From a foreign perspective, it looks like the problem is less general economic disenfranchisement and more than American medical care structuring really is uniquely awful and there isn’t the state capacity to rip it out and replace it with a new kind of system (most likely the kind they have in France, Japan etc.).
I might go further and say that insurance in general is just totally broken in the West.
Firstly, the stuff that people want to insure against (big, unpredictable disasters that result in ongoing costs) aren’t what insurance companies want to cover.
Secondly, the likelihood that an insurance company will pay you depends less on the terms of your contract and more on its own PR and financials. And those financials depend on how new the company is and how its investments are going than anything to do with you and your problems. All the incentives are massively perverted - it’s a way to milk money off people to use for stock market gambling whilst paying out the minimum possible until you inevitably go bust.
Corvos
1d ago
To (reluctantly) be fair, the teen in question had supposedly extremely high grades, had been to the White House dinner and was recognised by Barack Obama, and is clearly a social media star of some sort. Writing BlackLivesMatter over and over again on his application was cheap rhetoric but it was in response to a specific question on his application rather than an essay:
In response to a question asking “What matters to you, and why?" the teen wrote "#BlackLivesMatter" exactly 100 times.
it's not literally all he had going for him.
Stanford didn't just accept some total rando because he wrote Black Live Matter.
Makes all the stories posters tell about their five-year-old kids a lot grimmer, doesn't it?
Corvos
3d ago
Currently? Being ruled by decent people (and having seen off their Leftist movement in the latter half of the 20th century). I have no proof but I strongly suspect that Japanese people are capable of pivoting quite handily for another Mao or another Hirohito. It’s the nature of a hierarchical, collectivist society.
Corvos
3d ago
Aren’t the groypers disproportionately minorities? And maybe working class (?). I would be more worried about losing educated white voters.
Point taken. I must admit I cannot imagine fundamentalist Islam advancing to technological and economic parity with the West without becoming something quite different, so that doesn’t concern me hugely right now.
(Caveats: yes, there was a very advanced Muslim society pre-Renaissance, but they were cosmopolitan and borrowed heavily from Greek and Roman writings, as opposed to being insular and traditionalist.)
In general I think that advocating (even slow, non-violent) regime change for anyone who might one day be a threat is both deeply impractical and exactly the kind of behaviour that makes people perceive America and the West as relentlessly hostile! I’m no dove, but ‘we’ll figure out how to exterminate you some day’ does not strike me as a good basis for foreign policy.
I am also increasingly dubious about the use of Munich as an intuition pump for foreign policy. Yes, one time a country signed a peace treaty with somebody they were capable of beating militarily, and the other party didn’t hold to it. There must surely have been loads of other times when a peace treaty was signed and the other party stuck to it, or got distracted making war elsewhere, or busied himself with internal affairs. Likewise, there were lots of times when two countries didn’t sign a peace treaty because they each thought they could win, and one found to their horror that they were mistaken. The lesson from Munich cannot be ‘even if a warlike nation offers peace, you must set your sights on destroying them. Only once everyone who dislikes you is dead can there be peace’. Humanity is a warlike race and we will never be short of potential Hitlers; some distrust and hoarding of one’s own strength is appropriate but meeting each with a campaign of elimination will cause far more bloodshed than it solves.
Corvos
4d ago
That’s the point of the Erdogan biography though. Turkey had secular democratic government for generations (under the oversight of the army who were mostly strict but not despotic).
That is, they had a democratic government in which it was against the constitution to advocate for explicitly Muslim policy.
Erdogan rose to power in large part as an expression of deep fury by the Muslim majority whose desires and way of life were being discounted.
Personally I do not despair of human nature because other people have different religions and preferred ways of running society. What I do require is that they do so in their own countries and far away from me, which is why I am a firm advocate of very low immigration.
I think the belief that everyone, given time, will approach something that liberalish Europeans are comfortable with is load-bearing for immigration advocacy and also that it is mistaken.
Corvos
4d ago
The main thing that I got out of https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-the-new-sultan is that most of the people in Islamic countries really are very devout muslims, who want the same in their leaders. There's a reason that most of the Arab Spring countries turned into Islamic theocracies - people want those, they don't want to be ruled by The Great Satan or by Moloch. Secularism in the Middle East is and always has been a project of the sultan and/or the army, it's pretty much never bottom up. Be careful before you make assumptions.
I think the right wing can be too cavalier about this, but there's definitely a spectrum no matter where you personally place the line.
On guns: from selling to a man who tells you outright 'I want this gun to shoot my wife' to selling to an army known for indiscriminate mass murders, to selling to an allied military, to selling to society in general knowing that some may misuse it, to selling only to men of good background with good references.
On alcohol: from selling spirits to the man whose family came into your corner shop to beg you not to sell to him, to the off-license on the motorway, to society in general, to society parties only.
And so on. "Either you hold people responsible for what's done with their products or you don't," seems like a false binary.
Corvos
5d ago
In significant part because the end of the Raj split off famine-prone Bangladesh (the main site of the Bengal famine in 1943) into a separate country.
Bangladesh continued to have serious famines long after independence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh_famine_of_1974
The postwar advent of intensive agriculture and chemical fertiliser presumably also helped.
Corvos
5d ago
Interestingly, Marx came from a family of atheist Jews, who had converted to Christianity before his birth.
It makes more sense if you switch from
No house == homeless
to
No house == renter
If your home goes up hugely in value, and you sell without buying another house, then yes in a manner of speaking you have only acquired the approximate equivalent of a few decades of rental value which you will now have to pay, making the transaction net zero.
But if you had been renting all that time, you would still have to pay the new inflated price but you would have no assets to set off against them.
EDIT: I apologise, I see some of this was in your original post.
Corvos
5d ago
Oh, sorry, I agree with your broader point. You see the same with the very stern rule of the samurai in Japan. I just wanted to make a joke about poor old Australia.
I've often speculated that the frontier served a similar purpose for the US, actually, functioning as a place where you could send those who struggled to fit in or behave, or where they would remove themselves. A sort of capital punishment where nobody has to lose their capita if you will.
Corvos
5d ago
According to that article, relatively few people were actually sentenced to death under the Bloody Code.
They were instead sentenced to a fate worse than death. To whit, Australia.
Corvos
6d ago
Keep at it until Jonathon Strange comes in. Mr Norrell is really really boring, and it's not fun slogging through that, but the visceral experience of finding him boring helps you understand him better in the long run, as well as why the world reacts to Strange with such relief.
Yes, it is, and indeed I have a certain amount of time for the degrowth people on that basis. They're usually a lot more honest and consistent than the 'white heat of industry' technocratic ones or the 'don't worry about it, comrade, everything will work out once the revolution comes' strain. I think that their ideas are much better-founded than alternative ideologies but usually ignore the fact that:
- People have genuinely different capabilities...
- ...therefore keeping society relatively equal requires shackling the most capable in society, which is quite difficult, strongly negative for them, and...
- ...not a good idea in a competitive global system.
Plus, if you have to halt growth, now may not turn out to be the best place. It might be that there's a better equilibrium at a higher tech level where all the fundamentals can be protected but everyone is more comfortable overall. On the other hand, it might not turn out that way, in which case you have to remember that mod cons are not ultimately what makes life worth living for people.
Corvos
6d ago
That's the point. The two strains of argument against Scot Sumner's argument are:
- The fundamentals might have been better in earlier times - social life, community, family formation.
- Humans care about relative wealth and comfort, not absolute. Plus lots of other stuff like prestige, respect, etc. that you can't get from being a poor man even in the modern age.
Corvos
6d ago
unless the rural parts of the latter two countries are much worse off than would be expected
I think that's the main hidden variable, yes. UK is actually ~$60k, and I can't see QoL as better in the UK than Japan, but it makes more sense if you ask about rural Japan vs rural England rather than comparing Tokyo vs London.
pursuing a career as a journalist is one of the easiest ways to fail out of the upper-middle-class.
Can confirm, have sadly seen it happen to someone with enough talent to get their foot in the door but not quiiiite able to prise the door open under strong headwinds.
Corvos
7d ago
Quoth Agatha Christie: “I never thought I would be so rich that I could afford a car, and so poor that I could not afford a maid.”
This has got to be related to increasing urbanism, right? If I wanted to go and ‘play in the outdoors’ I could travel five minutes to a park packed with people where I’m not allowed to do anything, or more than an hour to the countryside.
If I wanted to do woodworking, the first step would be to get a new job so I could afford to move to a new house with the room to do it.
Technically, in normal gambling you are stastically certain to lose over time, whereas if you don't change your purchasing habits here you can only win.
(Give the Devil his due.)
But yes, obviously that's not going to be how it goes and this thing should be nuked from orbit.
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