There's very little evidence that tax cuts stimulate economic growth. If there was meaningful evidence the investigators would receive the Nobel Prize -- every year. And while economists can be relied upon to provide all sorts of elaborate theoretical "evidence" the actual empirical evidence tends to confirm the opposite: significant tax cuts have zero to negative impacts on growth [1].
It will be interesting though to see what tax cuts do in such a low-growth environment. In the end it seems Wall St. will be the big winner. There's plenty of actual evidence that tax cuts (a) eventually make it back to investors once finance takes its cut and (b) tax cuts lead to most firms adopting a much higher risk profile [2]. Ironically we could see lots of mergers and overseas expansion.
The article has some good points but the whole "crowd" thing was never a serious idea.
Crowds are not intelligent. Democracies are what are intelligent. Having lots of intelligent people who care deeply about something discuss it thoroughly in good faith and then vote will almost always produce optimum outcomes for all involved. This basic principle underlies everything from global capitalism to modern science to even modern military strategy (network-centric warfare).
The problem is that more often than not you don't have lots of people discussing a topic in good faith. In fact this is a might even be a rare and fragile scenario. It's very, very easy for the discussion or the voting system to be corrupted and subverted. The logical conclusion is that the "crowd" is only intelligent and able to reach good conclusions in a well-defined environment. There must be rules, institutions and ultimately reputational accountability to ensure that all actors are actually acting in good faith. Capitalism needs well-regulated markets, science needs its prestigious institutions and even the military needs civilian oversight and international conventions.
I think once people appreciate this it becomes obvious why suggestion boxes is a waste of time and why highly compressed mass referendums are almost certainly disaster.
America needs to embrace "local government." That means devolving budgetary power to the states. The federal model has failed. The current system is broken. The people who pay the most into the system (highly productive cities) are the people who actually have the least voting power. Once people wake up and begin to understand what's really going on this will not last. 'Taxation without representation' tends to rub people the wrong way.
End the Federal Highway/Farm/Energy Acts. Heck, even blow up Medicaid and Obamacare. Cut the military budget by 2/3. All of these enormously expensive federal "programs" are just elaborate means to extract hundreds of billions of dollars from the wealthy and efficient urban counties and distribute them to the relatively poor and inefficient rural counties. None of it is fair and none of it is sustainable.
This is one good thing that will come out of runaway polarization in America. As all trust dissolves and the two (highly geographically correlated) classes move apart this illusion of "one republic" acting in everybody's interests will fall away.
It's weird. This article is so poorly informed and, frankly, straight-up dumb that I'm surprised that the author would put it out there under his real name. But what's more surprising is how every time a startup geek shows up and insists he alone understands an enormous, extremely complicated, century-old distributed market system better than those who have been studying it for decades -- everybody actually stops and takes it seriously. I mean, we're supposed to take hearsay like this:
> Even fifteen years ago at an Ivy League school I did not like to say things too far outside the zeitgeist in section, because it just wasn’t worth the risk of making someone in class angry. And I hear the problem is even worse now.
and a bunch of literally made up numbers (ahem, "subjective assessment") seriously?
So yeah. That's the question. Why does nobody listen to the actual experts on the American education system? The people who've been studying this for decades? And when people aren't willing to do the hard work (that requires expertise)... how do you even talk about solutions in a serious manner?
This is actually a fantasy that has no basis in reality.
You claim that conservatives "(in general)" do believe in global warming but poll after poll after poll demonstrates otherwise[1]. 85% of Republicans don't think humans are to blame and (by extension) there's nothing we could possibly do about it. The Republican President claims quite emphatically that it's a "hoax." How do these observable facts jive at all with your claim that conservatives don't believe in the "solutions" when most don't even acknowledge the problem.
As for your fantastic claim that China won't cut emissions again, I suggest looking at reality. See the Climate Action Tracker for China [2]. China is on track to achieve its peak admissions by 2030 which is what they agreed to under the historic Paris Agreement.
The facts are out there. There's no need for you to make up fantastical claims you just have to have the courage to look at them.
Anecdote: I suspect if you're the parent of a special needs kid and you're not filthy rich and you want to have access to the best specialists and, frankly, access to other special needs kids then it makes sense to move to the East Coast. This may be changing but for a long time East Coast schools were the only place where your kid could spend any quality time with an autism specialist. Part of it, I think, is just the fact that a lot of the research and the teaching colleges happen to be on the East Coast so there's a kind of knowledge community effect at work and this leads to better infrastructure. It's a situation where you need all the help you can get.
1) Controlling memory layout is not as big a deal as people think. The JVM is highly optimized (really it's probably the most optimized system ever devised) for allocating and deallocating objects on the heap.
2) It is in fact possible to control memory layout today because Java has access to offheap memory where you can have all the control you want.
This has actually been the case for nearly half a decade but for some reason a lot of people are convinced that "big arrays" can knock over the JVM.
Trust in the mainstream media has only collapsed among a single group: the right-wing[1]. This is where your "it's just desserts" narrative falls apart. Study after study [2] shows that while the mainstream media is still popular and widespread among the majority, the right-wing have literally gone off and formed their own media-sphere.
And while there's no doubt that the media has engaged in deliberate propaganda -- though Snowden has nothing to do with this, the canonical example is actually Iraq -- it's highly doubtful that people are turning to InfoWars because they no longer trust the New York Times to give them verified, well-sourced, non-partisan reasonable facts and interpreting. That doesn't actually make any sense at all under even cursory analysis.
I strongly disagree. While Democratic Party loyalists and the establishment center-left may trust the mainstream media, in general progressives and leftists don't. They're not going to InfoWars, of course; they're going to The Intercept, CounterPunch, Jacobin, Truthout, etc.
Apologies if I'm out of order but is there a particular reason why therpe1's posts are being marked [dead]? [dead] posts are difficult to read )in my browser at least).
If this was a broad-based phenomenon because the media is incompetent and is constantly hiding conspiracy theories then you wouldn't expect to see such the heavily polarized differences between parties that you do. (That is to say, let's say the media shouldn't be trusted after Iraq, it still doesn't explain why certain populations exhibit virtually zero trust (7%) and other still largely trust (60+%).)
And keep in mind, this is not a exclusively US phenomenon, you will find the same anti-media, anti-science, conspiratorial thinking across right-wing parties in many other countries. Now it's possible that the media in every country really is untrustworthy and the right-wing are especially tuned to this because they are more intelligent and sensitive to propaganda... but it's unlikely. The more plausible explanation is indeed that this distrust of the media is endogenous to the right.
My only point wrt the original article is that this notion of an "information war" is almost certainly incorrect. Putting aside electoral politics, the wild conspiracy theories that proliferate after every terrorist attack or mass-shooting incident aren't coming from foreign agents or even from political agents. Rather what you have are specific populations who have adopted this manner of conspiratorial thinking as a replacement for the establishment media. Highlight these populations on a map[1] and what you see find are stark boundaries that exclude cities. This isn't an accident or a coincidence which is why I think we can exclude base explanations like "people were fooled," "the media failed" or "Russia did it." Really, from an epidemological perspective this is not exactly a world-class mystery.
To counter your assertion that it's just "the right wing" who have lost trust in the MSM, I would direct your attention towards: https://www.off-guardian.org
You're right. The problem was never really fake news it was more that a significant chunk of the population has abandoned consensus reality. This is not a US problem either. I travel a lot and everywhere -- Europe, Japan, Australia, India, and the US -- you see the same exact pattern played over and over. Right-wing partisans lose all trust in the established media[1] after decades of right-wing politicians insisting that journalists can't be trusted. Right-wing partisans deliberately constructing their own parallel knowledge community and this enables right-wing politicians to speak, completely unchallenged, about events that never happened and facts that aren't facts[2]. The end-game, where right-wing voters, having isolated themselves completely, begin to insist on more and more outlandish conspiracies[3] until we're talking about secret pedophilia rings and the Pope conspiring with Hollywood Jews and millions of fake voters voting in the most closely watched election in the history of the planet.
The interesting thing about this process is how deliberate and effective it is -- and I think, if you spend time on these right-wing forums, like yourself, you start to realize that nobody has been "duped," these people aren't fools, they are eager and willing participants in engineering a state of mass delusion. This was very apparent to Deleuze who grasped this very clearly:
Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when he refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on the part of the masses as an explanation of fascism, and demands an explanation that will take their desire into account, an explanation formulated in terms of desire: no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for. (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 29)
Like the war on drugs it is nonsensical to focus on the supply when the demand is so great. A population addicted to fake news, a population that wants to be propagandized, a population that will gather online in forums and message boards and self-propagandize, is going to find and consume fake news and generate conspiracy theories no matter what.
And I think a liberal society has to let this happen. It's not like China, the State is not going to deploy its own highly-trained, well-paid "media operatives" to find and destroy this alternative media ecosystem while lavishly funding the official media ecosystem. The whole point of liberal society is that desire is allowed to run its course.
This is almost entirely what I too hold as the best intersection of facts which explain the current scenario.
I'm spending a lot more of my time looking at community behaviors online, moderation and moderation evolution, and any papers which cover this area.
This stuff is virulent.
I think we might be headed into a dead cat bounce period in the near future - a lot of people have become aware of this now, and the idea is obviously disseminating a lot more.
(3-4 years ago, I never saw this idea summarized and shared in a single piece, vs multiple times in the last 3 months.)
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The fundamental motor, the gameplay loop which drives this is the degradation and competition in the media sector.
Competition for ads, consolidation, along with management targets would force magazines/papers to move towards language which would grab a larger audience and more attention.
And then you have the partisan right wing groups, created because they kept saying that the entire media is a liberal conspiracy.
> Like the war on drugs it is nonsensical to focus on the supply when the demand is so great. A population addicted to fake news, a population that wants to be propagandized, a population that will gather online in forums and message boards and self-propagandize, is going to find and consume fake news and generate conspiracy theories no matter what.
Interesting. And like drugs, people reach for fake news because they don't like reality.
So maybe the real question becomes: Why is reality so unsatisfying for so many people? It seems like there's an emotional gap that people try to fill with drugs, and a somewhat-emotional-and-somewhat-cognitive gap that people try to fill with fake news.
This reminds me of "Escape From Reason" by Francis Schaeffer.
I am fairly right of center but nothing in your narrative is anything I have considered worthy of attention.
There's plenty of good healthy center to right news. The garbage, left and right, is for consumption by the foolish. It also serves as inflammatory material to be used by extremists of the opposite ilk.
Don't fall into the trap of believing that, simply because a news source (no matter how loud) is present that any particular group of people takes it seriously.
It's not just ridiculous... it demonstrates an almost willful disconnect with reality. Just consider:
1. Do these people have any knowledge of history? Both Canada and the USA have sustained far, far, far higher rates of immigration than what we're seeing from Syria and prospered mightily because of it. In the 70s Canada was happily letting in a quarter million people a year. (At the time the US was also practically giving away citizenship.) These immigrants, mostly from Asia, contributed enormously to North America's wealth and stability. And this is not a new pattern. We see the same thing over and over. Which makes you wonder -- has there ever been a case where immigrants "overwhelmed" a nation state?
2. To that end, just consider the numbers, even for a moment. We're talking about thousands in a nation of 35 million. And yet somehow these individuals -- poor, isolated, without knowing the language, and isolated from their own families -- pose a security threat.
3. Most importantly at the end of the day basic common sense indicates that immigration is almost an economic positive for the host country. Even if you suspect that you're not getting the best and the brightest from another country what you are getting are individuals often in their prime earning years where some other country has paid to raise them up until this point. The economics here are pretty clear but nobody likes to talk about it. (For example, take a look at Britain. Brexit or no, Britain will need to import millions of laborers over the next decade or, frankly, it will go broke.)
I always bring this up because the language around immigration is so far-fetched, so disconnected from reality and history, but it also never changes, in fact few things are so predictable.
It will be interesting though to see what tax cuts do in such a low-growth environment. In the end it seems Wall St. will be the big winner. There's plenty of actual evidence that tax cuts (a) eventually make it back to investors once finance takes its cut and (b) tax cuts lead to most firms adopting a much higher risk profile [2]. Ironically we could see lots of mergers and overseas expansion.
[1] http://graphics8.nytimes.com/news/business/0915taxesandecono...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-19/u-s-tax-c...