[caconym_]

I may be reading this too late at night, but the theory seems to be that our benevolent, perfectly logical Ivy League-educated overlords regrettably have to break a few eggs to make a delicious omelette of economic prosperity for all, and those broken eggs are enough to make people throw up their hands and vote for Trump/Brexit/whatever just for a chance to cling to the present, the good old days, at the expense of that shining, golden future.

I have a feeling that people are actually pissed off because they don't think the established elite are generally benevolent, but rather that they act in their own interests at the expense of the prosperity of the middle and lower classes. Whether this is true is beyond the scope of this comment, but any discussion of this seemingly relevant alternate theory is conspicuously absent from the article.

[CM30]

Pretty much this. And that's the issue with globalisation; it's great for those at the top, decent for those at the very bottom and often rather awful for those in the middle.

The votes for Brexit, Trump, various far left and right wing parties, etc are a way of saying "let's watch the elite's world and system collapse on itself". They've seen how little any of this is doing for them as workers, and how every system seems stacked in favour of the well off, and they just want to see it all burn to the ground.

[return0]

> are a way of saying "let's watch the elite's world and system collapse on itself"

I don't think people want to replace the elites with void. Maybe that's the case for nihilistic, fringe far-right or far-left parties. But when majorities or near majorities are voting for Trump or Brexit, they want to replace the elites with something else`.

It's funny to watch the elites suddenly renouncing democracy because she stopped serving their purposes (It was quite a relevation to watch reddit go full-on military-dictatorship this past week, but hey reddit is not reality).

Democracy is a very adaptive concept and there is a saying that there are no dead ends with it.

[CM30]

That's a depressing pattern in general. A lot of people like democracy... up until something or someone they don't like gets the majority of the vote.

It's especially interesting to see all the political figures against brexit talk about more referendums and reconsidering whether to leave the EU. Think it's time the Labour Party and the likes accepted the results and started thinking about how to make the best of it rather than trying to ignore the results of a major vote like this.

[pjc50]

Replacing the "elite" with an underspecified, possibly unachievable "something else" is begging for a void.

Come on, we're software engineers; we know how crazy it is to turn off a working system without having a viable plan for its replacement.

[return0]

> underspecified, possibly unachievable "something else"

I think it's pretty well outlined what is that "something else". The implementation is not there (obviously), but the API exists, for example anti-immigration, [edit]pro-protectionism etc. Most people dismiss it as non-existent though, due to liberal reflexes.

[pjc50]

Being anti-immigration is protectionism, though. Especially for the services sector. The two things are in direct contradiction to one another. The specific motivation for objecting to immigration (other than straight racism) is "protecting jobs".

[return0]

yep. sorry typo

[Nursie]

Software != Politics.

Revolutions and other acts that tear things down do often result in worse outcomes, yet sometimes the tearing down is necessary, regardless.

[flukus]

We also know that management will never approve a replacement until the working system burns down.

[AnonymousPlanet]

Globalisation is much more than that actually. It is basically a technological change, happening throughout the last couple of centuries, that enables people to operate at any point in the world. Of course, the ability is not evenly spread out. First it was the Europeans who could colonise the world. Then it was big corporations who could set up shop abroad and fly their managers in. Tourism from the first world was kind of a fallout of that too.

Today it is not just rich people but pretty much everyone. It is much more easy to migrate from a different culture and then stick your own via the internet. This makes migration much more bearable for the migrants, especially if they can tell themselves that it's just temporary. And a lot of people are migrating, because wealth is just not evenly spread.

This is all nice until you realise the difference of cultures. In the 80's it was no big deal if someone at the other end of the world was "wrong" (about how to lead your life, what to eat, etc.). If that someone moves into the house down the street that's suddenly a different matter. What if his "wrong" spreads?

On top of that, corporations have less of a need to play well with a regional population if they can move any place of the world. This has resulted in a power shift towards corporations with an impact on politicians (think revolving door politics).

The result is that many people feel abandoned, betrayed, and left helpless under a deluge of "wrong". And finally they want revenge. Let it all burn down and build something that's more like how it used to be.

But those times are gone. We cannot wind the time back to the 80's unless we roll back the internet. Because the root cause of it all is not betrayal or corruption, or a conspiracy to establish a new world order.

It is my belief that this century will be characterised by how humanity will deal with the issue of a globalised world, with contradicting cultures and beliefs. Are we going to raise fences everywhere, forming blocks protected by new iron curtains, hiding in our shells? Or are we going to form one all encompassing harmonised culture that you better not deviate from? My hope is that humanity learns that the world is not going to end just because someone is wrong on the internet or down the block.

[majewsky]

Indeed. I can understand that a lot of economic policies can be viewed in the way the author describes (a relentless pursuit of efficiency), but Ivy League overlords are also doing a lot of stuff that's just plain greed and can't be explained away with efficiency.

For example high-frequency trading. Or (here in Germany) renting ruinous hotels to the government as refugee centers at bizarre rates because there was literally no other big-enough accommodation available.

[gpvos]

High-frequency trading is usually justified by pointing at increased market fluidity, which is a positive thing in principle. Whether that is enough justification for the problems it causes is clearly something that should be discussed more.

[majewsky]

Ah right, market fluidity was their cover-up story. I'm absolutely not convinced, seeing how billions of dollars and euros are pumped into the market to increase fluidity, with questionable success.

[patrickg_zill]

That's the justification. If you go to e.g. zerohedge.com and find an article showing the millisecond by millisecond bidding by hft, you might come to the conclusion that the justification is hollow.

[erikb]

Not 100% what the article said. Yes, prosperity for all is what the elite wants to achieve. But, they have a different understanding what "prosperity for all" means. For the normal person it may not mean "more growth, more efficiency" but a stable life, job, apartment. The assumption is that most people want less risk not more gain, while the people at the top think more gain is what everybody wants.

Just that much explaining the article. My personal opinion is that discussing the elite as psychopaths who just want to exploit humanity as boring. Yes these people exist and at the top there may be more than in the middle, but it's simply not common human behaviour. Most people want to be geniunely valuable to the other people around them. Your boss wants to make a good impression on you, etc. But the understanding of the world and how the different factors of your life influence you differently than the factors of other people's life influences them, that is what leads people to make different decisions and set different priorities.

[venomsnake]

Call it the syndrome of vox.com - there was this article about how Bernie's trade protectionism will have a "price" of depriving millions of third world countries' citizens of chances to develop and escape poverty.

I blinked twice or trice to see if they were not joking. But no - they were seriously thinking that some other's country citizens' problems should be considered equal to the US citizen ones by the President of US. I agree that all people are equal, but elected officials/statesmen should always consider their constituents couple of orders of magnitude more equal than the rest of the people.

The people right now want a real statesmen like Bismarck:

"The whole of the Balkans is not worth the bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier."

The US and British (and a lot others) working and lower middle classes want to hear that they are more important to their own government than the foreigners.

And Trump and Brexiters are the only ones that give that message. So was Sanders while campaigning.