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Comment by lava_pidgeon | Hacker News Reader

Maybe a political conflicts are more complex than a guy 150 years ago thought.

I think you're demonstrating the reluctance to admit that class conflict is a real thing.

There has been a class war going on for at least four decades in the US, and the lower classes are on the loosing side. All you have to do is look at growing wage gaps in that period. We can come up with all sorts of just-so stories, but the simple answer is that the rich have captured the US government, and it is being governed primarily for their benefit.

If you look at the actual numbers, the trend over the last several decades is a steadily shrinking number of people in poverty in the US. If the only thing you look at are the wage gaps, you're ignoring the very real gains the lower end of the spectrum have made. If the choice were to be poor then or poor now, I'd much rather be poor now.

The number of people in the prison/jail/probation/parole systems in the US has gone up ~16x since the 1970s

https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/mass-incarceration...

While the population of the US has gone up by ~1.6x during that same period.

Seeing as convictions aren’t spread evenly across income brackets, a poor person’s chances of being in the carceral system outpacing population growth by a factor of ten doesn’t really jibe with the whole “there’s never been a better time to be poor” thing

And contrary to boomers loved in childhood mythos of the wild west where the criminal could get a second chance, become the sheriff, etc. modern America gives no second chances. Huge sections of poorly paid labor would not be staffed if not for people having zero options. Many businesses get the majority of their cheap labor by exploiting ex-cons/people on probation and knowing someone on probation can't say 'no' because a complaint of their attitude from their boss to their PO has actual impacts on their life/freedoms.

Since social mobility has flatlined, this has more to do with about the decline in birthrates.

No, the numbers I referred to are percentages. The decline in birthrates doesn't factor in.

The biggest drops in fertility around 2007 were among teenage moms, hence fewer unwanted children / poverty. How is it immaterial regardless of pct or raw numbers? My point is that there's not a robust mechanism moving people out of working class to middle/upper.

What is poverty?

As defined by the Census bureau.

https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p...

There's a link below the tables to a PDF that describes the definitions and methods used.

Where in the PDF? It's very big.

I'm not American but I can tell city - land conflict, geographic conflicts are a very much thing in the whole world. I mean we have more contemporary political research so why not cite these.

Oh, also communism, Marx ideas were a catastrophy for Eastern Europe. Greetings from my vacation in Bucharest

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