[pcstl]

"Let’s state the uncomfortable truth. The future for many Americans is bleak and their lives are going to be nasty, brutish and short."

I find it funny how first-worlders are horrified by the idea that they might have to live in mild discomfort. Maybe try looking at how most of the world that isn't the US and Western Europe lives before saying people's lives will be "nasty, brutish and short" because they won't be working some low-skill 9 to 5 for 40 to 50 years while making 6 figures and then retire with the rest of their lives pretty much planned out for them.

[akra]

While this may be true, there's no point comparing yourself to other countries if you did achieve success, and are slowly losing it. The article makes the point that previous generations did have that success and slowly for newer generations it is being lost. That's a failure that needs to be highlighted - in the end against previous generations livings standards if you agree with this article we do not currently measure up to those standards.

IMHO I think globalization is to blame for this; it has transferred equity/ownership from Western countries over time. It has given us cheaper electronics, cheap aviation/holidays, and other discretionaries but in return has denied people of the essentials (cheap houses, job security, etc) and has transferred existing wealth away. The rich have the means to protect themselves and even profit from this redistribution of wealth; it's the middle class instead where much of the wealth was has slowly been drained. Instead of wealth they now substituted it with debt to keep the system running.

In the country I live in house prices are highly proportional to debt growth, much accrued to foreign debt. Our exchange rate stays high since issuing debt in the local currency despite increasing the CAD and draining wealth bids up the currency on the FX market. As long as houses don't crash (which is where most debt is issued) the dollar's worth doesn't deteriorate and we don't see the drain of wealth. As long as debt growth keeps growing we always create positive pressure on our exchange rate. The sad part about this of course is while young people can't afford houses, the goods they may substitute for this (cars, holidays, gadgets) are all underpinned by the debt used to bid those houses higher via a higher than otherwise FX rate.

[albntomat0]

I have a somewhat modified view, in that articles like this (and ones regarding income inequality) need to be specific in exactly what they mean by comments like "nasty, brutish, and short", or inequal wealth distribution.

Do they mean decreases in life expectancy? Student debt? Homeownership? Disease prevalence? Violent crime?

It's continually stated as an axiom, but poor writing such as that really weakens their argument.

[pcstl]

That's pretty much the same view I hold, I just couldn't stop myself being a bit less polite about it.

When Hobbes coined the idiom "nasty, brutish and short" he was thinking of a lifestyle with next to no guarantees. You might be dead at any moment.

Compared to that, I can't really see how first worlders being a bit less comfortable than previous generations is a valid use of the phrase.

[filoeleven]

I agree with your opinion of the phrase’s use here. Hobbes was talking about more than “no guarantees” though; he was referring to a life outside of society. The rest of this comment is about that, and tangential to the topic at hand.

He was working from the axiom that laws are what create societies, that “nature” without laws makes the life of man “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” It’s interesting how the first two are almost always dropped, isn’t it?

Anyway, this is a false premise. Nature abounds with examples of cooperation at the same rate as those of competition, from communal species banding together to mutualistic interspecies relationships. We keep finding more and more of them. My own suspicion is that what we find in nature broadly reflects our own ideals, because those are simply what we are most likely to look for, and so Hobbes’ society reflected more nastiness than ours does today.

[pcstl]

Even if nature has about as much cooperation as competition, society seems to put a damper on the nastier effects of competition. While we can find amazing examples of cooperation in the record of human history and prehistory, we also find a lot of brutal behavior which seems to have become almost monotonically less frequent ever since we started organizing into complex societies.

(Also, as predicted by complex systems theory, when brutal behavior does erupt, it is much more catastrophic - the 2 world wars are good examples)

[Dracophoenix]

Such as what? All civilization has done is systematize humanity's best and worst tendencies. It hasn't actively changed them. If anything, one could argue that it's much easier to cause harm and destruction than it has been at any time history.

[pcstl]

Well, we are in the least violent period of human history, and we have a lot of evidence that violence has been decreasing almost continually for all of history. https://slides.ourworldindata.org/war-and-violence/#/title-s...

[jancsika]

Let me tell you, we used to dream of living in the non-US/Western European world!

What I did there-- and what you are doing-- is referred to as "one-downmanship." Essentially, attempting to ignore or downplay suffering by talking about a case of worse suffering that you have experience with.

When not part of comedy sketches[1], it's usually considered disruptive.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE

[albntomat0]

Do you allow literally anyone, regardless of situation, to claim "woe is me"?

I understand that "one-downmanship" can be used to dismiss legitimate claims, but the existence of such tactics does not automatically validate anyone who claims their lives are hard.

The original article used a line from Hobbes regarding existence pre-society, which does not apply. The author could have used many valid other things in the US (homeownership and marriage rates, opiod addiction, savings rate) that would have made that part of their argument valid, but decided to go to the rhetorical extreme.

[jancsika]

> Do you allow literally anyone, regardless of situation, to claim "woe is me"?

As far as one-downmanship-- it can make sense in personal situations where trust is high and someone opens up about suffering. Perhaps in other high-trust instances, where it's likely to be interpreted as bonding/guidance and not muscle-flexing. But even in those cases it can quickly become unhelpful, hence the Python sketch getting lots of laughs.

In the case of political rhetoric, do you know an example of one-downmanship that isn't mere muscle-flexing? Just look at the example here-- OP said they find it "funny" that a generation of people are frightened by decreasing opportunities and the dangers of climate change.

Perhaps pre-internet this was a way to at least get a dissident message out before one got cut off in a live interview. A kind of "sign of life" to sentient beings in the audience. But on HN-- where those constraints don't exist-- it looks to me like the kind of low-effort disruption on par with asking, "What about Visa/Mastercard monopoly, or the telcos," on the next thread that discusses the Google monopoly case.

Edit: clarification

[pcstl]

For what it's worth, I can tell you I'm being completely sincere here and I just wish the literal most privileged people in the world would look a bit around them before claiming to live oh-so-horrible lives.

I say so being a third world inhabitant who has spent some time in the first world and noticed people there simply do not know how much they have it good.

[jancsika]

> For what it's worth, I can tell you I'm being completely sincere here and I just wish the literal most privileged people in the world would look a bit around them before claiming to live oh-so-horrible lives.

You're conflating two unrelated things:

1. American's poor understanding of conditions in the wider world, and of history.

2. How Americans feel about worsening conditions of poverty and health in America, or-- frankly-- how Americans feel about anything they feel is missing in their lives.

The times when Americans have implicitly conflated those things-- e.g., after WWII when a steep increase in depression among middle class women accompanied unparalleled prosperity in the middle class-- Americans actually prolonged their own suffering instead of ameliorating it. AFAICT, trying to "jolt" oneself out of depression by convincing oneself there's no good reason to be depressed is similar to trying to drink oneself out of alcoholism.

In fact, the idea, "You don't know how good you have it," is so hammered into the American psyche that one of the most popular Netflix series-- The Queen's Gambit-- is essentially an 8-hour long refutation of that idea from exactly that same time period. I'll save you the time-- that idea does not work.

Communicating with ignorant people by telling them about your experiences can be fruitful. Teaching your own coping strategies to people even though they are only experiencing first-world problems is graceful.

One-downmanship is simply not an effective tool to achieve either of those goals.

[pcstl]

Fair enough. But my point is to be disruptive.

I don't think the author has a point here. I think he's appealing to the fact that, on an emotional level, humans think they're entitled to always have their standards of living be equal or better to what they were before to make people think they live in uniquely hard times.

Looking to the world outside of the US might provide some badly-needed perspective as to why that is not true.

I think it is important to differentiate people's subjective feelings of being let down from there actually being a problem, or their lives being "nasty, brutish and short".

[Zababa]

> Looking to the world outside of the US might provide some badly-needed perspective as to why that is not true.

My understanding was that this is the opposite. In the US, the standard of living is pretty high, but not improving. In most of the world, standards are lower but improving. I think your point is that people should focus on what they have compared to the rest of humanity and the world, rather than compared to the generation before.

Feel free to correct me if I misunderstood you.

[pcstl]

My point is that even if US millenials' standards of living are decreasing, they still have it better than most of humanity. This is not to say that US people aren't allowed to try to claim a better future, just that keeping problems in scale helps ward off overreaction that might just worsen the issue.

[Zababa]

Fair enough, thanks for the clarification.

[dontbeevil1992]

People should stop complaining that they don't have healthcare because they have iPhones and vaccines and don't literally live in the mud? Maybe that would hold water if there were literally no other option, and if the distribution of wealth and misery were an unchangeable force of nature. But the reality is, people don't have healthcare BECAUSE some people don't want to pay more taxes, and want poor people to stay in a desperate bargaining position so they can be exploited. Some people have less BECAUSE other people have more, and for no good reason besides the fact that our society supports the haves in exploiting the have-nots. It is a choice that our society works this way, and there is another way for things to work, and we must make that choice to change.

[pcstl]

Life is not a zero-sum game. The reason why some people have little is not that some people have a lot. This is not something we will agree on.

I agree that the distribution of wealth could be a lot more equitable, but I fundamentally disagree with this idea that "If some people have little, that is only because evil/stupid people don't want them to have more". The world is a lot more complicated than that.

I live in a country with crushingly high taxes. Our public services suck. If it were just a matter of raising taxes, we'd have no issues.

[dontbeevil1992]

Agreed, life is not always zero-sum, and higher taxes don't always translate to better services.

Let's look at an example of where life is zero-sum, which also happens to be an important battleground that leads to more macro effects: wage negotiations. Clearly it's zero-sum: the firm produces some wealth, and many dollars that aren't paid to wages end up paid to someone with more power in the firm, such as an owner, major shareholder, or executive.

Now, when it comes to negotiating wages, in an oversaturated labor market, workers without a union are in a terrible bargaining position, as they basically have the choice: work or die. This leads to what we see today: horrible exploitation of the people with the least power in society. Lawmakers have, over the years, stripped unions of relative power. This is one of the choices I mentioned, where one group is immiserated precisely in order to let another group hoard more and more money. Now, sure, unions have downsides, and they can be corrupt, but on the whole, US wages have stagnated while production has increased since the 70s, when the US began its forceful destruction of labor power.

The only argument you can make in response is that the system as a whole has to be this way, or else, for example, talented executives won't step up to difficult tasks and things won't get done. I'm sure that, in some cases, this is true, but it's a trade-off, like most other things in economics, and the absolutist way that many people hold this, so that a lot of exploitation is justified to retain this, is murderously excessive, and not based on empirical evidence.

[licebmi__at__]

Physics is also a lot more complicated, but we have some simple approximations that help us describe a lot of our world.

I agree, life is more complicated than a zero-sum game, but can you argue that it doesn't behave like it is for most people?

[pcstl]

I don't think it does, no. I think our intuition is that it does, because that intuition works pretty well for tribal, hunter-gatherer life, but it doesn't really work in modern society.

[Qiu_Zhanxuan]

Is this sarcasm?

[pcstl]

No, not really. More of a statement on how out of touch with reality it seems first world inhabitants are, to the point where they think not having a guaranteed well-paying job or not being as rich as their parents is comparable to the kind of life Hobbes was thinking of when he coined that idiom.

[enraged_camel]

Having your frame of reference defined by your own circumstances and the standards of the society you live in is not "out of touch." People in other parts of the world might have it worse — that is completely irrelevant when it comes to personal happiness.

[pcstl]

It is not irrelevant if you want to use an expression such as "nasty, brutish and short", coined by Hobbes to refer to the condition of man living by himself, without a social structure to support him. It implies that people in the first world - specifically, the US - are living in conditions somehow comparable in their uncertainty to people living in a pre-civilized state. If anyone is minimally realistic about the first world, they will know that it is an absurd statement.

This kind of overly dramatic phrase is not accurate nor conducive to productive debate. Its only reason for existing is to make people indignant and unaware of their own privilege in order to make them support your cause of choice - or, more frequently, in order to make them fight the people who you designate as the "cause" of their "suffering".

There's also a personal aspect to my comment, in that I live in a country where, even if the USA's living standard keeps falling for the next 50 years, it will probably be just about comparable to here. Watching the most privileged people in the world be all "woe is me, I might not be as rich as my dad!" is not something I'm very able to take seriously.

[Flozzin]

I'm getting the impression that since the author overstates his case, by using a quote by Hobbes, his entire point is invalid. Therefor, millennials must accept their fate. And the fact that their lives will be worse than previous generations doesn't matter. Because the Hobbes quote is misused, and because other people have way worse lives.

I disagree. So what if he misused the quote. His overall point is valid. And other people have it worse, that's unfair, we should do everything in our power to improve everyones lives. And all backsliding should be protested.

[pcstl]

My point isn't that people should "accept their fate", just that they should be more realistic about how bad things really are. If you start treating minor setbacks as gigantic issues, you start having overreactions that might just make things even worse.

[enraged_camel]

Pretty much. Just because the quote may have been somewhat misused — or used out of context — doesn't invalidate his main point.