site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

5
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Fortunately, real median wages have been going up for the past 28 years.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q

Unfortunately:

  • https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DoKf. Number of weeks of the median US wage to afford a median US house has gone up by, what, 60%, since the 80s.
  • https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DoL3. Number of weeks of the median US wage to afford the mean cost of ground beef (wish I could find median) was lowest in ~1999 and has since risen by, what, 80%?
  • https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1DoMe. Number of weeks of the median US wage to afford the mean car loan. Indirectly, unfortunately, so take it with a bit of a grain of salt. I couldn't find a raw 'median cost of a car sale'. Still does nicely show the 2008-2009 spike and return to status quo in about 2012 or so, and then COVID weirdness that hasn't come back down to the prior level since.

CPI's approach to dynamic price-weighting means that if a good becomes unaffordable it ends up downweighted. (As one example: from 2011 to 2023 CPI-U's College tuition and fees weighting dropped from 1.695 to 1.275, even as the relevant CPI went up from 692 to 928.)

There are situations where this behavior is appropriate and useful; this is not one of them.

The housing crisis is bad, but that's a result of (local) government policy and is unlikely to be fixed by tariffs. If anything, increasing the cost of lumber (much of which comes from Canada) will increase the cost of construction even further.

Ground beef is somewhat more expensive these days, but it was pretty cheap in 2010 and I don't recall that being a particularly great economy. It's not hard to cherry pick a commodity that's in an expensive part of the cycle right now. Canada also exports half a million tons of beef, so slapping tariffs on that is not going to move the price in the direction you want.

Car loan price seems broadly stable since 2008 modulo the spikes you mentioned. It also doesn't capture the 40% (estimate based on googling) of cars that aren't financed at all.