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This may be new to your information bubble but have you ever read about working poor phenomenon?

Your comment is perfect example of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

fundamental attribution error is a fancy way to tell someone they are self projecting, so why didn't you just say that? also you might have had disadvantages in life so you may be seeing as everyone else being disadvantaged to, the very thing you identified hes thinking with.

The reality is people are taking advantage of the generosity we have in our society and people who grow up comfortably will never know how to see someone below their standard of living as a leech but instead as oppressed. Redistributing wealth more and more creates less opportunity for the free market to lift people out of poverty.

>Redistributing wealth more and more creates less opportunity for the free market to lift people out of poverty.

What? No it doesnt? How do you even

Is this satire?

I should have used the word socialism instead of redistribution to make it more clear on my stance, but I didn't want to get political.

You are right though, butchering the middle and upper class with taxes then passing it around does help people out of poverty -- At the cost of making our future generations poorer, happens every time through out history. I am heavily against government welfare. For markets to survive it need competition, not cooperation through government bureaucracy!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0e50fQLyebI

I completely agree with this.

My immediate family and I came from having next to nothing. We busted ass and have money now. We aren't rich, but we're enjoying life in ways we couldn't growing up.

If we, instead, believed the rhetoric that life is screwed unless you came out of a "lucky vagina," we would still be broke, in Brooklyn, trying to make ends meet, and I would be another socially-inept dude that spends way too much time on games and "computers."

It's not just us either. I graduated with a bunch of people who came from similar situations and are now doing great.

Life is what you make of it.

It is too easy for people who have "made it" to say this. I have kind of made it too, so I could have the same attitude. The problem however is that anecdotes don't proof a point. You have to look at numbers. Numbers say that the majority of Americans are losing purchasing power year after year, and there are fewer middle class jobs. Somehow, the 1% have more privileges each passing day, they pay close to nothing in taxes and corporations can dodge taxes any way they want. As a result, there is less money to invest in people, and the same pattern is repeating itself in most countries around the world (globalization, remember).

Where do you think rich people put their wealth? A savings account?

Caymans and investments. Most of those geared for quick and high returns, not sustainability, improving society or long term job creation.

I would argue that public securities and the stock market is exactly what provides sustainability and long term job creation.

Wrong. The stock market doesn't care about job creation. They care about wealth creation, which is mostly concentrated in the hands of a few. In fact, wall street loves when firms lay off workers. If every firm out there laid off 50% or their workers the price of stocks would greatly increase, because then more money would go directly to the hands of shareholders.

Some do

Who are they going to invest the money they have in though? People who play computer games and watch Netflix all day? Probably not hey. If you want any chance you're going to have to do something. At least try something.

Enough with this. People who have money are not investing in productive things. They are mostly investing in hedge funds to play the market for the short term as a lottery, or in merger/acquisitions, which kills more jobs than creates. They also put money in assets like real estate that have their prices inflated because of the big rise in money looking for safe investments. When investors do something productive, it is just high technology that kills more jobs than it creates. In other words, the idea that wealthy people create jobs is a myth that is patently wrong in our times.

alternate theory. people who have money are desperately looking for things with potential for big returns. if you are one of those things or create one of those things there is more money looking for you than has ever looked for anyone in the history of the world.

i.e., they're looking for something that will concentrate wealth in their hands even more. This just exemplifies my point.

even if they were investing specifically for job creation, it would be less efficient than just redistributing the wealth and increasing the demand for products which would directly lead to job growth.

in other words, a restaurant owner isnt going to hire new employees unless hes got more customers, it doesnt matter how much 'investment' you give them, what creates job is demand.

Confirmation bias?

Just because it worked for you, doesn't mean there aren't a thousand people who tried and failed at exactly the same thing.

Your chances are definitely higher than zero if you try, but unfortunately it's no guarantee that you'll succeed.

There is no guarantee for anything. That is not a reason not to try.

There is literally nothing better to do with your life than try. So just try.

this comment is what a lifetime of philosophical thought, traveling, psychedelics, meditation, and experimentation has led me to as well.

"there is literally nothing better to do with your life than try. so just try."

The issue though is that a lot of the people mentioned in the original article don't think trying is worthwhile. So advice to "just try" is always going to fall short.

As advice it also ignores the structural issues that make trying easier and harder for various people. One way of encouraging people to try is to break down the real barriers that exists and make it harder for them than others.

This is the same kind of "advice" depressed people get. "Have you tried getting better"? "You just need to be happy". "Try my coping mechanism". "See a standup comedian". "Just try".

I hope I don't have to go through all the reasons this is fundamentally disconnected from the problem described in the article now.

What's your alternative?

Professional therapy.

what if that doesn't work?

I'm not prepared for this hypothetical, who knows what I would do, I guess I might even launch a startup.

Thanks, but this gives me nothing actionable. What am I supposed to do with this? Just be depressed?

Your advice is for a problem which is different from that in the article and the larger Macro scenario.

People ARE trying. Its not really a good strategy as it gets no where. Its only a better strategy than not trying, as not trying gets you to being a depressing statistic, like joblessness in erstwhile manufacturing hubs.

So what's the alternative? Give up and cry before even trying?

Knowing that you might fail and flame out is the definiton of risk; you do it because the upside is worth it

Obviously the people who drop out of the labor force don't think the upside is worth it.

Otherwise they'd be out there, looking for work. Instead of dismissing the possibility that they act in their rational self interest, perhaps you can study how the actual risk/reward ratio evolved for these people over the course of the last few decades.

But that would be quite a bit harder than giving self-help advice on the internets.

Okay, but you still haven't presented me with an alternative.

The point is you need to qualify by trying first.

"There is no point in trying, because you will fail" kind of attitude prevents you from trying at the first place.

There is one reason to be assured of failure, which is by doing nothing at all.

Same. Neither parents went to college. I went to college completely on the government's dime because my EFC was $0.

The only thing I had to do to get free grants was to show my parents didn't have money.

Their poverty became an enormous benefit for me when applying to college and receiving financial aid. It's an incredible and amazing country we live in.

You are mostly correct. But IMO you miss something very important -- "busting ass" has zero correlation to "we have money now".

I busted my ass as a obedient worker bee for 15 years and now (at 37 years old) all I have are 4 debts and a bit of tech. No own apartment/house, no savings, no security of any kind. If I lose my job tomorrow, I am as good as homeless. Oh, and I have health problems for which I can't pay (having teeth with holes in them isn't fixed by home remedies, before you try that).

I am glad it worked for you. You have to understand what you say is a confirmation bias however.

Will I ever stop trying? No. I am changing approach drastically as I am typing this, changing the way I work and communicate with people, focusing more on what the business needs are instead of negotiating for meager salaries that barely cover my huge monthly expenses and food. I'll succeed eventually, simply because people who don't give up + change their way of doing things are inevitably bound to succeed. But again, don't try to push the message of "work hard and it will work out". No it won't, otherwise now my mother would have had respectable pension and wouldn't rely on me for shelter and food.

Marxism should never be "easily dismissed". It should be respected and fought for. The problem is that we're afraid to go out and actually fight the Permanent Revolution; because we've been cowed by those who currently hold the power.

You're right, we've never had Real Marxism (TM), we just have to try a little harder next time.

> Capitalism (according to Marxist theory) can no longer sustain the living standards of the population due to its need to compensate for falling rates of profit by driving down wages, cutting social benefits and pursuing military aggression. The socialist system would succeed capitalism as humanity's mode of production through workers' revolution.

Do they mean that same capitalism that brings >1,000,000 Chinese people out poverty every month? Did Mao not try hard enough?

Newsflash, folks: we've had a few workers' revolutions. They're not all they're cracked up to be. Try talking to someone who lived through one of them.

Revolutions have failed in many ways, but they have an upside: putting pressure on the elite to do something in order to maintain what they have (and to keep their heads glued to the body). Why do you think we have working rights around the world nowadays? Because a bunch of crazy people decided to fight against the prevailing status in the beginning of XX century, and even run a revolution if necessary. Nowadays people are too afraid of doing anything, this is the perfect scenario for the downward social spiral that we're seeing in the XXI century.

> Do they mean that same capitalism that brings >1,000,000 Chinese people out poverty every month?

No, they mean the dominant economic system of the developed West in the mid-19th through early-20th century (since replaced in the developed west by the modern mixed economy which is an unstable form with a danger of reverting back to capitalism because it retains central features of capitalism.)

What China has is a transitional form that is somewhere on the map between totalitarian centralization through a kind of neofeudalism (that relates to classical feudalism in the same what that Leninist/Stalinist/Maoist totalitarianism relates to monarchic absolutism) to something like capitalism. Which is certainly progress, just as Marx recognized that the transition from.feudalism to the kind of capitalism he and other contemporary socialist critiqued was progress.

But that it is progress from something worse earlier doesn't make it the ideal end state.

> Did Mao not try hard enough?

Mao tried quite hard at completely the wrong thing. Leninism and it's descendants abandoned key tenants of Marxism to create something that either (in the overly generous view) they thought could work in very different conditions than Marx addressed or (in the more cynical view) as served as convenient propaganda for authoritarian populism in the societies in which they operated.

A word of advice: avoid the word "Marxism" like a plague. If you believe there are some good ideas hidden in it, present those ideas directly, without assigning historical credit to anyone.

I'm not making the case that Marxism had good ideas here, I'm making the case that Marxism had ideas that led to change in the direction it seems, without collapse, in the places where actual Marxism is a thing, and that the collapsed systems that called themselves Marxist shared a common deviation from Marxism on fundamental points stemming from their shared point of departure, Leninism.

Also, treating Marxism the way you suggest empowers the people who will use association with Marxism (which whether or not people who think Marxism had good ideas avoid the name, people who don't can still draw the connections) as an attack against an idea, leveraging the failure of Leninist societies to suggest that anything associated with Marxism is bad. So, no, I'll continue to point out that that involves not only the ad hominem fallacy, but also the fallacy of equivocation.

Why? Marxism refers to the work of Marx and Engels, who are forefathers of the criticism of capitalism (along with other 18th century anarchists and socialists). I see no reason to get rid of the term or use other terms; I base my reasoning of Marx's work and Engels's formulations and I'll be sure to give the great men their credit.

That kind of language policing is ridiculous. The words mean what they mean. If there is some taboo around a word like Marxism or feminism or islamism, that doesn't mean we need new words, it means there is resistance to the ideas. Over time the words depoliticize slightly and can be used freely again.

Giving in to people who are trying to cloud the meaning of words is the linguistic equivalent to negotiating with highjackers. You can do it, but you just make the job easier for the next highjacker.

I know it's a scary moment, where it feels like words have lost their meaning and insanity reigns, but that's just the zeitgeist. Words still mean things and that still had power.

>Do they mean that same capitalism that brings >1,000,000 Chinese people out poverty every month?

The idea that by pointing to some successes, it justifies the whole system of appropriating labour for profit is utterly falacious and false. I hope you can see that it's not sound reasoning.

A system can have merits; Marx was very clear that Capitalism has various merits, especially over its predecessors. His idea was that there is a further reachable goal. You have made no effort to dismiss this other than by saying "what we have now is pretty ok".

>Try talking to someone who lived through one of them.

Why would their experience be relevant to reformulations in theory? To be clear, I'm not advocating for Soviet-style Communism.

"It should be respected and fought for. "

Sorry, 100 million dead bodies is more than enough to convince me that Marxism doesn't work.

If you think Leninism is Marxism, you are a dupe of Leninist propaganda.

Ah, yes. "No true Scotsman".

Nope, not going to play that.

Edit:

At this stage, enough so-called "Marxist" governments have descended into slavery, starvation, and mass murder that the burden of proof should lie on those who advocate such governments, and that burden should be heavy indeed.

But nope, it's always "but that wasn't REAL Marxism".

After a century of trying, with dozens of attempts, it is quite clear that either those hellhole governments are "real Marxism" or, conversely, that "real Marxism" does not and cannot exist.

Otherwise someone would've gotten it right by now.

Leninism directly reverses fundamental premises of Marxism, including the required initial conditions and path. It's not Marxism.

There has been real Marxism, though it's never been absolutely dominant in any society. Particularly, it has been a key driving force in replacing the system of Capitalism that 19th Century socialists identified and critiqued with the substantially different modern mixed economy as the dominant economic form of advanced societies, even though Marxists would claim that as far from a complete success, as the modern mixed economy is far from their desired end state.

> Ah, yes. "No true Scotsman".

Refusing to back up certain or all interpretations of an idea by no means amounts to NTS.

You're making a fallacy by saying that these problems you mention are core to Marxist thought. Modern Marxist philosophers are almost dedicated to finding flaws in 20th century Marxist implementations, and doing research on other models such as anarchism, post-left anarchism and technocracy.

Dismissing this research as "lol no true scotsman, not playing that" is incredibly ignorant and facile.

"You're making a fallacy by saying that these problems you mention are core to Marxist thought."

Nope. I recognize that "Marxist thought" doesn't specifically advocate such things.

Nonetheless, those things always happen.

So far the scorecard is about Murderous Hellhole: 100, Utopia:0.

Usually one only needs to be burned once or twice before deciding that touching a hot stove is a bad idea, even if that glowing burner does look really pretty.

I don't think they must necessarily "always happen"; capitalism is much more developed now, much more advanced, and the conditions for revolution are more pertinent. I think you should move out of thinking of the way hitherto "Communist" states have been thought of. If you think that the kind of society Communism wants to acheive is desirable, I would also suggest that you help research and develop ideas for how to reach it.

You may be interested in anarchist writers, or Murray Bookchin.

I sometimes wonder if there are Neo-Nazis out there who argue that Hitlers regime was not real National Socialism.

The "interesting" thing about capitalism is that it kills millions of people every year and people defending it don't need to say that this isn't real capitalism. It is. And it made it common to die, kill and fight wars for money and resources.

> The "interesting" thing about capitalism is that it kills millions of people every year and people defending it don't need to say that this isn't real capitalism.

Actually, defenders of capitalism, when confronted with problems attributed to it, frequently argue that the problems are "the State" or "crony capitalism", and that the problems would not exist with "real capitalism".

Of course, both the State and cronyism are features of the system for which the name "capitalism" was coined by its critics, but that doesn't stop the defenders of capitalism for saying that those are separate and opposed things to "real capitalism".

> And it made it common to die, kill and fight wars for money and resources.

That was common long before capitalism.

The two most murderous regimes in history have both been socialist ones. Capitalism has proven itself to be less deadly and more prosperous than both socialism and feudalism (which I assume you must be referring to with your "it made it common...", as if there was some idealistic pre-capitalist society to emulate).

>Sorry, 100 million dead bodies is more than enough to convince me that Marxism doesn't work.

Where did Marx and Engels write about 100M dead bodies?

Where did the people who invented thalidomide write about deformed babies?

Sorry, not seeing your point here.

If Very Bad Things happen every time a particular idea is put into practice, it's a bad idea, regardless of whether the Very Bad Things were explicitly mentioned when the idea was put forth.

> Where did Marx and Engels write about 100M dead bodies?

More to the point, where did Marx and Engels write about narrow vanguardism instead of broad class consciousness, bypassing capitalism rather than moving forward from it, or any of the other central points of Leninism, which (and not Marxism) is the common ideology shared by the people responsible for those 100 million dead bodies?

The only people trying to put Marxism, rather than Leninism, into effect have been in developed capitalist (and now, in part due to their efforts, post-capitalist mixed) economies.

> Where's the hard work in today's generation? Where's the personal responsibility? Where's the discipline? Where's the can-do attitude?

Look out your window it's everywhere.