Young White America Is Haunted by a Crisis of Despair
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An apprenticeship might just be right up his alley, but I'm not sure how available that is in the US.
That being said, its a mature industry and not highly regarded in the US as it is a "blue collar" job. Stigmatizing & devaluing an honest days work is ridiculous to me, but that is what our society has done to these jobs.
I don't think we should discourage trades, but we can't sugar coat them either. I used to work as a mechanic and never met one that was 65 (the SS retirement age). The safety nets in place are optimized for people who work office jobs, not manual jobs.
I was an officer and platoon leader in the Army, the endgame for a lot of my soldiers was to use their GI Bill benefits to get to trade school and then become an apprentice in a union. They considered making it in one of the sought-after trades really "making it."
If you've ever hired an electrician in the Bay Area, btw -- let me tell you, these guys are doing pretty well for themselves.
"Such work in Athens had not become so complicated as it is today, when the intelligence demanded in many manual trades is at times much greater than that required for the operations of the lower middle class, and even a college professor may look upon an automobile mechanic (in certain exigencies) as a very god"
Many require some sort of apprenticeship. The post is on the Mr. Money Mustache website, which is site dedicated to helping people lead happier lives that are less dependent on having lots of money and lots of "things". This idea runs pretty much against everything in a capitalist society, where consumption is encouraged and status is largely based on how much money you have. But you can live a good life with much less if you work to rid yourself of some of the harmful ideas that become ingrained in us as we grow up and live in this sort of society.
Even La Fin du Monde from Unibroue is $8 on draft at the Toronado on Haight... if you're into that kind of thing.
That being said, people I know in Turkey were wholly unwilling to go to the US to work, they'd rather wait 2 or 3 years for their company to send them to work in Europe due to the political climate and laws in the US. That was under Obama tho, I'd be surprised if it hadn't degraded since then.
There are a plenty of things that play into decisions like these:
1. 100K/year doesn't necessarily mean you get some fixed income every month. Not everyone enjoys that kind of a lifestyle.
2. Feeling of doing a lesser intellectually involving work.
3. Perennial threat of facing impending dilution in wages, as you are working in a area where people have a lower barrier to entry.
4. Other social respect problems. You likely won't get as much attention in your circles as some one is who working at Google.
Many other things...
By and large you will still be better off with a job that pays you a fixed income every month.
The reason I say I'm on the outside looking in is because doing any job that requires the ability to use both hands was never an option for me.
But when the business isn't successful, the resentment builds on both sides. Blue-collar trades are not considered societally desirable and working in the parents' business or career some interpret as a lack of ambition. These factors combine with geography to greatly affect the dating pool for such people, further restricting an avenue of social mobility whose availability was more widespread historically.
What contexts are we talking about for the regard afforded different occupations? Other parents at a school, former classmates at a reunion, talking to a stranger at a bar? what kind of bar? Making money, and being handy and able to work with your hands impresses people. Imagine telling someone in a bar that you are a contractor, plumber, fisherman, fireman, or lumberjack or telling someone that you do tech support at a call center.
Different people are simply going to think one job is cooler than the other, so his son should just choose the occupation that gives him the best life and ignore those who don't regard it highly.
I have no idea how we got to this point. It's even more absurd because you call these people because you didn't know how, didn't want to learn, or didn't want to do a job _yourself_.
It's absurd; I honestly feel guilty about being a software engineer with a cushy job making high-end of average for the area when I feel like I do nothing at all. I type some stuff, other people are happy, I get money. I get it, it took a lot of time to figure out what to type in the best way, but it took the electrician I hired to rewire my house a while to learn the regs and best practices, and after spending 5 minutes in my attic in the summer did not envy his job of running cable up to it and then out to all the rooms upstairs, whereas I just sit on a porch swing or at my desk or on my couch while I work.
Many now have their own businesses (one is a plasterer, another a builder) and they earn good money, own their own homes, and have no student debt.
The reason? They had supportive parents. Many of the people who are falling into despair tragically come from very broken families.
Housing rising in cost is only dog piling on and exacerbating the issue.
Look at the trends of the past few decades: divorce; single parent; and dual income households. There is in fact remarkedly less two parent, supported by single income households, meaning it's a rareity for a child to simply have a parent at home when they return from school to fix them a healthy snack, ask how their day was, or help with homework. Certainly it's not a single cause, but stability in the home is indisputably tied to mental well being of the child.
The rate of change is the rate of new divorces minus the rate at which divorcee households are ending (if the concern is divorced parents with children, by death of the parent, child, or the child leaving the household.)
> Even if the divorce rate was zero, there would still be existent divorced households.
A declining, eventually to zero, number of them.
I was instead pointing out that simply bring up a reduced rate is not really a counterpoint. Especially when, as you accurately point out, the divorce rate is not even the entire picture for the rate-of-change of divorced households. See also Arizhel's sibling comment:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14150694
But hey, will_brown did a better job of making the same point and defending himself:
Yes if you ignore overall trends and use a simple snapshot today divorce rates are slightly lower than the alltime high in 1980. To my larger point, in 1960 9% of kids lived in single parent homes, that number today is 36% and as high as 72% in a certain demographic.
Look all these 'you can make it other parts of the system, I know someone who had a disadvantage and went onto a great success' is nice, but it's also platitudinous. It's a way of saying 'I don't want to deal with your problems.' Yes, there are successful people who didn't finish school or had learning difficulties, but they often had other advantages or had the good luck to grow up in a time or region where there was greater economic opportunity and fewer barriers to entry.
Someone who can't handle very basic things like multiplication tables is structurally fucked, to put it bluntly. That's more than not being good at math or not being bookish, that's not being able to work out the relationship between the stuff in your grocery cart, the bill, and the amount of money left in your bank account. And not in a way that you can you screw up a few times and then get the hang of, but possibly permanently and unalterably barring major advances in our understanding of the brain, which I guarantee you will go to poor and disabled people last rather than first.
That level of disability falls far short of normal adult competence and raises serious questions about whether the individual will ever achieve economic independence. People who are not very competent or who are incapable of financial independence are systematically treated like shit in this society and generally forced into the humiliation of relying on charity, which is inherently unpredictable and unreliable and antithetical to any kind of long-term stability.
I apologize for putting this so bluntly as it will be painful to read for the gp, but we need to acknowledge the reality of these problems rather than wish them away with a fairy-tale about enterprise and a can-do attitude. Life outcomes are more than simply a matter of high or low expectations, and insisting that everything stems from the expectations one has of someone's potential is an implicit abdication of responsibility for dealing with tricky social problems through public policy.
All these examples of being a plumber, electrician, or similar skilled tradesperson - which are often trotted out on HN - are basically restatements of what the various posters would do if you told them they had to work some sort of manual job. How the hell is someone who can't do multiplication at age 15 and has trouble putting a sentence together going to succeed as a plumber or electrician? Would you trust your home's electrical wiring to someone who can't work out Ohm's law to figure out what sort of fuse you need, or trust your plumbing to someone who won't be able to remember what sort of pipe to use for what purpose? Of course you won't, you hire a tradesperson because you assume they're certified and competent to work with sometimes-dangerous tools and procedures.
A person like that described in the gp may have many qualities, but intellectual disabilities like that are going to bar them from any sort of safety-critical work that might pay well. The friend that I mentioned at the top of this post has the intellectual and emotional development of a 9 or 10 year old. She's already a legal adult and her capacities are unlikely to improve significantly. That doesn't mean the world is a closed book to her or that she will never be able to develop herself, but it does impose a pretty solid ceiling on her economic prospects because there ain't a whole lot of jobs for adult-sized 10 year olds with personality problems. She wants to be a videogame character artist and I give her help and encouragement with anything that might advance that goal, but we're talking about someone who can't handle a busy shift at a Taco Bell and spends several weeks of every year in a secure psychiatric unit. She's almost certainly not going to go on to enjoy the rewarding careers people are talking about here, but very likely to end up homeless or in jail.
These are problems that we need to start talking about instead of wishing away because there are a lot of people who have a lot of problems, nothing much to lose, and little motivation to keep trying in a society that treats them as dispensable or ignores their existence altogether.
What do you think, realistically, are the options available here?
In full fairness, here's where I'm coming from with this question: You talk repeatedly of a "problem" that society needs to "talk about" instead of "wishing away". But I'm not sure what to even consider, if we are discussing people with disabilities severe enough that they cannot function independently. And if independent living is not a solution, then the only other solution I see is long-term supervised living. And, AFAIK, this is something already provided through disability-based Social Security and Medicare.
Apraxia is a motor disorder caused by damage to the brain
(specifically the posterior parietal cortex), in which the
individual has difficulty with the motor planning to
perform tasks or movements when asked, provided that the
request or command is understood and he/she is willing to
perform the task.
I find it borderline condescending that so many comments below are just handwaving this as "he should just be a plumber!" as if plumbers don't need to take training classes or remember specific technical details. If you're reading this thread and wondering why manual trades are undervalued in the US and also suggesting gp's son become an electrician, you're part of the problem.
>despite putting forth his best effort because he simply can't remember anything
Acting like this person should apprentice as a programmer as some have suggested is wishing the problem away.
Of course, this was a different time, but I believe the principle is valid. If you have confidence, charm, and enterprising spirit, the world is open despite any particular individual limitations.
The white-collar career path of collegiate education is not the only option, and as many upset Millennials are discovering, it's often not even a good option anymore.
An illiterate black person had almost no chance to have a successful life.
> If you have confidence, charm, and enterprising spirit, the world is open despite any particular individual limitations.
THAT is white privilege. You must understand that the world is simply NOT open to black people this way. Not at all.
clearly this is not the same thing.
The #1 challenge is quality - as a parent, you'd have to be and stay involved, as even within a single organization, the quality of each "house" can vary really significantly based on the people who work there, and further, can drift over time as the staff evolves.
Anyway, here's to you; parenting is never easy.
edit: grammar
http://study.com/welding_education.html
If the OP's child can not multiply, or follow ordered operations, it may be a huge stretch to to follow welding step-by-step assembly instructions.
The higher level welding certifications have chemistry and physics knowledge requirements.
http://www.aws.org/library/doclib/CWEng-bok.pdf
Source: Dad welds and has attempted to teach me. Only marginally interested :)
While that's pretty damn horrible, the fate of people with newly-minted bachelor's degrees isn't much to write home about either, unless you happened to major in the few areas of study where gainful employment is possible. Crushing student debt, high cost of living cities, an unreachably inflated housing market, low (but non-zero for now) job prospects, the looming threat of automation and robotics, underemployment--and if they get a professional job--a workplace full of only entry-level opportunities, with senior and management opportunities sucked up by boomers who refuse to, or can't, retire.
Sure, it's not at the level of dying of a heroin addiction, but there's plenty of anxiety and lack of opportunity to go around.
Additionally, they will usually influence monetary policy to ensure their status is never challenged, which is why rapidly rising housing prices aren't a major political issue at the state and federal level, despite our tax code & loan incentives encouraging ballooning housing prices.
Also, this is a decent piece: https://www.oxfam.org/en/pressroom/pressreleases/2017-01-16/...
I don't have any links on-hand but there's plenty of material out there (from reputable sources, and not-so-reputable ones) with a quick Google search.
https://www.google.com/search?q=wealth+concentration+suppres...
Democracy and diffusion of political power have been very recent phenomena, in the larger scheme of things.
Interestingly, I was reading about the idea of a wealth tax and came across this depressing nugget ...:
> In 1999, Donald Trump proposed for the United States a one off 14.25% wealth tax on the net worth of individuals and trusts worth $10 million or more. Trump claimed that this would generate $5.7 trillion in new taxes, which could be used to eliminate the national debt.[18] A net wealth tax may also be designed to be revenue neutral as where it is used to broaden the tax base, stabilize the economy and reduce individual income and other taxes[citation needed].
Another arguing point for when I get into it with the "what's wrong with income inequality" folks here. :)
Basically the only place to get decent returns these days are in startups, which is why valuations have gone sky-high. This in turn cuts the average return, although in tech startups this is manifested as a big chance of losing everything and a small chance of a great return rather than a small chance of losing everything and a big chance at a small return.
I think what's actually going on is a big innovation deficit. We're at the end of the current scientific & technology paradigm, and there's not enough fundamental research going on to generate new technological opportunities. We see this in the returns to innovation (which are sky-high: if you come up with a technical breakthrough that legitimately makes things better for lots of people, you become an insta-billionaire) and the rareness of those returns. Historically, the last time this happened was the Great Depression, and WW2 broke us out of it because the war department funded a good deal of research that could never have happened in peacetime, which were then commercialized over the ensuing 50 years or so.
We need to mobilize this capital back into the economy, rather than letting it languish in the financial markets, guarded jealously by a handful of people. The economic stimulus it would provide could easily help kickstart and sustain waves of growth and development, though we should not repeat the errors of the past (urban sprawl, heavy investment in infrastructure in dying suburbs).
The last two were borne of an era where sprawl was supposed to distribute the white populace so as to allow some to survive nukes, and it has run its course and proved to be unmaintainable (look at Livingston, TX).
>> not enough fundamental research going on to generate new technological opportunities.
And on the other hand, the news is full of items about technologies with large market impact, in almost every industry, and a lot of new technological building blocks. Some of it is crap, but still.
>> We see this in the returns to innovation .. rareness of those returns.
Maybe this is because of more intense competition - in the past you could had some years before someone copied you. Today, it happens much faster, and barriers to entry are often easier, at those stages.
The post-war years saw rapid consumer adoption of lots of technologies initially developed in the 20s and 30s but forced into rapid adoption by WW2: radar, sonar, aviation, refrigeration, antibiotics, nuclear energy, microwaves, air conditioners, interstate highways, computers, aluminum, plastics, synthetic rubber, rocketry, and then later the offshoots of rocketry & computers (GPS, software, and the Internet). That last wave is petering out now.
There is evidence that a huge new wave is incubating now, with 3D printing, drones, telecommuting, cheap satellite launches, mesh networking, solar and wind energy, and more far-out technologies like carbon nanotubes, memristors, and solid-state batteries. But all of these technologies will need sustained R&D expenditures to get to a robustness & price point level that makes them suitable for consumer applications.
Then you have the secondary effects: the chips that are used as sensors in the phones are now cheap enough to put into everything. I have an e-parking device that automatically stops and shows the time when I park (many parking spots here are free, but can only be used for a limited time). It is not connected to anything, it just measures when the car moves.
[1]: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/01/12/evolution-of...
The mature technology wave also tends to incubate the next wave as well, like how digital computers grew out of the dying gasps of mass-produced factory manufacturing, and the Internet grew out of the dying gasps of desktop & workstation software. It's likely that whatever comes next will incubate & get initial distribution on top of the Internet.
EDIT: also i think there's a fundamental step up in the nature of scientific discovery - with the combination of miniaturization, robotics, and machine learning and simulation(sometimes) is a new, very potent discovery tool.
And a lot of this is at the commercial level, and while more r&d could probably accelerate things, even staying at the current levels,we'll see a lot happening.
But i'm not sure how can we compare what's next to what was before? what can compete with 0 infant mortality and nuclear weapons ? let's say we cured cancer, is it enough? Maybe not. Maybe a fully automated world can ? maybe.
Naturally that's far harder than some vaccines and a critical mass of a bunch of stuff. But we may be getting there.
"Live where your heart desires. Work on what your brain finds most interesting." Telecommuting + solar + mesh/satellite networking.
Really, a more economically realistic vision(depending on moore's law) would be high-quality VR for everybody, so everybody can be where their heart desires.
- waste disposal: system knows trash levels in each bin, allows optimization of routes, saving 30%.
- agriculture: for trees: a bug trap, that measures the bug density in an area - allowing optimization of pesticide. etc for agriculture.
- Smart sensors inside pipes, allowing cities to detect leaks in advance. Same for clogged pipes in restaurants.
- Putting a lot of sensors in manufacturing processes, collection and analysis to see at what conditions there are problems with the product.
- in restaurant chains, putting a lot of sensors, allowing management to keep an eye. also, measuring and tracking everything allows better stock management, critical in high-perishability stuff,
It's just that a.) nobody has produced a product that actually lets me do this (other than the DJ thing, which you can approximate with various streaming services) and b.) I want to make sure that nobody other than me can do these things. Until someone solves the security & usability aspects and the industry actually adopts those solutions, it's just a gimmick.
Nor can I stand the idea of having devices in my home that send telemetry back to their manufacturers, because we've seen time and time again that any such central control can and will be used for harm. The recent case of the garage-door-opener manufacturer who bricked their inexplicably network-connected controller in retaliation for a nasty review is a perfect example. I don't care how convenient the device might be, if it requires me to maintain an ongoing relationship with its manufacturer, I'm not touching it.
So - much as it might be nice to wake up, yawn, ask the house for coffee, and know that the pot has started brewing over in the kitchen, I most emphatically do not want to actually live in such an environment. I fear that I may be forced to do so, someday, should product manufacturers decide that IOT-encrusted gadgets are so much more profitable that they are no longer willing to sell the ordinary kind.
One aspect which feels like a significant difference to me is the centralization of control into cloud services. It's great that my washing machine performs the various steps in its job without human supervision. It would be rather less great if the washing machine needed to phone home and get permission from its manufacturer before it started. An IoT washing machine would have to offer a hell of a lot more convenience before it would make up for that kind of a disadvantage... but IoT devices as they exist today are basically just normal devices with extra remote control bolted on. That doesn't buy much, especially not when the remote control remains under the control of the manufacturer.
If there were an internet-connected washing machine where the novel automation remained entirely under the end-user's control, that would be a different story; but as things stand today, if someone is trying to sell me an internet-connected washing machine, it's because they are not content to merely sell me a piece of hardware: they are trying to leverage that sale into some novel ongoing revenue stream. Well, I don't want to sign up for them to have an ongoing revenue stream, and I especially don't want them to retain control over the device they have putatively sold me. So, unless this new automation is, let's say, doubling the convenience the device offers, it's a net loss and I don't want it.
That brings out the other difference I see between the IoT and previous generations of household automation projects: we are already well out along the curve of diminishing returns when it comes to household chores. There are already lots of automatic devices I don't bother with because they don't offer enough value to justify the space they take up. Sure, I have a refrigerator, laundry machines, and vacuum cleaner; but I don't have a food processor or an automatic coffee maker (I use a kettle and a french press). I used to have a roomba, but it wasn't worth the bother, so I clean the kitchen floor with an ordinary broom. Nor do I have an electric can opener, as my grandparents did, nor an electric towel warming rack, nor a motorized shaver, nor any of dozens of other "labor saving devices" as they used to be called, because they don't actually save enough labor to make them worth the cost of storing and maintaining them.
In the case of a hypothetical IoT laundry machine, for example, there's little that further automation and remote control features could accomplish to save more time, because I still have to load the machine by hand and deal with all the sorting and folding and putting away afterward. Perhaps an IoT washing machine could, let's say, send a ping to my phone when the laundry is done. Well... that optimizes a part of the process that is already cheap, so it isn't worth much. I still have to go downstairs and do all the work after I get the ping, and there's nothing that any amount of Internet connectivity can do to help with that. In order to actually be significantly more helpful than today's machines, a future laundry machine would need to have some kind of robot hands coupled with machine vision, so it could sort and fold. That would be a true innovation, something valuable enough to be worth putting up with the increased fragility and novel failure modes - but there's no reason such a device would need Internet connectivity or a subscription to a cloud service.
The capital class (as opposed to workers) has captured [2] nearly all of the business value created since the 70s through productivity improvements. Automation will multiply this disparity. Recent "post-recovery" income gains have almost gone entirely to the top [3].
I really don't think anyone should be expected to give a shit about what capital holders think. Maybe things would actually improve if they could be made to stop "holding" so much.
1: http://www.gallup.com/poll/182816/little-change-percentage-a...
2: http://www.epi.org/publication/understanding-the-historic-di...
3: https://thinkprogress.org/the-1-percent-have-gotten-all-the-...
The problem with class-warfare explanations is that class distinctions are a lot more muddled than simple labels, and many people are both labor and capital at the same time. Or if not, one member of a family might easily be working class while another family member relies upon savings to live.
(I do think there's something inexcusable about the layers of hedge funds & management fees between a retiree's pension and the actual capital markets; it's like the entire financial industry decided that pensioners are the rubes to fleece.)
I agree with the rest of your post, except this part. Entry level jobs are what people should be getting straight out of college. Senior positions and management jobs go to the people with the experience to do them, and that's almost certainly not a person with a year of experience and a new bachelor's degree.
I kind of wonder if these weird expectations aren't part of the problem. If the definition of success is to graduate college and move straight to senior management, things might not work out so well...
"Entry level" positions are by definition for people just entering a field, and have nothing to do with whether the position requires a degree. Entry level retail doesn't need a college degree, for example.
In a lot of fields, though, getting a degree is the bare minimum qualification, so simply having one doesn't give you a leg up. Why hire a person just out of school for a senior level position when there are more experienced people (also with degrees) applying for it? Feel free to apply, but experience will win out every time.
> Conversely, who wants to spend 4 years (and probably $$$) getting a college degree in order to then work a job that bores them to tears?
That's not really what work is about. Every job is boring and sucks sometimes, that's why it's called "work" and not "leisure" or "playing" or "fun". Unfortunately, a degree isn't a magic certificate to avoid boring work.
Very much this. I came out of a good school with only $30k in debt and a degree in a tech field. My wife came out of an okay state school with $60k in debt (much of that private loans with high interest rates) and a masters in art history and really no job prospects.
I'm supporting both of us now on a salary which sounded like a lot to me at first, but we live in the Bay Area. After my $2500 per month rent on a 1 bedroom (low for Bay area standards), and $1600 per month for student loans, we're not left with much each month. I certainly never thought I'd be living paycheck to paycheck on my current salary. We're postponing kids and a house for now, while my parents had both at my age. We don't go out much, we don't buy much. We're comfortable, but not really flourishing.
And now I'm starting to see the words "Ballistic Nuclear Missile" and "Napa Valley" in the same sentence. My wife said to me last night she's scared of the future, and for the first time in my life, I'm starting to get a little worried too. As long as I can remember the future was the brightest, most desirable place for me to be. Now? I'm not so sure...
I don't understand why any sensible person would get an MA in the humanities. It's all well and good if you are doing for your own intellectual curiosity, but it's not so great if you expect a living wage on that degree. :(
Fast forward to today. The liberal arts (humanities) are fine if you have a trust fund. If you're going to have to work for your living? Not so much.
Yet.
The US used to be like this, and people thrived as a result. We've been heading in the opposite direction.
Automation can either allow everyone to do whatever they want with almost unlimited leisure, or continue as it has destroying the middle class and consolidating wealth for the elite.
I used to be hardcore capitalism but if something isn't done to spread the wealth we are going to have our own French revolution with the plebes rising up against the elite. The anger that got trump elected is just the beginning if things don't change
Unfortunately, basic human nature probably won't allow this change to happen without violence.
the answers to these problems are rarely simple
Do you really think Google should be paying 3% tax?
They didn't direct things from the top, but the mob's opinion was accounted for.
Another problem is actually having skills to program the machine and devise even a basic industrial process. Then there is a game of finding right suppliers for smaller volumes...
This will literally never happen. The labor force will look a lot different, the average person will be much more educated. But we are never going to be in a perpetual state of leisure, or anything resembling it, lest we want to halt human progress in place. All automation does is allow us to focus on larger problems, or create new ones.
What do you suggest we do with them?
Unless we can get to the point where we can manipulate genes to increase intelligence that's not a solution to the problem
As the high school coach used to say: "You don't need talent to practice!"
Barring people truly born with mental disabilities, anyone can do it with the right attitude and resources. I'd be less worried about the gene pool and more worried about the unequal distribution of education spending causing pockets of the country to be financially unable to educate people.
Do you have evidence of the contrary? Of the top X% of highschool students who make it to engineering programs at my university, roughly 40% fail or switch majors. If they can't do it, how do you expect average or lower people to?
It is simply not feasible.
How many scientist and engineers can any future workforce support? There will be a limit to how many "production" jobs there can be. By this I mean manufacturing, farming, infrastructure etc. This still leaves many creative endevours that can be produced and consumed almost without limit - but this also assumes people have expendable income.
As far as how many scientists and engineers we need? Virtually infinite if you're creative enough. There are plenty of problems left to solve that we haven't even started. The best motivator for finding and solving those problems? Money.
Look back on history and I bet all the things you think of as great achievements in human progress were the result of the leisure class's hobbies. Especially Math and Science!
Theres a darker reason why the majority of people won't be enjoying leisure- because the power to force people to work is actually a pleasure and a value of the ruling classes, and nearly everyone has internalized it.
Thats why you hear an outcry against welfare or basic income, but not a peep about trust funds or inheritances.
Note: I say this as an Atheist, ex-Catholic.
Jubilee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_%28biblical%29
It would be brutal. Very few would be able to get credit, and those that could would come under constant pressure to liquidate assets.
> land is pooled and redivided
If the government tried to seize and redistribute private land, there would be civil war.
I think we have different definitions of practical.
Circling back to an uprising by the 1%, I'd be impressed if there weren't sufficient people ready to quell the rebellion, as it is in the interest of the vast majority to have a Jubilee year. If it is not in the interest of the majority of people to have a Jubilee, then wealth is likely not significantly stratified.
I don't believe you have a full understanding of American society, particularly in the rural areas of the country.
Try to get a single Democrat to acknowledge this. They are still belitteling and stigmatizing those who share these concerns (and riduculing them for their audacity of hoping that Trump will be able to change anything).
Not saying it's rational, or correct, or wise. Just saying that I'm pretty sure that's how people feel.
Note well: I agree that electing Trump won't actually help these people whatsoever. But honestly, I'm not sure that electing Hillary would have helped them very much either...
This is half-wrong. What you, and most people on the right, fail to see and understand is that (just like the right), the left is divided into different camps. In this election, the Democratic Party was clearly shown to have two main camps: the "Progressives" and the "Establishment". Hillary's staunch supporters were in the latter camp, and Bernie's supporters were in the former.
The "belittling" you see is from the establishment Democrats, who are mostly people actually IN the party (not just voters) if you're looking at stuff in the media, or are a small number of actual voters. Quick question: how many Hillary bumper stickers did you see last year? I barely saw any. In fact, around the DC area, I saw far more 2008/2012 Obama bumper stickers (in 2016!) than I did Hillary stickers, right up until Election Day. There just wasn't any enthusiasm for Hillary at all, except for party faithful. Maybe the DC area isn't representative of other Democratic strongholds in the country, I dunno, but I thought this was telling.
Anyway, the point is, talk to any Bernie voter and you'll very likely have complete agreement about the establishment Democrats refusing to acknowledge the concerns of many Trump voters, and about how utterly out-of-touch Hillary and her side of the Party were.
Now, the following is all obviously my personal opinion and wildly speculative at the end; the sad thing is that Trump won by claiming to be anti-establishment and winning votes from more conservative people, but in reality he's going to be mostly pro-establishment: just look at his AG pick Jeff Sessions, who's pro-police-shooting-unarmed-people-in-the-back, pro-private-prisons, and anti-marijuana-legalization-and-decriminalization. Trump is pushing budgets and tax plans that favor lower taxes for rich people. The Trump voters voted for Trump mainly based on racism and xenophobia, as best as I can tell, and would have been much better off if they had organized, registered as Democrats (in states where you have to do that to vote in primaries), and voted for Bernie, and then elected him in the general election. He was the one who really addressed income inequality and other issues of real concern to the lower and lower-middle classes. Politicians like him, widely regarded as honest but also clearly seeing the issues that need to be addressed and having enough popularity at the national level to get elected, don't come along very often, and we've probably missed our shot: Bernie is nearing 80 now and isn't likely to be feeling up to another Presidential run in 2020. Most likely, we'll have either Hillary or another really lame Dem candidate run, they'll lose to Trump, and the economy will continue its downward spiral. This will eventually end up with the dissolution of the US and large parts of the country (esp. the South, probably also the Northeast) will be much like Italy: formerly economically powerful but now relative backwaters infamous for corruption. The west coast cities may stay economically powerful after forming their own independent nation, or may be get dragged down. Long-term, I'd say that China will be the new world superpower in 50+ years. There's probably an alternate universe where November's election turned out very differently, Bernie won, and the US and the rest of the West avoided collapse, but we're not in that universe unfortunately.
Once immigrants have been stomped down, minority rights done away with and the environment wrecked maybe people will turn on the elites but by that time we won't have much worth saving I'm afraid.
When even outside of times of unrest, encounters with the police result in getting fatally shot or seriously injured much more frequently than in comparably high-HDI states [1][2], it would take the cooperation of police and the military to allow unrest to take its course instead of being quickly crushed; this is culturally unlikely in the US which holds public order and the continuity of government in high esteem.
[1] https://www.pri.org/stories/2016-07-12/when-it-comes-police-... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-...
The problem is not direct force of arms, the problem is society needs a vast number of soft targets to continue to operate. If large numbers of people chose to simply take down power lines there is almost nothing the police or military could do. City's water supply pipes are similarly easy to destroy and difficult to replace. Roads are harder to destroy, but easy to prevent most civilian traffic.
One only need to look at the city of Flint, whose water pipes continue to deliver lead-laced water to households black and white, but society has largely routed around the damage: we carry on with our lives and ignore it's a problem. It's only a problem for those in Flint.
Meanwhile, the military and police can turn off utilities, blockade towns, enact curfews, and isolate even the flow of information, all without firing a single bullet. This way, pockets of unrest can be abated before they become a movement so pervasive that the military themselves defect.
The gap from tagging aka spray-paint to tossing bricks through windows is tiny. So, yes you can have independent enclaves that are protected, but it's easy to get into no mans land where the police don't come to some and then most areas without a lot of backup.
Which absolutely enrages a large portion of the populace. The state can't just put down protests with violence and expect things to get better. Ruling through fear never works for long. History is littered with revolts that only became popular after everyone involved were slaughtered and normal people became sympathetic
Define 'long'. North Korea has been a mess for a while.
In 2008, state and local law enforcement agencies
employed more than 1.1 million people on a full-time
basis, including about 765,000 sworn personnel (defined
as those with general arrest powers).
The person I responded to was discussing law enforcement being overwhelmed by armed revolt. The Federal armed forces could be used in such a situation.
Some might consider me naive but I believe many if not most all police and military are good wholesome people who will try to do their best for the people. A few bad media popularized outliers does not represent the whole.
That's it. It just doesn't take that many people to make all the stuff. Erie, PA isn't going to come back.
The mantra used to be that people would be employed in "services". But services are more automated, too. Services done at some fixed location are rapidly being automated. Mobile services, too. Some recent developments:
* Stock picking in an Amazon warehouse - robots taking over. [1]
* Doordash delivery - robots now deployed in Redwood City. I've seen one in the downtown area. People just ignore them as they roll along the sidewalks. Their active six-wheel suspension can climb a curb. [2] There's an experimental partnership with Mercedes where a self-driving van holds multiple robots and lets them out for deliveries.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14062360
[2] http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5g2a2g_a-robot-that-delive...
I just wanted to offer a data point here, my buddy worked at the Amazon warehouse in Breinigsville PA a few months back and said he never saw a robot. Reading Hacker News I would have thought that Amazon had their robots widely deployed but that doesn't seem to be the case.
[1] http://www.scdigest.com/ontarget/15-03-03-1.php?cid=9051 [2] https://vimeo.com/113374910
Source: wife is an engineer in high volume new model automotive
I think the deeper problem is that kids are not inspired to gain their own ambitions. So many people walk through life with no ambitions beyond what they plan on doing next weekend.
I think a huge issue is the way material is taught in school tends towards hero worship. Scientists, authors, are all looked at as mythical creatures who achieved things that mortal man cannot. It makes us all feel as though the best we can ever achieve is being a cog in a wheel. It took me many years after school to realize that something as simple as starting your own business was actually achievable (by me!) and not something relegated for those who had been born of a higher caste, or of some superior skills.
Source: https://medium.com/@Chris_arnade/drugs-despair-and-trump-1c6...
From my bubbled existence, most of the people who I went to school with who became drug addicts were always part of "the bad kids" cliques; those who always saw life through the prism of partying and never had ambitions to be much of anything. Maybe my perspective is totally wrong, and most drug addicts were B students who just decided not to go to college, but if that's the case I'd love hard data.
Do you really find the idea of people self-medicating depression hard to encompass? I'm having a hard time myself, encompassing the idea that there is anywhere in the world this might seem like a controversial question.
"The man in this article was already an addict before he was old enough to have any perspective on his future potential."
> Johnson started using opioids in high school after breaking his collarbone, first in football and again while wrestling, and he got hooked on his prescription, his mother thinks. He was a functional addict at first, caring and warm, but things slipped out of control after he graduated and found that his skills—art and cooking, but not academics—meant little in the workforce.
In Arnade's formulation, this is how a front-row kid who succeeded looks at a back-row kid who failed. "Where's the numbers?" and "Always looked to me like drugs are for people without ambition in the first place." Which, fine, if that's how you want to look at it. But, speaking as a back-row kid who's known a lot of front-row people and had a lot of front-row jobs, it doesn't aid understanding.
But it's not necessarily the one in despair that turned to drugs. It might be his/her kids, who grew up without a supportive family (or perhaps were abused) when then found friends who accepted them, who turned them on to drugs. I mean, drug stats are what they are, more than 50% start before their 18.
The German dual education system addresses this. Normal jobs have a formal education system where young people learn practical things in companies and at the same time they learn more theoretical things in special schools. One gets some kind of degree and it also enables them a further path for education and career. You could have gotten education in jobs like plumber, aircraft mechanic, medical assistant - there are more than three hundred apprenticeship occupations.
This gives young persons with more practical skills a real education and career path. There is also a positive social status for those who went through this system.
The companies also pay them for taking this education. Around 850 Euro per month.
https://www.bmbf.de/en/the-german-vocational-training-system...
> In Germany, about 50 percent of all school-leavers undergo vocational training provided by companies which consider the dual system the best way to acquire skilled staff.
http://www.npr.org/2012/04/04/149927290/the-secret-to-german...
> The Secret To Germany's Low Youth Unemployment
Coming from a Princeton egghead that's not a surprising point of view. It seems very typical for those with education to look down upon the less-educated.
The truth is, US high schools miserably fail the non-college-bound student. I know people without college degrees who make six-figure incomes in the trades or as entrepreneurs. They did not get there with any help from high school guidance counselors or administrators (all college-educated), who basically write you off if you are not college-bound or come from an impoverished background.
The message from traditional education for anyone not going to college is "you have no future" rather than helping to explore the limitless expanse of possibilities that are open to anyone who has the motivation and encouragement to pursue them.
Coming from a Princeton egghead that's not a surprising point of view.
^^^^^^^
As an example: A friend from back home got into boring right out of high school. 20 years later, he runs one of the most successful directional boring companies in the region and is a multi-multi millionaire. He was told in high school that if he didn't go to college that he would fail.
I don't find this to be a unique story from my perspective but I do have some bias.
I'm an exception, too. I'm not about to argue that, because I exist, the trend doesn't.
The town I grew up in was very polarizing. We had both extreme wealth and extreme poor. As a retrospective, we had very equal opportunities from all income brackets. There were wealthy kids who had huge success but many others who fizzled out and didn't do anything. Some ended up with extensive criminal records.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, some of the extremely poor kids I grew up with could barely afford ramen as a family. Some ended up drug dealing and in jail, others ended up with massive success.
There were a few key attributes that I think determined success vs. failure for all wealth brackets. We had some very key teachers in shop classes who encouraged folks who didn't think they could go to college to specialize in trade skills. Those who took it seriously and worked hard at it are largely stable or well off. Those who didn't fizzled out.
Obviously this is all anecdotal as it was one graduating class in one city in one state. However, in my own experience the desire to work hard dictates much of the success of an individual. It would be foolish to say that it is the ONLY thing contributing to success but I believe that it is a large portion of it.
Also, that word "lucky" drives me nuts but I'll save that for another time :)
Determination and readiness to work hard enable someone to take advantage of an opportunity. But you still need the opportunity.
Commenting that 'America is not a great place for people with only a high school degree' is not looking down on the less educated, it's an observation about how society at large treats the less educated. Between this and your description of one of the world's leading economic thinkers as a 'Princeton egghead', It's hard to give much weight to anything else you say.
In this day in age a college degree gives you a much higher chance of success/income. Median net worth is 8x higher for those with a college degree. And salary is almost 18k/year higher.
In the past the gap was much smaller. It's been growing and will likely continue to grow.
[0]https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/02/11/study-income...
How is this "looking down"?
He made a well-backed empirical observation: life in this country sucks donkey balls for those who didn't graduate from college.
> At one point [... he] got a full-time job making wood pallets. [...] “It’s a stupid job. It doesn’t matter if you’re high to work it”
It's hard not to think the kid was let down by the system. It should be inconceivable that you can go through K-12 without being told very sternly that a) skills in sports, art and cooking are not very marketable, and will probably only get you "stupid jobs" b) in the current environment, even McD may require a college degree soon, so you'd better bite the bullet on those academic skills. Any adult in a position of responsibility should have known these facts. Yet for 12+ years they've failed to communicate them. The kids are allowed to drift aimlessly, and then it's somehow their fault if they end up in a very bad place at the end.
I resent your suggestion that people engaged in these field are doing 'stupid jobs'. It's insulting to to large numbers of people who work diligently and develop significant skills in those domains whose product you have chosen to declare worthless.
The "stupid job" was what the kid himself called his employment making wooden pallets. It wasn't a job in sports or cooking and I nowhere implied that I agreed with his assessment. If he had been hard at work and passionate about a line cook job that didn't pay well, then we'd be having a totally different discussion.
Every job can theoretically be automated away. Yesterday I was thinking about someone I knew who specialized in detecting detecting cancer on biopsy slides (I forget the technical term for her job). Last time I saw that person was 15 years ago and I was musing on the fact that her job as she described it then may well have been taken over by machine learning since, or will be soon if not. Did her teachers and family do her a terrible disservice by not telling her to get into a line of work that would be harder to automate? Probably not.
I'm arguing that we need a different approach as a society to choosing jobs based on an assumption of remorselessly increasing technological efficiency and cutthroat competition. This hyper-Darwinian approach to employment, productivity, and economic decision-making is reducing the quality of life for an increasingly large number of people, and at some point they are going to get tired of holding up the pyramid from which more fortunate people self-righteously piss down upon them.
>While blacks and Hispanics without college degrees are also falling behind economically and socially, middle-age mortality has worsened for whites in particular over the past 20 years—a fact some attribute partly to social context.
Do you specifically disagree with this?
Now, we as a society should have cared when it was happening to blacks. But it is a significant change that it is increasing dramatically among working-class whites.
That said, maybe once people see that this sort of despair is beginning to affect white people, they will gain more empathy for all the black people suffering the same way.
Growing up in the rural south I have heard literally my entire life how most of our problems are caused by government greed and immigrant, not massive wealth inequality. At the same time on NPR you might hear about the terrible working conditions immigrants deal with, lack of labor protections, minimum wage abuses but as far as many in the white middle class are concerned the problem is down, not up.
This is everyone's problem and the solution needs to be for all Americans not just ones who live in a select region or have higher amounts of melanin
First off, the majority of all people understand that there are poor white people, especially in rural areas that have had similar economic issues to minority groups for a long time. There is no economic issue (that I know of) that entirely effects any one group. Long standing race-based discrimination however has caused the left to focus more on minority groups however because they have generally been worse off (especially when compared against non-minorities as a whole). This doesn't mean we don't care about rural white Americans, its possible to care about many different things but also take into consideration that caring about minorities has been a great way to lose the votes and support of rural whites (welfare queens anyone?). It shouldn't be mutually exclusive but effective marketing has made it so.
As many people have pointed out, the problems working class white people are facing at increased rates (its not new, but its getting noticeably worse) have been a reality for minority groups for a long time and generally they are in fact worse off in every measurable metric as a group. The kinds of policies that the left propose that benefit people of color generally benefit poor and working class people in general (healthcare, education), but the left hasn't found a way to market itself to rural white Americans while also being the only major party to support minorities in general.
Also, I can't personally take offense at this but I've been seeing a LOT of statements like yours lately (race fatigue I'll call it) so I feel the need to address it. I'm quite sure that all people of color would be more than happy for race to no longer be an issue, and to make it out as if minorities are playing the race card when "the majority" are simply trying to move past race is ignorant if not downright insulting (my optimistic nature makes me want to think that it is accidental). Does that make sense? I understand where it comes from - you like I probably don't directly experience or observe overt racism or discrimination in our daily lives. We might see more occurrences of the opposite but that doesn't mean its not there and that our experiences are Representative of the country as a whole. If it weren't for good journalism and educational resources I wouldn't be really aware either.
That's not racism. That's journalism.
Racism would be if the article made fun of white people, or derided them.
It may not fit the traditional idea of Jim Crow style racism, but the article's implications are certainly there.
The 'liberation' of business that replaced the controls put in place before has brought us to a place where corporate feudalist rules supreme. Those that defend capitalism and democracy frequently confuse the one with the other. Hating on 'communism' while being oblivious to the fact that the capitalism they so feverently defend has died 20 years ago.
Mark Blyth has a lot to say on the topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSYb6RbuOG0
As automation and outsourcing continues, the issue will only worsen. On top of that we are constantly bombarded with images of the life we should be living via advertising and television. Not meeting these media driven standards leads to further depression and despair.
Doctors prescribe opioids because drug companies encourage them too, leading to an easy addiction and escape for the depressed.
We need to start treating people like they matter and help them understand that there can be joy and happiness in even the simplest of lives.
[1] http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/issue-brie...
Not meeting these standards does not automatically lead to depression and despair. You have to think that these things are things you should be attaining to actually feel bad about not having them. This is more of a personal development problem, not a media problem.
"While blacks and Hispanics without college degrees are also falling behind economically and socially, middle-age mortality has worsened for whites in particular over the past 20 years—a fact some attribute partly to social context.
“For whites, their reference group is previous generations of whites,” said Shannon Monnat, a Pennsylvania State University professor who studies the opioid epidemic in rural America. “When they look back on their parents and grandparents, it feels like their generation is doing worse.”"
I'm a big fan of Colin Woodard's book American Nations, which examines the very different social, economic and cultural assumptions of 11 different regions in the USA and goes a long way towards explaining the various frictions that arise from conflicting worldviews.
Canadian medias on the other hand, seem to be much less interested in playing the race card.
US is 60% white roughly.
It's a bigger deal because it's a more noticeable issue.
"Oh now that it's white people dealing with drugs, it's a crisis. America is so racist".
That's a load of crap on so many levels. I hope we figure out our next chapter here as a society.
To take one example, the media and politicians have put a huge spotlight on the plight of coal and manufacturing job losses, while only recently did we learn that in fact we're losing even more retail jobs. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/04/the-sil...
Want to guess at the racial and gender makeup of those manufacturing jobs vs. retail?
Manufacturing and coal towns are isolated. Manufacturing and coal are sometimes literally the only fields with jobs available in those towns.
Retail is generally located in places with many opportunities
Should they be able to? Absent some kind of deliberate regulatory or collective-bargaining action to prop up the price of labor in a given category, I assume the prevailing wages tend to reflect an implicit agreement between employers and potential employees on what that labor is worth. What is the argument for propping up the price of labor beyond what people are willing to do it for?
Or, put another way, what is the argument for why jobs should be seen as existing for the sake of giving workers enough money to live on, rather than as existing because some people want certain things done and are willing to pay a certain amount to have them done? In the second case, the value of having certain things done is not infinitely variable: some actions will create x value in the world, and can only be worth doing if they cost <x to do. Requiring that those actions be paid >=x will simply mean that those things will cease to exist. Is it a better world if we regulate out of existence those jobs whose performance is worth less than a family-supporting wage?
As for wage floors killing jobs, the effect would depend on the height of the floor. Modest increases in the minimum wage have had practically no effect on employment, but I'm sure massive hikes would cause problems.
I'm not convinced that propping up the price of labor directly follows from your point 1), which I do of course agree with. It seems better to me that the government do what it can to encourage the creation of jobs that are valuable enough to support living wages, rather than mandate that jobs which are not valuable enough to do so cannot legally exist. The former, I think, encourages creativity and the development of new possibilities, while the latter restricts freedom and limits the diversity of the economic ecology.
My (naive) guess would be that retail is a less-skilled job, so attempts by labor-groups to make themselves a controlled source of labor supply are easily circumvented by the readiness with which those jobs can be filled by nearly anyone. Whereas manufacturing jobs that involve some degree of skill are more able to corner the market on their own labor, and thus better able to negotiate from a position of power.
1. Retail involves large numbers of part-time workers, making the workforce harder to organize.
2. An idle factory is incredibly costly to the owners. Factory workers have more leverage.
3. Employer hostility/union breaking efforts, you need only spend a few minutes on google to find some nasty stories about wally world or your least favorite retail chain.
4. Lack of identity: if the last few years have taught us anything, it should be that people in manufacturing clearly have integrated their jobs into their identity. You can see programmers et al doing the same thing right here on HN every day. I doubt most people in retail consider "working in retail" to be an important part of who they are in the same way factory workers or programmers might.
5. Men ("breadwinners") have historically worked in manufacturing and women have historically worked in retail, lack of focus on retail historically by organizers
A more interesting question that "Why is it hard to unionize retail?" is "Why is it hard to unionize programmers?" I don't have as many good answers for that one. #3 is the only one which applies to programmers.
Yes, if you're of the "drugs should be legal" perspective. Revenge isn't justice.
[1] https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/assets/141027_iachr... [2] http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-sessions-vows-to-ramp-up...
But... can you explain why it's a load of crap to point out that this crisis of despair and drugs and early death is being treated differently than previous ones that mostly affected blacks and other minorities? Reporters could have written awfully similar articles about hopelessness in the inner city at just about any point in the past few decades, and at least a few of them did, but society's response wasn't "Oh no, how could we have let this happen? How can we give them hope and a future worth living for?" as it is in this case, but rather the War on Drugs and mass incarceration and police militarization and condemnation of black culture (and many other minority cultures).
To be clear, I'm absolutely not advocating for white, rural America to be targeted by no-knock raids and public blame for its own predicament! I think that "How can we help?" should be the response to all crises like this. But we as a society are still heavily invested in the War on Drugs and a whole host of other forms of structural racism. So yes, I'd be a lot more comfortable with this treatment of the drug crisis facing white communities if it were going hand in hand with a similar reevaluation of the parallel challenges facing minority communities as well. But it's not.
It made my heart sink to read this sentence.
Edit: Highlighted the part that made me sad. You never get over the death of a child.
> “He just saw his life as not what he wanted it to be, and he didn’t know how to get it there”
I think though, that this is a near universal aspect of the human condition.
It's not really that complicated. Progressive policies, regulation, and tax policy have better outcomes. There are just powerful and wealthy forces with vested interests working hard to argue otherwise.
A thousand years ago there were 400 million people on earth. Today there are 764 million jobs in China alone. So, on a literal basis at least, that's not turning out to be true so far.
Your supposition is that this time it's different than all the other times people have claimed that automation and technology will make everyone idle.
But maybe it's not different this time. Maybe technological advancement proceeds relentlessly and has for awhile, and today only looks special because we're in it. Maybe the mechanisms by which economies achieve full employment don't work in the way you're describing.
There may be 764 million jobs in China, but it's almost certain that those workers are doing more than just double the work of the 400 million people from 1000 years ago (as measured by output).
I am still Facebook friends with many of these kids -- none of whom really finished high school. I see them go in and out of rehab on social media all the time. More and more of my friends who did end up going to college are dropping out for various mental health issues. A lot of them are not rebounding.
It's all very surprising coming from a middle class suburban town in CT but it is the new normal I guess -- many friends of mine from other suburban / rural areas tell me their towns are facing the same issues.
Young people everywhere are haunted by crises and despair.
It seems to be true in general, unless you have a boatload of money, but then I would argue you would be ok pretty much anywhere. HN has been bombarded with such grim news of the US that I honestly feel bad for Americans(maybe I shouldn't, I don't know), but at least on paper, the world's greatest country doesn't look that great to live in anymore(UK is looking worse and worse by the minute, so maybe it's a general trend).
I love it when people make evidence-free assumptions about other people they know nothing about. That's what makes this society great.
Without borders or a culture, what's the point of a country other than being a sort of municipal corporation? And what if the stakeholders are outside shareholders looking to extract value?
The fantasy that millions of jobs are going to fall out of the sky is exactly that. We need to think of real solutions, and soon.
Moving one, there's is something to be said for the effect of expectations. The data shows that you don't see the same levels of mortality rise in any other population. Simply put, us minorities don't have a false narrative of the American dream instilled in us and therefore don't expect to achieve it. We don't experience suicidal disappointment in ending up in a dead end job because our role models (parents grandparents) are statistically likely to have held those kind of jobs.
Personally I hate "white privilege" as a trope, but it does speak to something real: minorities, until very recently, were largely locked out of the American dream (as white people know it). The wealth of white households was 13 times the median wealth of black households and 10 times the wealth of hispanic households[1]. Numbers don't get like that over night. They are the result of generations of discrimination and institutional systems designed to exclude and screw with people that were not white. The point I'm making is that the average white person today probably doesn't even realize that, relative to other groups, their expectation of what a "nice" life is is basically seen as unattainable for others. Hence, we (POC) don't kill ourselves because we failed to reach the unattainable.
As the economy, and society, has diminished the ability for many whites (especially in rural areas) to take vantage of their "privilege" and they're forced to play the same game as the rest of us, they find themselves feeling like failures right out the gate and aren't quite sure why - hence the anxiety and subsequently despair.
The answer to this is not that white folks "check their privilege" - although it would help to stop being in denial about it and the effects it has on them and their expectations. The answer is to realize that rugged individualism is just a myth. In no other culture is this myth so central, and now so damaging. Despite what their parents and grandparents, and TV shows and movies have taught them, their relative success is not due to how much tougher they are than other folks and America is not, and has never been a meritocracy.
At this point, white America can continue to believe this rubbish at their own peril. Support policies that acknowledge people need other people and we will, evidently, kill ourselves if we go at everything alone as "rugged indivduals" unless the game is rigged in our favor (even if we don't realize it).
1: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/12/12/racial-wealt...