anemoiac

I’m personally sympathetic to your concerns, but to play devil’s advocate: Who’s to say that typical high-paying “real jobs” are a net good for society, (even) assuming that their occupants donate half of their earnings to worthy causes?

I’d imagine that plenty of “talented and capable” people working in (what might be considered) “low impact non profit jobs at low pay” are aware of effective altruism, or similar movements that seem to reflect your perspective, but would consider working in high finance/Big Tech/management consulting/etc counterproductive to their ultimate goals.

Not particularly, especially for the Hacker News set - Pittsburgh has one of the lowest cost of living to earnings ratios in the US for tech workers. Detroit doesn’t have as big of a tech scene, but the cost of living is lower than the national average.

> In every instance I've seen, redistribution does limit mobility

> You keep harping on the US, but it is one of - if not the most - upwardly mobile societies in history.

The data doesn't support your conclusions. The US has lower social mobility than many of its (more redistributive) peers in the developed world. [1]

1 - https://www.weforum.org/reports/global-social-mobility-index...

Hierarchy is not an all-or-nothing phenomenon. We can reduce levels of inequality without producing the negative outcomes you fear.

I’m not sure whether this applies to you (I’m not implying that it does), but I continually find it interesting to hear Americans expressing the fear that acting to reduce inequality will somehow limit social mobility, as if they don’t realize that much of the developed world has greater social mobility than their country (or that many countries also rate higher in measures of social welfare, despite having greater social mobility and lower inequality).

Why not? In the US, there isn’t a formal professional engineer (P.E.) certification for software engineers (unlike most other branches of engineering). If you’re performing the same job as someone who has a software engineering or comp sci degree and your job title happens to be “software engineer,” why would it matter if you have an unrelated degree, no degree, or even no high school diploma?

*This may not be true outside of the US

Is there any reason to not read this as “we can’t have a more equitable society unless the market happens to create one?”

On a related note, why does it seem as if some countries (all of Western Europe, for example) have managed to create more equitable societies using government policies?

I don’t think people generally call him a fascist when/if he defends freedom. I’m not sure how familiar you are with them, but his political positions don’t exactly portray him as an advocate for freedom.

What does this have to do with economic education (the article is from the Foundation for Economic Education)?

* More like, may have contributed to a reduction in violence since the 11th-century.

While it’s possible that some form of genetic pacification might work to reduce deviant behavior over centuries to come, the concept lacks relevance in a discussion about criminality in a nation where violent crime has fallen for decades and high rates of incarceration are more readily explained by a host of factors far less abstract than genetics.

Is this (a poor attempt at) satire?

So, to be clear, it’s horizontal totalitarianism when members of a society cast judgment on those who view homosexuals as illegitimate, for example, but not when society itself marginalizes homosexuals because they are generally viewed as illegitimate? I’m not sure the author would agree with this characterization, but it seems entirely compatible with the logic they presented here.

Shouldn’t this be an obvious option? When did desktops become a non-thing?

I know it’s not a practical choice for everyone, but I’ve always maintained both a desktop and a laptop. The desktop tends to be both significantly cheaper and more powerful, and it typically also survives a couple laptop upgrades before being replaced.

Hmm, so you’re suggesting that a variety of heterogeneous movements together protesting an authoritarian justice system that continually refuses to stop dehumanizing its subjects can be equated to a bizarre conspiracy group built on the premise that an elderly businessman-cum-president, known primarily for his sleazy business practices and reality TV personality, is single-handedly protecting the world from a secret cabal of satanist pedophiles?

> Because if the majority of people spend some time in the top quintile (54% spend at least 3 years in the top 20%), it means that the majority of people experience the same (or similar) set of opportunities available to the top quintile income earners.

This is an assumption that you're making, not a logical conclusion which naturally flows from the data. All we know is that 54% of people have been in households with annual income landing in the top quintile three times. The article says nothing about opportunity - would you consider a household where two adults each work two full-time jobs, all four jobs paying $30,000, to have similar levels of "opportunity" to a new CS grad making the same $120,000 total working at FANG?

With regard to social mobility, I found the article's most compelling data to be that representing the percentage of individuals who spent 10 or more years in one of the provided income categories, as that seems more conducive to measuring sustained improvement in economic outcomes. Those numbers are as follows: Top 20%: 31.4%, Top 10%: 14.2%, Top 5%: 6.6%, & Top 1%: 1.1%. These seem to illustrate a far stabler income distribution than that suggested by the 1-5 year figures. I'd be interested in seeing comparable figures for 15 and 20 years, as well, but they aren't readily available.

>Rather, the implication is that personal responsibility might play a greater role in outcomes than some of us are willing to accept.

In all candor, while I could certainly be misreading you, it sounds to me as if you're so "willing to accept [personal responsibility playing] a greater role in outcomes" that you're practically evangelizing for the notion.

This is tangential to the discussion at hand, but, if you feel that the role of personal responsibility is under-emphasized in the United States, my assumption would be that you must spend a lot of time in relatively homogeneous, counternormative circles. American culture has long been characterized by what many other cultures might consider a glaring over-reliance on the ideal of personal responsibility as a means of attaining prosperity (perhaps that cultural inclination is unsurprising, given the unprecedented growth historically experienced by Americans). Personal responsibility is a bipartisan value for most Americans, though what it actually means often remains elusive in practice.

> it suggests the uncomfortable reality that there is a higher degree of personal responsibility involved than we may be letting on.

How did you reach this conclusion? I don't see any link between data demonstrating that most people spend at least one year in relative affluence and even the general concept of "personal responsibility," let alone some sort of specific causal relationship between the two.

I’m not sure whether this oft-cited research demonstrates much regarding upward mobility, per se, but it does provide some compelling insight into the volatility of income throughout one’s life. Typically, when speaking of upward mobility, some degree of stability is assumed to follow an upward income movement, but this study doesn’t preclude the possibility of someone going from, say, the 20th income percentile to the 80th for a year, then subsequently falling back to the 20th income percentile for the remainder of their life. That’s not a fault of the study, to be sure, but it does limit the scope of its application with regard to the topic of upward mobility.

While I doubt that you have a reliable source for your assumption that poor people don’t seek out deals or limit unnecessary purchases, I’ll note that being poor literally reduces your capacity to make good decisions - https://www.reuters.com/article/us-poverty-brain/study-finds....

Lived experience is certainly anecdotal, and I agree that anecdotes don’t simply transform into data when aggregated. That’s not the point I was trying to make.

You ask, “Does the mere existence of people whose lived experience contradicts that of the aggregate majority suggest that we ought to upend our systems?” First of all, I’ve said nothing regarding “upending our systems.” More importantly — just as anecdotes != data, neither can data replace the role of lived experience. If many people feel like they’re struggling today, that doesn’t contradict data saying that they should be making more money in less time - to me, it suggests that there may be more to the “equation” of positive lived experience than income.

In other words, while I don’t think that it’s feasible to precisely compare the “difficulty” of living across different eras, it’s certainly possible that people can be making more money than ever before and also struggling en masse. The whole of life can’t be explained by simple economic data. Scratch that - the whole of economic life can’t even by explained by economic data... I expanded on this concept in a reply to another comment of yours, but you may not have seen it.

The comment you responded to above poses a valid question - what should we do if empirical data seems to contradict our own lived experience?

"The data" is not homogeneous or infallible, nor can it fully describe all phenomena it's applied to. At best, data can provide us with a rough approximation of the landscape it attempts to describe. In this particular case, I think that landscape is smaller than the territory established by the OP's linked blog post (which seems to transcend the easily-measurable world of simple economic indicators).

Would you consider it prudent to dismiss one's lived experience offhand, at the mere site of a few quickly-pasted links to tweets containing simple, decontextualized data points? What, then, if another commenter subsequently provides contradictory data? Scrolling through a typical HN thread would turn into a nauseating ride on some sort of intellectual see-saw.

If the commenter you responded to is "not convinced" by some tweeted factoids claiming that Americans are working less and making more than ever, does that imply that they're ideologically motivated?

I don't think so, no more than I think your reply to them implies that your own motivation is ideological. Without additional context, those "facts" don't significantly imperil any specific worldview.

I agree that it's important to compare anecdotes to available data, but we should be careful not to assume that the available data is itself "the forest." In other words, the map is not the territory.

While it's certainly possible that the sort of anecdotes commonly found in threads like this (regarding the challenges facing today's youth) are unfounded, I think it's more likely that they reflect qualitative changes not represented by the data (or, alternatively, changes which simply aren't represented by the particular data typically used in conjunction with analysis of these topics).

Data showing that the median person earns more working fewer hours today than their parents did at the same age, for example, can't reflect (hypothetical, let's say) circumstances such as:

* An increasingly competitive job market: Unemployment figures don't account for increasing education and experience requirements job-seekers face, nor do hours worked reflect time spent on career preparation in an era where high school students study for the SATs, college students are taught that "networking" is an essential skill, and college grads are more likely to have had multiple internships than their parents are to have had one between them.

* Increasing career instability: Not only are single-employer careers long gone, but, for many, so are single-career lifetimes. Additionally, the increasingly bimodal distribution of incomes means that, while the median income may have increased, the consequences of falling out of a "good" career track can seem greater than they used to be. [1] For reference, 44% of Americans work in 'low-wage jobs' with a median income of ~ $18,000. [2]

* Increases in the cost of living that counteract income gains: Rent, housing prices, (more-important-than-ever) higher education, healthcare & childcare have all increased significantly over recent decades, which likely makes it difficult for many to feel as wealthy as one would suspect.

Considering circumstances like these helps me understand how many may feel much worse than real median income might suggest and makes it seem less strange that young people appear to be poorer than their parents were at the same age - living with their parents longer into adulthood, buying fewer homes, getting married later, having fewer children, etc...

I would also speculate that, in terms of perception alone, the rise of social media and increasing economic inequality (with specific regard to the research suggesting that individual well-being is more closely linked to low inequality than absolute levels of economic welfare) could negatively impact the average American's perception of their quality of life.

1 - https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2020/01/09/trends-in-income-...

2. - https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2019/11/21/low-wag...

Smoke weed in Kansas - boom, criminal record. Walk across the Colorado border and smoke weed - no problem, it's completely legal. It's also completely legal to spend your free time carting your AR-15 and Nazi flag down to the village square and recruiting supporters for your "Turn America into a white ethnostate" movement. The point I'm making is that not all criminal behavior is even widely considered objectionable and plenty of legal behavior is.

Thus, why would you consider having a criminal record to be "a [big] blemish" that justifies employment discrimination, yet no personal views extreme enough to allow an employer to disassociate from their employee?

When you consider that the ratio of those affected by criminal record-based employment discrimination to those impacted by twitter-based discrimination is on the order of millions to one, it seems strange to be more concerned about the latter than the former.

> *You don't have to be "older and wiser" to know that you aren't supposed to murder people.

I mean, I'm not sure how relevant "knowing" anything is, but age is an incredibly strong predictor of criminality. Gender is another one. The majority of crime, and the overwhelming majority violent crime, is committed by young men. One factor that likely contributes to this reliable statistical phenomenon is that the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for decision-making, self-control, emotional self-regulation, and other aspects of executive function, doesn't fully develop until around 25 years of age. For one example of how executive function relates to criminal behavior, look into the connection between ADHD (a disorder linked to deficiencies in the prefrontal cortex) and crime.

I agree that most people haven't killed anyone, but I also don't think that there's any reason for any of us to assume that 'we' would have behaved any differently when placed in the circumstances of those who have.

You’re right, but the odds of that happening are likely very low for the typical entheogenic plant enthusiast in Ann Arbor.

From the article:

ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) — The city of Ann Arbor has decriminalized psychedelic plants and fungi, including magic mushrooms, and police officers will no longer make them an enforcement focus.

City Council voted unanimously Sept. 21 in favor of a resolution declaring it the city’s lowest law enforcement priority, MLive.com reported. It means that authorities won't investigate and arrest anyone for planting, cultivating, buying, transporting, distributing, engaging in practices with or possessing “entheogenic plants” or plant compounds.

The resolution defines entheogenic plants as plants and fungi that contain indole amines, tryptamines and phenethylamines “that can benefit psychological and physical wellness, support and enhance religious and spiritual practices, and can reestablish human’s inalienable and direct relationship to nature.”

The move applies to ayahuasca, ibogaine, mescaline, peyote, psilocybin mushrooms and other substances with hallucinogenic properties considered illegal under state and federal law.

Additionally, the city council called upon the Washtenaw County prosecutor’s office to halt prosecution of people involved in the use of such plants and plant compounds.

I'm not sure if this was your implication (I may be reading too far into your relatively succinct comment), but I don't think most "criminals" do crimes because they explicitly want to break the law. I would imagine that there are about as many potential reasons for doing things that happen to be against the law as there are for doing things that don't happen to be against the law.

I'm not even all that sure what qualifies someone to be considered a "criminal." Is it simply breaking the law, which virtually everyone has done at some point? Is it getting caught committing a criminal act? Getting caught committing a felony-level offense? Is someone who smokes cannabis in Kansas (illegal) a criminal, but not someone who smokes cannabis across the state border with Colorado (legal)? What if the smoker from Kansas crosses the border into Colorado - are they no longer a criminal? What if the smoker from Colorado smoked cannabis before it became legal to so - did they stop being a criminal when cannabis was legalized? What if the smoker from Colorado walks across the border into Kansas - are they a criminal for having smoked cannabis in Colorado, given that doing so is illegal in Kansas? This list could continue, but it's probably already bordering on pedantic... Point being, if breaking the law is all it takes to be considered a criminal, aren't we all criminals?

...currently crumbling?

The Democrats didn’t block Bork for writing an article.

Democratic “threats” made in 2019, post-Merrick Garland, have zero bearing on their hypothetical behavior in 2016, pre-Merrick Garland and the shattering of norms that his (non)hearings represented.

I’m not a Democrat, but, from the outside looking in, it doesn’t seem like they have a real problem with right-leaning politicians or judges. I can understand why they might not view those who seem to be pursuing a return to the pre-Civil Rights era as wholly legitimate, but they’ve adopted plenty of relatively conservative positions over the years (just look at the record of their current presidential candidate!). The American Left has only recently begun to show its face again, for example, after decades of absence, and the Democratic Party has long seemed to harbor more resentment toward that group than moderate conservatives.

I’m also not a demographer, but I don’t think many would consider a potential 6-3 conservative majority on the SC to be at all representative of the US population. To me, that seems like the real legitimacy crisis here, not whether Democrats think of conservatives as legitimate political actors (spoiler alert: I think it’s safe to say they view conservatives about as favorably as conservatives view them).

I was responding to the request, "Please tell me the last time a democrat-controlled senate confirmed a Supreme Court justice for a republican president in an election year."

If you're trying to be thorough, though, you should probably mention that Reagan's first selection for that seat was controversial because of his involvement in the the post-Watergate "Saturday Night Massacre," as well as the general suspicion that he would try to reverse Roe v. Wade and other civil rights-related rulings of preceding decades. Reagan's second selection withdrew his name from consideration before even being nominated, so I'm not sure why he's even relevant here.

I get that you're trying to make a political point, but there's simply no evidence that Democrats would have behaved like McConnell's GOP (perhaps more aptly described as the post-Gingrich GOP) did in 2016.

Sure, the Democratic-led Senate confirmed Reagan's appointment of Anthony Kennedy in 1988.

The source you're referring to explicitly discusses benefits. It even includes a chart that depicts the relationship between "wages and salaries" and "total benefits" over the past twenty years.

While I think it's important to distinguish between wages and total earnings, it's also important to differentiate between earnings and purchasing power. The fact that benefits have increased over time won't mean much to the average American if that increase simply reflects a corresponding increase in the cost of healthcare, for example.

In my view, the important question to ask isn't whether median earnings have been completely stagnant over recent decades (i.e. 0.00% growth in real terms), but whether increasing inequality represents some sort of structural change. Thinking in those terms, the range of varying estimates regarding the change in median earnings over recent decades seems relatively small and insignificant when compared to the larger economic picture.

It seems to me that (non-black) Americans commonly overestimate the amount of time that’s passed since the end of slavery - there are still living children of slaves! [1]

1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/07/27/slave-son-...