The Trump Problem (the real one)

Intended for constructive conversations. Exhibits of polarizing tribalism will be deleted.
7Wannabe5
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Re: The Trump Problem (the real one)

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality.

The educated class has built an ever more intricate net to cradle us in and ease everyone else out. It’s not really the prices that ensure 80 percent of your co-shoppers at Whole Foods are, comfortingly, also college grads; it’s the cultural codes.
This is what I was trying to communicate to Ego in some other thread when I said that it was sooooo boring how all the women shopping in the affluent suburban Whole Foods try to look attractive in exactly the same way. Also, I would note for the record that my friend who is worth over $70 million understands only enough of the above to make decisions related to stock market purchases. He grew up on a hard-scrabble farm with 13 siblings and still behaves like somebody who had to eat on the porch half the time. Whereas, my former lover who was practically the Ideal Ken Doll for the lifestyle described above does not have nearly that net worth and admired me for being such a "beautiful free spirit" (or at least that is what he said to get into my NOT-Whole Foods Shopper Pilates Ideal size 6 pants. :lol: )

By happenstance (or not???), I recently decided to explore how tutoring in an affluent district would compare with teaching in a low-income district. Verified my previous supposition that there are a good many very bright, low-income kids getting a seriously crap education in America and a good many, not very bright, affluent kids getting an excellent education in America. Since I long ago decided that my core "tribe" was the "IQ over 130 cuckoo-bananas" tribe, I personally think this is a shame and a waste.

black_son_of_gray
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Re: The Trump Problem (the real one)

Post by black_son_of_gray »

Chad wrote:
Thu Jul 13, 2017 12:47 pm
Another piece of the puzzle that has been touched on:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/opin ... .html?_r=1
Related: https://aeon.co/ideas/conspicuous-consu ... gibles-now

Riggerjack
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Re: The Trump Problem (the real one)

Post by Riggerjack »

By happenstance (or not???), I recently decided to explore how tutoring in an affluent district would compare with teaching in a low-income district. Verified my previous supposition that there are a good many very bright, low-income kids getting a seriously crap education in America and a good many, not very bright, affluent kids getting an excellent education in America.
This presumes that compensation is related to quality. The highest paid teachers in the state (before they went on strike for more money) also have the student body with the lowest test scores in the state. 24% passing the WASL basic skills test. Having dealt with lots of teachers while cabling classrooms, I would say most good teachers are not teaching in public schools. The entire school system is setup to filter out teachers with drive or passion.

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Trump Problem (the real one)

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@black_son_of_gray:

These articles are really bringing out my love/hate relationship with the aspirational class. I am going to have to read that book. I must admit that the story of the first couple decades of my life as an adult would be based on how to slap-dash apply the rules of frugality in order to raise two children in accordance with the standards of the aspirational class while married to a depressive hipster.

@Riggerjack: I would say that public school teachers are a mixed lot. I have met some truly dedicated professionals whom I greatly admire. The problem is that great teachers are not enough. Teacher to Student ratio is extremely important. Even the size of the classroom itself makes a difference.

The main reason why I chose, at significant financial cost, to stay at home with my kids when they were young is I had previously worked part-time in daycare facilities where costs were held steady by staffing right at the legal limit of adult/toddler. Nothing can compare to the benefit of one-on-one attention. In any institution where the level is maintained at just barely functional, the adults will have to focus their energy on putting out fires, and the reasonably well-behaved children will get almost no attention at all.

BRUTE
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Re: The Trump Problem (the real one)

Post by BRUTE »

Dragline wrote:
Fri Jul 14, 2017 7:47 am
There is an interesting interview of him by Tyler Cowen recently on his podcast, which is about the sum of my knowledge at the moment: https://medium.com/conversations-with-t ... 5b4a435323
great interview. brute pretty much agrees with everything Sasse said. he also appears free of that political bullshit brute hates about professional politicians.

Campitor
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Re: The Trump Problem (the real one)

Post by Campitor »

7Wannabe5 wrote:
Sat Jul 15, 2017 10:59 am
The problem is that great teachers are not enough. Teacher to Student ratio is extremely important. Even the size of the classroom itself makes a difference.
Don't forget the problem students - Even a great teacher will do a poor job if she has a 2 or 3 sociopaths in her classroom. One on one teaching would be ideal but there isn't enough money in the system for it. And sociopath children or those with psychological issues/trauma require 3 to 1 ratios unless you're going to hire educators who are trained psychologist with MMA skills. http://www.apa.org/education/k12/teache ... ation.aspx

BRUTE
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Re: The Trump Problem (the real one)

Post by BRUTE »

the idea of a school itself is sociopathic and inherently broken. segregating young humans by age, enforcing arbitrary authority, removing their rights "for the greater good", every class teaching humans to shut the fuck up and obey orders, it's all the evils of statism in a microcosm.

school cannot be reformed. it is the problem, not the solution.

Chad
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Re: The Trump Problem (the real one)

Post by Chad »

This guy is way more right than wrong, and it's very Henry Ford esque.

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ ... ism-215347

BRUTE
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Re: The Trump Problem (the real one)

Post by BRUTE »

not going to happen. higher wages would mean higher prices for consumers, which they won't accept after 3 decades of cheapo stuff, or lower capital gains for investors, which they won't accept either.
The real threat to our republic is an alarming breakdown in social cohesion, and the cause of this breakdown is obvious: radical, rising economic inequality, and the anger and anxiety it engenders.
brute would completely agree with the social cohesion part, but he thinks "radical, rising economic inequality" is only one part of it, and not necessarily the biggest. plenty of societies have maintained social cohesion much stronger than the US ever had outside of wartime, yet have much bigger economic inequality or are much poorer in general.

it is that the economic American Dream is pretty much the only thing that ever resembled any kind of social cohesion. American humans would be wise to find some kind of other thing to rally around than money, because putting all their cohesive eggs in one basket is not very anti-fragile.

one tried and true method for creating social cohesion is starting wars, but it comes at economic and moral expense, so brute doesn't recommend it. also the US is currently involved in plenty of wars already, so maybe American humans are experiencing the equivalent of QE-burnout where those measures stop working after prolonged use.

brute thinks the sectarian identity politics are as much grounds for eroding social cohesion, as is coastal elitism, which is probably a symptom of the information economy. not making as much money as urban professionals is one thing, but being derided as stupid hicks adds insult to injury. humans don't like insults.

Dragline
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Re: The Trump Problem (the real one)

Post by Dragline »

BRUTE wrote:
Sat Jul 15, 2017 4:15 pm
the idea of a school itself is sociopathic and inherently broken. segregating young humans by age, enforcing arbitrary authority, removing their rights "for the greater good", every class teaching humans to shut the fuck up and obey orders, it's all the evils of statism in a microcosm.

school cannot be reformed. it is the problem, not the solution.
I think a society's schools are more a reflection of the society than the other way around. The causal arrow points from society to school. This is why schools with a lot of active parent participation are usually pretty good schools.

Most people have this weird idea that you can "fix" something wrong in society just by altering the school system, leading to the societal fixation with "what is going on in the schools" and lots of hand-wringing about it. Yet at the same time, if you ask people who are most convinced that the schools dictate society whether they were brainwashed by their own educational experience, most of them would say "no", because its only "all those other wrong-thinkers" who were brainwashed in the schools. This line of reasoning makes no sense when you think about it.

Schools are just a convenient scapegoat for other problems/issues, often used to "explain" what are just differences in opinion or perception. The media is used as a scapegoat in a similar way.

BRUTE
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Re: The Trump Problem (the real one)

Post by BRUTE »

brute isn't even saying school is bad because it makes for a bad society. school is just bad on its own.

black_son_of_gray
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Re: The Trump Problem (the real one)

Post by black_son_of_gray »

BRUTE wrote:
Wed Jul 19, 2017 11:37 pm
school is just bad on its own.
What is your prefered alternative?

BRUTE
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Re: The Trump Problem (the real one)

Post by BRUTE »

brute has not raised any children and so can not say he's explored all the alternatives long term, but he thought that unschooling/homeschooling sounded pretty good. he also likes the apprenticeship model a lot. there is a lot of tacit knowledge that human children don't learn in school that they can learn from adults day to day, subconsciously.

Chad
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Re: The Trump Problem (the real one)

Post by Chad »


Riggerjack
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Re: The Trump Problem (the real one)

Post by Riggerjack »

Since the income inequality theme came up here, I thought I would post this here:

http://xhxhxhx.tumblr.com/post/16319456 ... -rebellion
Amartya Sen, in the introduction to On Economic Inequality (1973), wrote that “the relation between inequality and rebellion is indeed a close one,” and who could disagree with that?
It would be the easiest thing to test: We know how to measure inequality. We know how to measure conflict. We have strong theories of causation. If the relationship was that strong, the findings should have been clear, consistent, strong, and positive.
They weren’t.
This comes up fairly often, the intuitive leap from income inequality to political instability.
If you want to prevent civil war, you need to increase incomes and growth rates, limit political instability, expand your armed forces, and ensure your neighbors are peaceable democracies. Reducing inequality would not do much good.
Inequality doesn’t seem to matter.
Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say it doesn't matter, rather that it isn't likely to lead to political instability.

Lately, like since the election, I have noticed serious radicalization on both wings of the political spectrum, and this has been... alarming. So I have gone back to a hobby of mine, trying to figure out how we started a civil war 157 years ago. It seems irrelevant, but in a world where quilters can't get along with quilters http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-40278684?SThisFB this strife is enough to make me want to go build a bunker. Even here, on ERE, where we have been civilly (and occasionally less civilly) disagreeing for years, we have had multiple threads locked. This is not my attempt to add to that list.

So, I posted the income inequality link to discuss this.

7Wannabe5
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Re: The Trump Problem (the real one)

Post by 7Wannabe5 »

@Riggerjack: Hear you on the bunker. The situation is really getting out of hand in my neck of the woods. I find it worrisome that I am still having difficulty with maintaining friendships on both sides of the divide this many months past the election. I actually hear people saying things like "We know where they live, and if we have to, we will burn them down." I don't know if many people comprehend how difficult it would be to do something like call in the National Guard to reinstate order in a rural as opposed to an urban location. There are vast expanses of the United States in which the only officials representing larger government are some poor young state trooper cruising up and down miles of highway when not sipping coffee and flirting with the waitress in a small town diner and a harried middle-aged social worker dealing with welfare payment disputes. There are also many urban neighborhoods which have a high level of greater government presence during the day, but they all drive home to the safe suburbs at night.

That said, I really don't have a clear notion of what could actually happen, beyond "something bad."

BRUTE
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Re: The Trump Problem (the real one)

Post by BRUTE »

If you want to prevent civil war, you need to increase incomes and growth rates, limit political instability, expand your armed forces, and ensure your neighbors are peaceable democracies. Reducing inequality would not do much good.
Inequality doesn’t seem to matter.
brute's somewhat limited travel experience confirms this. in some of the poorest and most unequal societies he's seen in Asia, he'd walk around openly as a clear foreigner at 4am with a laptop out. random strangers would approach, offer free food, and give him directions. similarly poor and unequal areas in Latin America seem almost like war zones in comparison.

brute isn't sure what it is, maybe the culture.

that said, brute believes the single biggest thing any human could do for peace and civility on the north american continent is legalize all drugs. this would instantly ruin the cartels.

Tyler9000
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Re: The Trump Problem (the real one)

Post by Tyler9000 »

Riggerjack wrote:
Wed Aug 30, 2017 8:41 pm
Lately, like since the election, I have noticed serious radicalization on both wings of the political spectrum, and this has been... alarming. So I have gone back to a hobby of mine, trying to figure out how we started a civil war 157 years ago. It seems irrelevant, but in a world where quilters can't get along with quilters http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-40278684?SThisFB this strife is enough to make me want to go build a bunker.
I hear you on the desire to build a physical bunker. Unfortunately, I think the phenomenon of intellectual bunkering on all points along the political spectrum is a huge contributor to the current toxic environment we find ourselves in. We really need people to come out of their holes, not retreat to deeper ones.

jacob
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Re: The Trump Problem (the real one)

Post by jacob »

A high school vocational tech teacher in central Ohio — who asked not to be named, to speak freely — told me: “Most of our students will not give the slightest thought to relocating should they not be able to find good employment here. They cite all the [usual reasons], but a big one is just plain fear of the unknown. My students think Columbus is a big, scary city. Many have never even been out of the county.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/won ... ust-leave/

I highlighted the last sentence to give an absolute reference level for what is likely 3+ Wheaton levels away from the experience of most people on this forum.

On a side-note, it might also explain the animosity towards immigrants since they represent a value and risk-tolerance set that's far removed from the "folks" described in the quote?

jacob
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Re: The Trump Problem (the real one)

Post by jacob »

I must admit that the observation that many have never left their county(*) (by age ~<20) blew my mind. It makes me regret being rather dismissive about the value of "travel" which in retrospect looks somewhat guided by my bottoming out on the hype cycle during my early thirties [just after having recently traveled a lot :roll: ].

(*) My brain keeps reading this as country ... but we're talking county ... so practically over the next hill ala 18th century mobility levels.

I now think that "going elsewhere" for a while during one's formative years is an absolutely great idea. Whether that's college in another state (that's not too similar to one's own), military (meet new people and shoot them), or even backpacking in Yurop or Asia is worthwhile. I also think "working outside of one's natural/target field for a while" is a good idea.

Other than incentive, another crimping factor is ... the lack of life skills for dealing with living outside of the "valley". It's not that it's hard, but to anyone who's never seen/experienced it, it seems overwhelming/unpossible to deal with.

The counter point to all this: Why the insistence that everybody be middle-class 9-5 employed. Maybe the current situation is acceptable as it is ... and maybe we should just respect that rather than trying to change a culture that thinks itself okay.

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