Are Progressives in Denial About Progress? Yes, but So Is Almost Everyone Else
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Similarly, we see disaster everywhere in media, and there is disaster, but in real life… hunger is almost gone, living standards are high, soul and body crushing work is continually being made easier to handle, and we have more awareness of things like mindfulness, mental health, and loving kindness (all of which were no no words when I was younger).
The world is a good place, mostly.
Sometimes it’s easy to get so wrapped up in your well intentioned culture where you end up being ridiculous and detach yourself from reality.
It’s not like the other side is wrong about 110% of things(although this statement may be against progressive speech codes currently).
That's an absolute that's not true. I've seen a variety of people lambaste it, from right-wingers to independents, apolitical folk to even some progressive folk. Isn't nuance neat? :)
Wow. Do you realize how dangerous that attitude is for humanity? There is not a political, religious, or moral philosophy on this earth that should be beyond criticism for the inside or they outside.
I hope that the existence of things like ChatGPT (which does not "care" about the truth or falsity of its utterances) will cause people, in an attempt to distinguish themselves from the AIs, to consider paying more attention to consistency.
(if we get an AI that performs self-consistency checks, I'll reexamine this statement. but we're not there yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34092710 )
The key “innovation” is that we interact with all sorts of people. I coach a baseball team with guys who range from a police sergeant to a chief counsel to a guy who bakes wonder bread to a real estate developer.
You know what? We’re all the same and we’re all friends. We all want the best for our kids and have fun playing baseball. That’s important, the other shit is a waste. When I see people get angry about whatever the TV guy says, I just shake my head and say “Why do you care about this guy?”
Well, reading your second paragraph - I'm not sure I would apply that to the entire world necessarily? This year's global hunger index estimates that close to a billion people 'lack regular access to sufficient calories', and that progress here had stagnated in recent years [1] . Similarly, globally workers are generally not very happy, including an all-time high reporting of stress of those surveyed by Gallup [2].
I don't mean this to come across as overly negative and denying progress. But your post has an air of 'mission accomplished' that I don't agree with.
[1] https://www.globalhungerindex.org/pdf/en/2022.pdf
[2] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-...
Edit: I don’t mean to imply “mission accomplished” but merely that all the lines seem to be going the correct direction. Problems are not solved overnight, but rather with experience and sustained effort.
The fact that is a minority rather than majority is a miracle. The last 100 years is the first time in hisotye that the vast majority of people on earth didn't have to regularly worry about starving to death.
1. Excuse making and reasoning
2. Anger and argumentation
3. Flight or acceptance
That day, the subreddit mourned a bit. I think people's ideals were semi-dashed realizing that hate could make it's way into such a party.
To me, the hate wasn't surprising. I left (big P) Progressivism within a year. In conversations with other Progressives I noticed a few trends:
- Veterans were nearly left out of intersectionality. Some are overtly hostile and don't realize they are (or don't care).
- American Progressives focus on race rather than, or in addition to, class limits their interpretation of the world and overtly excludes serving places like rural areas without belittling or disregarding them.
- Their stark views on the way society should be prevents them from making incremental plans that people can be moved on over time.
- Their language is, frankly, hostile a good amount of the time when directed outward. It very much creates an atmosphere of a team sport which is brutal.
I'm not alone in these interpretations and if you search there's actually a rather large swath of liberals looking for something new. I'm looking forward to whatever we build next.
0 - https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/11/friendships-less-is-n...
Agree, but these things do matter on the margins. A Jewish landlord may almost always rent to Muslims, but once in awhile might not. Or might apply stricter standards to rental applications from Muslims on occasion.
There's been a lot of progress for sure, but self-reflection in order to understand your own implicit biases is work that's never really finished I guess.
In the early parts of the 2000s, Muslims (and people who had outward appearance that ignorant people associated falsely with Islam, often Sikhs) were targeted in a wave of hate crimes across the US, as well as fairly arbitrary acts by government, with very little public opposition.
(Largely, this was triggered by an act which itself was something of the antithesis of love and tolerance, though it was directed at people who had nothing to do with it.)
America’s domestic response to 9/11 was nothing short of amazing. Had Muslims killed 3,000 people in India in a similar attack, Muslims would have been driven out of their homes en masse. You would be able to see the effects of that on aggregate statistics such as income, health, wealth, etc. 9/11 had no effect on the fact that American Muslims are among the most affluent groups in America, much more so than white Christians (which is an achievement unmatched in pretty much any other country).
As a brown guy with a Muslim name who moved to the south in 2002, I didn’t even notice any anti-Muslim reaction. What I noticed was there were suddenly all these movies about civil liberties, and the TSA was conspicuously searching white women at the security line. (Contrast with say Japan or China, where to this day I have a nice airport lady follow me around before boarding.) That is of course not to say there wasn’t none. But when shit goes truly goes sideways for a minority in a country everyone notices it.
There was a massive cultural backlash against the anti-muslim stuff? Maybe you were watching different media than I was.
Though small caveat about your claim "hunger is almost gone, living standards are high". I hope you're aware of the comparatively abysmal poverty most of the world lives on as compared to the developed countries of the world:
https://income-inequality.info/
80% of the world's population is living on less than poverty level in the US (and this is PPP - purchasing power parity adjusted income). 20% live on less than $2/day.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/the-share-and-number-of-p...
Very much so. There are several problems we need to solve that, I believe, are crucial for the advancement of society.
In no particular order:
1- Lies in the media. Social is hard, however, traditional media should not be protected at all if they lie. In the US, I do not believe the protections afforded to the press were intended as a license to lie and manipulate.
2- Politicians should not be legally protected if they lie. That is the case today in the US. A politician can say someone is a terrorist pedophile a million times and they suffer no legal consequences. This is most often used to smear each other during elections and beyond.
3- The forcing function driving the behavior and focus of politicians does not include a variable measuring good, positive, useful, constructive or beneficial outcomes of the work they might do. Given this, their entire focus is consumed by winning elections and engaging in never-ending smear battles with the opposition. The end result is they rarely accomplish anything of note.
4- Bills must be focused on the relevant matter and nothing else. It is truly counterproductive and dangerous to allow politicians to stuff bills with unrelated matter. At the very least, this material is never really exposed to enough daylight and debate.
5- Laws have to have expiration, review or re-ratification dates. Perhaps this should apply to a certain category of laws, not all. However, it is clear that there are likely a massive body of laws that should not be in the books today, at least in the form they were originally created or intended. Three that come to mind are the Postal Agreement (which subsidizes millions of shipments per year from China), the First and Second amendments. The first needs to evaporate. The other two are in serious need for changes. Media and politicians should not be protected if they lie. Gun rights and responsibilities need clearer treatment.
6- Again, in the US, we have a huge problem of being taxed with no political representation or influence. If, for example, you are an independent or republican voter in states like California, your vote is, effectively suppressed, erased, discarded. The same is true of other states and political perspectives if they are “winner take all”. I have lived in CA for about 40 years. Despite the fact that I pay federal and state taxes like everyone else, my vote has never had any value at all. It is summarily discarded in each and every election where that mechanism comes into play. That, objectively speaking, isn’t right, regardless of party or state. If people pay taxes, their vote should be counted. This is part of the reasons for which a third party is doomed to fail in this nation.
7- Anyone should be able to run for office without requiring hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. Every candidate should have equal footing and no advantages afforded by money. No more political donations. We should have a national elections website where every candidate gets a free space to post essays, position papers, plans, proposals, videos, etc. Rule #1: You can’t smear anyone.
There are more. These, I believe might be the most important. Imagine the news without lies and real investigative reporting behind everything asserted. Imagine politics without the constant bombardment of lies. Imagine politician’s jobs depending on merit and outcomes rather than lies told for votes and words, outright buying of votes through various means. Imagine if every law was required to be reviewed, ratified, modified or eliminated every few decades. Imagine if your vote counted, regardless of where you happen to live. Imagine if we took money out of politics and implemented an equitable system that allowed anyone to run and removed the influence of big money from our political system.
I happen to think this would make for a better society. Not perfect. Can’t have that. We could have better. Definitely.
I believe it's a mistake to discount that media, though. People will hold their tongues in public, but say something closer to what they really believe in social media. As Mike Tyson famously said, "Social media made y'all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it."
The media itself wouldn't be a problem, except that it also shows up at the voting booth. That's where disrespect turns into force. Government has the ability to force people to do things and to deprive them of rights. Regardless of what people say when you're outside talking with them, it's clear that there's a link between the social media discourse, increasing incivility by politicians, and their willingness to use government to act against those they do not like.
The news may present a more dangerous picture of the world than it should, but it's also neglectful to say "Everything looks fine to me". There are genuine dangers that affect real people. Many people still do soul-crushing and body-crushing work for a wage that cannot support them, much less their families. Not everybody has a high standard of living. And many people are finding their rights slipping away under a political process heavily based on falsehoods.
I'll grant that it's not all bad. But you really need to grant that it's not all good, and a lot of people are worried for good reason. Sweeping them under the rug just invites people to believe that this is the reason why the bad things are so bad.
For black and indigenous people, gaps relative to whites are not closing at all. Moreover, for black people, the gap results entirely from gaps between black men and white men. Black women actually have similar income mobility to white women raised in similar economic circumstances.
Hispanics and Asians by contrast have similar or higher income mobility compared to whites. That means that income gaps for these groups are closing over time (and quite rapidly). The gaps that do exist are attributable to recency of immigration, similar to what could be said for Italians or Polish people in the 1920s.
Are progressives in denial about progress? When it comes to black and indigenous people, the answer is “no.” Their error is instead that they lump non-white immigrants into the conceptual “black/indigenous” category when in reality they should be categorized with other immigrant groups: Germans, Italians, Irish, etc.
This is blatantly incorrect in regards to black Americans. They match all other non-indigenous race groups in term of income distribution and have seen huge leaps in total wealth over the last decade.
Obviously wealth building takes time, but we’re getting there
https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disp...
"New data from the 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) show that long-standing and substantial wealth disparities between families in different racial and ethnic groups were little changed since the last survey in 2016; the typical White family has eight times the wealth of the typical Black family and five times the wealth of the typical Hispanic family."
It also clearly proves their “black/native and everyone else” wrong since it says Hispanic ethnicities are also not catching up all that fast. The narrative that we’re just not improving the lives of black Americans is unhelpful and incorrect.
Id agree about natives, but there’s a lot less discussion around then (which is sad to say the least.)
One thing that has happened is the income gap for the top 10% has narrowed, even as the income gap at the median has stagnated: https://www.nber.org/digest/jan17/earnings-gap-between-black...
I do think in many ways things are getting worse. The American economic system becomes more openly exploitative by the day, and oligarchs openly flaunt their power while we are largely powerless to stop them. There is very little accountability for powerful companies that break the law (see something like Hertz Rental Cars getting people arrested with false reports of stolen cars), and income inequality in America is growing from it's already staggering heights.
The comparison for "are things getting better" shouldn't be a baseline of "things used to be even more terrible and now they are slightly less so", it should be "are we making things better at the rate that we should be", and I think the answer to the latter is clearly no.
That said I'm an optimist because my left wing politics demand it of me. A better world is certainly possible.
EDIT: this article doesn't mention climate change at all does it lol. The big looming thing that could ruin the next generation's lives entirely.
Is it realistic to expect that society can eliminate fuzzy, grey-area problems like discrimination when we can't even eliminate tangible, clear-cut physical-reality problems like murder?
I agree with your general point that it's easy to cherry-pick metrics though.
Call me a pessimist, but I don't think it's possible to eliminate murder so I think that is an unreachably high bar.
That being said, I think that there is lots of low hanging fruit that we absolutely could do something about. Traffic fatalities and injuries are an obvious one. In the US, if we collectively decided that it is unacceptable to have tens of thousands of people die every year in auto incidents and scores more seriously injured, we could rework our road infrastructure and impose regulations that would drive these numbers down dramatically, even if not to zero.
The biggest challenge to enacting the types of reforms that would improve most people's quality of life is that advocates have mostly done a poor job of communicating their positive vision for how such changes would improve most people's lives. The story progressive transit advocates (myself included) tend to tell sounds like it's about taking away the rights and freedoms of drivers. This is undeniably true. Freedoms and rights are always in tension. Progressives will always lose though if they aren't able to tell a compelling story about the benefits of the changes they wish to impose. Otherwise the other side will be able to successfully hammer them on whatever is being taken away.
In our current regime in the US, we have essentially legalized murder if you are driving a car. If someone runs me over with their SUV while I am legally crossing the street because "they didn't see me," they are extremely unlikely to face any consequences unless they were drunk. But at the same time, if I'm driving a car a lot, I also face the risk of killing or harming someone else even if I am always doing my best. This would be devastating even if I wasn't legally at fault. In other words, the freedom to kill someone with no accountability is no freedom at all.
The point is not that I want people to go to jail for killing people with their cars. I want to live in an environment where people are not killed by cars. There are many things like this where I think there is a more positive vision for society that is not that hard to imagine but that does require letting go of some of our past ways of looking at things. In this particular case, a century of marketing and pr by auto/oil companies has warped our perspective that we can't even see how anti-human the industry and our infrastructure has become. That doesn't mean we have to get rid of cars entirely, but we should rethink our relationship with them. There are many things like this.
TFA's first few pages mention that most people underestimate current inequities. Considering that it took 80 years after the 14A for the US Armed Forces to desegregate[0], and it's been over 150 years now and the US has arguably still not managed to say "mission accomplished"[1] on Reconstruction, I would agree the answer is clearly no.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9981
[1] similarly 50 years (and counting) without ratification of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Rights_Amendment ; my country didn't have nationwide female suffrage until the late XX, but a couple of decades after doing so we had the equivalent of the ERA in our Constitution.
It recently struck me that the US approach and challenges addressing the aftermath are quite different than other colonial powers.
Following the end of slavery for other colonial powers, the former slaves and their decedents were separated from the parent nation state, allowing the Colonizer to move forward without really resolving the damage and injustice.
This means that in the US, we observe the long legacy of slavery as racial inequality between citizens of different race.
However, for a country like France, this is observed of the inequality between France and a former colony like Hati.
At least for me, this was not an obvious realization and I thought that the US was uniquely bad at post slavery reconstruction. Perhaps the US is doing the better than other former slave nations. To look at this through the lens of economics, Black Americans earn ~70% of the national average. Haitians earn ~5% of the French national average, adjusted for purchasing power.
This is not to say we can't to better, but I do think it is helpful to understand the scope of the project and challenge undertaken.
cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33931615
Between all that and the Monroe Doctrine having been enunciated suspiciously close to the Vienna Congress anti-slavery declaration in Europe, I lean towards the US as having unique issues with slavery and its aftermath.
Im not sure what conclusions we should draw from the difference in dates and how hard abolition was US, aside from the fact that slavery was more economically entrenched in the south than most other places. After all, the north abolished slavery it in 1804, long before Mexico or Canada.
Similarly, the number of slaves in Mexico ranged between 20,000 and 45,000 prior to abolition. Historians estimate that Canada had fewer than 4,000 slaves. These numbers are both far fewer than the 4 million slaves who toiled in the U.S. south. Both Canada and Mexico also paid the owners of the freed slaves compensation, as did many other countries [1].
Lastly, as a minor note, I think that saying it took the US 4 years and 650k lives is an understatement. The abolishment movement in the US predates the revolutionary war and formation of the country itself, so I think it would be fair say it easily took 100+ years.
I think there is also something to be said about the rise of racial inferiority as a post-hoc justification for slavery in the south, which I understand to be primarily an American invention, but I'm not sure if or where it fits in. Prior to this, most civilizations held that the only justification needed to hold slaves was the power to do so. Most also held that other races were inferior, but the two concepts were unrelated, with independent reasoning.
[edit] After writing this, another thought occurred to me. Perhaps one of the main reasons why the abolition of slavery in the US was so protracted and bloody was the weakness of the federal government. This both limited the ability to finance compensation, but also meant there was no monopoly on military power to enforce abolition on resistant states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compensated_emancipation
>cf https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33931615
What a beautiful song
still digesting the rest of your reply, but on this point: prior to the civil war, the US army had made its units up out of people from the local area. In the run up to the civil war, some of these units defected en masse, with their command structure intact. Ever since, the army has been careful to rotate geographically diverse people through each unit, ensuring spatial and temporal mixing.
(if chatter surrounding events of the past few years {Bundy, Floyd, J6} is to be believed, the army is not worried about the ability of its officer corps to distinguish between legal and illegal orders as it is the inclinations of potential splinters at the squad level)
(Just to make the point) The West seems to have recently decided that people are born innately masculine or feminine, which strikes me as a Regressive step from the previous Progressive position that people were unique individuals incidentally sexed purely for the purposes of reproduction (and therefore society should eliminate normative gender expectations and other gender-based discrimination).
How can we eliminate gender discrimination when it has become problematic merely to suggest that sex is real, that sex itself can be a chosen basis for identity, and that some (arguably most) gender-based discrimination is actually sex-based - for example failure to progress in an organisation after taking one or two extended breaks for pregnancy and infant care?
What’s the source for this? It was my understanding (e.g. from the poverty line) that there’s been significant improvements also in the last few decades.
I am willing to hear this argument, but intuitively it seems like this is not the case. Does a poor person in Arkansas have a lower quality of life now than they had in the 1980's? I feel not, but I'm not sure how to measure or validate this. Income numbers aren't great, because often they don't account for various assistance programs and subsidies (not that assistance programs are a satisfying end-state).
I'd love to look at things like
- whether that have indoor plumbing (I would have assumed this was near 100% even in 1980, but I don't know).
- Ownership of microwaves, TVs, cars, etc.
- Hours spent working
- Usage of things that have made all our lives better, like vaccines and other medicine, internet, education, etc.
- Prices of healthcare, education and housing have increased in real terms
- Double income trap
- Shift from well paying union jobs to gig economy, temp agencies, Amazon warehouse etc. leading to precarious employment
- Opiod crisis
And in 40 years the same will be true for the average Indian, Vietnamese, Bangladeshi and the other fast growing developing economies of today (unless climate change wrecks havoc in the tropics by then).
We’re seeing the highest growth in the countries that aren’t already at the top.
Yes - only engineers are capable of independent and rational thought. The orange site continues to sniff its own farts.
I find the tone of "engineers, developers smart, everyone else dumb" to be really tiresome; and when it becomes self congratulatory, it becomes really irksome. It's also the casual dismissal of knowledge in other fields and lived experiences of others that just happen again and again here.
I should probably find a different place to hang.
That being said, we need to do WAY more obviously.
"Most laypeople do not organize information in ways that provide reliable monitoring of social change over time, which makes their views on progress susceptible to memory distortions and high-profile current events and political rhetoric."
I remember an older person warning me to not go to NYC because she thought it was still riddled with crime (as it presumably was decades ago). I am confident that watching the news actively distorts one's perception of the state of the world (unless one explicitly discounts what they see in favor of many other pieces of information).
My baseline for whether progress is being made is this : Is home-ownership as accessible to a single bread-winning family with 2.5 kids as it was in 1970, furthermore that's just to return to a normal time where the American dream was at least in reach, for this to be 'progressive' it'll have to encompass minorities who were most likely cut out of the ability to reach those things back in the 70s for whatever reasons.
Empirically things trend towards getting worse for people when CEO's and elites are having runaway profits such as they are now. Case in point the 1920's before the great depression. CEO pay was < 100x average salaries in 1980, by 85 it was 200-300, today for some companies its as high as 5000x.
Furthermore, healthcare costs have hardly made any progress in fact more and more people are having to choose to pay rent or buy diabetes medicine. When just 'living' is by default stressful and miserable for > 60% of people it can't begin to be progressive in nature.
I put my trust in how the average person thinks things are going, not from people on high telling us everything is great and why don't we recognize this. In the past year our industry has seen stocks tank, and layoffs increasing along with the fed funds rate. Someone having to push a story of how great everything is will get a cool response. People can assess how things are going, despite efforts from on high that people are mistaken in how great things are going.
In social sciences today a monoculture has formed and any criticism is frowned upon due to all the new sensitivities.
...
and why is this flagged?
But in essence, if people aren't kept focused on what isn't right yet, it's easy for them to see the positive and assume the future is here and uniformly distributed, when only one of those things is the case.
Color blindness may be an ideal goal for the future, but we're not there yet.