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Comment by DrScientist | Hacker News Reader

To blame all the $#!+ that's going on Facebook et al is really either missing the point or willful misdirection.

I'd argue that fear not Facebook brings out the worse in people - fear about income or place in society.

In my view, the real cause of the recent rise tribalism is rising social inequality and corrupt politics doing nothing about it.

You could argue then why hasn't democracy acted?

I'd argue that it's paid for content - whether it's ads or partisan coverage, lobbyists, paid shills, or astroturfed pressure groups all managed by professional manipulators ( ad people ) - that's the problem, not the medium ( Facebook or TV/radio or whatever).

Why haven't politicians acted decisively on climate change? I don't think it's the Internets fault.

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> rising social inequality and corrupt politics doing nothing about it.

People keep saying inequality but I'm still searching for a convincing argument as to why my neighbour's life getting better should make me unhappy. I really don't see it.

The problem is more likely to be that employee productivity has been completely delinked from compensation. That means that a lot of economic measurements showing good times are irrelevant. Eg, to a typical worker productivity growth prior to ~1971 meant better living conditions. Productivity growth after 1971 means nothing. Recipe for political disaster, because now the workforce has no particular incentive to make things better. Technological improvements just mean layoffs or expenses reeducating.

I can easily see why I should be unhappy about that. If I go from being responsible for 1% of a companies output to 2%, why isn't there a mechanism for me to get more money? I dream for a world where workers automatically own a significant share of the company.

> You could argue then why hasn't democracy acted?

Everyone agrees on symptoms, there is plausible deniability about the problems because there is just enough disagreement on the root cause.

> I'm still searching for a convincing argument as to why my neighbour's life getting better should make me unhappy.

It's psychology, not logic; there need not be a convincing argument why it should be so.

It's easy to see that people care more about relative wealth than absolute wealth. We have more wealth now than ancient people could have imagined, our basic needs are easily satisfied, but we still work and compete for the power and status that comes from relative wealth.

'It doesn't need to be a logical reason' is a glib starting point that should only be arrived at after very carefully ruling out all the other options. What if there is a logical reason for people to feel economically threatened? There are a lot of arguments out there for things that could be good reasons.

It is known [0] that people are terrible at estimating what the actual rate of inequality is. If they aren't using data to come up with their opinions, why would this psychological effect trigger now in the late 2010s instead of some other time?

Feeling bad about gaps between your wealth and your peers is a real effect, but it doesn't scale up to societal levels because people by and large can't detect changes in inequality at that scale. They have no idea what the actual wealth distribution is. I don't actually know it, and I suspect if you wanted to actually say what it was you'd have to go look up the Gini coefficient or something. Psychological effects don't trigger at a large scale when people need to look up statistics to realise that they should be triggered. That isn't how psychology usually works.

It seems much more likely something is happening locally in people's own lives or amongst their small social circle.

[0] https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2010/09/28/actual-vs-e...

There surely are many logical reasons for people to feel economically threatened, but that doesn't mean people aren't also angry about inequality.

> people by and large can't detect changes in inequality at that scale. They have no idea what the actual wealth distribution is

Everyone knows how wealthy Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are. They may not know the entire wealth distribution but they can detect the presence of the new robber barons.

> why would this psychological effect trigger now in the late 2010s instead of some other time?

It didn't just trigger in the late 2010s. It's been a major force since at least 2008.

We are seeing the first generation where large numbers of children are worse off than their parents. ie there isn't a sense of general progress.

Parents are working, but children can't find a well paying job or put down a deposit for a house. The trend in life expectancy is even reversing.

The concept of justice and fairness comes in to play as well - it's not just about whether people feel they have enough, it's about whether they feel they are getting a fair share.

If you went to work and got paid the living wage ( just enough to get by ) and somebody else doing the same job got paid more - most people would feel it was unfair and be unhappy.

Yes, excellent points. On top of that, people are clearly (as a group) less well off than their parents, with hardly any pensions, not enough money from a single income (think about how elizabeth warren's mom supported the family and a house with just a min. wage job in the 50s).

It's only people who are in special job categories today (like say programmers) who have so much opportunity. And nothing lasts forever.

It's been researched and you are (generally) happier as a rich guy in a poor neighborhood than an even richer guy in a very rich neighboring.

Of course, you could be an exception. Most likely though, you are richer than what you consider your closer peers (especially considering that we're on HN).

PS. Sorry for not posting references. It should be fairly easy to look up for the interested though.

> I'd argue that it's paid for content - whether it's ads or partisan coverage, lobbyists, paid shills, or astroturfed pressure groups all managed by professional manipulators...

I think it's that, and the average people who don't realize what they're digesting and who think it's organic. Perhaps I'm being nostalgic, but I don't remember another time when so many average people had over-inflated notions regarding the power and reach of their thoughts.

Not that they didn't have strong opinions, but I don't remember anyone outside of nutjobs believing that those opinions should, by default, carry so much weight. Now your average, middle aged Facebook addict thinks that they're on a mission from God.

The internet increase the power of small groups of actors. In adversarial conflicts this leads to increasingly expensive arms races. So there you go. The same internet that gives us the understanding of what is happening is the same internet that gives small groups of people the ability to run hundreds of newsrooms as a fraction of the staff.

See also the tyranny of small minority. Some of the social shifts we're seeing wouldn't happen without the Internet, as people wouldn't be able to coordinate and amplify their views and preferences that much.

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