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Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

There’s already a lot of civil unrest not from just the BLM protesters but also the people scared to lose their jobs, homes, etc. before that.

We are paying for our lack of social safety net now. There’s enough people already questioning the legitimacy of our liberal democracy.

Having lots of people lose the place they live (effectively making people who have played by the rules and bought into the system) would certainly create a lot of unnecessary instability. Calls for revolution that were actually shared by a big enough population and then gaining steam, calls for civil war, and a fractured political apparatus too impotent to reign it in before it gets out of control.

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>We are paying for our lack of social safety net now.

While that might be part of the problem, how much of it is self inflicted? Even people who can afford to save, don't. They blow all their money on a lifestyle. ATM I am trying to gently advise a co-worker to really start thinking about saving for his retirement. 50 years old and it's paycheck to paycheck (6 figure salary)for him.

Some people create their own rainy days....

Even if nobody in his position acted as unwise, it would barely offset, in society at large, the swaths of people who never had a chance.

So to answer your question - in aggregate, fairly little.

Many people don’t have any financial role models in their lives, especially at young ages. It’s not like the school systems teach children about saving, and especially not in the more underfunded districts.

I’m much more inclined to blame maladaptive behaviors on systemic failures to educate people and to provide them opportunity than I am to blame individuals.

Sure, in every system with live agents there will be bad actors and those with poor behavior, but when the system is overrun with examples of this, perhaps it’s the system we should be looking at, not individuals.

Tax such incomes at higher rates and invest in the infrastructure that would necessarily support such people anyway were they to become destitute. As a surprising benefit, people who do require welfare of some kind for reasons beyond their control will also be helped. Avoid passing moral judgement on post-tax expenditure - if people live less than ideal lives at that point, that's indeed on them.

Is that an unreasonable perspective?

It's considered a reasonable perspective in Europe, by and large. I guess one's opinion depends on whether one expects those in control of tax expenditure to provide welfare in an effective way.

Well partially because that's the culture and status game. That's what you see in movies, on TV, everywhere. Success and personal worth equals money, salary, expensive stuff. Advertisement, marketing, credit cards etc etc. Keeping up with the Joneses, denial about getting old, never sitting down to deeply reflect on their life, being caught in the hamster wheel, the FOMO, etc.

Its the same question as why people eat crappy junk food and get obese. Answer 1 is everyone suddenly became stupid and morally corrupt, answer 2 is that their mind is being bombarded with hyperoptimized perfectly honed marketing strategies, carefully designed by very smart people to drive engagement and profits. One needs to adopt a hostile and skeptical attitude to every outside influence reaching you to be able to resist this. Or just shut off a lot of your media consumption, associate with people who value different things etc. But most people won't be able to do this, because once the average person gets ahead of the curve, the marketing machine is already in front of them.

So what?

The same argument could be applied to companies, and they all put out their hands for government money the instant this pandemic happened, and the government gave it to them (mostly, some small businesses did get screwed in that).

The difference between a company and a person, is that when a company has lost everything, it shuts down. But when a person loses everything, they don't just shut down, they take action, and that action could be violent (especially if they're backed up by a mob of people in similar situations).

It doesn't matter that these people didn't save properly, just telling them "Well you shouldn't have gone out to eat twice a week and saved that money, so you'd have three extra months to survive before you're screwed!" isn't going to make them sit and go "Oh yeah, guess I'm the screw up, I'm just going to sit on this street corner now and not bother anyone."

I'm in a weird place on this one.

On the one hand, I agree with you.

Some of this -- no idea how much without crunching numbers -- is totally self-inflicted. People living well beyond their means, not saving, and then ending up totally up the proverbial creek.

On the other hand, I'm a pragmatist.

You throw 5% of the population out on the streets simultaneously, and you will experience entirely new realms of mob violence. Historically speaking, this is soon followed by a regime which bizarrely invests heavily into researching the full depths of human misery. Not good.

There has to be some sort of balance, a way to address the problem, without creating perverse incentives which harm those the system claims to aid (like our current welfare system). Maybe UBI or UBE. Not sure, but it's a problem we are going to have to solve.

I forget what the percentage of Americans is that literally cannot afford to save money, but it's absurdly high.

And then you have massive businesses with massive profits that take all that money and dump it into juicing the stock price, going into debt rather than save a penny for a rainy day...and then, when that rainy (or virus-y) day comes, they come crying to the government for a handout.

Tell me, which of these is more of a "self-inflicted" problem?

6 figure paycheck is in top bucket of population you are by definition cherry-picking an anecdote and applying it to a population which doesn't fit your data.

Even if true, "people are foolish" is never the source of a problem, and it's not something that can be directly addressed. (Except maybe with education, over the course of generations.) Unless we want social unrest, we need immediate systemic fixes.

> There’s already a lot of civil unrest not from just the BLM protesters but also the people scared to lose their jobs, homes, etc. before that.

I just want to point out that the cause of the civil unrest is

A) The history of consequence-free, system-wide racist violence in police departments across the US.

B) The violent response of police departments to the peaceful portion of the protests.

Yes, there have been riots contributing to civil unrest as well — some out of a misplaced justified rage, some from various political groups instigating, and some from people (probably unemployed, considering the unemployment rate) looting stores.

But I would still argue that if police had responded differently to the peaceful portion of the protests the riots would have been smaller. And now we are seeing an effect somewhat like that.

I know it probably wasn’t your intention but I think it’s both inaccurate and an easy trap to fall into to posit BLM protests as a source of unrest — they are fundamentally a _response_.

Lastly, as I know this is a charged topic, I’d like to encourage respondents to do their homework (if one hasn’t already) on the various reputable news sites prior to responding or making counter-claims.

While I’m not citing sources a relatively quick search of most of the reputable, relatively fact-based news organizations out there provides support for what I’m arguing, I think.

[EDIT: You could also list the astoundingly incompetent federal response to the coronavirus as another root cause of current civil unrest, IMHO. Along with, if we are being real, the words of a president who clearly is stoking civil unrest as a re-election strategy. I think that’s a pretty clear statement of fact irrespective of ones political beliefs.]

Yeah, the government should not allow these mass evictions to happen if they plan to stay solvent.

A ton of people who have had homes (in one form of another) suddenly losing them through no fault of their own, especially if they don't have the income to rent anywhere or family to move in with, are not going to just sit and take it, nor should they.

The problem with that is that owners are also short on cash so when the government doesn't allow evictions, they will also need to disallow the inevitable defaults on mortgages.

This will, of course, eventually be paid for by the US government. That money isn't free and will continue our entrenchment in stagflation.

Which is worse, stagflation or death?

False dichotomies?

Hard to tell these days w/coronavirus and the lack of a competent, coordinated Federal response in the U.S.

You are right. But for the people in charge, it's probably in their selfish interests to kick the can down the road (like they always did in the past for just about everything else) for future politicians and hopefully a stronger economy to deal with. It's a little baffling they're fighting so hard against it now, especially in an election year.

You can certainly not give any money out to anyone, and watch as society crumbles, the government overthrown, and a new government put in place. Have fun with that. Might be where we are headed anyway, they just delayed it a couple of months with the one time stimulus check.

I think it still might not happen, but that's mainly because Americans have gotten so soft from inertia and just enough kitchen scraps given to the working class over the years that it'll take a lot to get us to that point. But then again we did just have one of the largest demonstrations of civil unrest in the country in about 50 years, so who knows.

Indeed, we may see century bonds soon. It's popular to laden future generations with the current generations debts. Mostly because they can't vote against it since they aren't born yet.

I've made the ironic argument before that Americans suffer from too much stability. Since the economy and currency has been so stable for so long, many haven't bothered to develop good financial habits.

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