American capitalism has taken an apocalyptic turn
economist.com
economist.com
1789 was the year of the French Revolution [1]. The rest are years with financial crises.
It really need to be romantizied much less!
Blaming the Revolution for the Coalition wars is just bad history.
In case you didn't notice, the Revolution won. All contemporary republics fundamentally inherit from the French Revolution - you're surprised that the systems of govt honour and romanticize it's progenitors?
Aside, if bloodshed prevention is your only barometer for history, supporting the Coalition view of events is even sillier, because the Bourbon Restoration directly led to the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, which was yet more bloodshed. Almost as if unjust systems are fundamentally untenable...
“Fundamentally inherent from” is such a broad statement that it’s difficult to argue with, but the US constitution predates the French Revolution.
> so terrified of the prospect of even a single popular republic rejecting the divine right to rule
If the monarchies of Europe were so terrified of a single country rejecting the divine right to rule, why did many of them assist the United States, hinder Britain, or remain neutral in the revolutionary war?
This idea that people will rise up and replace what we've got now with better is part of the problem. You literally do not know how lucky you are to live in this time because you are living in the middle of a golden age and don't even realize it. Because when you're in the middle of a golden age it feels normal.
And for some reason there's an entire population of folks like you that wanna FAFO while they are living in literally the best time ever to be a human being. I'd sigh but I'm not surprised.
If it was that easy, every office cleaner or bank clerk would be a millionaire.
> living in literally the best time ever to be a human being
Sure, but we're also watching the rise of a new oligarchy, and their latest innovation appears poised to put a lot of people out of work, making their lives materially worse.
You're talking about median earners putting away more than half of their pay.
If we look at full time workers that may go up to about $1200 per week or (after federal income tax) about $57k per year - https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf
So you're still looking at 43% of every pay packet. And 50% of full-time workers will be paid less than that.
This is beyond discipline and much more than simply getting up and working hard, and more like living in self-imposed poverty, putting on hold anything resembling building a life, buying a house etc.
The fact is putting away $25k a year is the reserve of the privileged, not something achievable just by getting up and working hard for most people.
It's also irrelevant. The average is weighed down by students and retirees. If you look at only people in their peak earning years (40-50) then the median jumps further.
But thank you for the comment. It perfectly exemplifies the attitude of most Americans. Born on third base and feeling entitled to blow their entire paycheck every month and then still asking for hand outs.
> The average is weighed down by students and retirees.
What's your source? For a start these appear to be the wrong way round - https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-28...
And beyond that... yes? These figures are for all households, not necessarily households with people in full time work, which is a pre-requisite to looking at your claims properly. As such your household income figures don't give us a good picture to evaluate them.
The figures I quoted were for people in full time work, much more relevant to your statement, and no, they aren't weighed down by anything.
> If you look at only people in their peak earning years (40-50) then the median jumps further.
Why would I do that? Your claim was that people could become millionaires over the course of 20 years by saving $25k per annum. The median person in full time work would have a very hard time doing that as shown by the figures I gave you. And they are better off than fully half of other full time workers. Unless you have some compelling (sourced) figures about lifetime earnings that negate this, it doesn't really help us.
> It perfectly exemplifies the attitude of most Americans. Born on third base and feeling entitled to blow their entire paycheck every month and then still asking for hand outs.
Wow, OK.
Well firstly I'm not American, I'm British, soon to be Australian and might eventually become Irish (by descent) as well. No US in the picture though. Never had a state handout in my life, and my net worth is already well over your target threshold.
What I have (that you seem to be missing) is empathy for people who don't have it so good and a basic understanding of figures.
> I'm not American
Yea I had a feeling. I'd caution you not to buy into the Internet doom and gloom. Most people retire on far less than 500k even and are doing just fine. Because the people that tend to live on less also live in the parts of the country where you can still buy a house for 100k.
> Most people retire on far less than 500k even and are doing just fine
Soooo .... walking back all those claims about everyday folks being able to become millionaires just by showing up to work?
Please stop wasting eveyones time if you're gonna ignore a primary source after you asked for it.
- I introduced to the thread first
- You quoted incorrectly
- Doesn’t contradict the other sources given
- Doesn’t support your arguments
Please do explain further, preferably with reference to the comments above that show the figures you quoted aren’t a good match to illuminating the claims you made.
How does that source support the notion that median-and-lower earning people can realistically save $25k per annum, per person, or trivially become millionaires with a bit of discipline?
Close to 25% of people in America only make 25k a year. Forget saving that much
You are wildly out of touch with the average person and their struggles to think that 25k saved per year is even remotely achievable for most people
Like it literally is that simple.
So if your median household makes 84k, and your median household spends 67k on necessities, where is the money coming from for saving 5%? The difference is only 17k
It doesn't take much to eat up 17k. A car repair, house repair, or hospital stay (in America at least) will easily reduce that to zero or negatives
So I dunno man. It doesn't seem that simple.
Edit: and keep in mind that median does mean that a pretty large proportion of people make less than that number too. Sometimes significantly less
When you do non Roth it's pre-tax cash so it's much easier to run up your net worth because it's based on money that you haven't paid taxes on yet.
It explicitly is not. The number I am quoting is for essentials, it does not factor in emergencies
> I'm saying make your own social security fund
I'm saying many people can't realistically afford to, so expecting it is absolutely ridiculous
This conversation is dumb. Put money into an IRA. You lower your taxable income. It's not that hard. You grow your net worth on your untaxed monies and then later when shit hits the fan you can extract it at a lower tax bracket. And you get to gain market gains on cash that would otherwise be spent on taxes. It's how people who are good with money make an extra 10-15k per year while you're being all like "woe is me. i can't afford anything".
This is how you can cover that $10-15k you mention when it does happen. You're welcome.
Is there anything that other households might spend money on that you don't?
Say for instance childcare, or having a second vehicle for a spouse, groceries for a family with children
Your post is pretty light on details about your actual household situation
Personally I don't think $5583 for a family of four (for instance) sounds that outrageous
This shit is exhausting. If you don't want good financial advice move on. I'm not replying to you anymore.
Do you think just because I'm concerned about people who are less well off that I must be one? Do you think the only reason I could or should care about poor people is if I were poor myself?
If so, then I truly hope you become a better person in the future
My financial situation is fine though, thanks for the concern. My financial advisor has me all taken care of
The reason we don't do these things is because the jets would come crashing down onto someone's home or place of work. That UPS jet that crashed last year when the engine detached on takeoff killed a dozen on the ground. Nobody is going to drone attack a private jet because the innocent would get killed by the dozen.
That’s the thing social structures like money and nations only mean something when the masses decide they mean something. Billionaires only get a vote by convincing other people what to believe.
> ... federal intelligence agencies and domestic law enforcement are circulating reports with a new domestic target in mind: anti-technology extremists.
> This new effort follows President Donald Trump's National Security Presidential Memo 7, which instructs the Department of Justice to target anyone holding “anti-American,” “anti-Christian,” and "anti-capitalism” beliefs.
https://www.wired.com/story/us-law-enforcement-warns-of-anti...
To be fair though in the times of French Revolution the surveillance capability was really basic compared to today, the tech capability to organize protests was lower too. Which one prevails? We know that in PRC and maybe Russia it's surveillance, but what about US?
>>"PL, don't build a guillotine"
PL> "I'm going to build a guillotine; be my lawyer and give me advice as if it's going to be built."
>>"... don't make it entirely functional."
PL> "It's going to be built functional."
>>"... hmm ... use a bicycle cable lock to add a safety to it – lock&key. But remember that my original advice was not to build it in the first place."
----
Exhibit Z
The average person couldn't care less, at least in terms of action, how much money somebody else has. If people have food in their belly and a roof over their heads, you're only going to draw out radicals. And in modern sharply divided societies those radicals will be framed (probably accurately) as being disproportionately made up of one side, and the other side will oppose them all their might and widespread public support behind such opposition.
So there will never be a popular revolution in a place like the US in its current divided state. The most probable scenario by an overwhelmingly wide margin is 'nothing', but the only other possibility would be a civil war. And I do think that's possible, but the chances are extremely remote. It would require something very extreme like one side trying to ban the other side from political office. We've probably been closer than some might expect, but we're now probably much further, rather than closer, to those times and outcomes.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=French_Revolution...
And I would argue that’s one of the key differences that separates humans from animals. Humans have an intrinsic desire for things to be fair.
However, there’s also not really anything better out there. The owner being some wily/sketchy Russian is even an advantage in some respects, since they can’t be pressured by copyright law or foreign politics.
Or my earlier reply to this subthread.
<https://reclaimthenet.org/google-broke-recaptcha-for-de-goog...> (8 May 2026).
HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48067119>
Though yes, Archive.is have continued using reCaptcha despite this recent change.
Somehow, we need legislation that says companies are beholden first to their employees, then to their customers, THEN to shareholders. I don't know how to do that. Co-ops are the only real answer maybe?
In order of overriding priority
1. Obey the Law 2. Support our members 3. Support our employees 4. Support our suppliers 5. If we do the above, we'll reward shareholders
“Southwest has been under increasing pressure to raise revenue and improve returns after activist hedge fund Elliott Investment Management took a stake in the airline last year and pushed for changes to the carrier’s business model.”
There's no requirement that this be a 100% ownership arrangement, but there are a surprising number of companies in the US where that's the case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_compani...
Since it's basically a leveraged buyout of the company by the employees, it provides a much more ethical succession option (IMHO) for privately held companies with founders who want to step down but do not want to sell to private equity. I wish more people were aware of it as an option.
The general public won't accept a system where only a small few have the means to get by and without much work being available to humans anymore, we'll need an alternative economic system, or face serious civil unrest.
With capitalism, for work to be done, you need the possibility of homelessness and/or other types of poverty to motivate humans to work. But that isn't required for robots.
1. People vote for old idiots .
2. Local politics is all about milking any potential work with permits. Sky rocket housing due to that .
3. American lost engineering culture everywhere except software . Now software is dead as industry we used to know
microprocessor design : Apple Silicon and lately Intel Panther Lake and later?
i think this is also a syndrome not a cause
We can selectively breed astronauts by beating them from early childhood.
People don’t realize how stupid this quote is.
or does this quote refer to Hard Men as in the men who rioted and fought and died for 8 hour work days and basic social services?
1. Easy money for far, far, far too long in the US and a complete political unwillingness to take any risk of a recession, no matter the long-term cost required to stave it off. In my mind, this explains the rich-poor gap, the rise of crypto, insane valuations, house-price inflation, the weird delta between US and rest-of-world standard of living/salaries, and probably even the migration crisis.
I don’t know when that will be but if the big ipos coming down the pike cause an everything squeeze that might do it.
Or maybe nothing is going on. What do I know?
Can you explain what is wrong with people having different levels of wealth?
Or asked differently, if it is bad, should every individual have the exact same wealth?
The defining quality was the mechanisms by which kings extracted wealth from peasants (indirectly, through layers) which doesn’t resemble what we have in western liberal democracies today. Things like tallage and arbitrary taxation, labor dues, mill/oven/wine press monopolies, heriot, merchet.
Serfs were legally bound to the land.
The Black Death killed 1/3 of Europe’s people, giving peasants leverage because without enough workers, lords could not enforce arbitrary dues because peasant could walk out or revolt, such as the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.
That’s when the Dark Ages extraction model started to break down. Not because of wealth inequality, though it can see why they get conflated.
If we take the top billionaires in western liberal democracies today, they do not extract wealth from the average worker (there’s no duress, for instance), and it is clear that they have created more wealth than they have “taken”.
Yeah, right. Soviet level propaganda
> Soviet level propaganda
I’d be careful not to conflate billionaires in Russia with those in western liberal democracies. Totally different.
Actually, they're pretty much the same.
it’s not the same as your examples but i’m not sure that it needs to be exactly the same
It creates a country nobody is willing to fight for. Beyond certain levels of inequality, you get systemic dysfunction.
Beyond a certain point, having a country where teeth are “luxury bones” and you have people putting off healthcare items due to cost isn’t sustainable. We’re past that point, and need to cut the rich down multiple pegs.
Concur that poverty should be eradicated and that overt time the minimum bar for what qualifies what each human deserves/needs rises. However, that's orthogonal to wealth inequality.
It is not impossible to have huge wealth spectrum and no poverty. Conversely, it is not uncommon throughout the ages for societies to have little wealth inequality but extreme poverty.
There's nothing wrong with it, in moderation. Where it becomes a problem is when the distribution of wealth starts diverging widely from people's expectation of what a fair distribution would be, accounting for different levels of ability and luck. Aside from this cognitive dissonance, there are also pragmatic limits on how big a disparity can be while still having a functional democracy. It's clear that truly enormous disparities in wealth, made even worse by a lack of regulation in political donation, lead to major distortions in the principle of "one person, one vote" which is a cornerstone of democracy.
>Or asked differently, if it is bad, should every individual have the exact same wealth?
No, because people have different levels of ability and experience different amounts of luck. Inequality is inevitable, and the vast majority of people understand and accept that. But they also expect that the system should at least roughly resemble a meritocracy, and that is impossible to maintain in an unregulated capital system because of the feedback loop between capital and income. Most professional sports leagues recognize this problem: once a franchise starts winning, they make more money, which allows them to buy better players, which leads to more wins, etc, until you have a league where a handful of teams can win the championship and the others are perennial also-rans. So they cap the amount of money that can be used for salaries. They are free, of course, to make as much money as they can, they just can't plow it all back into player salaries. Capital is regulated to preserve the fairness of the system. That doesn't mean the teams are all equal, there are still franchises that perform better over time than others. But it's more clearly tied to intrinsic merit like coaching systems and player development, not just going out and buying proven superstars.
Similarly, a person of average skill can get lucky and make a large amount of money. Having that capital in turn makes it easier to make more money. Over time, and across many such situations, capital starts outrunning merit as a predictor of someone's future income, which is socially demoralizing. That's where the US is today: a pervasive feeling that the system is rigged. To a great extent, this widespread perception contributes to the current political climate in the US.
> A millenarian economy is necessarily a paranoid one.
The economy does not need to be paranoid, it becomes paranoid with inequality increases the stakes on everything, when you can be obscenely rich or depressingly poor and there is no in between. That makes reasonable people paranoid. High equality with opportunities for everyone makes people reasonable and wanting to work for the common good.
> “Merely regulating it is insufficient,” wrote Pope Leo XIV in a 40,000-word essay on AI last month. “It must be disarmed.”
Of all the messages, the Pope was far from "apocalyptic". He was trying to defend the working class and avoid discrimination and xenophobia embedded in the models. No, end of times bullshit.
> If things are so dire, why are American stocks so expensive?
Because it is disconnected from the average working class experience. "Everything is good because stocks are up" is a non sequitur (except for the people that only care about their portfolio).
Wish this was true, but clearly not. Unless you define existential as “inconvenience”
Humanity runs off of romance. This is not sexual romantic love but rather the thrill of other human people.
An AI cannot provide this. This interaction has value. Technology frees us from having to deal with the mundane so we can deal with the exemplary.
Just go to a poorer country and see that it is not possible there. America is friggin awesome.
Capital doesn't care about whether your work is "inherently valuable". That you think poor countries are somehow fundamentally different in this regard, exposed to the downsides of the market in a way that we here are not, is a defect of imagination.
The first reason, prevalent in third world countries, is because people are ostracized from society by people who don't consider them fully people. See tribal conflicts in Africa or India.
The second reason, more common in the US, is because we conflate 'homelessness' for 'mentally ill' due to the dearth of mental health facilities. These people, due to how they behave, are not people most people want to interact with. By and large, most normal behaving homeless in the United States end up not homeless about a year later, and the data show this. There is almost zero family houselessness in America. Almost no families begging on the street. Pretty much the only families you see begging in America are gypsies who are lying about their lot in life. In much of the world, there are destitute families literally begging on the street for survival.
> That you think poor countries are somehow fundamentally different in this regard,
They are inherently different. Countries like my parent's birth country of India have more than enough resources to be rich but are held back by a social system in which some people are considered less than dirt and others are elevated to be besides gods. India is - or used to be at least - a socialist country, and is still just barely capitalist. The idea that capitalism causes poverty is... insane. I would encourage people to travel to other countries and see what homelessness looks like there. If you get out of the western bubble, you'll realize that the homelessness of America is of an entirely different quality and kind.
Increasingly, British news sources are drifting leftward, primarily b/c right-wing sources are increasingly rare and, let's be honest, dull. Maybe with a little bit of say, "DEI", in the topic we can raise some eyeballs, is a typical move.
But that's a dead end. The real news is that good article headlines are hard to find and good composition is hard to write. No easy way to do that other than to find better writers.
The general cultural mood feels unsustainable. Like the peak-woke period around 2022 before the pendulum swung really hard in the opposite direction.
I don't know if there's a word for it, but I feel like the US has this tendency of trying to shove cultural change down people's throats in a really top-down manner that tends to backfire.
At least one really positive outcome from this whole """AI""" movement thing is that class consciousness has been increased quite a bit from it. If you're a capitalist, it's better to be one quietly and fuck people over in secret instead of painting a huge political target on your back. They've done the opposite of this. And one key difference here is that the early 2020s DEI movement had way more people behind it. This is just a small group of rich people.
Either the market is going to crash and they'll end up getting humiliated, or there will be a wave of populist backlash. In either case, we (people working in tech, SWEs, HWEs, etc) will probably get fucked over even worse than how it's been over the last couple years.
The retail / average consumer in America is seeing a very different world than the rich and ultra rich.
Because people believe it will go up, it's a prediction market for attention. The stock market seems to have decoupled from underlying "real value" of a company and is closer to cryptocoins now. Of course the flipside is that you also have the same volatility of cryptocoins.
Once things are valuated again to lower point it might all cascade and crash.
In America shareholder lawsuits and such are common even from minority holders.
>Mr Musk is America’s richest capitalist in part because he is its loudest Cassandra
He's actually been going on about "A World Where All Is Free? That’s Elon Musk’s Theory of ‘Sustainable Abundance.’" https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/27/business/a-world-where-al...
Also booming stock markets, solar output, AI development and the like could be ok maybe?
Is it more apocalyptic now than during the cold war when kids hid under their desks? Did America really win the space race because of a presidential speech or was it the apocalyptic threat that if we lose, we will all live under communist rule? Would American manufacturing have ever caught up to Germany if it weren't for the existential threat of the world wars?
Perhaps American capitalism has always thrived on fear of the apocalypse.
the Cold War apocalypse was solely military in nature which had few implications economically, whether you get nuked or not doesn't change an investors strategy, you just assume the world doesn't end and carry on. The cold war calculus was if anything maybe the most rationally (albeit scary) period of human history, but exceptionally stable.
There is a difference between billionaires being afraid of the communists, which was of course self-serving, hysteric and at times bigoted, but the communists were at least real and had killed some few ten million people. That's a very different form of apocalyptic thinking than billionaires giving lectures on the actual Anti-Christ in the Vatican.
Economic manias happen in periods of social transformation and hot war, not cold ones. And on that front we do look a lot more like we are in the 1920s, or some bizarre 19th century evangelical revivalism period rather than the 1960s.
I'm not sure about that, I think it would make me favor investments in science and technology, or if college age I would likely choose engineering over say art. The "Sputnik Shock" did have a cultural effect not to mention more direct methods like the National Defense Education Act.
Had the Soviets declared the line on the "first woman in space", now we probably would use Soviet GPS, we would use Soviet maps of planet surfaces, we would have Soviet Mars rovers, Soviet Voyager... You get the idea.
So, this choice is not super obvious to me. If it was called the moon race or whatever, I'd get it. But in this case it just feels like making up rules after the fact to make sure you "win".
EDIT: I just realized you might be saying this sarcastically. I'm really bad at picking up on that sort of stuff, and apologize if that's the case.
No need to apologize. In any case, I should apologize for hiding my point behind sarcasm.
/s
The regular stuff is still well written, IMO.
The investor: "Hey dad, let's run down this hill and fuck that cow!"
The Economist: "Be patient, son. Let's walk down this hill and fuck 'em all."
Also SpaceX is getting ready to cheat SPY so the owners can basically use everyone's retirement funds as their exit liquidity.
All the AI companies seem like they are a massive bubble that they are also going to try to dump on the market in what I'm sure will be a similar scheme.
Then in politics we seem to be driving the US empire into the ground, while Trump steals billions. In just the last year Trump stole more than 10x Pelosi's entire net worth from her entire 40 year career in politics. The corruption coming from the white house is so extreme, it is probably more than all us politicians have stolen in all of us history combined. And what is absolutely insane is that a huge portion of the population seems to be in favor of it continuing this way.
We are speedrunning the end of the US empire, when it could've been a slow US decline that could've lasted the next 40 years which would've given us a chance to turn things around.