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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   27319 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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Get men, especially those without a degree, into a decent paying job.

If you can't see why this can't be solved under current globalized market and current macroeconomic conditions, I don't know what to tell you.

You can print as much money as you like, but the world is engaged in active wholesale value destruction and redistribution in many areas and most actual financial growth these days is the result of arbitrage, not genuine productivity increases.

As Neal Stephenson put it in 1992:

When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity

and most actual financial growth these days is the result of arbitrage, not genuine productivity increases.

I think this is overstated. There’s definitely a larger role for finance and asset appreciation than people are comfortable with, but it’s hard to argue that productivity growth is entirely illusory when you look at sectors like tech, healthcare, or energy. The bigger problem is that the gains from real productivity growth don’t necessarily translate into broadly accessible, non-degree employment.

A lot of men aren't positioned well to move into the sectors of the economy that are growing, some of those sectors pay well, others could pay better, but we have a lot of wiggle room to try some things before throwing in the towel.

Healthcare growing the economy? The majority of recent innovation is targeted at extending the retirement period at massive expense

There's also the massive self-licking ice cream cone of the healthcare bureaucracy, half of which is dedicated to getting paid and the other half to denying payment.

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