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179 sats \ 5 replies \ @elvismercury 2 Nov 2023 \ on: Meta Econ Takeover Day 16 meta
This is sort of cheating, but I think the secondary effects are part of it: the loss of manufacturing + the effects the loss of manufacturing has had on people. Specifically, it seems like a certain kind of person used to be able to have a solid middle class living, and participate in civic affairs, and now that person can only have a lower class living, and face the subtle social pressure from that.
I'm not totally comfortable with this -- it makes it seem like some people are incapable of doing other stuff. If you were in tech for the last thirty years, maybe fourty years, the world was your oyster. It's been hard to hire good people in those industries since forever, and even average people had a lot of leverage. So one might ask: why would someone not get one of those jobs, vs working some shit job that pays only 25% as much? A host of factors. But the whole failure of the 'retraining' movement attests to the real frictions there.
So to me, that's a giant effect Not just the economics of it, but the psychology and sociology of a bunch of people feeling like they've lost their self-respect, while certain other people lord it over them. The contempt for the working class is real. The effects of the contempt are probably in the populist uprisings we've been seeing. How that all plays out, ultimately, is tbd.
That feels like a continuation of the selection pressure that civilization has been exerting on us since the beginning, but in this instance it's coming from the reserve currency.
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I think that's a fair way of putting it.
If you're not some kind of ideologue who denies science and data, you must admit that some people are smarter than others and capable of more abstract thought than others. It's not a nice thing to say, but it seems to be true. If civilization continues in the way that it's been going, requiring increasing levels of intelligence to do the jobs that the market wants done, what happens?
It's a real thing to think about, even if it's not really a thing you can talk about without getting canceled. The angle that a fiat reserve currency is accelerating this trend is a very interesting monkey wrench on top of everything.
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It's not just about smarter. This modern environment is so novel that a whole host of traits that were highly adaptive 10,000 years ago are now maladaptive.
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True. Being an aggressive and violent asshole was probably socially adaptive for a long time, when there were plenty of outsiders to whom your urges could be directed. The Iliad is a nice account of some of that.
Now all they have is cryptotwitter.
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At the very least, it was beneficial to have a larger share of those people around.
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