At the societal level this trend has been happening for decades, and not just in the west. It’s a global trend correlated with the degree of integration into the “global machine.” This machine commodifies and extracts. It extracts more money if you’re lonely. If you’re isolated. If community is replaced with cold market exchange. If all your needs and wants are solved with a purchase or a monetized distraction.
Yet even when the system makes it hard to imagine anything else, we’re never too far from our true nature. We need only take a step towards a neighbor and carve a space, no matter how small, separate from the machine. That’s the only way out.
I feel like there's something in the zeitgeist happening. I've only become aware recently of the 'gift economy' but I'm seeing more and more people post things related.
Productivity will go up, competition will go up, profits will go down, unemployment will go up, wages will go down, a crisis will occur, consolidations and monopolies will emerge, hyper inequality will then break a system incapable of compromise. But sure, there will be a lot of washing machines.
I read the whole post. Really revealing - so much analysis but not a single mention of a global system that is reaching a singularity in wealth concentration, and maybe how that might be an important dimension to reflect on. Its like using so many words to deeply analyze the speed differentials in a car race, but not looking up to see that all the drivers are racing towards a brick wall.
Sometimes I wonder if our system evolved the discipline of economics as an incredibly expensive intellectual distraction to pacify the petit bourgeois.
We can read Dan Wang and Tyler Cowen and whoever else to educate ourselves on the idea that {interests aligned with the further concentration of capital} are the real reason why we the people of the middle class can’t afford to buy a home, and actually you should be grateful you have antibiotics and shelf-stable, flavorless tomatoes and Instagram Reels. Your forebears were not so lucky!
You can’t afford to buy a home because the current owners vote to restrict new housing through zoning and expensive regulation on construction permitting, so supply is limited in the places you’re trying to live (a higher income region?).
The government also subsidized mortgages for the prior generation to increase asset values and now that time is up. Subsidized demand = inflation
Finally, you likely want a bigger house than your parents had. And most people want it to be in the cooler area, not somewhere in Iowa where schools are great but restaurants and non-remote jobs are lacking
> And most people want it to be in the cooler area, not somewhere in Iowa where schools are great but restaurants and non-remote jobs are lacking
This is a fundamental problem. People in big cities are on average richer. That's not just a US thing. People in a Tier 1 city in China have a substantially higher standard of living than people in lower tier cities. There is a very real hierarchy.[1] City tier is determined by size, not income, but income tracks size.
This is the phenomenon that induces over-concentration. Go to the big city and make your fortune, or at least find enough scraps to keep you alive. That's why US homelessness is a rich city thing.
Figuring out how to make mid-sized cities, at the 0.5M to 1M population level work, is something the US currently is not doing well. Those cities have housing, but not jobs.
Supply and demand doesn’t just work in terms of raw housing supply, but in terms of housing that is “on the market”, which is a critical distinction that economists’ arguments deliberately ignore.
In my parents’ generation, it used to be that if you moved or stopped living in a house, you would sell the house in location A and buy a house in location B. Today this would be considered a critical wealth-building error / faux pas. Widespread absenteee landlordism is a new phenomenon, and the fact that we allow it to exist is a de novo policy decision constructed to inflate property value (similar to the subsidized mortgages you referenced).
The reason housing is so unaffordable in my city is not because there isn’t enough housing for the people who live here, it’s because I (along with countless other professionals) am given a choice between subsidizing the lifestyle of somebody who literally doesn’t live here if I’m living in old housing stock, or I’m subsidizing the unavoidably high cost of developing new property (and the lifestyle of property developers) if I’m living in new housing stock.
If the balance of households renting vs owning were inverted, housing would be more affordable. I agree that subsidized mortgages helped create this beast. But the superset problem is the financialization of housing, that the American dream stopped being about the picket fence and started being about securing a passive income / rent-seeking on that picket fence. There are many policies that contributed to this problem.
No mainstream economists touch this problem because we’ve become a country of rent-seeking. So right-leaning economists will say we just need to relax regulation (read: increase the profit margin of property developers) and liberal economists will say we need more “affordable housing” (read: remove more housing stock from the market, for the benefit of a few lucky souls), while neither addresses the core problem of putting median housing titles in the hands of median people, which was perfectly normal from the 50s-80s, before our current system crystallized.
In our current system, building marginal housing and reducing regulation more benefits capital (the top 1% of asset holders; the property developers and the people who can afford to subsidize their profits), not the people who actually live here.
Emotionally, I agree that the current system sucks. But how exactly do you "[put] median housing titles in the hands of median people"? Government seizure and redistribution of property titles? That's where I always get stuck: criticizing society ills is much easier than proposing concrete, pass-able policy.
"No mainstream economists touch this problem" because it's a damn hard problem without painless solutions.
I mean the problem will solve itself eventually. As wealth continues to centralize and urbanization continues unchecked, the “renter” voting block will eventually be state-level majorities in places like New York and California.
There are plenty of ways for people to “vote themselves” property, whether it happens peacefully or not is a decision of those in power. The spectrum runs from land value tax to punitive landlord taxes, improving tenant rights, squatter rights, and outright seizure.
I don’t know which path we’ll go down, but some step in that direction feels inevitable within the next 60 years.
US Per-capita real income tracked productivity growth until about 1975. After that, productivity continued to climb, but per-capita real income did not. This is why life sucks worse than it used to for everybody but the top 10%.
With AI coming along, productivity is about to get another boost. Maybe a big boost. But will most people benefit from it? Under capitalism as currently implemented, no.
That's the meaning of Sam Altman's “I think that AI will probably, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world. But in the meantime, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning.”
Universal basic income is not the answer. That's welfare 2.0, leading to high-rises of useless people. Altman doesn't have the answer. Wang doesn't have the answer. They both see the problem coming but suggest no viable solutions.
I agree. The center of capitalism may have shifted to China, but they'll have to deal with (are already) dealing with the same problems and it'll probably happen even faster for them. Instability in the system is only overshadowed by the growing instability in peoples lives. I think most people feel this and the discourse has fundamentally shifted in the west, but these are tectonic and unpredictable forces.
A parting thought: from a geo-political perspective, I understand the purpose of essays like this but like I said I think its losing the forrest for the trees and at great risk.
Consider PRC has 90%+ home ownership rate and declining population, i.e. almost every person in PRC is functionally going to inherit a house, likely multiple, the floor for stability is going to be much higher. This is not west where high % of population is one paycheck away from eviction. Worst case scenario for PRC youth is to have roof over head. Worst case scenario for PRC elderly is they die 100s of times more materially affluent than any past Chinese. VS west deals with onerous social safety nets that's increasingly unsustainable, old gen will lose benefits while new gens finance and live worse off then old gens... because everything is financialized, something CCP very keen to guard against... because it regulates capitalism. IMO very different scale instability to govern for.
those articles were written a plenty about the Davos Elite - even precovid. It’s a tad lazy now.
Sure there was some evidence of wealth concentration mattering. But there was also evidence against it (like Jack Ma). Power is still the ring to kiss.
And hopefully it’s very understood to the parent comment and agreers, wealth creation is not zero sum. When something new is created the pie gets bigger. All wealth inequality discourse is driven by that misunderstanding and a lack of building more homes https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001429212...
Maybe your brick wall is the singularity instead and I misread you but I don’t think so.
Entirely not the point. We know that monopolies and wealth _concentration_ reinforce each other, at the cost of wealth creation.
Every time a monopoly buys a company, a chance of competition gets eliminated. As monopolist have enough money to buy the government by regulatory capture or even state capture, competition cannot grow, stifling innovation and growth. Parasitism is the most apt way to understand, because the host will wither away from it.
I agree we should be busting more monopolies in the vein of Teddy Roosevelt, but you are forgetting the monopolies and capture political parties have on the states themselves.
I know its a hot issue and I apologize, but if you look at Minnesota with its likely fraud: would their social welfare program numbers look better without the fraud? Could California be run better without its (also likely) welfare fraud? You might really want this but the leadership doesn't want to root it out. So you're left with voting for the opposition but how many want to do that? Nothing happens.
There's no competition in politics. It's two parties or nothing right now.
There's Californian billionaires who loudly hate the Government but can't get anything to change. I feel you are overestimating wealth's influence too some degree as well.
>but not a single mention of a global system that is reaching a singularity in wealth concentration
that's not the case though and Dan is implicitly addressing this given that China is the subject of a decent chunk of the letter. Wealth in the global system is much more evenly distributed these days. We're much closer to a multi-polar world than we used to be in a long time. A lot of the emerging economies are building middle classes of serious size, it's a whole other world compared to 20 to 30 years ago. The developed world's been mostly stable inequality wise, the only outlier being tech oligarchs in the US but that's hardly a defining feature of the global system.
But globally we're likely living now in the first time in human history when the median human is going to see a drastic increase in their fortunes.
I read stories like these and it inspires me to think a bit deeper about things. Recently I told a friend that a good compass in one’s life is to seek out what gives you a lump in your throat, the rest are just words. Merry Christmas friends.
I have a feeling that most people imagine this. But this doesn’t sound like on the ground reality for me? Here in Tokyo, most people I’ve seen just grab brewed coffee or the usual espresso drinks and go on with their lives. When I lives in Toronto/Vancouver, that’s what I experienced over there as well. Used to frequent one down the street as it was the cheapest brewed available coffee, and the regulars would always order their normal cups to go.
It’s interesting to see these type of generalizations that I never experience in life. I’m not saying there’s no truth to it, as girls in my circles often talk about “oh, it’s PSL season, I wanna go!”. But it’s hard to believe that all of their customers go for the special drinks.
I've never seen this either. I'm just interpreting what I think OP meant.
I used to live in Seoul, and new special food or drink items definitely would cause fad waves and would appear on Instagram feeds (Seoul is notorious for this), but I doubt it was the major parts of Starbucks' business.
The sweet latte-based drinks are a huge part of Starbuck’s business. They make far more money on these things (and frappucinos and iced lattes, etc.) than coffee or espresso. But it’s mostly just selling them to people who like the taste (and don’t really care for plain coffee at all). The people posing for instagram are a small minority.
Yeah most chains these days have specialty items that are 3 times the price of their staple items where they make a lot of money and draw in new and old customers. I think Starbucks was just one of the first to do it so regularly.
I’m reading a book by a British author called Against the Machine which you may enjoy. It distills this pervasive unease so many have felt of this growth at all cost system that has been rapidly eating the world. The environmental, humanistic, moral, and spiritual costs of this “machine” is sometimes hard to see when it’s all we’ve known.
Society as a whole needs to decide what is to be done with the additional resources generated by on-going technological efficiencies and how the societal aspects of such will be handled.
I wish that folks would consider reducing the work week, or universal basic income --- the total amount of human labour necessary to feed, clothe, house, and entertain humanity is decreasing --- how does society handle vast swathes of the population being not just unemployed, but unemployable, and to the wealthy, unnecessary?
One view on this is to be seen in Marshall Brain's novella "Manna":
On a very related note, I can recommend Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher. To quote Wiki:
> It explores Fisher's concept of "capitalist realism", which he describes as "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it."
> The book investigates what Fisher describes as the widespread effects of neoliberal ideology on popular culture, work, education, and mental health in contemporary society
Thanks added to my list. I do believe that with the inevitable obsolescence of most work the system will continue to destabilize and some alternative will arise (maybe not in my lifetime) although I’m not optimistic it won’t by dystopian.
But haven’t many countries not only imagined but tried very different alternatives to capitalism? What have we learned from those countries?
It seems to always come back to the fact that people who get power always attempt to use that power to get more resources and power, violating all their supposed values and stealing resources from the public.
Personally, I am far from enamored with the apparent equilibrium state of capitalism, if that’s what we have in the US. However, when you compare how I feel about American capitalism to how I feel about North Korean totalitarianism, Venezuelan corrupt socialism, Soviet murderous communism, Cuban destructive communism, etc etc. suddenly I appear to be a booster for capitalism.
> It seems to always come back to the fact that people who get power always attempt to use that power to get more resources and power, violating all their supposed values and stealing resources from the public.
Seems no different in capitalism.
Ever considered that the failures of other methods does not inherently mean the success of the current method.
Nobody said it did, but the other methods fail much harder. A fuckton more people died of starvation under Lenin, Stalin and Mao than will ever die of starvation in even the most right-wing capitalist country, because communist and extreme authoritarian socialist countries have all the same moral failings of their leaders as capitalism has, but also ruins their economies as well.
What is the best / most popular / user friendly terminal http client I can replace postman with. Has a history I can search, save favorites, secure etc.
I like smaller more focused tools on the terminal. You can make these all work together pretty reasonably with a little glue. Hurl, mitmproxy, httpie with http-prompt. I tend to prefer mitmproxy sessions and massaging that with Python/curl as needed for repeating and tweaking. User friendly is relative, but these tools work well. Python for tweaking http streams in mitmproxy is powerful and rather friendly for what you get in return. Mitmproxy lets you easily save flows with a bit of Puthon glue to output httpie commands giving history, and you can save mitmproxy sessions.
Slightly related: to any British readers, I have a question. In the past few weeks, I have seen more and more YouTube videos showing most of Britain outside of London as being essentially like Detroit. How bad are things really?
That assumes our knowledge of Detroit is more informed that yours of the UK ;-)
Generally there is a lot of propaganda around at the moment, so take that with a pinch of salt. The UK is not as well off as the US generally, but this does not mean there is a breakdown of society or law and order.
The propagandists would have you believe that there is a massive crime wave and social breakdown due to immigration, but what people are mostly worried about in actuality is job uncertainty and backlogged public services.
There are areas of wealth and of deprivation both inside and outside London. There is political and economic uncertainty because the UK economy is imbalanced, and most people expect a difficult few years and are sceptical that the government knows how to fix the issues (and that vested interests won't prevent the solution)
> this does not mean there is a breakdown of society or law and order.
There are some issues with (lack of) policing IMO, such as the reluctance to investigate "minor" crimes, but this is not entirely new.
> The propagandists would have you believe that there is a massive crime wave and social breakdown due to immigration, but what people are mostly worried about in actuality is job uncertainty and backlogged public services.
I think politicians like to play up immigration as an issue because it distracts attention from their real failures. Both the big parties are try to cling to consensus policies that have failed.
> most people expect a difficult few years and are sceptical that the government knows how to fix the issues (and that vested interests won't prevent the solution)
I agree entirely. On the other hand I think the west in general faces the same problems.
Thanks. To be more specific on what I’ve seen by YouTubers touring outside London is just boarded up shops, minimal economic hope, lots of abandoned homes again outside London. The narrative being essentially the de industrialization having now gutted the entire economy except for the well off and financial services etc. which of course shocked me cause I always pictured England as quite wealthy and having made that transition out of factory economy quite well. Which then led me to wonder if Britain is just just a few years ahead of the rest of us.
There are some high streets that are struggling, but that is mostly due to the move to online shopping and the rise of big retailers in different locations.
Unemployment has been low most of the past decade, although it is rising this year.
De-industrialisation is much exaggerated because there is a perception that the UK makes nothing because there are so few British branded consumer goods, but there are a lot of things made in the UK either foreign branded (e.g. Nissan cars) or parts or non-consumer goods (from drugs to satellites to get engines). While we are at the bottom end compared to other large developed economies, its only marginally so compare to, for example, France or Canada. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NV.IND.MANF.ZS?end=2024...
I have lived in two English counties (Warwickshire and Cheshire) in the last few years, and have visited a lot of different places this summer (from Somerset to York to Liverpool to Cambridgeshire and a few other places) and overall its a pretty pleasant country to live in in terms of everyday life. A lot of places (Manchester and Coventry, for example) seem to have improved over the last decade or two.
That's the picture you'd get if there was an unemployment problem, but what we actually have is an aging population and a productivity problem: it's really telling that most people's idea of changing their working life for the better is in effect to move to a lower productivity role in the higher end of their market:
Individually making and selling things, or having their own tiny influencer brand, or leaving a company to start a one-man business.
We have a housing deficit, so abandoned houses are unusual, and mostly in places where people are moving away.
However "having transitioned quite well out of the factory economy" is definitely too rosy. We did "what the market wanted" but it turns out the market is not a strategist. And we have too large a population to exist purely as an offshore financing hub.
The southeast of England is well-off, everywhere else is less so. It has basically always been like this. There have also obviously been repeated hammerblows since 2008, with austerity (which is still happening), Brexit (a remarkable self-own), and then covid (an unprecedented upwards transfer of wealth). The political and economic establishment is also essentially monopolar, a process begun with Blair and now approaching culmination.
People just don’t have the money to spend on things. Wage growth is non-existent and prices have risen dramatically. For my own part I have get a real “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas” feeling. All we ever hear on the news is how spending will have to be cut yet again and taxes will have to go up.
Being from Northern Ireland I personally hope for unification with Ireland, although without significant changes I worry nothing much will change as Ireland has its own very similar issues.
Abandoned homes in any great number would be a real surprise. I think those videos are likely quite carefully staged.
I left the UK about four years ago but AFAICT the picture of housing over there hasn’t changed a lot - it keeps going up in price and there’s a shortage.
There are economic problems at the moment, and service provision problems in particular with the NHS. A decade of post 08 GFC austerity stripped public services and hammered government investment, which turned out to have not been that smart. Then Brexit hammered trade.
Closed-up shops have been a minor trend for a while - small shops have been failing for years due to high taxes, insane rents and being thoroughly outcompeted by the internet. Many old-fashioned high streets have become little more than strips of coffee shops and charity retailers, the former because apparently there is no limit to the appetite for coffee, the latter because they often get tax and rent concessions.
It has always been true that London is like its own country, with transport, employment and investment there dwarfing everywhere else, and tackling this to spread out the prosperity more widely has been a consistent failure of British politics for as long as I remember.
Beyond London there’s the ever expanding, fairly wealthy belt of dormitory-towns, and then there’s the rest of the country, which in my last visit did just feel run down.
I’ve been to Detroit, and I’ve read about the decline there. I don’t think the UK is anywhere near that. But it is languishing in a prolonged economic malaise.
Not noticeably any worse than over the last 15 years.
Be wary of what you are fed on YouTube (or any major social network) they are astroturfed to hell at this point.
Life here isn’t great for a lot of people but it’s not super terrible either for the most part, we have broadly the same problems as many western nations (aging population, corporations running amok, slow and expensive infrastructure development, expensive housing, low wage growth).
We are still a safe wealthy western democracy though.
This is a somewhat silly question because you could probably get anecdotal replies of all kinds to it. Some things are different to how they used to be, and in some cases different in ways that feel bad. For example, there are more empty shops in the town centre where I live compared to 20 years ago, which for some people evokes a strong emotional reaction and a sense of loss.
My own personal experience tends to back up what the data here show (no significant changes really) - I teach in a large secondary school and really, kids today are not massively different from how they've ever been. They face challenges in navigating the vast amounts of information and misinformation presented nowadays, but we do try to educate them as best as possible in respect of this.
Appreciate it. Yeah I knew it was a very subjective question. I guess the reason I was shocked was prior I watched British shows like grand design and all I saw was rolling green hills and idyllic life outside the capital. Then in quick succession I watch some YouTubers doing walking tours outside of London and railing against the decline and neglect. So I was just curious what the locals opinion is. That said the same debates are happening here and half the time I feel people are describing different planets.
Yeah I can imagine - although probably in any town you could go out and find a nice bit with nice houses and shops, and equally, you could find a bit where shops are closed and houses look a bit run down.
If I'm honest with you, I wonder if you need to think more critically about what you're watching? Grand Designs is designed to evoke envy (mostly) as well as some of the difficulties involved, which keeps people watching. I don't really watch YouTube but people generally seem more predicated towards watching things that evoke feelings of danger, anger, loss, worry, that sort of thing. In both cases you are being shown a version of the truth that results in the programme maker gaining somehow (money, views, whatever).
I'm only saying this off the back of your few comments here though, so apologies if I'm wide of the mark.
Detroit is known as a place with lots of abandoned buildings and I don’t think something similar exists in the UK. There are poor regions but AFIAK they don’t look like Detroit. Many high street shops are closed but it doesn’t mean that everything is bad. High street shops were hit hard first by COVID lockdowns then by high inflation (people can afford less) but rents continued to be high. It sad to see a row of boarded shops but it’s not everywhere and eventually landlords probably will reduce rent prices.
You seem to be picking on a US city as an example of (something) and attempting to apply (something) to the entirety of the UK that isn't a particular city in the UK.
Are you sure that is a wise comparison? I'm certain that Youtube is a source of information, but are you sure it is a useful one?
I live next door to a park and have just stuffed shit loads of cash into an American cruise company as a passenger (P&O - British name, American owner).
Sorry didn’t mean to pick on anyone. Even Detroit I heard has had somewhat a recovery in the last decade or so. I guess what stoked my unsettled curiosity was if the narrative of de-industrializion of the west and its impact on the social fabric was worse than I thought.
Yet even when the system makes it hard to imagine anything else, we’re never too far from our true nature. We need only take a step towards a neighbor and carve a space, no matter how small, separate from the machine. That’s the only way out.
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