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Their seems to be a concerted effort to propagandize the population into believing that lowered living standards is a GOOD thing Not being able to get a full t

• bryanrasmussen 8y ago
  also not having kids is good because if you have them now they will die in horrible ways in about 30 years from Global Warming!
  • booleandilemma 8y ago
    Would you give up having children to save the planet? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/20/give-up-having-children-couples-save-planet-climate-crisis https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/20/give-up-having...
    • deogeo 8y ago
      A large part of the West has children at below the replacement rate, so in a very real sense we're already doing that.
  • village-idiot 8y ago
    Literally why I don’t have kids. I could afford them (with some sacrifices to my quality of life, of course), but I can’t stomach the ethical consequences of bringing a kid into what I think is a dying world.
    • chadAnon69 8y ago
      The developed world is fine and has reached equilibrium On the other hand Africa's population will be larger than the rest of the world combined within the century and while you are responsible you're tax dollars are going to pay for a syrian refugee with 4 wives and 20 kids or the equivalent in your country https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/muslim-migrant-benefits/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/muslim-migrant-benefits/
      • jlongr 8y ago
        The article you linked says that your claim is 'mostly false.' Don't spread lies.
        • chadAnon69 8y ago
          Only the dollar amount, the number of kids and wives is confirmed by a German newspaper Snopes does that pretty frequently, adjust what about the story they are "fact-checking" and then rate only that aspect to try and discredit the entire story Read more carefully, language can be twisted quite easily
      • kijin 8y ago
        In every society, birth rates drop precipitously as soon as 1) modern medicine reduces infant mortality and 2) women get a better education. Both of these things are already happening in many parts of Africa, and the trend will hopefully accelerate greatly over the next couple of decades. Those 20 Syrian kids will be lucky to want 2 kids each by the time they've grown up, having been exposed to European culture and technology. I don't trust any prediction about what Africa will look like by the end of this century. Every prediction I've seen is little more than a projection of past trends into the far future, but far too much change is going on across the continent right now to make such projections even remotely realistic.
      • dang 8y ago
        We've banned this account for using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's not allowed here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
• anticensor 8y ago
  Those are all bad, however, if you turn them around to read "being able to not ...", they become good things. Being able to not retire or being able to not have kids are good things.
  • chadAnon69 8y ago
    But the difference here is there's not choice. There's plenty of people who want kids or want to retire, but can't because the job market is garbage due to artificially increased labor supply and thus they are forced to live hand to mouth
    • sokoloff 8y ago
      What's artificial about the labor supply?
      • anticensor 8y ago
        Unneeded worker spots and/or burocratic procedures are created to create an illusion of extra labour. This hampers technological advancement.
        • sokoloff 8y ago
          > Unneeded worker spots and/or burocratic procedures are created to create an illusion of extra labour. Aren't both of those serving to increase the demand for labor, not the supply?
          • anticensor 8y ago
            No, demand can only be controlled indirectly in free market, no-UBI economies. You are creating a supply to fill already existing demand in this case.
      • chadAnon69 8y ago
        Offshoring with free trade means the whole global population is effectively in competition for jobs. Pay and benefits is reduced to the country willing to provide the cheapest labor with least protections and benefits.
• netcan 8y ago
  This is kind of tangential but, I don't really understand the "death of the middle class" meme/claim. In what sense is the middle class not growing, decade over decade?
  • Lkjhmnbv 8y ago
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2015/12/10/congratulations-american-middle-class-youre-becoming-a-minority/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/eriksherman/2015/12/10/congratu...
• andrewmcwatters 8y ago
  My question isn't how frequently will we see more Yellow Vestian movements in the future, but what will it take, and how long will it take before leaders die over this? When will someone get killed over it?
• throwaway487550 8y ago
  > offshoring and massive immigration lowers the cost of labor for the rich This will fail in the long run, because any serious studying require isolated from "society" middle-class life.
• GarrisonPrime 8y ago
  Perhaps they are trying to sway public mentality to be more accepting of a more modest lifestyle, but... Most of what is viewed as "The American Dream" was indeed an unsustainable and overinflated dream, built on debt and fraud. But yeah, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. (At least, relative to each other.) That's kind of the point of technology. But all the while, the baseline the poor live at does rise quite a bit above what had come before. Our parents and grandparents may have been able to buy a house, but it was half the size (or less) of what most people would consider to be a resonably sized house today. And their houses weren't packed with appliances and gizmos for every need. They may have been able to buy a car, but it would have lacked so many features and required so much maintenance, for a company to produce such a car today would be considered negligent to the point of being worthless. They may have had pensions, but those pensions were built on debt and lies, and today we're seeing the pensions have very little to actually back them up. (In other words, they really didn't really have legit pensions.) They may have been able to afford kids, but they didn't spend hardly anything on them compared to what people today seem to think they "have to" spend on their kids. They may have been able to retire, but part of that was larger communities and several generations living very near each other or even in the same house. There was no expensive health care because the healthcare industry had very little to offer anyone. There was no huge retirement community expenses because granny lived with the family and everyone chipped in to take care of her. They may have been able to get a job, but only half the population was able to get a job. And no, most of the jobs didn't have benefits. Overall, my point is many people have an overblown perspective of how good the past is or what normal is supposed to be. Today's standards of living may be seing stagnation - or even a bit of a backslide - but I don't think it's all that worrisome or oppressive in the grand scheme of things. Rather, our expectations what standards of living "should" be are a bit unrealistic. You may see this and claim that I've drunked thE Kool-Aid or something and been brainwashed by this article and simialr media. I would counter that I think you've been brainwashed by movies, TV, and Facebook into thinking everyone is supposed to have respectable homes, solid jobs with bennies, and financial security. Very few people ever actually have that kind of life.
  • ABCLAW 8y ago
    I think you do yourself a tremendous disservice by ignoring the actual numbers associated with the generational wealth disparity on display here. We aren't talking a small backslide. Who gives a fuck if your fridge can make ice if you can't afford to buy a place to keep your fridge. >I think you've been brainwashed by movies, TV, and Facebook into thinking everyone is supposed to have respectable homes, solid jobs with bennies, and financial security. Very few people ever actually have that kind of life. No, the middle class most assuredly did have that kind of life. That's what made them middle class.
• rhexs 8y ago
  It seems like a middle-class existence should still be quite trivial to provide for most Americans. We can afford universal healthcare, but we can't afford a system of for-profit insurers, unconstrained pricing, non-negotiated drug pricing, emergency room doctors being "contractors" to some shady out of state/out of network racket etc. We can easily afford to send a large majority of our "top" students to colleges for free, but we insist that everyone needs to go to college, no matter the academic ability. We also allow universities to use this "free money" to create degree programs with no job prospects in order to grow universities for no other reason than to make more money, at the expense of the younger generations. There is a shortage of skilled tradesmen and tradeswomen due to this, and of course the "solution" is yet another cry for more immigration. We already have a large amount of struggling poor Americans we don't take care of, but we insist on programs that do nothing except subsidize very specific connected and powerful lobbies (tech, farming, etc.) Both republicans and democrats support this. Republicans have always supported the black hole of funding that is the farm lobby, and Democrats have recently given up the blue-collar unions to focus on immigration. I'm unclear why, but this campaign has been extraordinarily successful. At the end of the day, all of the above causes the market to go up, until it doeesn't anymore. Any change in policy would most likely crush the market in the short-term but would potentially be a start at trying to fix endemic issues. I guess we can't have the market go down though. That'd make the boomers mad.
• solatic 8y ago
  > Globalism is neo-feudalism, offshoring and massive immigration lowers the cost of labor for the rich and the result is death of the middle class and the creation of a global equilibrium for wages. And why, pray tell, do you have a right to a high-paying-with-benefits job? Certainly, it was more likely for your parents to get such a job. Certainly, the pay and benefits were well fought for. Certainly it's better to have such a job than to have a job with less pay and benefits. But why do you feel like you have been wronged when such jobs are lost? Why do people deserve such jobs? I think that if you delve into this line of thought, you end up either with the labor theory of value (we deserve it because we worked hard for it), or nativism (we deserve it because we were here first). The first is economically indefensible, and the second is morally indefensible. Yes, you may (in theory) tax the rich to prop up your economically unsustainable lifestyle. Go empty the bank accounts of people like Hollywood A-listers and Wall Street financial executives and put the money into getting another couple weeks of vacation, a $10/hour raise, guaranteed six months of paternity and maternity leave, free healthcare, free daycare, and a fat pension besides. But if we're going to empty their bank accounts, then why do you deserve the cash? Why don't college students deserve the cash? We could pay off all that student debt and bankroll free higher education for the future. Don't kids deserve to enter a bright future, unsaddled by debt? Or what about infrastructure projects? Don't we all deserve not to sit in traffic jams? Don't we all deserve Gigabit fiber Internet access to the home, bridges that won't collapse, smart energy grids that pay us for the excess energy from our houses' solar panels and batteries? Don't we deserve that? Around the world, do you know who thinks that they deserve being well-off? Saudi princes think that they deserve their oil wealth. Russian oligarchs think that they deserve their gas wealth. Chinese politicians think that they deserve the wealth the Party has given to them. Why are you different? Why do you deserve more - because you ask for less? The universe is a pretty unforgiving place. You only deserve what you can persuade people to give you, and most of the time you can only sustainably do that if you can make an honest, rational argument for why it should be given to you and not to somebody else. If you try to make economic arguments with emotional appeals, you may win some of the time, but the arc of the universe is going to bend towards undercutting you. Nobody deserves to grow old in the same place they were born. Nobody deserves to have a guaranteed lifetime job with the same employer for forty years straight. And so nobody deserves to be able to say, "I have a right to stay here instead of moving far away for work."