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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   30843 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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Is the economy good?

This takes the cake for the biggest load of nonsense I have ever read. It blusters a lot with only a few actual points made in defence of the notion that government economic statistics failed to capture true economic conditions post-Covid, all of which are very silly indeed.

My colleagues and I have modeled an alternative indicator, one that excludes many of the items that only the well-off tend to purchase — and tend to have more stable prices over time — and focuses on the measurements of prices charged for basic necessities, the goods and services that lower- and middle-income families typically can’t avoid. Here again, the results reveal how the challenges facing those with more modest incomes are obscured by the numbers. Our alternative indicator reveals that, since 2001, the cost of living for Americans with modest incomes has risen 35 percent faster than the CPI. Put another way: The resources required simply to maintain the same working-class lifestyle over the last two decades have risen much more dramatically than we’ve been led to believe.

In the first place I am disinclined to give this any credence because their calculations are very opaque. Even if you got to their website the 'data' section and 'white paper' for their 'True Living Cost' don't seem to give their actual weights or the changes in weightings (other that impressionistic statements like saying that 'luxuries' have been deweighted). However, even if I could trust their numbers it doesn't at all resolve the 'vibecession' question because based on TLC the Trump years were ones of economic decline too. However, the economic discourse in those years was uniformly positive. So what gives?

If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can’t find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent. In other words, nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today — hardly something to celebrate.

Aside from the fairly preposterous gambit of saying that we can count some people in full-time employment as unemployed if their wage is too low (words have meanings, if you want to talk about wages then just do, don't crowbar it in to unemployment figures). More importantly though, what you will see again is that his 'true' unemployment figure tracks exactly the common U-3 figure over the years. So again it's totally worthless in explaining post-Covid dissatisfaction because the post-Covid 'true' rate was actually the lowest it has ever been since his data series starts in the 90s.

Here, the aggregate measure of GDP has hidden the reality that a more modest societal split has grown into an economic chasm. Since 2013, Americans with bachelor’s or more advanced degrees have, in the aggregate, seen their material well-being improve — by the Federal Reserve’s estimate, an additional tenth of adults have risen to comfort. Those without high school degrees, by contrast, have seen no real improvement. And geographic disparities have widened along similar lines, with places ranging from San Francisco to Boston seeing big jumps in income and prosperity, but places ranging from Youngstown, Ohio, to Port Arthur, Texas, falling further behind. The crucial point, even before digging into the nuances, is clear: America’s GDP has grown, and yet we remain largely blind to these disparities.

This is insultingly dishonest. Why does he say 'since 2013' in an article about the post-Covid economy? Because the trend doesn't hold true - after over a decade of sharply rising inequality, the 2021-23 period was actually saw bottom quintile income rise as a proportion of top quintile income.

This article is utterly irrelevant to post-Covid economic perceptions. What is might prove, if one believes the statistics, is that Americans ought to have been pessimistic about the economy throughout the 90s, 2000s and 2010s as well as post-Covid. But they frequently weren't. It still doesn't answer the question of why Americans get specifically upset in the post-Covid period.

What is a woman?

Couldn't resist just dwelling on this for a second too. Now, obviously no-one has to buy into avant-garde views of gender/sex, but to be simply unable to entertain the plausibility of a scheme of gender which includes trans women among women betrays a quite remarkable lack of intellectual imagination, and, frankly, intelligence.

This is talk radio 'why are my enemies all so thick' slop. Take it elsewhere.

Couldn't resist just dwelling on this for a second too. Now, obviously no-one has to buy into avant-garde views of gender/sex, but to be simply unable to entertain the plausibility of a scheme of gender which includes trans women among women betrays a quite remarkable lack of intellectual imagination, and, frankly, intelligence.

Then why don't you provide such a scheme? Why so few on the left have given precise definition of a woman that got traction. The left keeps extremely vague on the topic what is a woman, the only concrete thing that they say is that trans women are women.

Then why don't you provide such a scheme?

Seconding this challenge. The left has collectively choked to death on the "what is a woman" meme and failed to even articulate any sort of attempt at an answer. Every single time I've ever deployed it anywhere I've gotten a bunch of circular logic and hand-waving in response, and nothing of substance.

circular logic

I refer you to my reply here. "A woman is someone who says they're a woman" is only as circular as "a William is someone who says their name is William", and I don't see why that's a problem. If you object "but then saying 'So-and-so is a woman' doesn't tell you anything else about that person besides this one bit of trivia about how they self-identify" I will yeschad.jpg you.

  • -12

You can do this, but it doesn’t satisfy either side. The conservatives shrug and say, ‘fine, but we care about whether you’re a biological male so that’s how we’ll treat you’ and the progressives get furious that you haven’t defended a non-trivial interpretation of their femaleness. It just progresses the euphemism treadmill.

The conservatives shrug and say, ‘fine, but we care about whether you’re a biological male so that’s how we’ll treat you’

And I can tell them "stop being sexist". (Outside of the couple of specific contexts where the biological difference really does directly matter.)

and the progressives get furious

Which progressives? I'm a progressive. My friends are progressives.

  • -21

And I can tell them "stop being sexist". (Outside of the couple of specific contexts where the biological difference really does directly matter.)

What's being achieved here? You've proposed to turn 'woman' into an obviously useless appellation that doesn't capture any of the information people actually care about, and then when they pivot to different words you say, 'no, you can't do that'. What you seem to want to say is, 'there is no important difference between biological men and biological women outside a very small number of very specific contexts so it doesn't matter who wants to be what gender' but you know perfectly well that loads of people disagree with you on what these contexts are and how many of them there are. Which is how you end up litigating 'trans women' in female prisons and 'trans women' in female sports.

Which progressives? I'm a progressive. My friends are progressives.

I get into a lot of niche fan/SF/fantasy stuff, so I read a decent amount written by trans people to an audience of (assumed) trans people. This is not how they think. They want to opt out of maleness and into femaleness, they want to be 'one of the girls'. They are very definitely not happy if you call them 'women' as an appellation but otherwise treat them as male.

What you seem to want to say is, 'there is no important difference between biological men and biological women outside a very small number of very specific contexts so it doesn't matter who wants to be what gender'

Yes. Not only do I want to say it, I say it openly and have done so in the past. I got pretty deep in the weeds of trans prisoners in another culture war thread.

As for your second paragraph, you may want to read what I wrote out here.

  • -10

The problem with 'there is no important difference between biological men and biological women' and in turn with defining sex by cluster-of-traits is that humans are a sexually dimorphic species. This means that:

  1. There is a single, clear differentiating characteristic that distinguishes between and creates men and women in a causal way (XX vs XY).*
  2. That genetic difference is causal for a massive number of physical and psychological differences.
  3. Therefore it is very difficult to find a cluster of traits that includes genetic XX and trans XY but not cis XY. XY traits cluster and XX traits cluster.

This is why progressives don't usually go for sex-as-cluster-of-traits: you then have to start defining those traits. Upper body strength, height, testosterone, estrogen, propensity for violence, propensity for nurturing, thing-person preferences, womb, penis, voice pitch, clothing, OCEAN scores, pronouns, leadership styles, intellectual interests, hobbies, sexuality, etc.

Many of these traits are obviously relevant to the real world, especially the physical ones and the ones related to desiring women, which is why the biggest battlegrounds have been sports, prisons and shelters for battered women. Many others of these traits are directly observable, which is why people resent being forced to affirm in public that the tiny person with breasts and a high-pitched voice is a man and the big, bearded sysadmin with an anime body pillow is a woman.

So far, progressives have been unable to put together a convincing cluster of traits that doesn't look cherry-picked, doesn't sound conservative and doesn't exclude things that the majority of people think are relevant. This is how you end up with Keir Starmer's famous claim that "99.9% of women don't have a penis".

*I'm not going to cover intersex because there aren't enough of them to matter and they don't disprove the general case. A chicken born with a deformed leg doesn't mean that chickens don't have two legs.

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