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Comment by nopinsight | Hacker News Reader

Brexit and the Trump election share the same root causes:

* Inequality within developed countries, leading to dissatisfaction among working-class voters.

* Globalization benefits accrue largely to capital owners, leaving a lot of workers behind. Many blame immigration since it is the most visible cause. The blame is partly backed by human's xenophobic instincts.

Ironically, Trump's tax plan will mostly benefit the rich. Instead, we need a much better system to mitigate hardships from job losses to globalization and technological change. The 2017 Congress will be very unlikely to enact such policies.

I wonder how this tension will play out in the future...Thoughts?

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You've hit the nail on the head: inequality is at the heart of this. Unfortunately, people are quick to forget the democratic foundation of society. It is not big businesses that have the final say, neither is it the middle classes or any other segment of population. It is the people, collectively, that have influence. And when you forget that over a long period of time, it comes back to bite you hard. Lesson for the future: take inequality seriously.

It seems so strange: Inequality makes people vote for billionaire.

It's not that strange really. I don't think most poor people hold the wealth of the rich against them so much as they resent the feeling that the rich think they're superior, or that the rich dismiss and ignore everyone, and rig the system.

A rich guy who says the things that the poor already believe (rightly or not), things nobody else will say, has a leg up on gaining their support. People want a champion, whether or not that champion looks like them. (cf. Gracchus [1])

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiberius_Gracchus

Since the GOP now holds both Congress and the Presidency, with a possibility of the Supreme Court majority, they may enact some protectionist policies to appease the voters. However, they could in fact make the economic situations worse and some people would start to blame other things.

Could the backlash spill to the technology and related sectors as well? (e.g. a neo-luddite movement might get started)

Note: I did not grow up in the US, so I would like to hear your opinions on this, especially from Americans.

> with a possibility of the Supreme Court majority

... possibility? They already have it. He gets to pick Scalia's replacement and that's 5-4. If Ginsburg or Breyer can't make it 4-8 more years (and Ginsburg is 84), then it'll be a guarantee for the next 30+ years, minimum.

Well, there's that saying about how the poor in America think of themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires...

Yeah, it's one of those high-horse things elites tell themselves while they try to understand why they can't just instill their perfectly obviously correct opinions already.

Poor whites in America seem to identify with rich whites more than others from different races who are working (or unemployed) right next to them.

To them, Trump is like the star NFL quarterback that everyone wishes to be, and wears that star's jersey on their back. Even if the fan is overweight and can barely waddle across the parking lot.

Except that in reality Trump does not have the skills necessary to do the job. (He is a great candidate, but will likely be a terrible president). Someone observed that Trump is a poor person's idea of a rich person. He is unfortunately likely a disenfranchised person's idea of an effective president.

That's ironic, because that quote means the exact opposite of what people think:

“Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: ‘After the revolution even we will have more, won’t we, dear?’ Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property. "I guess the trouble was that we didn’t have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew—at least they claimed to be Communists—couldn’t have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves.”

Indeed. Globalization is not the enemy. Overall wealth and productivity have gone up, up, up in the last 40 years. The problem is that a disproportionate share of the returns from that growth have gone into the pockets of the rich. There's about a zillion reasons why that happened, but there are also many ways to tackle the problem and improve the situation.

Its possible that the causes are more social than economic. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2822059

Inequality should've been the/a big issue, but I don't think it was. I think this was driven very strongly by "human's xenophobic instincts".

Inequality and xenophobia are not mutually exclusive. One way in which resentment of inequality is expressed is in the form of xenophobia.

Had this really been about inequality, would the winner be the rich guy with the gold-plated everything, whose tax policies favoured the richest? I think it was more straight-up xenophobia.

I would've thought that black and Hispanic people in the US were strongly represented on the "wrong" side of the inequality ledger? Yet the vote had strong divides on race, and those people did not back the winner.

>Tax's lowering for everyone == mostly benefit the rich

What?

US is above its head in debt right now, on par with states like Spain or Greece.

Lowering the tax means it will be less money, meaning less social initiatives that benefit the poorer such as Medicare. Making taxes more progressive would work.

Because they take home more in absolute terms. Capital accrues in a compound manner, that's why we have progressive income taxes. Or did.

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