Thread by @lymanstoneky

the world is actually fairly okay. there is no compelling reason for anyone with a job in a rich country to be miserable and angry all the time. inequality mostly doesn't impact most peoples' daily lives. the best evidence we have suggests it's been falling for a few years now.

https://twitter.com/Claudia_Sahm/status/1585633829531709441

i think more of us need to publicly disagree with "the world is totally awful" statements because i see a lot of them and they just don't make sense, but they clearly wreak havoc with a lot of peoples' lives.

life 102:

don't expect people on twitter to be your therapist.

https://twitter.com/Claudia_Sahm/status/1585642302923411456

i think it's actually very reasonable to tell people when you think their emotional responses to stimuli are inappropriate. people do this to me all the time; it is very helpful, and is a very normal part of human interaction.

i'm not saying the world is perfect or problem free. i'm not even saying we're living in top 10 best times. maybe not even top 30. but in the grand scale of humanity y'all we are not experiencing a total shitshow of a world. things are *okay*.

i'm not joking. since about 2012-2015, there's strong evidence for declining inequality!

and yeah, the truth is, rising or falling inequality doesn't impact your daily life, since it's purely a population feature.

https://twitter.com/CharliePatrick/status/1585691981094625280

inequality might be a problem. but it's not like if inequality fell 25% you'd even notice anything at all different about your life in the world.

(note that by inequality, i of course mean what most of us mean by the "rich" or the "wealthy," basically highly concentrated non-labor income. yes it's true, among laborers, a growing share have high skills driving high income, which may change the labor income dist too)

(but it's not clear to me what social problem is created by a doctor getting paid $15,000 more than a few years ago; most of the concern about inequality is about mega-fortunes arising from capital)

i love all the people replying now being like "you're just super privileged" or "what's your tax bracket"

right

because the graduate student/missionary living in a foreign country with 2 small children is probably super-high tax bracket.

in fairness, i do get a LOT of costco rewards.

anyways, yeah, I do fine. truth is, while I'm not top 5% or anything like that, I actually am quite content with what I earn, so I have no grounds to complain. but I'm just lol'ing at the people replying assuming that I must be some super rich guy

without looking: has the wealth distribution become more or less unequal in the last 3 months?

https://twitter.com/AlgorithmDaddy/status/1585705675895803916

my bet would be "less unequal" i.e. "more equal" because the stock market is crashing and the main source of inequality is unequal financial assets, so if the stock market crashes, we get more equal.

i'm not sure why that should make me happy??

huzzah, we are 8% more equal, i am so glad that my paltry retirement savings are now worth 18% less, yippee.

i mean honestly yeah, i do think people should spend more time reflecting on their blessings and cultivating gratitude for the fact that they aren't living through the Bubonic Plague or the Year With No Summer!!

https://twitter.com/coffee6727/status/1585705128228802561

i'm not sure how anyone can consider it to be virtuous to just ignore the massive material blessings we all ignore and take them for granted and not see them as a powerful argument for a high baseline level of happiness and gratitude.

when we were having our first baby in HK during the protests and then the first wave of COVID coming out of China, we had evac plans for "if China sends in tanks" and evac plans for "if this is the bubonic plague" and also plans for "if we can't evac" etc etc

for a while we were like "LIFE IS SO HARD" but then the longer we lived like that the more we realized that was a kind of gross and privileged mindset

you might have to flee your home due to violence or disease; or worse, you might not be able to flee.

that's not "the worst of times."

that's "a normal thursday" for most of human history.

and at the end of the day we didn't have to flee. and if we had we would have been able to. because we don't live in bottom-30 worst times folks. we live in mostly okay times. be thankful. #blessed

and of course during that pregnancy ruth was in the hospital twice for two different serious non-pregnancy-related conditions, and then Suzie had failure to thrive, so it's not like we had nothing else going on.

but at the end of the day, you either allow your mind to be ruled by the things that happen to you, or you grit your teeth, exercise the English archer's salute to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and assert that joy conquers all. and things are mostly okay.

Ruth and I teach free weeknight and weekend classes for refugees and immigrants 2-4 times a week in one of the bottom 1% poorest neighborhoods in Canada.

i'm reasonably familiar with poor people.

https://twitter.com/LifeWithoutLack/status/1585719301968756736

i'm not going to do some "woe is me, i've had my time of poverty" routine; that's a ridiculous thing. but the idea that the guy whose former job was literally to chat up cotton farmers and smallholders in Africa *just doesn't know poor people* is eye-rolly

the thing is, it's precisely because i've spent a ton of my life and career living and working closely with a lot of people who *are* very poor and *do* have absolutely enormous problems that i have the view i have

when my friend whose husband beats her but she has no status in canada so she can't stay here so she's going back to india to the husband to protect her daughter from her husband says "life is hard," i believe her. and i compare your struggles to hers.

when i see families with 5 kids packed into a 2-bedroom living off of 1.5 workers getting paid under the table in cash while they try somehow to learn some french and english, and they say they're struggling, i believe them. and i am comparing you to them.

but the crazy thing is? most of the people i see in our classes or in these kinds of situations don't really share the dour and miserable attitude i see in my well-educated white neighbors.

sure, they may be episodically sad because bad things happened.

but this immiserating outlook on life where your assumed baseline is negativity and your view of the future is borderline apocalyptic just isn't there.

i talk to people whose problem is they literally don't have any piece of paper proving they are who they say they are, and they can't access hospitals for their obvious jaundice or infection, and also we don't actually "talk" because we have no common language.

so do not come at me with your educated white girl platitudes about REALLY knowing the poor and if you REALLY knew the poor you'd be negative and pessimistic and probably a socialist.

let me put it this way:

when we had an open house for people in our neighborhood to do a Q&A with some of the local beat cops, tons of actually poor people showed up to ask and listen. they WANTED that event. it was valuable to them. they learned: about fraud, domestic violence

but the Liberal Party or NDP-voting white college kids at the south end of the neighborhood spammed our Facebook ads with hostile rhetoric: we were COLLABORATING with the police! they booted us out of some of the neighborhood Facebook groups.

and when the local free "French teacher" decided to do some kind of "revolutionary pedagogy" bullcrap in the class Ruth was in with a bunch of the other immigrants and instead of like TEACHING GRAMMAR AND PRONUNCIATION he wanted them to reflect on "the nature of language power"

idk, that doesn't seem like serving the poor very well. they need to know how to actually talk to people.

i could go on. i'm not even touching experiences back home in KY, or in Asia, Africa, wherever.

my point is, i'm extremely irritated by this particular line of critique, and i will not stand for it. i shall tweet stridently in response.

also, i'm willing to grant the poor people i know best are 1) in unusually rough spots due to transnationality and 2) also unusually well-equipped in psycho-emotional terms because Sikhism is a pretty baller religion. i have unalloyed admiration for the Sikhs.

i'd also like to petition Lutheran High Command for a new practice where we, too, may assert that the carrying of swords everywhere is a liturgical necessity.