Rethinking the American Dream by David Kamp
- check out the lights in the frame at the bottom, and the kid taking a picture center-right (image courtesy of Kodak, hence.)
- (quote:) "Still, we need to challenge some of the middle-class orthodoxies that have brought us to this point—not least the notion, widely promulgated throughout popular culture, that the middle class itself is a soul-suffocating dead end."
- Perhaps they should teach expectations management in school? Sure, middle class should never die - I hope it will grow.
- And yet, this is still rather depressive - we all want things to continuously, exponentially get better. I actually think this is almost possible, we just need to reason carefully about how this could happen: what changes in manufacturing, consumption, energy generation, transportation, and social organization would gradually effect widespread improvement.
- Some time in individual lives (my own included!) is squandered in pursuit of the small pleasures which would be better used for purposeful endeavor. Seems we need to resurrect the idea of sacrifice towards the future (and it seems this meme itself is increasingly popular).
- Realistically: nothing is for free; we are probably only enjoying this more recent economic boom because energy (and i mean oil, gas, coal, hydro, nuclear etc), which drives almost everything in society, is really cheap. If we can keep it this cheap, or make it cheaper through judicious investment in new technologies (and perhaps serendipity), then our standard of living can increase. That is not to say that it will - we need to put the caloric input to the economy to good use.
- Currently our best system for enacting a general goal of efficiency is market-based capitalism. Now, the problem is that this is an inherently unstable system: there will be cheaters e.g. people who repackage crap mortgages as safe securities, companies who put lead paint on children's toys, companies who make unsafe products - and the capitalistic system, in and of itself, is imperfect at regulating these cheaters (*). Bureaucracy may not be the most efficient use of money or people's lives, but again it seems to be the best system for regulating/auditing cheaters. Examined from a control feedback point-of-view, bureaucracy 'tries' to control axes which pure capitalism does not directly address.
- (*) Or is it? The largest problem with using consumer (or, more generally, individual) choice as the path to audit & evaluate production is that there is a large information gradient or knowledge difference between producers and consumers. It is the great (white?) hope of the internet generation that we can reduce this gradient, democratize information, and have everyone making better choices.
- In this way, I'm very optimistic that things will get continuously better. (But recall that optimality-seeking requires time/money/energy - it ain't going to be free, and it certainly is not going to be 'natural'. Alternately, unstable-equilibrium-maintaining (servoing! auditing!) requires energy; democracy's big trick is that it takes advantage of a normal human behavior, bitching, as the feedstock. )
- Finally (quote:) "I’m no champion of downward mobility, but the time has come to consider the idea of simple continuity: the perpetuation of a contented, sustainable middle-class way of life, where the standard of living remains happily constant from one generation to the next. "
- Uh, you've had this coming: stick it. You can enjoy 'simple continuity'. My life is going to get better (or at least my life is going to change and be interesting/fun), and I expect the same for everybody else that I know. See logic above, and homoiconic's optimism
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