Comment by thenaturalist
3 days ago
Yeah as someone being born in the early 90s to Eastern European parents who experienced generational joy when Causescu and his wife were shot dead, the globalization that followed hasn’t exactly delivered for people - mostly so in the West.
Yes, millions of people in the poorest nations have been raised out of absent poverty since, but beyond that, wealth has flowed to the top 1% any country you look at (check median wealth ownership in the US, basically plummeted for the average Joe since the mid 80s), the environment has gone to shit and the generational promise that the children will have it better than their parents has gone over board with asset prices ballooning.
I‘m right there with you, the societal promise of meritocracy and the middle class was broken in the early 90s and so far there is no replacement in sight.
> Yes, millions of people in the poorest nations have been raised out of absent poverty since...
That... seems like something that shouldn't just be waved by.
And if you include China and India it's more like hundreds of millions. Like, if you think about the people of the world and not just "the West" the standard of living since the time Causescu was overthrown has increased dramatically.
Nobody "waved it away"?
What is at work is that you cannot treat it like electrical charges and say that the sum is neutral (and even there distance matters, such a statement would only be within a very small distance).
What happens elsewhere is elsewhere. If you get sick, do you want to be sent home because the public health statistically educated doctor tells you that overall health has increased worldwide (just using it as an example, I make no statement about actual worldwide health)?
There is this public discussion phenomenon that in every discussion somebody will inevitably use such a "neutralization" method to "balance" somebody's statement. I find this less than helpful for any discussion.
If we talk about too few good bakeries in the state of Idaho, there is no point in saying that New York has more than enough of them.
Similarly bad discussion phenomena: We cannot even talk about problem X, never mind do anything about it, as long as completely unrelated problem Z exists elsewhere. Or, we should not spend money on X as long as there is Z.
It's like some people assume a Single Global Lock mechanism exists, and the lock is set whenever somebody somewhere attempts to deal with some problem, preventing others from doing anything about theirs.
> the societal promise of meritocracy and the middle class was broken in the early 90s and so far there is no replacement in sight
That was less of a "promise" than a bait-and-switch, and we're in the switch part.