The Despair of Poor White Americans

This is also the primary explanation for the rise of right-wing European nationalists, and the Brexit vote. Their success is a restructuring of the party landscape, to conform more closely with the attitudes and aspirations of the electorate. Two-party systems tend to exclude new parties, but if enough voters are dissatisfied, then sooner or later there will be a shift in the political spectrum.

Trump has clear policies, which certainly on immigration correspond to the positions of populist parties in Europe. He does not have a full policy platform, but that is not necessary for a populist party to be successful. It only needs to address the issues which anger its electorate. And that is the reality which needs to be considered: a section of the population is angry at the political class for ignoring their concerns and fears.

Simply disparaging Trump and his voters does not offer an alternative explanation for his success, or for comparable populist success in other countries.

Best line I read on HN today. This explains so much about everybody... Thank you.

Just a quick list from that page -

"Dana Loesch believes in Christianity, patriotism, traditional marriage, and the right to bear arms, among other “quaint” ideas. For the elites in DC, Los Angeles, New York, and Silicon Valley, that makes her as bizarre as a three-headed dog." - Nice use of "elites". If you disagree with her, you must be one of those crazy elites. Also, nice fallacy equating her views with patriotism and Christianity, again if you disagree you must not be a true patriot/Christian.

• In Flyover America, people believe criminals should be punished. Coastal America focuses on “rehabilitation.” --Unless you believe in revenge and career criminals, rehabilitation is a far better way to deal with convicted criminals. Also, nice use of quotes on rehabilitation. If you just want to punish them and not try to stop their cycle of criminality, what sort of people are these? Not good ones.

• Flyovers think the Declaration of Independence was crystal clear: “All men are created equal.” For Coastals, Black Lives Matter—but anyone who adds that all lives matter must be a racist. ---First, hilariously myopic because the Declaration of Independence was written when slavery was in full gear and women has very few rights. Hence "all men". Also, if you don't understand what people mean when they say "Black Lives Matter" you are really lacking empathy and saying "All lives matter" is missing the point so hard, that yes, it borders on racism.

• Coastals think they understand firearms because they watched a TV movie about Columbine. Fly- overs get a deer rifle for their thirteenth birthday. --I'm pretty sure the debate is over military style weapons with large magazine and high rates of fire, not deer rifles. But nice strawman.

• Coastals talk about blue-collar workers in the abstract. Flyovers have a relative who works the night shift in a granola bar factory, where the big perk is taking home a bag full of granola bars every Friday. ---No one on the coasts have shitty jobs. Nope.

• Coastals think every problem—from hurt feelings to the cost of birth control—requires government intervention and huge federal spending. Flyovers know that money isn’t magic fairy dust, and many problems can be solved only by individual character and hard work. ---Many problems can be solved only by individual character and hard work, except of course for all the problems "fly-over nation" has. Or is she saying that those people don't have character and are lazy? Hard to tell. Or maybe she's just demonizing the government to pander to her audience.

How can you be angry at Walmart if you’ve never shopped in one? --How can I be against the use of nuclear weapons if I have never survived one? The answer is called education, research and data. Surprisingly, you can learn things and form opinions without having to experience the thing you are researching.

How can you hate the police if you’ve never needed help from a cop? --- I think she's trying to say "How can white 'elites' on the coast hate the police if they don't need them". Which of course, more logical fallacies. Talking about police corruption and wanting to do something about it is of course is the same thing as hating them, right? Right?

How can you attack Christians if you don’t have a single friend who goes to church? -- How can you attack Muslims if you don't have a single friend who goes to mosque? Oh wait. She probably wouldn't want that question turned around on her. Also, who's attacking Christians? 70% of the country is Christian. What is she afraid of? Is this is a war on Christmas thing? Manufactured outrage created by media companies to get ratings.

If you aren't willing to step up to the table with rational, well reasoned arguments that improve the country as a whole why should people bother to listen? Asking how can they judge walmart if they haven't been in one? It'd be laughable if people didn't take it seriously.

In my situation, problem was caused by two main issues:

* Alcoholism. My dad functioned well, so it wasn't necessarily a matter of drinking up all the money, as much as getting to the drink was a primary objective, leaving little room for motivation to do more in life. He was quite intelligent, but didn't care. (I've personally taken a few trips down that road myself, but have fortunately gotten out of it, and am currently 15 months sober)

* Mental health. My mom had serious undiagnosed mental health issues. Like talking to people who weren't there, the inability to function as seemingly routine tasks, explosive temper at virtually nothing. Like the alcoholism, I can see elements of this in myself as well.

I'm obviously on HN because I'm a developer, and doing well for myself, but these issues are still there, and I still feel "poor". My family still is, and I put as much distance between me and that situation as possible. I could possibly help them be a little less poor, but it's not a money thing. It's a mentality thing.

And entrepreneurship isn't going to soften the tumble. It requires intervention of a different kind.

They can migrate to the American southwest and do agricultural labor, competing with the illegal immigrants doing jobs that "Americans just won't do". They can migrate to the distant outskirts of high productivity cities (e.g. NY, SF), then commute in and provide domestic labor to high productivity individuals. There is plenty of opportunity out there; if there weren't then people from around the world wouldn't be desperately attempting to enter the US.

Hundreds of millions of Indians, Chinese and others engage in internal migration, moving themselves to where the jobs are. Americans could too.

This is just not a fix that Silicon Valley can do; if a man doesn't want to fix himself, then Peter Thiel can't build an app to do it for him.

Even someone applying for food stamps has to jump so many hurdles, sometimes including in-person interviews! As if someone who has difficulty affording food every day has an excess of time and reliable transportation. (Then again, these people aren't easily monetized, unless you're comfortable exploiting them. c.f. check cashing.)

I'm hopeful for initiatives like the US Digital Service. And I wish our culture stopped glamorizing startups for being worth a lot of pretend money, and instead valued them on how much they did to advance us as an equitable society.

In the process, it is struggling with the area's incumbent zoning laws, not enough new construction, high cost of living, and, higher than average gap between the rich and the poor. They've concentrated so much capital and opportunity that it doesn't translate well to other places, despite attempts to incubate the same thing in Austin, Seattle, Raleigh, and the like. And if you were referring to "app-based" solutions as opposed to proven injection of capital, you're in uncharted waters.

Before Silicon Valley, the miracle non-extraction-based economic engine of the country was Detroit; before then it was Akron, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Buffalo, Rochester, and New York. If history is of any lesson, in the future we'll fondly remember Silicon Valley's "IT boom" of a couple decades, before the circumstances and realities of the situation changed and the next big thing after automobiles, rubber, steel, railroads and meatpacking, electricity, and shipping (respectively) came along.

A military coup followed by a dictatorship, in which massive, forcible wealth redistribution would take place.

Silicon Valley, as the country's second greatest concentration of wealth, would not survive this.

The solution is dictated by the boundary conditions. Politics is a desperate struggle for who gets what.

We can't bring the manufacturing jobs back for these people, either. Let's dispel the notion that the collapse of manufacturing jobs in the rust belt, where many of these people live, was the result of political choices. It was inevitable -- the rise of China, southeast Asia, and Latin American countries has revealed the truth that US manufacturing was not globally competitive, but merely sheltered. NAFTA sent some jobs to Mexico, but in the absence of NAFTA, those jobs would have gone to Asia instead. If the US government had decided to protect US manufacturing jobs at all costs, we would have quickly learned what "all costs" means -- the cost of protecting those jobs would have risen quickly over the years until we could not have afforded it anymore. The tariffs required to do so would have been an enormous drag on the economy, and on the well-being of most Americans, and therefore unsustainable economically and politically. So the political choices involved in the collapse of manufacturing jobs could at best have delayed the inevitable.

So, whatever we can do for these people is by degrees -- improve the free public education they already have, improve the welfare benefits they already have, maybe cut their taxes, if they earn enough to pay taxes. We can't bring the jobs back, and it's naive of them to believe candidates who promise that they can.

But maybe we shouldn't feel sorry for these people, who grew up in the richest country in the world, with free education, and have nothing to offer to anyone. A lot has been done for them already, and unlike almost any other group in this country, they cannot point to any injustices visited upon them as an excuse for their current state of affairs. Let's keep in mind that they were never enslaved, and that they were sheltered from competition from non-whites and foreigners for decades. They have managed to fail in a country designed to promote the success of white people, often at the expense of other groups. Their lives are significantly better, more comfortable, and more secure than those of people in many countries of the world. Billions of people live in poverty these poor white Americans could never imagine. These Americans have housing, enough to eat, clothes to wear, cars, TVs, video game consoles, government-provided health care (Medicaid) and welfare payments in many cases -- all the trappings of middle-class life in many parts of the world. What else do we owe them? Self-actualization?

Frankly, I'd rather give my money to some of the billions of people in the world who live in ramshackle houses with dirt floors, no electricity, no education, and no way out. These white Americans have enough that I don't see how they are entitled to any more unless they earn it themselves.

Basic math and science research now is the soil Silicon Valley needs in the future. But government budgets are cut, and there's a philosophy that predominates that government is not the answer.

So Larry Page has Google do research and development. But there is the beginning of a stockholder rebellion. The trend is toward focus on short term ever-increasing stock returns each quarter. The powers-that-be want funding for basic math and science research trimmed down to nothing - both government and corporate.

Plus treaties like TPP are being pushed. If Silicon Valley profits on the increased spread of information, the TPP tries to tie down information in rules which seem out-of-date.

Also telcos (read AT&T and Verizon) are using their last-mile land/airwave monopoly power to redirect bad DNS calls to ads, hijack sessions and place cookies on them, they want to use their monopolies to charge upstreams fees etc.

Then there's the Eastern District of Texas patent racket.

An example of this discussed recently - in the years after World War II, the transistor was implemented and Moore's Law took effect. As everyone knows, that has slowed down in recent years and soon the current methods will hit a brick wall.

If you look at constant non-military R&D dollars coming from the federal budget, they are less this year than they were in 2003. The population is growing, the economy is growing and becoming more complex, but federal R&D dollars are shrinking.

Also, you talk as if wasting human capital was not an intention of our current mode of production and economic system. Look at this 1999 Businessweek article, "When is the jobless rate too low?" ( http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/1999-10-31/when-is-th... ). The worry by the people controlling the economy starts when unemployment gets too low, not when it's too high. Of course, if it starts climbing up to 25% like it did in 1932 in the US, turmoil starts to take hold, so in that respect they're against high unemployment on the other end.

Why do you assume wasted human capital is the concern of those making the economic decisions? By the people making the economic decisions, I mean the people pressuring Larry Page to cut Alphabet/Google R&D, who pressured Facebook to go public, who beat the drums for years for Apple to have a special dividend etc. Wasted human capital, unemployment - the existence of a reserve army of labor is a cornerstone of the existing economic system.

Do you know what stops the very poor in such a rich country from simply moving to a better state or city with more jobs and resources? Is it fear? sadness? lack of confidence? lack of expense to move? too much attachment to the place they grew up in?

Studies have repeatedly shown that metropolises are the future. Big cities have the jobs, healthcare, education, networks to help everyone, especially the needy. Why aren't more needy people moving?

1. A device that allows knowledge uploading would make most of education obsolete - everyone could know everything there is to know (which is not the same as understanding, but I don't think it's possible to teach understanding anyway, only help someone understand).

2. An equivalent of a drug gland from the Culture series would fix most mental problems, especially motivation and lack of self discipline.

3. An implantable electric powered CO2 to glucose/triglycerides converter would decrease basic survival costs by orders of magnitude, at the same time freeing lots of agricultural land for other use. With no risk of starving everybody would be much more entrepreneurial.

1 requires sf technology, but 2 and 3 is 'just' an engineering problem.

This article isn't about that. It's about a culture (that is bound by tradition and heredity of which one sign is low melatonin) predicated on the philosophy that all one needs to succeed is a strong work ethic.

In a lower-class minority culture, you're taught that success is possible, but needs to be fought for. In lower-class white culture, success is transforming into a stolen birthright.

The poor non-whites have been discriminated against. That discrimination hurt them, and it helped the whites who did not have to compete against them for jobs and government resources.