America's Complacent Class | Hacker News Reader

America's Complacent Class

npr.org

32 pointssimonsarris45 comments

> "wealthier people tend to live together more than before and so do poorer people"

Some people are essentially told to contribute to this phenomenon when you buy a house in the US. High home values mean good school funding, which means homes will hold their value over time, pricing out people of different incomes. Buy the cheapest house you can in the most expensive neighborhood you can afford for the best return (with the caveat that mixed use zoning is rare).

If had a Japanese zoning model,[0] decoupled school funding from local incomes,[1] and ended or capped the mortgage interest deduction, a lot of this would go away.

None of those are trivial changes without entrenched interests though.

[0] http://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

[1] I've heard some states do this already. Oregon maybe? I know economic mobility varies a lot based on where you are in the US. http://www.npr.org/2014/01/23/265356290/study-upward-mobilit... Would be interesting to cross compare that with some of these policies, see how much they matter. Maybe the effects of redlining can't just be papered over so quickly.

Hawaii funds all of its public schools at the state level (i.e., not through property tax). And there are still differences between the more affluent and poorer neighborhoods. More affluent neighborhoods can fundraise more effectively and the students tend to have more stable households.

The other effect, is that for high school, almost everyone who can afford it, sends their kids to private school. This is because at the high school level, many of the smaller school districts are combined mixing different socioeconomic groups.

There's more to it than just school funding. Homes are expensive in certain areas because they are expensive. Affluent people are willing to pay more specifically to avoid being near poor people.

People who can hardly-afford-their-(new)-home will also move to expensive areas to avoid being around the "typical" poor people: alcoholics, drug-addicts, dropouts, street gangs, etc.

My mother raised me as a single mom. Her two options were "live reasonably in a poor, drug-riddled, crime-filled area" or "live poorly in a more affluent area with far less drug/crime issues". As a kid I understood that we were too poor to be living where we were living but was still too young to understand why we had moved "if we couldn't afford it". It wasn't until I was old enough to know I'd never raise my kids in my hometown either, even if it meant struggling to live somewhere I couldn't quite afford.

We weren't affluent by any means, but we we had just enough money to not be living down the street from a meth addict and being next-door-neighbors with the neighborhood slinger.

I am actually somewhat surprised that rural school districts haven't argued for pooling state funding assets. The focus always tends to be on the Urban vs Suburban divide (and cultural politics involved with suburban flight, etc.) - but rural schools would far and away be beneficiaries of such a policy change.

Rural districts want independence. Pooling of funding always results in consolidation.

I have been under the impression that economic want fuels consolidation: as funding is reduced small districts must consolidate into a smaller number of larger schools.

I believe this is what has happened in Kansas - small towns have lost local schools and kids are bussed into larger, more centralized school districts. Anecdotally, I've heard fears that this might threaten the long term stability of the small towns as kids will be less inclined to move back. Can't speak to that personally, though.

Only in extreme cases. It's hard to kill institutions. States and counties drive consolidation by paying for things.

Assuming that states/counties are not merely cutting a check to school districts (as they do for Title One funding). Using the state level department of education as a pass through to aggregate and distribute funding per student doesn't neccessitate that they can then dictate consolidation on school districts.

This touches on something that's been bugging me for awhile, and I think it's related to all the harm people do in the process of furthering their careers. Most people's goal seems to be either to get into that perfect career spot or do ANYTHING to maintain that current job they acquired.

Everything else is secondary. Family, religion, strong personal beliefs, politics, getting treated for substance abuse, etc etc. Everything is less important than that career, you are not a real man or woman if you don't have a job and don't provide for your family. Everything important is disregarded to further one's own career (I HAVE to fly to this conference, I have a super important career and all that carbon emission nonsense is for other people or other days).

When this all goes away and nobody works unless they want to the shift is going to break so many fucking brains. I really hope people can embrace the shift and work on self improvement and curiosity above all, but my hunch is most people with this idea that their job completely defines them won't handle the transition very well.

That's the wrong way of looking at it. Question why people are like that. Humans aren't infatuated with their work by some corporate conspiracy. Work has always defined the individual. Look at the history and origins of family names.

That's only in post agricultural societies. Look at most Pacific new Guinea tribes (where scarcity isn't much of an issue) and you see a lot more focus on social networks and leisure time.

> Look at the history and origins of family names

Governments of the time forced (conspired to force?) people to pick a family name for identification and tax purposes and many simply picked their profession, location, or fathers name. Some families were multigenerational smiths for example but that had more to do with the the way people learned their trades.

> Look at the history and origins of family names.

Yeah, largely derived from occupation or location [0], at least in the West. They've lost their meaning though. Example: I'm a German-American kid named Scott; as in "from Scotland." This has always bothered me.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surname#Typology

Right. It doesn't mean much anymore, but it certainly has history. OP seems to think this infatuation with work is a new phenomenon.

> Humans aren't infatuated with their work by some corporate conspiracy

I don't think he/she implied that.

I agree, you constantly see posts and discussions on the elusive concept of "work-life balance". People don't stop and take the time to address their personal needs and just concentrate on the career.

It certainly hasn't helped that:

- The adage "don't believe everything you read on the internet" from the 90's and 00's has substantially died off.

- People have turned to listening to reply, not listening to understand.

- Death of "the expert", where people believe they're a search away from being an expert on a topic.

- The language of the current divide (Patriots vs Authoritarians) is still instead presented along the partisan axis (Democrat vs Republican).

- Glorification of the 50's prosperity, where the USA was the only major manufacturing power worldwide not decimated by WW2.

All of this is fuel for various forms of civic-oriented intellectual laziness.

The article paints a pretty negative picture of the present. While its true that there has been a convergence of factors that have caused much despair/desolation in most of America outside Tech/Coastal areas, this might simply be a rebalancing of the economy. Completely anecdotal of course, but most of the young Americans I see/meet are incredibly optimistic about the future, willing to work hard for their future, interested in other cultures etc. (But perhaps this is only because I live in a liberal city). It seems like Millennials are much better poised to build and contribute to a 21st century America.

At the risk of sounding incredibly ageist, it seems like its the older generation, the baby-boomers who are unwilling to retrain, unwilling to move, unwilling to accept or understand the new economy and world order. They seem to be yearning for a time when life was easier. While I can understand the sentiment, it seems to be producing incredibly toxic effects on the nation; we've seen the political ramifications, soon we might see social and economic ones as well.

I think there is a strong selection bias going into effect here. I know plenty of young people who are struggling to find good jobs and not optimistic about the future, and I live in a "liberal" city.

"On the fact that median male wage was higher in 1969 than it is today"

The obvious explanation for this is women entering the workforce, it is basic supply and demand. While this is good for the economy and society as a whole, clearly men now face more competition for jobs.

On the one hand I'd love to talk about this with other people, particularly the sort of person who gets (some of) their news from Hacker News. On the other hand I feel like political garbage is what killed off Slashdot, and I love how HN feels like /. before it tanked. So with that being said - what I took from the article was the author's belief that Trump won because the economy is doing great for some people and terribly for others (this seems like a reasonable statement to me). He goes on to say that those people who are doing well haven't done enough to help those who have been left behind. I think there's a kernel of truth here, but I think he's also leaving something important out. Many of those most solidly left behind vote hard-right. They go to the polls and vote for politicians who promise to gut the government - to slash taxes, eliminate public education, slash Social Security and Medicare, to make the government so small you can drown it in a bathtub. It's very, very hard for those who are doing well to help those who are left behind when the people who are left behind are working so hard to eliminate any help they could (and should!) get from the government.

The fact that the rich keep getting richer seems to argue against his point of people becoming complacent around those like them. I would argue that the wealthy surrounding themselves with other wealthy is actually a driver for them to acquire more.

On the other hand this definitely has a negative affect on the poor and minorities. Although I would argue they are not so much complacent as just treading a path that is very difficult to deviate from, probably in part due to factors the article references.

In the tech sector I don't really see any aversion to moving for a job or reluctance to jump ship, just the opposite, and the tech sector is a major driver of US industry. But I can understand how this occurs in fields such as manufacturing. This is just my personal experience though.

I think complacency is not the best word to describe this phenomenon.

Tyler Cowen has a good video on this as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdfYEJa_Q38

I'm new here, and just read the Guidelines. It says "Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon."

This post doesn't seem particularly technical, and (IMHO) isn't particularly interesting. Should this article actually be here?

HN has a complicated relationship with submissions related to politics. There's been plenty of discussion related to what's appropriate and what's not. Also key to remember is what's on-topic: "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." Please note I'm not here taking a position on this particular submission.

Here's a link to some comments by mods on the topic:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13527940

When you've been on HN after a while you'll get a feel for what's appropriate and what's not, and when you've accumulated enough karma, you'll be able to flag submissions you think are inappropriate.

I love the idea of NPR discussing a complacent class

Reply on news.ycombinator.com