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Comment by portaouflop | Hacker News Reader

So the people who are fed up with how things are currently going are according to your argument here either

- manipulated / brainwashed - entitled / spoiled - outliers (the few who have it bad are too loud). - the problems can’t be fixed anyway - don’t realise how much worse it was in the past ?

I disagree that the sentiment of the general population is not a useful indicator of how good things are going for the general population. I think it is the best indicator, but people in power (and I would count most on this forum among then) don’t want to see anything that threatens their status quo.

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Yes people are fed up. Nobody is arguing that people are happy and somebody is misrepresenting that.

What I'm trying to say is that there is an explanation for why this sentiment exists despite measures of material wealth and economic success being positive.

The fact that there is an explanation doesn't magically make people feel better.

I think it all boils down to the attitude one has towards seeking explaination.

One is a scientific approach where one aims at understanding the dynamics of a phenomenon in a way that is detached from it as much as possible.

The other approach is moral one where one seeks an explanation in order to convince oneself (and others) how one should feel about it. "You shouldn't complain, you have indoor plumbing your grandparents had to pump water from a well; shut up".

I'm not making the latter, moral, argument. I'm trying to make the scientific one

Normative approach versus a descriptive/empirical approach.

Thanks. In a first draft I used the words descriptive and prescriptive but then I decided to avoid possibly using the wrong terminology. Would "prescriptive" be a synonym for "normative" in this case or is there an important difference?

Yep, positive vs normative might be the words you are looking for.

> despite measures of material wealth and economic success being positive

Are they? GDP is a measure of national economic success not of personal economic success.

The latter is measured by metrics such as: value of a home relative to wages, value of rent relative to average wage, disposable income relative to the prices, food prices relative to wages.

These are the numbers you don't often hear about in the media, you only tend to hear about GDP and the time derivative of prices, neither of which have much relevance to ordinary people.

Most of those are measures of the housing market and not the economy though. We've chosen to make housing an artificially scarce good which is making fortunes for some people and making life hard for many more. But as far as I can tell, the have-nots are also in favor of keeping everything expensive low density SFH. They just want to be in the have group.

And we get into the root of the issue. I wouldn't be surprised if much of the Gen Z support for left wing positions doesn't just boil down to Gimmeism that they'd quickly abandon once they're part of the elite.

Another example is constant controversy over Elite College Admissions, ignoring the 99% of perfectly good but not as reputable State Colleges with high admissions rates.

"When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor"

> But as far as I can tell, the have-nots are also in favor of keeping everything expensive low density SFH.

I have no clue why you would think this. Basically ever poor person I know (and I know a lot of poor people) has simply given up on ever experiencing home ownership. None of them can afford to live by themselves. High density or low density, zoning laws, etc, don't even enter the picture because not one of those will actually bring housing into any kind of affordable range. It's just that politicians refuse to campaign on anything but "what type of housing supply should we hope developers build—low or high density" that there's any confusion here.

> I disagree that the sentiment of the general population is not a useful indicator of how good things are going for the general population

I think that there's a factual case that general sentiment is no longer a useful indicator of "how good things are going for the general population".

Sources:

https://www.newsweek.com/economy-strength-politics-yougov-da...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/09/is-e...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-21/consumer-...

Yes, people readily concerned with the defensiveness of their position are easily manipulated. The conviction towards or against a position is the subjective basis open to modification.

A battery of competing measures compared against historical trends are almost certainly the best gauge of how things are.

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