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Comment by hourago | Hacker News Reader

This is the main reason that Western society is radicalizing. Workers are fish in a smaller and smaller pond. Long term it is unsustainable, but like bubbles it is very difficult to predict when it will melt down.

A healthy society needs to be fair. To work hard just to continue being poor, a part from cruel, will have long lasting political consequences. Some people will go to Communism, other to Fascism as left or right authoritarian regimes grow with people desperation.

Things can get better, there are many good know ways of redistributing wealth and creating opportunity for younger generations. People deserves better.

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Another dimension besides just the economic outcomes is the constant appearance of normalized, or even celebrated, impropriety. There's no real accountability for exploiters and no meaningful restitution for the exploited in pretty much any domain. Institutions which advertise themselves as society's equalizers (e.g. "Nobody is above the law") regularly prove to be either nakedly inadequate in the best cases or even active promoters of predation in the worst cases. So people stop believing in the premise. Impartial institutions, or at least the believable perception of impartiality, is perhaps the most essential component to sustain "Western society". For example, I strongly suspect that if any real accountability and real restitution had followed in the wake of something like the 2008 financial crisis, we'd see a lot less radicalization today.

> For example, I strongly suspect that if any real accountability and real restitution had followed in the wake of something like the 2008 financial crisis, we'd see a lot less radicalization today.

Very much agree with this — an opportunity stupidly discarded.

Obama parlayed it into a Netflix deal and donations to his favored causes. He used it, just not to help people.

>is the constant appearance of normalized, or even celebrated, impropriety.

Can you provide some examples of such "impropriety"?

>For example, I strongly suspect that if any real accountability and real restitution had followed in the wake of something like the 2008 financial crisis, we'd see a lot less radicalization today.

What would this look like? My impression of the 2008 financial crisis was that the factors were so varied and the responsibility of a single actor so diffuse that it was very difficult to actually convict anyone of causing the multi-trillion disaster.

I wish this were true, but is it? One of the most stable societies in human history was ancient Egypt which was ruled by a god-king and remained relatively unchanged for thousands of years. Democracies, on the other hand, tend to be much more volatile. I think equal societies may be more unstable than unequal ones.

One of the key things about democracy is the peaceful transfer of power (between internal elites). Thus policy direction can change, perhaps radically, without the violence of a civil war.

This is particularly important in the face of change (technological, external, resource etc). Probably ancient Egypt survived in that form for so long because everything pretty much stayed the same - relative to our tumultuous modern world anyway.

Also, the population decreasing will see fewer and fewer people to work those crummy jobs.

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