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Comment by AlexandrB | Hacker News Reader

I have my own pet theory - based on nothing - that we're seeing the political consequences of massive income inequality. If you're at the bottom of the heap watching massively wealthy individuals controlling a large portion of your daily life while accumulating more and more wealth for themselves, populism is really appealing! You get to watch people who think they're better than you (see comments in this very thread about how this is about "education" and "ignorance") squirm and sweat because things aren't going the way they think they should.

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The article notes that democratic backsliding is a global phenomena, particularly in the G-20. Seeing as countries with much less wealth/income inequality than the US are experiencing the same trend, that kind of disproves this theory. There have been populist revolts in countries with a pretty low Gini, most recently Chile which is in the middle of the pack inequality-wise for Latin America. Basically, this is a popular but demonstrably wrong theory. I recommend reading Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri for a deeper explanation of how the Internet Age enables rolling, continuous populist revolts that have inchoate goals and accomplish little

With a longer view of history, we can remember that invention of mass printing led to a huge uptick in conspiracizing and sectarian violence across Europe. While widespread literacy proved a long-term good, it was quite a rough ride from start to finish.

> Basically, this is a popular but demonstrably wrong theory.

Knowing whether income inequality has some effect on the popularity of populism in a particular country cannot be "(dis)proven" one way or the other based on low-dimensional observations of (alleged) behavior and motivations of people in another country. Each individual person holds an incredibly complex set of beliefs in their heads that drive their actions. Some people go to school to learn some things about human behavior and cognition, and then get jobs hypothesizing about the causal underpinnings of human behavior, and then broadcast these hypotheses to the world from where they are picked up and stored in other minds, which then also proceed to hypothesize about other things based on the aggregate of information (of which this is only a small part) they have consumed in the past.

These hypotheses, the ideas the mind conjures from thin air, seem largely indistinguishable from reality, but this is a clever illusion that (allegedly) arose out of millions of years of evolution. Seeing speculative beliefs in other people is easy, seeing them in oneself is not so easy - or so psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy would have us believe.

It's only demonstrably wrong if you assume that wealth inequality should be calculated within the borders of a nation. That people in Chile should only compare themselves to their nearest oligarchs.

I think you’re right.

But what people don’t realize is the the rich and the even the upper class aren’t stuck with this country and generally don’t feel much allegiance to it. They can benefit from lax regulation and low taxes and political turbulence and simply leave when things get out of control. It’s fun watching elites squirm but they have an exit plan. Most Americans can’t. They don’t have the skills or the money to go anywhere else. Using your politics to troll the elites is very much an example of cutting off your nose to spite your face. I wonder how long it’ll take for people to realize that.

While they certainly would have the resources “to go anywhere else” - where would all these very rich people actually want to go? Where can they maintain a high status lifestyle while also enjoying low taxes? Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems like a mighty short list and, hence, an empty threat.

It depends on the threat. If the United States actually descends into any real chaos they can and will bail. For now, they can just move to their second home in Montana. But if gets bad, they’ll leave. They always do.

Sure. Which is true of all people. You don’t have to be rich to flee violence.

I guess my question relates more to the idea that the US has a “business friendly” economic regime and any change to that status quo is going to cause the very rich to leave. I’m sure a few will move to Monaco (as suggested by the other poster) but I’m not super convinced there are a bunch of viable alternative places to live.

> Where can they maintain a high status lifestyle while also enjoying low taxes?

Monaco.

And skiing in Andora.

I would also say that cold places are also a good option relatively speaking as they aren't very forgiving if you can't provide yourself with a warm home through the winter. This is why rampant poverty such as tent cities tend to migrate to cities with warmer or at least moderate climates. Norway, Iceland, Canada, etc.

I guess it sort of makes sense that it appears much of the homelessness in Canada clusters around Vancouver since it is far more mild than the Eastern portion of the country.

It's worse than that. Modern day populists usually don't harm the elites, and don't benefit anybody but the poorest segment of society. Many don't even benefit the poorest segment, only harm everybody but the elite.

Modern populism is just a set of lies, where they harm poor people on less visible ways to make money available to distribute, most of it to the elites, and a small share back but on very visible ways.

It is not the elite that sustain governments nowadays, so it can't really be any different.

>But what people don’t realize is the the rich and the even the upper class aren’t stuck with this country and generally don’t feel much allegiance to it.

Spicy take: the nationalist branch of populist voters are very aware of this, and are actively exploiting it to make the internationally mobile professional class suffer.

Seems like a bad strategy. America’s technological and cultural relevance depends on the internationally mobile professional class.

When you put it before the voters as America's relevance to the international order versus their houses, jobs, and communities, they're gonna choose the latter.

> When you put it before the voters as America's relevance to the international order versus their houses, jobs, and communities, they're gonna choose the latter.

It’s sad because they’re not getting those things through nationalism either. In fact they’ll lose international relevance and their homes, jobs, and communities because of the folks selling them nationalism.

So what if they leave? The Federal Reserve is in the United States, so is the political power, the military, the banks, the land, the factories, etc, etc, etc. The US government can tax US citizens from anywhere in the world. The government can print or redistributed as much money as they want. A few people leaving a country and taking some gold with them won't matter in the end.

These researchers would agree with you, so it's not exactly a fringe idea. I think it's not more commonly discussed because most people aren't used to doing root cause analysis that spans several steps. It's easy to just assume the other side is filled with uneducated fools or truly evil people than it is to keep asking "why" repeatedly and come to conclusions. Also it makes sense that both major US parties are mostly filled with wealthy people, so if they can keep "the poors" fighting about orthogonal issues, the two parties can stay in power.

https://www.noemamag.com/welcome-to-the-turbulent-twenties/

I would think that income inequality in terms of real wealth (food, shelter, pocket-sized entertainment-rectangles) is not as bad as it seems in nominal terms, especially when you look outside the US. The ability for trades and unskilled labor outside of the US to take advantage of arbitraging wage differences across national boundaries has never been greater. Outsourcing and insourcing labor is much easier than it was in, say, 1964. For many countries, remitted wages are a source of income which has lifted many from extreme poverty. I think you could observe some of the biggest changes in quality of life over the last 60 years in places where wage arbitrage is popular. Of course, by extension, the larger your hiring pool, the less pressure there is to increase wages.

Also, I think many studies on inequality assume things like stocks are all worth face value, which is optimistic to say the least. Stock valuation has almost everything to do with faith in a bigger fool and almost nothing to do with tangible benefits. GOOG, for example, has a market cap of >$1T, now ask yourself, how did it come that there are even USD 1T in existence? Were they printed? Can you touch them? Did Eric Schmidt hold the poor up by their ankles and steal $1T one pocketful of quarters and dimes at a time? Or maybe, just maybe, these numbers are all just make-believe.

At least, I think it's not as simple as people who live in the suburbs must have wronged some particular voting block and should be punished.

A quote from 2016 that I heard agrees with your thesis: "I can't throw a Molotov cocktail through the window of the White House, but I can throw a Donald Trump." Many view him as a "fuck you" candidate and like him precisely because the majority of the elite and the political process doesn't. They don't care if he does a lot of damage or even acts against their interest because it's not like anyone was paying attention to their interests beforehand anyway.

My related theory is that it's a decoupling of politics from material outcomes.

Both parties are under the control of professional classes who don't actually need to care about the material outcomes for them. David Brooks type Republicans supported a "tax cut" which raised their taxes. Woke liberals want different TV characters represented while knifing Bernie Sanders in the back.

The professional classes have the privilege to engage in culture war, and it's what the parties respond to because that's the donor base. Actual policy and material outcomes are irrelevant to everyone across the spectrum.

Oddly, Linebarger (a professional propagandist who, to my knowledge, went 1-1, winning WWII and losing China) claims good propaganda is the opposite:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24373042

> "Most enemy themes are beyond reach, especially those of inter-ideological warfare. The Nazis and Russians made the best propaganda against each other when they got down to the basic necessities of life, not when they were trying to weave finespun theories about each other's way of thinking or of life."

but on the other hand, Linebarger was aiming at a much wider[1] population than a donor base.

[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Pag...

> "The first thing to do with the hypothetical man is to make him fit the kind of person who does get propaganda. In dealing with China, for example, it would be no use to take a statistically true Chinese, who lived on a farm 1.3 acres in size, went to town 5.8 times a year, had 3.6 children, and never read newspapers. The man to be set up would be the reachable man, the city, town or village dweller who had an income 2.1 times greater than that of the average in his county, who owned 1.7 long coats, and who shared one newspaper with 6.8 neighbors. Take this lowest-common-denominator of a man who can be reached by enemy propaganda and by yours. Name him the Propaganda Man. (Realistically speaking, modal and not arithmetical classes should be set up.)"

I mean, if we're talking about the Eastern Front, the basic necessities of life were a lot more stark there than they are in 21st century America, right? "These people are coming, and they're gonna kill and rape everyone" is a pretty easy propaganda pitch on material grounds.

That's a very interesting quote about the reachable person in an agricultural society. It's worth noting that after taking power, one of Mao's highest priorities was raising the literacy rate.

Good point, I believe Linebarger was talking about whole-country operations, not just messaging for the fronts.

"Political Limitations of Psychological Warfare." and "Definition of the Enemy." are interesting sections.

He does mention that communication, even mid-20th century, was prone to retweeting: "German broadcasters who emphasized the anti-capitalist character of National Socialism in the programs beamed to Eastern Europe found that B.B.C. picked up the most tactless statements and repeated them to Western Europe, where the Germans posed as anti-Bolshevik champions of private property. American attacks on the Germans for associating with Japanese monkey-men were passed along by the Japanese to the Chinese, who did not like the slur either."

(Another anecdote he tells is about getting into a flame war that went around the world. In hindsight, he regrets getting mixed up in it, yet admits he'd had the dopamine hit at the time.)

====

interesting to view this para of "Political Limitations" in hindsight:

> "President Roosevelt, in his conduct of the political world role of the United States, promised Manchuria to the Chinese, Korea "in due course" to the Koreans, and the integrity of the French Colonial Empire to the French; outside of that he avoided specific promises. In another instance (to put a complicated matter baldly), the British promised Palestine to both the Arabs and to the Jews in World War I, and consequently got themselves into a political mess which, thirty years later, was still a mess."

It not only explains indochina/vietnam but also I think we could fairly update that "thirty years" to 100.

It's definitely a super interesting piece, thanks for linking, I've emailed it to myself to give a deeper read.

This one resonates with me in our current moment:

> From the very beginning the British had the lead. They nailed German propaganda as propaganda, while circulating their own as news, cultural relations, or literature.

Graeber, the anarchist anthropologist who coined the phrase "we are the 99%" and wrote Debt: The First 5000 Years talks about the idea of revolutionary non-confrontation in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.

One of the ideas he discusses is intentionally keeping your literacy low and your population itinerant.

"...under the French, administrators would complain that they could send delegations to arrange for labor to build a road near a Tsimihety village, negotiate the terms with apparently cooperative elders, and return with the equipment a week later only to discover the village entirely abandoned—every single inhabitant had moved in with some relative in another part of the country."

Graeber on the myth of the ignorant savage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvUzdJSK4x8

I'm not sure that itinerance or illiteracy are strategies I would recommend to anyone. :)

Dreher's Benedict Option seems like a Western perspective of a similar strategy.

Thanks for the refs. Until I digest them the following pair of anecdotes will have to suffice:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangutan#Etymology

> 'Malays had informed him the ape could talk, but preferred not to "lest he be compelled to labour".'

For more literate sandbagging, in Oflag XVIIA (POW camps actively discourage itinerance): https://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~michor/leray.pdf

> "Recteur Leray lectured mostly on calculus and topology. He had succeeded in hiding from the Germans the fact that he was a leading expert in fluid dynamics and mechanics (a mécanicien, as he liked to say). He turned, instead, to algebraic topology, a field which he deemed unlikely to spawn war-like applications."

====

For a certain period (when the lifestyle was actually militarily superior) roaming worked well for steppe peoples.

I doubt there'd be much theological overlap, but do the BenOp people ever think to look at what the least english-dependent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_people already practice?

Bossmang! Mi du sensa. Milowda na sasa lang inya, keya?

I hate to respond just to say "thanks!", but this was interesting and you taught me two things in a handful of sentences. Thanks!

Unless someone shows up who'll defend BenOp, I'm not looking further into it. As far as cursory surfing reveals (I have only been able to find a table of contents online whose chapter headings are not helpful) not only does Dreher not bother with the separatism of plain religions in the US, nor the experiences of other more heavily persecuted, more melaninly enabled, christian churches in the US, his doctrine doesn't accord with any of his[1] religions, nor does it, according to secondary criticism, seem to have been informed much by actual Benedictines[2]. Indeed, he's even been accused of rooting the whole project in reaction to Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015)[3].

[1] protestant, catholic, and orthodox, in that order. One is reminded of the person who is constantly looking for the New Shiny Library/Language instead of writing their app with the ecosystem they have at hand. (cue GKC quote on difficulties untried, Benedict on Sarabaites)

For more similarities to open source schisms, consider https://blog.ayjay.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/BenOp-788x... and replace the christian references with geeky projects such as "building a modern operating system", "immanentising the crypto eschaton", "welcoming our new GPT-N overlords", etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0BpfwazhUA

[2] who are still around to ask. There's a non-benedictine abbey near me which celebrated its 1'500th birthday a while ago, and at least a handful of benedictine which are probably not many centuries younger.

TIL Benedictines are more Marxist than Marx.

From each according to their ability: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50040/50040-h/50040-h.html#c...

To each according to their need: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50040/50040-h/50040-h.html#c... (no private property, nor personal property, nor even personal volition)

[3] as I'm not charitable, I'll suggest that being afraid of Obergefell then writing phrases such as "L.G.B.T. activism is the tip of the spear at our throats in the culture war" reminds me of Poe's law. Then again, I'm not sure if he fears swallowing "liquid modernity" as much as being swallowed by it. (a complaint which I believe Dreher shares with another movement I doubt he covered: the Taliban)

I don't think you should be downvoted. Admittedly, I agree with your opinion, but I also think you phrased it civilly and made a contribution to the forum.

Thanks :)

Point of pride for me if I can get downvoted for a thoroughly classy comment.

> massive income inequality. If you're at the bottom of the heap watching massively wealthy individuals controlling a large portion of your daily life

this is a perfect microcosm of the confusion about inequality (you didnt say inequality but MASSIVE inequality, but the magnitude is not important). the inequality premise is non-causal to the actual problem, which you yourself immediately state: control. the issue is not inequality, but the loss of ability to transition from low to high income. inequality is a necessary, sufficient, and desired outcome of any system - by definition.

we should be fighting generational inequality, not inequality itself. the system needs to encourage mobility and allow for potential maximization. its ok that there are poor neighborhoods, but its not ok that poor neighborhoods have gang, drug, crime, and school quality problems. equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. chasing down outcome inequality is murder-suicide. marxists and communists have killed hundreds of millions of their own people in the last two centuries.

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