ve never read Laffer or Kudlow. I’m interpreting society through the values of my Bangladeshi parents. And they lead me to the same conclusion.

And given the remarkably higher income mobility of Asian kids raised in the bottom income compared to white kids, I think social liberals are sticking their heads in the sand by trying to hand wave away these social trends and blaming conservative think tanks.

Be careful when trying to draw conclusions about cultural values of different ethnicities within western countries with high percentages of recent immigrants. Immigrants in general outperform natives in income mobility, and this tapers off in later generations. Additionally it's difficult to ignore the massive selective bias within immigrant populations. Immigrating is very difficult and that's positively reflected in basically every way you could measure the character of those populations.

In America immigration isn’t difficult at all—we don’t have skill based immigration. The Asian kids being raised in the bottom 20% of the income distribution are mostly here based on chain migration.

I don't see how this relates to the question the parent comment was asking. But yes, the US does have a history with resentment of Asian immigrants, one of the first laws regarding immigration was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and you may be able to surmise from the title what that law did. I think you'll find that conservatives make very capricious allies once they believe you are "stealing their jobs".

The point is that “conservative economists” didn’t invent these ideas to annoy democrats. Asian people tell their kids the same thing. My dad is a blue dog democrat. But he’s not going to ignore his own cultural values just to avoid agreeing with conservatives on something. That would be absurd.

> But yes, the US does have a history with resentment of Asian immigrants, one of the first laws regarding immigration was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and you may be able to surmise from the title what that law did. I think you'll find that conservatives make very capricious allies once they believe you are "stealing their jobs".

Who cares about any of that? At the end of the day, Reagan’s America and Newt Gingrich’s America has been extremely good to Asians.

What ideas are we talking about again? The idea that growth in productivity de-coupled from real wage growth in the 1970's?

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

So Asians teach their children that this is not a real effect? And are Chinese Asians? Because I've heard about this whole "lay flat" movement in response to 996 culture that seems awfully familiar. And Japan seems to have a similar movement with the Hikikomori that in fact predates the American version.

We’re talking about the fact that people in Asia who are a lot poorer than lower middle class Americans manage to have much better social indicators of family stability and crime. And when those people come to America, even the poor kids have much better income mobility than their white American counterparts. So blaming social dysfunction on wages not keeping up with productivity growth is a bunch of baloney.

Ok, then what changed in the last few decades?

Globalisation, the rest of the world slowly catching up to the United Stattes, which slowly stops being the singular land of milk and honey it was in the 1940-1970 era?

Up until 1970, Europe was still catching up after the destruction of the war and the rest of the world was either completely mired in communism's stupidity or undeveloped rural societies. Fast forward 50 years and the communism is almost gone and a lot of those rural societies (i.e. South Korea, China etc.) are now leaders in high tech that successfully compete with the US.

And that changed American working class culture such that the men no longer want to work?

The social indicators started going sideways in the 1960s. Lots of cultural change since then. Much less focus on religion, tradition, and obligation, and much greater focus on individualism, self expression, self determination and “finding yourself,” and sexual fulfillment.

> "Why is the author ignoring the change in conditions that led to that change in expectations?"

Because recreating the economic conditions of the '50s-'90s would require repeating the global devastation of industry and commerce of World War 2 but with the US (again) untouched along with reduction of emerging economies back to the backward state they were in then. Anytime one sees people asking why America can't just bring back to that golden (for the US) era, this should be pointed out in no uncertain terms. There is no way to put the genie back in the bottle.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com