| > First watching the tearing up of the societal contract in the US over the past decades turned this into a country that feels like it is on the brink of a collapse. Hehe, reminds me about a video I saw some years ago. They asked ordinary citizens what a reasonable distribution of wealth should be. Like the share of overall wealth owned by the richest 10% (or 1% or whatever), vs wealth owned by the rest of the population. Let's call this ratio "X". Then those citizens were asked what they thought the wealth distribution was actually like (let's call that "Y"). No surprise: people thought wealth was much more UNevenly distributed than it should be. Then they showed what the distribution was like in reality (let's call that "Z"): way more extreme. So, wealth distributed way more uneven than people thought, and that in turn way more uneven than what people thought it should be. That alone explains a lot of what's wrong with the US imho: broken/corrupt politics, outsized influence of tech bros (including outside US), a health problem bankrupting people, people turning to drugs, a militarized police force, incarceration ratios, homeless epidemic, etc etc. Especially in a highly developed country where total wealth is enough to have everybody live comfortably & care-free. As opposed to some poor war-torn country where wealth is also unevenly distributed, but it's obvious and everybody knows it. And overall wealth is a lot less to begin with (so people being desperate isn't surprising). US' downfall turning it into a banana republic, its erosion of democratic institutions, human rights etc, is a logical result from the above. I'm not expecting that to improve sadly :-(. Things will probably get worse & there will be blood in the streets. |