America is regressing into a developing nation for most people | Hacker News Reader

America is regressing into a developing nation for most people

ineteconomics.org

45 pointsdeepakprakash35 comments

We first moved to the US in 1981. For me, a lot of the country already seemed like that back then.

Cars with '50s technology. Same for washing machines. Crumbling infrastructure, people (usually dark-skinned) doing jobs that had been automated since before I was born. Windows that didn't close properly.

And yes, on the other hand incredible wealth. I went to a private school with people that never had, and probably never would, have any idea of how "The Rest of Us" live. Father: doctor or lawyer. Kid goes to private school, then on to an elite college (if grades aren't quite up to par, daddy has to buy a library). Graduate, prestigious law firm, house in the same sort of suburb they grew up in. At 13, they had their life mapped out, and a comfortable life it was.

I had never seen these sorts of divides in my native country. Different social classes live much closer together, go to the same schools and to the same universities, they don't live in totally separate spheres.

Numbers are better than gut feeling when it comes to economics...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Unite...

It's a bit more than "gut feeling", it's qualitative data, and I think it helps tremendously with understanding something.

Quantitative data is important to see whether the qualitative data is actually representative.

We can test your 30 year old cars feeling with numbers. Less than 10% of vehicles on the road in the US are 21 or more years old: https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-3/pdf/americans-aging-au...

You seem to confuse 'cars with old technology' with 'old cars', though I am not sure how "cars with '50s technology" could have led to that confusion.

Anyway, these are not even close to being the same. I was talking about the fact that the new cars being sold had ancient technology.

These were not "feelings". I mean, they were selling cars with rigid axles that would screech when turning corners. My dad (who worked for both US and German carmakers) explained other details to me about the engines, about fit-and-finish etc., but it was also painfully obvious for a layperson like myself.

I missed what point your anecdote was making. I think the adjective 'new' would have made it a lot clearer. And there was no verb in your original "sentence". I guess your point was that the US was like a developing country in 1981 because new cars were sold with 50s technology? Do you still fell like that is the situation today? I thought you were trying to say the US is/was like a developed nation because of the age of the cars on the road.

I don't have a feel for what the worldwide car technology situation was in 1981, I was a few years from being born.

And still the influence of 'government is the problem' is alive and well in my home country, the Netherlands. We are in no way in a state like the US, and still the largest political party wants to cut taxes and decrease government influence. Despite all the evidence contrary.

For me, someone interested in politics, this is pretty obvious. Every european reporter that covers US politics talks about this divide: rich vs poor.

I do agree with other posters here that the article doesn't back up any claims with evidence, but I guess that's in the book. The author seems credible, to say the least.

> We’ve been digging ourselves into a hole for over forty years, but Temin says that we know how to stop digging. If we spent more on domestic rather than military activities, then the middle class would not vanish as quickly. The effects of technological change and globalization could be altered by political actions. We could restore and expand education, shifting resources from policies like mass incarceration to improving the human and social capital of all Americans. We could upgrade infrastructure, forgive mortgage and educational debt in the low-wage sector, reject the notion that private entities should replace democratic government in directing society, and focus on embracing an integrated American population. We could tax not only the income of the rich, but also their capital.

That paragraph alone shows how heavily political this article is. It's just the basic, typical left-wing program. I'm not visiting HN to see this kind of crap.

Yep.

Jordan Peterson has discussed how important IQ is in the modern economy and how both the left and the right are in denial about it. While the left thinks anyone can be anything, the right thinks lazy people just need to work harder. Both are wrong.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjs2gPa5sD0

Difficult problem.

So what's the "right" answer? The high IQ crowd yucks it up, while the proles live in caves somewhere?

Thanks, I loved the video, so I submitted it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14173566

Agreeing with my sibling comment - absolutely fascinating video, thanks. Watched the whole original lecture.

I honestly can't tell if this is a joke comment or not. With the exception of the loan forgiveness idea, it sounds like a pretty obvious list of improvements. Genuine question - what about it makes you think it's particularly left-wing?

The problem you are experiencing is an interesting one. It turns out conservatives understand liberals but think they are misguided. Liberals, on the other hand, do not understand conservatives and, therefore, think they are evil.

A liberal has written and spoken extensively on this phenomena:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Haidt

I suppose I was more interested in what specifically in the quoted text was supposed to embody left-wing ideology. Discounting the aforementioned loan forgiveness idea, which does smell pretty left-wing, what exactly is it? Isn't everyone in favour of better education? Fixing infrastructure? I couldn't hear the dog whistle.

And FWIW I wouldn't really identify either way (maybe fiscal conservative, social liberal) but yes, hearing someone react viscerally and negatively to the suggestion we improve education did make me wonder if the OP was simply malicious, or was perhaps making some kind of joke. Hence the (serious) question.

I understand that this is just a summary of a book, but I have no takeaways after skimming this, as there was not one statistic or graph in the article. I love a good argument backed by statistics, and maybe the book has it... the article certainly didn't.

Agreed. I flagged this article because it is exactly the type of article I believe doesn't belong on HN. No empirical evidence, just opinions that may or may not be based in actual facts.

Well done, brave Throwaway. Now please keep flagging articles with no charts, even the ones who cater to your belief system.

This one does cater to my belief system. Have we reached the point where it's nearly inconceivable that one can actually agree with a conclusion but still find the reasoning and evidence sloppy (or nonexistent)?

Are you perchance in a situation where you don't plainly see the dual economy right in front of your face when you go outside? I'm about as skeptical as they come, but not as much about things I can watch happen with my own eyes. Or was there something more specific in the article that seemed dubious?

I'd encourage people not to let HN's ridiculous faux-scientific culture enable you to persist in denial about how around 100 million people in the US live.

Requesting that opinions be backed up with data is the hallmark of an actual scientific culture.

If Hacker News cargo-cults an actual scientific culture long enough, maybe it will transform into one.

There are plenty of real research studies and articles (often displayed on HN) that show the growing inequality in the US, with correlations between that inequality and lots of negative social outcomes. If we want to debate inequality, we should do it on one of those articles, not this 0-content opinion piece.

Or we could just debate it, if it matters.

College doesn't work very often anymore. There are plenty of Comp Sci programs at US universities where half or more graduates can't get FTE jobs. We're so tired of seeing education being touted as a solution as underemployment continues to skyrocket because the new structural reality of the economy is that human bodies are being considered the most costly expense to be excised.

I just read in, I think, Bloomberg, that the unemployment rate for STEM secondary education is around 2.4%. Do you have any numbers to support your statement (I obv don't have any)?

That's true. Hiring a human, period, is costly.

Interesting. Do you know of a detailed article about this?

It ought to be FS (Finance & Software) instead of FTE. The TE (Technology & Electronics) isn't a growth sector. Seems most hardware is overseas, unless one assumes growth in automation, but again that's mostly software.

The SM in STEM doesn't pay, unless M is in Finance. Don't know why he would specifically call out Electronics unless he naively thinks that is software.

He's an econ prof at MIT, and is getting back at the hard science people who have bullied him for years? I propose FIRE is a more appropriate acronym against which to direct one's ire over the state of society.

Not sure where you got that notion, but coming from an M back ground I know that M is in high demand, for example, in computer/data science, insurance, or consulting.

I think that everybody have to understand that USA is very big country and it's extremely diverse, much more than countries in Europe. USA seems to have spots of extreme wealthy like Silicon Valley and most of the West Coast and extreme poverty like Detroit. With very small (in comparison to European countries) support for people in needs it's very easy to fall under poverty line only because of some accident.

Detroit has both extreme wealth and extreme poverty in very close proximity. Bloomfield Hills used to be one of the two or three wealthiest cities (townships?) in the country.

Drive down Woodward Ave or Telegraph Road and you get a cross-section of America.

Diversity is the main "excuse" I hear when speaking about the inequality problems in the US.

USA is in no way more diverse than Europe. Are you saying that a guy from Lisboa and a guy from Prague (who, by the way, don't speak the same language) are more similar than a guy from LA and another from Columbus?

The root of the inequality in the USA is political, not the diversity.

Are Lisboa (Lisbon?) and Prague in the same country? The charitable (and common too) way to read "more than countries in Europe" in this context is that it's more diverse than any country in Europe, not than any two countries in Europe.

Talking about anything across the USA is as insightful as talking about anything across the whole Europe, the point you have just supported. Do we cry about Europe turning into a developing nation because Moldova is not quite as developed as Monaco?

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