This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
As we all know, in America, absolutely no homes were built, no lawns were mowed, no children raised, no crops picked, no animals butchered, prior to the passing of the Hart-Cellar Act.
At one point, all of these jobs were done, and ones requiring a wage - as opposed to the family just doing it - paid living wages. The idea that it's mathematically impossible for chickens to be slaughtered at a living wage without immiserating the rest of the US flies in the face of all of recorded history.
Once again, I am begging the citizens of the Motte to stop with this "reasoning from first principals" nonsense; it doesn't work, it has never worked, and it is incredibly unlikely it can ever work.
This is true, but you are overlooking the fact that the average American in the past was very poor compared to Americans now. Yes, even poor people could buy houses and raise large families back then, but the standard of living was much lower. How many Americans would really be willing to pick fruit or lay roof for contemporary fruit-picker or roofing wages today if we just magically departed all the illegal immigrants? You might like to go back to the demographics of the 1950s, but you can't magically unroll immigration but not all the economic and technological changes since then as well.
Personally, I'd be willing to bite that bullet and say yes, let's deport illegals, pay Americans living wages, and eat the price increases in the grocery store and service industries. But I think a lot of people would regret asking for this, because I think those prices will get jacked to the sky compared to now.
(Tagging at @BahRamYou and @Tractatus because this is all kind of flowing together)
No one should be a chicken processor for their entire career. Or a waiter / waitress at a diner or fast casual restaurant (service staff at high end restaurants is another matter). Or the proverbial burger flipper.
These jobs should be more or less easy-in-easy-out temporary employment for people who need cash to pay their bills. If you read some of the mid century "road" novels, you'll see how a pretty common modus operandi was for the protagonist to roll into town on his last dollar, pick up a few days work doing janitorial work at a auto garage or something, and then go on his merry (usually drunk) way of philosophizing. I've written about this before. It's not so much that people in the 50s/60s were raising full families on these unappealing jobs, it's that these unappealing jobs were the equivalent of day rate motel stays.
So, problem number one is that employment law and regulation has become so burdensome that we literally have millions of jobs that are not worth having - for either the employer or employee. These are the jobs that immigrants (many illegal, all of them willing) actually end up taking. I think I actually saw the very beginning of this as I was finishing high school. One summer, I got a job at a book store - I filled out a single page application and was working the next day. I got a check at the end of the week. The next summer, I got a job at a decent restaurant. The first FULL DAY, I had to fill out pages and pages of digital corporation nonsense on the computer, then watch a bunch of compliance videos (mostly about not falling down in the kitchen or being on drugs), and then had to sign even more physical paperwork relating to me 'trainee' status. This is all so that this restaurant (owned by a corporate chain) doesn't get sued to death by various regulators for not ... self-regulating.
To put it in economist terms, the friction for labor is so much higher than it was decades ago, that it isn't worth going through that friction for some of the lower paying jobs.
For immigrants, however, employers might just skip the paper work and pay in cash. Or, if they employee is visa connected, the company knows they won't just rage quit one day and face deportation. I can't support this at present, but I also feel like the visa-employment situation has a cottage industry of consultants who help the employers manage all of the paperwork (for a fee).
But the fact remains that shitty jobs have always been shitty but, before, you could hop in and out of them, collect some cash, and be on your merry way.
The second issue is that market interference has made the cost of certain things untenable. The major one, of course, is housing. There simply isn't enough (because of burdensome construction regulations and the perverse incentives of home equity appreciation). Wages can't keep up. Wages, however, have kept up with some things that we now consider close to necessary - computers and phones. A decent laptop can now be had for less than $500. Same for a phone. Monthly cellular service is between $20 - $100 depending. nearly gig level internet at home is $100- $200 a month. Very few Americans who want a phone do not have one. Very few Americans who want broadband (and don't live intentionally in the middle of nowhere) do not have it.
All of this is to say I see "the immigration question" in it's economic context as really an outgrowth of a much bigger issue - over regulation and bureaucratization. I shouldn't care too much about low skill immigrants because, if I am competing with them, we're all essentially "taking turns" in that job pool. As we go up the skill ladder, I'm competing with fewer people and then things like community and connections (networks) become more important (which I, as a native, ought to have an advantage in). Instead, because jobs are such high friction now, I am at the bottom of the skill ladder competing with people who exist with the ability to better slide through the legal maze of employment because they are either (a) breaking the law or (b) part of a international labor movement system that penalizes me, ironically, for having been born in the right place.
I think you're the first person I've seen in the wild who seems to agree with me thay not all jobs need to pay a "living wage", and that that's okay! That some jobs should be just for the high school kid after school or during the summer, or someone who isnt trying to support a family on it ling term. I don't know how you deal with people getting stuck in a rut and eventually not being ready for retirement, though... I'm sure many will say that it isn't their problem to make sure others don't make poor life choices, but that doesn't help convince the general population when the news is publishing sob stories.
I'd be willing to bet that the number of people who:
Rounds to zero.
Let's say you get the "burger flipping" job because you're not really doing anything else. You're living at home (or with a bunch of other underemployed roommates). Sure, maybe you get some cheap beer every weekend - fine, whatever. If you retain that job for two years, you're going to be promoted to some sort of assistant manager position by inertia and availability alone. The cycle repeats.
Or, you get the burger flipping job, decide that, yes, it does suck, and figure out a new job a little further up on the skill/wage level. You like this and do it again. The cycle repeats.
My more controversial take is that this should be the path for pretty much everyone.
College has become a pay-to-play social proof mechanism for bullshit jobs that mostly fuels middle class over-capture of resources - especially housing. There are some hacks around this (military service, community college pathways) but it, most of the time, boils down to a family being able to pay between $100,000 - $500,000 to jumpstart their kid into the professional class. Oh, by the way, for something like 50% of graduates, this has not worked and has been a fraud for 20+ years. Please ignore that.
At the bookstore job I alluded to in my original post, I got unofficially promoted to assistant manager by my second month mostly because I would follow the store close down procedures correctly each night. This was as a 17 year old. Several of the other 20-somethings working there would routinely forget to lock doors, secure the cash box, or do basic cleaning and organizing. It doesn't take much to be an above average performer and, with just a dash of talent, you can accelerate quickly. I've seen too many graduates of "prestigious" universities who can't metaphorically close down the bookstore making $100,000+ per year because they have the fancy sheepskin on their wall.
Reading reddit subs like /r/personalfinance and /r/povertyfinance, I am not so sure. There are a lot of threads along the lines of "My mother worked her entire life at low-wage jobs and has nothing saved up, what should I do?" A lot of people really do just fall into a rut, have zero ambition, and do not think about the future. Either they assume their kids will take care of them or they assume there is some sort of government assistance.
We here on the Motte are almost all well above average in intelligence, conscientiousness, and time preference. Those 20-somethings you mentioned who couldn't even cut it as assistant manager of a bookstore are more numerous than you think, and a lot of them will never really change.
Should we as a society say to these penniless retirees (even the ones who did have substance abuse or crime issues) "Tough shit, your bad choices, die on the street"? While there is a certain karmic justice in that, I also think that's a path to looking more like India.
This made me think of something else.
The Success Sequence
It states:
If you do this, there's only a 3% you're at or below the poverty line by your late 20s to early 30s. This even holds for a variety of often awkwardly tricky subgroups:
To me this says there's more to the equation than just jobs and job friction - it's a basket of pro-social and delayed gratification goods.
So, to return to your anec-data about "my mom worked odd jobs all her life and she can't retire" .... I'd have to ask that reddit poster if their mom had kids before marriage (perhaps before adulthood)? Did she graduate high school? Has she always worked these menial jobs full time or sort of cycled in and out? Because, depending on those answers, I become a little more openly hard-hearted. Repeatedly fucking up what should be obvious decisions because of a lack of self-control doesn't make me feel for you.
If you go to page 3 of the report, you see a pretty stark data visualization. I've attempted to summarize it here:
These numbers drop drastically as each step is completed, starting with finishing High School.
Much like crime being concentrated in a handful of super-repeat offenders, it would seem that non-violent but "I don't have my shit together at all" people are hyper concentrated as well. Maybe a lot of them party on reddit, that wouldn't surprise me.
I know there are some other folks on here who like to dabble in the genocidal, but I do not. I don't want to round up the "poor 'n stupids" to walk them off a cliff. I don't want to sterilize them. I don't want to have them knife fight on Netflix (Hobo Wars 6!). But allowing them to exist in a kind of poverty limbo that also slowly bankrupts the nation seems like a literal negative sum game; everyone who plays leaves worse off.
I mean, I don't disagree that anyone in that situation in their 50s or 60s has probably made a long series of bad life choices. I don't think many people exhibiting even a modicum of common sense and responsibility wind up old and penniless through sheer catastrophic misfortune.
And yes, the people who fuck up like this are probably concentrated in certain demographic groups.
All the being said - what do? Like I said, being hard-hearted may feel righteous, but then you have a population of elderly poor people eating cat food, so to speak. I'm okay offering a very sparse social safety net for those who done fucked up their lives, but I'm not okay offering nothing (or something like poorhouses). Not just out of soft-heartedness, but because I think there is a genuine case to be made that some people are just born... well, not able to do better. And some people who could have done better have the misfortune of being raised by people who sucked as parents and didn't teach them any better. And some people really do hit a run of bad luck (a woman who decides to be a SAHM in good faith and then her husband ends up gambling away all their money and does a runner really can leave a single mother in terrible straits, through no fault of her own but not being able to see the future). I don't think you can really say that every one of those people "deserve" to suffer. Maybe a lot of them do, but we also can't realistically separate out the "deserving" poor from the undeserving.
Is there a solution that doesn't leave poor people on the streets and also doesn't bankrupt us? I'm sure there is; can our politicians construct such a workable solution? Eh...
Well, yes. But it would probably cause some serious issues with the market and bubbles.
If the government takes $50,000 for every birth within the USA each year, and puts it into a broad market fund returning 6% a year (this is conservative), at age 70, that's worth $2,953,796.51.
Everyone who makes it to 70 automatically gets $3 million. At 4% per year (considered the "safe" withdrawal rate) this is $120k per year. Current max social security per year is $45,864.
There are 3.7 million live births per year in the US. Times $50,000, that's $185 billion. Per year.
Current social security disbursements, annually, are about $1.4 trillion.
So, there, I've solved social security, right?
Maybe, but maybe (probably) not.
People, and the politically ambitious among them, will inevitably see this $3 mil as "theirs" - They will want to withdraw it early, or be able to take loans out against it etc. If we allow people to include this payout in their wills, you'll have all sorts of fun family fights about who gets to go to the lawyer with Mom. If all of this is allowed to happen, we're right back in the same situation as at present and, for an added bonus, we get a massive doom credit bubble to wait on to explode.
This involves putting tax dollars directly into the market. Lot's of people have problems with this on principled grounds (which are valid). The pure financial economics of it are also worrisome - every year, the market can count on $185 bn of super patient capital arriving. That will fuel risky bets left and right.
The one upside I can think of is that people who choose to live frugally can do so with a very real sense of 'reward' coming to them. Entrepreneurial types will maybe decide to take the risk and start-the-thing in their lives. Most will fail, but many more people taking risks like that could actually propel the general advancement of society forward.
You can math out some solutions, sure, but @Amadan's point remains - what do when the bottom 10 - 20% find a new and inventive way to short circuit the system? "DIE IN THE STREETS" is an attractive edgelord position, but even median pop culture level moral thinking detests that.
The answer is we'll muddle through. I see a comeback of multigenerational households. I see a return of old school style "poor houses" and weird alt-poverty encampments (think Slab City, not Portland Tent Camp).
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link