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Noah Smith 🐇

15 Jun, 16 tweets, 5 min read

1/I wrote this post the other day, but I didn't do a thread about it. Let's remedy that.

Americans are thinking very zero-sum these days. It's a big problem for our nation.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/americas-sca…

2/I've been reading about the 70s, when high gas prices and inflation (not matched by wage increases) created real scarcity for Americans. They turned to the selfish, every-man-for-himself attitude of the 80s.

I worry that something similar is happening now...

3/Have you ever heard of "self-expression values" vs. "survival values"? It's one way political scientists measure attitudes in different countries. And over the last 10 years, America has shifted dramatically toward the "survival" end of the scale.

4/Here are more anecdotal pieces of evidence that to me suggest a shift toward a mindset of scarcity and survival.

5/But what the hell are we fighting over? Unlike the 70s there's no energy crisis. Unlike the 70s, wages have risen strongly. Even in the pandemic, people's incomes went up thanks to generous government programs!

THIS IS NOT THE 70s!

6/Instead of fighting over scarcity that the world has imposed on us, we're fighting over scarcity that WE OURSELVES HAVE CREATED.

7/Nothing illustrates this self-imposed scarcity more than housing.

Housing construction has never recovered from the Great Recession. THIS IS A CHOICE WE HAVE MADE.

8/NIMBYs have utterly taken control of our politics -- not just on the Right, but on the Left as well.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-left-nim…

9/Another example of artificial scarcity is the unending furor over who gets spots at selective colleges.

Folks, selective colleges aren't uplifting the broad middle class in this country. It's big state schools like Cal State and CUNY!

noahpinion.substack.com/p/who-cares-ab…

10/A third example is immigration. Immigration doesn't hurt native-born Americans, and enriches our country.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/why-immigrat…

11/But despite a swing toward pro-immigration sentiment overall, a large chunk of our populace has become RABIDLY anti-immigration.

This creates an artificial scarcity of the American Dream!

noahpinion.substack.com/p/immigration-…

12/We're not running out of space in this great nation. We're running out of the belief that this nation can be made greater by bringing in new recruits.

13/But the most important thing that we've chosen to make artificially scarce is AMERICAN-NESS ITSELF.

We have collectively decided that only some subset of Americans can be the Real Americans, and we're fighting each other to death over who that subset will be!

14/I cannot stress enough how utterly insane this is.

America is a land of plenty! We have plenty of space! Plenty of work! And if we choose to, we can have plenty of respect and acceptance as well.

But a land of plenty is only a land of plenty if you allow it to be.

15/Our nation needs to switch back to a mindset of abundance. Only once we stop creating artificial scarcities for ourselves to fight over can we end the zero-sum thinking that has dominated our society in recent years.

(end)

noahpinion.substack.com/p/americas-sca…

Anyway, as usual, if you like this kind of stuff, remember to sign up for my Substack's free email list!

noahpinion.substack.com

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More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🐇

@Noahpinion

17 Jun

This is pretty scary.

foreignaffairs.com/articles/china…

I mean, we can argue back and forth all day about whether the U.S. would go to war with China if all China did was invade Taiwan.

But it's 100% certain that if China launched preemptive strikes on U.S. military forces, we WOULD go to war.

I mean, if China preemptively attacks American forces, it's not even about Taiwan anymore. Taiwan is then a sideshow. At that point it's World War 3.

Read 4 tweets

Noah Smith 🐇

@Noahpinion

16 Jun

1/Here's a post I wrote about how worker power might spark a productivity boom!

noahpinion.substack.com/p/a-virtuous-c…

2/COVID has forced a lot of businesses to use the internet to increase productivity in ways they had resisted before.

@erikbryn

3/And as the great @erikbryn has noted, productivity is rising!

technologyreview.com/2021/06/10/102…

Read 17 tweets

Noah Smith 🐇

@Noahpinion

16 Jun

America is a highly stratified class society, with class consciousness present in almost everything we do. But because our racial and ethnic divisions are more pressing, we don't even really get a chance to think about class stratification.

Living in a less class-stratified society feels like having a great weight taken off your back, that you never knew was there. It's impossible to describe how different America is to people to have only ever lived in America.

It's not as simple as saying "there are places where top college grads will marry construction workers, and private equity people will invite fry cooks to their dinner parties". Because that doesn't tell you *why* they do that, or how they think about it.

Read 7 tweets

Noah Smith 🐇

@Noahpinion

14 Jun

10% of graffiti looks really good, and 90% looks bad. We need some sort of voting or rating system for graffiti artists so that we can get some quality control around here.

Actually, I have a friend who was a graffiti artist in Japan, then got arrested for illegally painting on stuff. It made him famous, and now his wall art is in high demand at trendy Tokyo shops.

OK I'm thinking about how to implement this. How about:

1. Graffiti artists spray-paint unique personal QR codes that let passers-by send tokens to a crypto wallet

2. If you get enough tokens, the city hires you to do graffiti on officially reserved walls

Read 5 tweets

Noah Smith 🐇

@Noahpinion

13 Jun

It's interesting how the tankies and assorted other Cold Warriors have become incredibly strong on Twitter, but they've so far failed to gain any real political influence. Even Ilhan Omar doesn't even slightly buy into their bullshit.

On Twitter you'll get ratioed to hell and back for saying the U.S. helped the Soviets beat the Nazis (which is obviously true).

In real life, the Representative who's thought to be the most leftist on foreign policy is denouncing China over the Uyghur repression.

The tankies are the purest illustration of how Twitter lets a few bad actors look like the voice of the public, and of how limited and ineffectual that apparent influence is beyond the confines of this website.

Read 4 tweets

Noah Smith 🐇

@Noahpinion

12 Jun

@McReynoldsJoe

@McReynoldsJoe @wesyang Whether or not this discomfort is a widespread trend in reality, it certainly seems like this is an *aim* of at least some branches of wokeness -- to make White people as uncomfortable as Black and Asian people have been forced to be heretofore.

@McReynoldsJoe

@McReynoldsJoe @wesyang In other words, faced with a nation where White people felt like a comfortable majority and Black and Asian people felt like uncomfortable minorities, one popular "solution" is to minoritize White people as well, so that *everyone* is an equally uncomfortable minority.

@McReynoldsJoe

@McReynoldsJoe @wesyang But is this the optimal solution? Instead, I wish we could have become a nation in which *no* groups of people feel like uncomfortable minorities; in which everyone feels like a respected, safe member of the American majority.

noahpinion.substack.com/p/wokeness-as-…

Read 4 tweets

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