"Listen, Liberal!" by Thomas Frank. A must-read if you care about politics in America
5,959 karma · joined April 6, 2012
http://www.epi.org/blog/putting-9-minimum-wage-context/
"..if the minimum wage had kept pace with average wages—i.e., if minimum wage workers saw their paychecks expand at the same rate as the average worker—it would be about $10.50 today. If the minimum wage had kept pace with productivity[i]—i.e., the economy’s overall capacity to generate income— it would be almost $18.75 today. Finally, imagine if workers at the very bottom were seeing the same kind of raises as workers at the very top. If the minimum wage had gone up at the same rate as wages for the top 1 percent, it would be over $28 per hour."
The person in the story is using EPI's last number
persistence determination self-control / the ability to delay gratification abstention from substance use curiosity conscientiousness self-confidence (occasionally) emotional intelligence good communication skills and a willingness to listen grit
I’d personally add to the list ‘the willingness to always learn’ (i.e., be a dedicated autodidact for life.)
Based on what we’ve seen over the past ten years, especially with things like ‘the gig economy’ and our ‘free agent nation’, this hypothesis (perhaps model) holds up well. So what else is necessary? One or more of the following:
a strong personal safety net (savings and/or relatives and friends to fall back on) good credentials a strong personal / professional network
These last three are exactly the ones that are generally not available to those who need them most, even if they have all the qualities of the first list (you could also substitute ‘incredible luck’ for these three.) The idea that “men of enterprise are practically assured of success” is the kind of beautiful, romantic notion that periodically gets revived in America; the reality is different. We should remind ourselves that character alone may not be enough for success in today’s world for the even the most determined, confident, and gritty of people.
Regulatory capture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture
Cultural capture: https://baselinescenario.com/2016/04/22/cultural-capture-in-...
The revolving door between government and the private sector: http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/11/11/slowing-the-revolving...
https://medium.com/@spencer_th0mas/why-america-cares-about-e...
WORK REQUIREMENT Non-assistance CalFresh recipient over age 17 and under age 50 must satisfy the ABAWD work requirement as a condition of eligibility unless they meet specified exemption criteria or live in an area where the ABAWD work requirement is waived. ABAWDs cannot receive CalFresh (food stamps) for more than three months in a 36-month period unless they meet this requirement or are excused from it. The ABAWD work requirement is met by performing one of the following:
Working at least 20 hours per week in paid or volunteer employment; Participating at least 20 hours per week in an allowable work activity such as vocational training or basic education programs; or Participating in workfare (i.e., community service). The number of hours of participation in workfare is determined by dividing the CalFresh allotment by the higher of the state or federal minimum wage.
Max benefit: $174 a month(!)
Compare Germany:
If a worker is not eligible for the full unemployment benefits or after receiving the full unemployment benefit for the maximum of 12 months, he is able to apply for benefits from the so-called Arbeitslosengeld II (Hartz IV) programme, an open-ended welfare programme which, unlike the US system, ensures people do not fall into penury. A person receiving Hartz IV benefits is paid 404 EUR (2016) a month for living expenses plus the cost of adequate housing (including heating) and health care. Couples can receive benefits for each partner. Germany does not have an EBT (electronic benefits transfer) card system in place and, instead, disburses welfare in cash or via direct deposit onto the recipient's bank account.
As far as the sheen wearing off, I'm not sure I'd agree with that. In extant communities that have no rewards outside of their status hierarchy, people continue to participate, often with great gusto: gaming, stamp collecting, meme creation, drawing, etc. People do them for both intrinsic rewards, and for status rewards only within that hierarchy or in "nearby" hierarchies.
Even Trotsky thought "the powerful force of competition which, in bourgeois society, has the character of market competition, will not disappear in a socialist society, but, to use the language of psychoanalysis, will be sublimated, that is, will assume a higher and more fertile form" "individual competition will have the widest scope." In the cases where the sheen does wear off, people can always switch, as they do now, to other areas (get bored of WoW, start playing Dark Souls, or go to a completely different hierarchy [games -> painting].)
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/03/5-key-findin...
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1556-4029.12998/a...
Economic turmoil in general is linked to suicide:
There are enormous numbers of people who work very hard and get nowhere. The elements of the "Character Hypothesis" (persistence, determination, self-control / the ability to delay gratification, abstention from substance use, curiosity, conscientiousness, self-confidence, emotional intelligence, good communication skills, a willingness to listen, and grit) are all necessary to escape poverty, but not anywhere sufficient. Pure chance is a huge factor, but acknowledging that fact destroys the entire project in some minds.
There's a reason the Nordics have so much higher social mobility than the US does. They actually work at it:
"In addition to other correlations with negative social outcomes for societies having high inequality, they found a relationship between high social inequality and low social mobility. Of the eight countries studied — Canada, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Germany, the UK and the USA, the USA had both the highest economic inequality and lowest economic mobility. In this and other studies, in fact, the USA has very low mobility at the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, with mobility increasing slightly as one goes up the ladder. At the top rung of the ladder, however, mobility again decreases.[10]
One study comparing social mobility between developed countries[11][12][13] found that the four countries with the lowest "intergenerational income elasticity", i.e. the highest social mobility, were Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Canada with less than 20% of advantages of having a high income parent passed on to their children"
"In public life, our pillar institutions and the elites who run them play the mechanic’s role. They are charged with the task of diagnosing and fixing problems in governance, the market, and society. And what we want from authorities, whether they are mechanics, money managers, or senators, is that they be competent—smart, informed, able—and that they not use their authority to pursue a hidden agenda or personal gain. We now operate in a world in which we can assume neither competence nor good faith from the authorities, and the consequences of this simple, devastating realization is the defining feature of American life at the end of this low, dishonest decade. Elite failure and the distrust it has spawned is the most powerful and least understood aspect of current politics and society."
"..what we’ve seen time and time again is that the two aren’t so neatly separated. If you don’t concern yourself at all with equality of outcomes, you will, over time, produce a system with horrendous inequality of opportunity. This is the paradox of meritocracy: It can only truly come to flower in a society that starts out with a relatively high degree of equality. So if you want meritocracy, work for equality. Because it is only in a society which values equality of actual outcomes, one that promotes the commonweal and social solidarity, that equal opportunity and earned mobility can flourish."
- Chris Hayes, Twilight of the Elites
There's a good reason social mobility in places like Denmark is so high compared to the US; they do meritocracy better.
I’m just being really honest, it [an application] pretty much goes into a black hole. And I’m pretty open about that with the students I talk to. It’s tough. You need to know someone, you need to have a connection, you need to get someone to raise their hand and say, “Let’s bring this candidate in.” … Look, I have a specific day I need to go in and look at … the Brown candidates, you know, the Yale candidates. I don’t have a reason necessarily to go into what we call the “best of the rest” folder unless I’ve run out of everything else. … Unfortunately, it’s just not a great situation. There’s not an easy way to get into the firm if you’re not at a target school."
https://hbr.org/2015/10/firms-are-wasting-millions-recruitin...
https://hbr.org/2015/10/firms-are-wasting-millions-recruitin...
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21640316-children-ric...
http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21646985-americ...
You may also never be fully accepted culturally, since one of the major advantages of going is that you're the "right" sort of person (meaning that you have the correct socio-economic background and understand/speak corporate-derived "elite meritocratic culture") / you're able to build a high-quality network of well-connected peers who themselves are part of the socio-economic elite.
TLDR version: you may have to deal with lower salaries, less respect, lower quality organizations or departments, lots of free time catching up/keeping current, more questioning compared to degreed peers, and occasional culture shock. Not everyone deals with all/any of those, but chances are higher with no degree.
"DiscoverTracks" is a service to help with part of the process (it looks at your likes and plays you related tracks based on the likes of friends and friends of friends I believe.) Doesn't solve the entire issue, but it's handy: https://www.discovertracks.com/
"But a new paper by Jose Azar, Martin Schmalz and Isabel Tecu argues that trustbusters now need to look in a new direction: at concentrated ownership. If, for instance, a mutual fund owns shares in two rival companies in the same industry, it would not be in their best interest as shareholders to encourage them to act in a competitive way. The boss of Delta Airlines might propose a price war to boost his business. But would a mutual-fund manager who also owned shares in United Airlines be supportive? And would company managements be as keen to cut prices and fight for market share if they knew that their shareholders did not want them to?
Mssrs Azar, Schmalz and Tecu find evidence for exactly this in the airline industry. Including levels of common ownership in conventional measures drastically increases market concentration to more than ten times the level authorities say would be "likely to enhance market power"."
Bottom line: it looks like there should be competition, but maybe there isn't due to ownership structures.
- Follow good aggregator accounts. These repost new music regularly, which appears in one's timeline.
- Follow good regular accounts and play their "likes."
- Go to a song's "related tracks" screen and play those
I find excellent music on a regular basis this way.
Broad correction, though, seems unlikely to happen, whether attempts are done via the market or via legislation.
Fair, desirable, optimal? All debatable depending on one's perspective, but unstoppable. I think the only way we'll be able to get a handle on it is to manage its effects through policy (which has to happen eventually, given how many people will be affected, and how few will actually be able to be one of the "superstars"), rather than turning this train around.
The individual or even group decision-making (with regards to not just company goals, but to lifestyles and associations) means that things like that end up as a wash. Make it more concrete:
28 year old founder decides to pass on excellent 47 year old programmer. What does that do the founder's life or company? Let's speculate on some possibilities:
- It does nothing, because even though the older developer would have been better, their level of experience wasn't even necessary to do the job well.
- The business winds up marginally less profitable, but still succeeds.
- The business fails, somehow, because at the margin, missing out on hiring that older developer somehow started a chain of events that could have been prevented if said older developer were hired.
In all cases, the founder goes on to find another job, makes plenty of money, is able to surround themselves with the type of people they'd rather be around (people their own age) and never is even aware of any impact on anything. To that person, it was just "didn't hire someone, something happened or didn't, life went on well, and founder was still happy, ultimately."
What I'm saying is that the "disadvantage" and other related theories start sounding like a secular version of Karma; people use them as a way to tell themselves there will be justice (not that you're necessarily doing that, I have no idea), when in truth it's likely there will be none.
You can try to "prevent" the discrimination through your own actions, which is by no means easy (https://medium.com/@spencer_th0mas/dealing-with-ageism-in-te...), but as the article makes clear, even in egregious cases, it's hard to prove or do anything about. Look how long we've had these various kinds of incredibly well-intentioned anti-discrimination laws, and look at the success rates on the suits / how often they're brought. The results are terrible. It's just too hard to prove.
"You have a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) Degree from a top tier school."
I wonder how much longer positions with requirements like that go unfilled compared to more open-minded ones.
"Few economists have bothered to think about the issue of offshoring, preferring to dismiss concerns about it as manifestations of the old protectionist fallacy. They learned in graduate school that free trade is always mutually beneficial and ceased to think when they passed their exams. This is especially true of “free market economists” who believe that economic freedom, which they identify with the freedom of capital, is always good. Thus, most economists mistakenly believe that offshoring is protected under the authority of free trade doctrine.
However, free trade doctrine is based on the assumption that domestic capital seeks its comparative advantage in its home economy, specializing where its comparative advantage is best and, thereby, increasing the general welfare in the home economy. David Ricardo, who explicated the case for free trade, rules out an economy’s capital seeking absolute advantage abroad instead of comparative advantage at home.
...offshoring, or the pursuit of absolute advantage, breaks the connection between the profit motive and the general welfare. The beneficiaries of offshoring are the corporations’ shareholders and top executives and the foreign country, the GDP of which rises when its labor is substituted for the corporations’ home labor. Every time a corporation offshores its production, it converts domestic GDP into imports. The home economy loses GDP to the foreign country which gains it." - Paul Craig Roberts, former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal.
If employers prefer actual CS degrees, they should be pushing to make obtaining said degrees not require people to go into massive amounts of debt. The "gold rush" might be part of the issue here, but the cost of bootcamp certs vs degrees is not insignificant, as the article states.
http://www.demos.org/blog/3/16/16/nordic-innovation-argument...
Just a few example companies: Skype, Spotify, Mojang
Example technologies: Bluetooth, pacemaker, AIS (like GPS), first LTE system. More, just from Sweden: http://www.swedenabroad.com/ImageVaultFiles/id_19367/cf_347/...
As far as people coming to the US, there are totally understandable reasons. We have excellent universities, more people (which matters: bigger local market, larger talent pool, more companies to work for, etc.), and we also have legacy clustering effects (NYC for finance and ads, SV for chips and startups.) These advantages are obviously very significant. There's absolutely no reason we cannot combine those advantages, our highly entrepreneurial culture, and the best the Nordics have to offer to be even better; that's part of what the "Silicon Valley Democrat" idea is about, and influential people there support it (that's where the idea comes from, obviously.) Even YC is doing research into the GBI.
This implication here wasn't about that, though; it was about what we'll be forced to do if we don't want to simply leave the masses unemployed and eventually storming the metaphorical--or literal--gates. That will require some or all of the above list.