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Sometimes I feel like the data is capturing an accurate average of a highly lumpy picture.
My extended family is scattered to the four winds. The difference in outcomes in different circumstances and different regions is shocking.
The lucky ones in Northern Virginia are doing great. They all have six figure government-adjacent jobs and they bought homes before the real estate market exploded. Their retirement funds are bursting at the seams and their hardest decisions are whether Becky is taking dance lessons or violin lessons this year. The unlucky ones in Northern Virginia either live in run down shitty rentals an hour and a half away from their jobs that cost an increasing fraction of their paycheck every year, or they're reaching the point where they have to sell their farms.
The lucky ones in Pennsylvania are doing great. They work in healthcare or education and they bought their homes before the real estate market exploded. I don't think they could get fired unless they committed a felony on the clock. The unlucky ones in Pennsylvania can't hold down a decent job because the plants keep closing, and several have had to sell their homes because they have to desperately move around to follow the work. The skyrocketing cost of rent makes it harder and harder every year.
I have no lucky relatives in Kentucky. They're all doing their best to not starve to death as they try to recover from the floods a few years ago. There's very little work. The environment is hard on cars. It's reaching the point where they can't even afford to move out of the area. Drugs are a common escape.
I don't have any more relatives in West Virginia. They're all dead. The deaths over the last five years were not due to natural causes.
I don't disagree with @iprayiam3. I also don't disagree with all the people telling him that he's wrong because Actually Look at Line - Line Go Up. Line Definitely Go Up. I've read the same graphs as everybody else. I can't disagree with the direction that Line Going.
On the other hand, it feels like the truth of the average person doing better is obscuring another, separate truth, which is that the American middle class lifestyle is more precarious than ever, and a concerning number of people are falling through the cracks. It points to a structural weakness in our country that troubles me, both because it's a structural weakness and because so many people choose to use Line Going Up to avoid even discussing it.
My cousin who died of a fentanyl overdose after he got hurt in a forklift accident doesn't give a shit about how big his TV is. His widow doesn't really care either.
My cousin who's working 60 hours a week at three jobs just to make rent is doing his best. He's working far harder than I do. When my uncle smugly tells him that he "should invest in them mutual funds, boy", he's missing the entire damned point.
I'm reminded of a quote from Jeff Bezos
Clearly, a lot of people think something is wrong in this country. It's easy to suggest that the people complaining are retarded, lazy, and wrong. After all, Line Going Up! Look at Line! If Line Go Up, why aren't you Going Up along with aforementioned Line? The thing is, that's exactly what the quote above is trying to warn us about. But if that's true, what the hell is actually wrong? What data are we missing that prevents us from getting a clearer picture?
I have some thoughts. I don't know if they're complete, or even correct, but I want to get them down.
One thing I've mentioned repeatedly above is the cost of housing. I don't think it's the whole picture, but it really seems like housing instability has an outsized psychological impact. It also tends to be the biggest single monthly cost most people have, so even a small percentile increase tends to be a big bottom line number.
At the same time, there are fewer and fewer places where a person can exist in public for extended periods without a financial transaction involved. This goes back to the $20 burrito. Maybe it's not universal, but for hundreds of miles around me, public libraries are cutting hours or shutting down. Small corner bars dying along with their owners and getting replaced by Another Goddamned Chipotle. You can't shoot darts at a Chipotle on a Friday night. You can't even linger for too long before they ask you to buy another burrito. The end result is that if you want to be out of your house, you're either deep in the woods, or you're spending money on another goddamned burrito in a way that simply didn't happen 20 years ago.
On top of that, job security is getting worse. Layoffs used to be the kind of thing that would get an executive fired, because it meant that they fundamentally misunderstood the nature of their business and client demand. Nowadays layoffs are just good clean fun that will probably result in the bosses getting a bonus. It was a lot easier to have a positive outlook about a meagre lifestyle if you know it represented a solid floor. That's less true in the year of our Lord 2026.
Am I ignoring the fact that Line Go Up? No, I am not. In fact, I'm one of the lucky ones. I have been able to capture some of the Upness of Line, and I'm doing better than I ever expected to do in my life as a result.
At the same time, the fact that this discussion is even happening suggests that there's something wrong that we're not capturing. When people say "It's just lifestyle creep," I'm reminded of the line from Chernobyl when Dyatlov says "3.6 Roentgen. Not great - not terrible". He's making decisions based on the readings while simultaneously not considering the limitations of those readings, and coming to a specious conclusion as a result.
Keep harping on Line and its Up at your peril. Calling people lazy and retarded and wrong feels good in the short term, but it feels like it's dangerously close to shooting the messenger. The fact that they're not communicating it in clear, quantifiable terms doesn't mean there's nothing there.
Great post. Tangentially,
Good. Took my kids to one once. Nothing like when I was young. The homeless people aside, the whole place was a temple of wokeness and the books belonged in a bonfire. I'm aghast that my tax money is going to support this establishment, just as I am when I drive past the local elementary school and see 'progress' flags and coded anti-white messaging in the wall murals. And that's before we get to all the trans stuff in both.
Down with all of it, I say. I'd pay twice as much in the relevant taxes to be rid of them. If I could send the people who've been running them to prison I'd do that too.
To be fair, you do live in San Francisco.
Thankfully not. I just work there occasionally.
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It's tragic. Local libraries were a refuge for me growing up. Learning that there was a place with air conditioning and more books than I could ever read, for free, only an hour and a half's walk away, was one of the most mind-blowing things that ever happened to me.
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Yeah, my sense is that that is a big factor. I have no statistics to back this up, but I live in the Northeast United States and my sense is that a lot of the new single family houses being built in the suburbs are very very far from the cities with the jobs. So that the average price of a house is misleading. And in fact, one of the results of building more housing far away from the city is that road congestion increases, arguably raising the premium for housing which is more convenient to the city.
I would have predicted that work from home would fix this problem, but at least for now, the situation seems pretty lousy.
Anyway, I think it's also worth noting that this is a factor which seems to have changed considerably over time. In the 1970s, notwithstanding the high interest rates, it was possible to buy a single family residence in the inner suburbs of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, etc. on a much lower income than what is required today, relatively speaking. Since then, it seems like things have really gone downhill. (Or uphill, if you happen to have bought a house decades ago.)
The thing is it’s worse than what you’re bringing to light, because this problem is endemic to that whole area and it exists even beyond the whole housing market.
We can stick with the northeast, per your reference class. Take housing out of it for instance. How many people do you think have ever actually tried to build a new business in NYC? Not that I have, but there’s a good body of literature people can read on this and it’s clear that from the people that have, the problem of the business side of things looks very similar to the problem ordinary citizens have of it.
For most people, unless you’ve directly witnessed/experienced it, you just would not believe the regulatory/bureaucratic/tax/economic nightmare doing business in NYC is. Just basic things like getting permits can take months to years due to incompetence. And everything has gigantic fees associated with it. Building in NYC is at least 75% more expensive than in NY/CT, just due to fees, taxes and lost time. By itself NYC as a standalone city is uncompetitive and nobody would want to start businesses without some sort of inducement (here’s where we get to policy…)
NYC itself is an archaic disaster of a regulatory/tax regime and this isn’t even debatable. They’ve been the paradigmatic case for years in political discourse when it comes to the poster boy for dysfunctional politics. For example, their zoning and regulatory laws haven't been overhauled since 1963. Just think about how much the city has changed since then. Back in the 80s/90s, the city decided to try and do something about it. So they created entities like the NYBDC and the ESDF (and also others) that have the ability to waive fees, freeze taxes, stop unnecessary overregulation and fast track permitting, etc. just reflect on that. NYC is so messed up, that they’ve created government entities to fight off other government entities. And the worst part about it is you simply can’t begin anew and start all over.
So when the average person complains that Amazon or some other corporation is getting massive tax breaks; that’s an incomplete picture of reality. NYC itself as a whole is uncompetitive, and the NYBDC/CoC/ESDF/etc., in addition to the city of NYC itself waives fees, permits, taxes, and everything they can to make NYC economically competitive at any level. This is all aimed at trying to level the playing field, which is where it should start to begin with.
You can always make the argument if you want that we shouldn't have to give these giant incentives or giveaways to 'lure' companies in. But I think we should already have a tax/regulatory framework in place that makes the city competitive. The reason these policies exist in the first place is because of an enormous failure of the state to create an environment that is conducive to investment.
If you want to look at the mechanics of how this happens on the ground, it goes a little something like this… About a decade or so ago, I remember they were re-zoning a fairly large area in NYC. Investors go in and perform an analysis of things. They identify two buildings adjacent to one another that are for sale. One’s vacant and the other has a struggling business that's just skirting by, breaking even. There's 10 employees, and the two properties when combined get you say $70K year in all taxes (this includes property, payroll, your business license, etc.). So you want to buy the buildings and put in approximately $10 million into development. In just the first year alone, you would be projected to pay $1 million in all taxes and $750k in the second year, etc.; and on top of that, the permitting process could take up to two years. So right there, that’s a deal breaker, and under those terms, you’d just walk away leaving the city/state to collect $70k in taxes. So what happens instead is you work with the city to cap your liability at $700k in the first year and $500k in years 2-10; and additionally they’re expediting all the permitting and sign offs for you. (And don't forget that the $10 million is taxable to the construction companies that are building this thing, and the state gets a cut of that too…)
So now keep going and look at your analysis from the other side. You could look at this and say "This is bullshit! You’re getting a $3 million tax break!" (Which again is $300k in year one and ~$250k in 2-10) And technically you’re not wrong… Incidentally, that would be the obvious headline you’d see ran all across the news: "Rich assholes get an obscene $3 million tax break at the expense of the people!" And people would rage until they had an aneurysm over this and politicians would say idiotic populist diatribe about it. But that would be an incomplete picture which is so misleading to the public that it’s more analogous to lying than being mistaken.
Now go back to the analysis. Look at what the city is getting… From the status quo, they’re getting a whopping $70k a year from the current arrangement (which $700k over 10 years) in all-source tax revenue. But look at your project: with the tax breaks, the city is now getting $5.2 million in taxes over ten years (that's an increase of $4.5 million). If an average teacher's annual salary is $75k, then that's nine new teachers that are funded by this project. And this is exactly the negotiations that are had at the local level when you are pitching your project to the city; "even with the tax breaks, we are paying $X millions in taxes versus the $Y dollars you are getting at present." And don’t forget that the project is going to hire X amount of people compared to the Y amount today.
Of course you can still disagree if you want, but the reality is NYC is likely better off with X corporation + tax breaks, instead of X corporation goes to Boston.
I don’t work in this industry and never will. I intensely hate it with the fury of 49 crackheads, but members of my extended family own and lease land to businesses and they’ve negotiated with corporations and local bureaucrats before; so I’ve heard a lot of these stories and I’ve been with them when I was younger and watched them do this. The work is extremely hard from the business side and if it’s difficult on that side you can be damn sure that the “rational voter” really is a myth. Other sources (1, 2).
I'm not an economist, but assuming that NYC is hostile to new businesses, it seems to me that this would help ameliorate the housing issue I mentioned. Because it means that more people will start businesses in Stamford, Morristown, White Plains, Garden City, and so on. All cities which are far more easily accessible from distant suburbs.
So I would argue that the problem is not so much that NYC is a bad place to start a business, but actually the opposite -- that it's too great a place to start a business. That notwithstanding the extra taxes, the regulatory hurdles, the crime, and so on, NYC offers a huge array of advantages.
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Yes, because the places closer in are already occupied. It's worse in places with Urban Growth Boundaries; you can't build closer in because it's occupied and you can't build further out because that's to be left as a playground for the planners. Then YIMBYs come in and want to replace single-family homes with apartments.
Ok, well anyway you slice it, I think it's a significant part of the reason young people today often feel poorer than their parents. Economic activity and job growth has concentrated in 5 or 10 big cities while at the same time, there's basically the same number of single family houses in locations convenient to those cities. So it's become much more expensive for a young family to get a basic 3-bedroom house in a nice suburb. Anyway, that's my personal theory, I have no data to back it up.
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