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What's hard I think is that "graphs up and to the right!" people are not wrong, but they're missing what they're missing not because of bad faith, privilege or authoritarian high modernism as people (reasonably) assume. They're more like drunks looking for keys under streetlight.
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Super subtle and complex topic fraught with the risks of simplification and condescension. I'll make one note that is relevant, but also tangential: on a lot of things like this, people really are wrong as a result of availability bias, even in day to day life experience.
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2/ As an example - Americans (of all races) perception of police brutality. Even as it was objectively falling, it was perceived to be rising for a variety of reasons, one of which being increased media coverage as well as the rise of bystander videos.
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At a high level, the idea that market societies curtail certain natural wants in the human animal (meaning the society, not the individuals) is appealing and intuive, and dispels the contradictions with the economic growth we often argue about.
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Are you both familiar with “the true and only heaven”? The argument Lasch makes there is more about the ideology of progress than the market per se. That has always seemed to me a better explanation than the pure economic one.
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Productivity goes up, but who owns the products? Typically the capital owners appropriate them, as stipulated by the employment contract. This state-enforced contractual arrangement is the essence of capitalism. But it's not a necessary feature of property or markets.
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I’ve been double-fisting Polanyi & James Scott recently, and this piece succinctly poses one of the key insights: “human beings want much richer social lives than they can maintain under strict market conditions, and much of the reaction against market societies comes from that”
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