I read Sinclair Lewis' Babbit last year and it was kind of depressing how little has changed since 1922. The political climate (at least as portrayed in the novel) seemed eerily similar to now. Maybe we continually go through oscillations.
In the same vein, his It Can't Happen Here is also well worth reading, as is Jack London's The Iron Heel. The more things change the more they stay the same.
I'm shocked how much the average American knows about how things work. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. I'm not surprised how quickly Americans are giving up their liberty.
46% dont even know what America 250 is... Worse 61% of <30 year olds dont' know. Dont like them but here is poll source (while not crazy maga i dont fully trust it's not push-poll or biased question structures wo reading full xtabs): https://www.cato.org/blog/gen-z-fails-basic-civics-quiz-amer...
a gross percent can't name the 3 branches or their Reps.
How much and how little are logically equivalent, although in vernacular usage it is of course common to use how little when implying the amount is less than one might expect, and how much to imply the amount is more than one might expect.
English is a very context dependent language, so the phrases "surprised by how much" and "surprised by how little" actually have opposite denotations. Mechanically, sure, they're interchangeable, but using the "incorrect" form carries extra connotations. You've used the counterintuitive form, demanding the reader more carefully consider your meaning, which heavily implies you're making a point beyond what appears in the text.
If the second half of that reader engagement doesn't pay off, the sentence reads as clunky or incorrect, likely a mistake from a second language speaker.
Natural languages are not code and words can't be swapped arbitrarily. Word choice and construction carries meaning in and of itself, totally divorced from the actual words used.
obviously you can use much to mean little with a how in front but generally with a little snarky aside like ", which is not much at all," after the "how much", but yes, in typical usage they are not interpreted the same, although I'd say the difference really only becomes important in comparative usage as in "how little for how much" and similar examples.
"Surprised by how much" pretty directly means the amount is higher than expected. It has the opposite meaning the person intended. The neutral phrasing would be more like "surprised by the amount".
You're a 26 year old in 1926. You're part of what history would later call the Greatest Generation. You will suffer through both the Great Depression and World War II. Perhaps due to those experiences, you will be the only generation that votes more left as you age.
If you were born in 1900 you probably are at the tail end of the Lost Generation — the Greatest Generation is considered to be those born between 1901 and 1927.
Lost Generation describes those who experienced WW1. Given that he turned 18 in 1918 it's certainly possible he enlisted or was drafted. The article implies he didn't join WW1. It's that experience rather than his exact birthday that would categorize him into Lost vs Greatest IMO.
Wild to think there were people who as adults lived through all of the railroad buildout, WWI, the 20s, the depression, and then WWII. Complaining about AI buildouts causing electronics prices to regress by a decade or so begins to seem rather trite in comparison.
> Wild to think there were people who as adults lived through all of the railroad buildout, WWI, the 20s, the depression, and then WWII.
My great-grandmother was born in the late 1890s and lived until 99 years old. I knew her very well (she died when I was 17).
Her husband died in his sleep: they had a house built and it wasn't finished yet, but he was so excited he decided to sleep a first night in it, alone. Gas leak.
They had two daughters, 4 and 2 years old. My grandmother and my great-aunt, whom I both knew very well too.
I've got a letter signed by Eisenhower, before he was president, thanking my great-grandmother for her "galant service" during WWII: she was part of the resistance and hid, for months, a UK pilot that had been shot down by the nazis over Belgium. Before helping him regain the UK.
They were a though generation, really nothing like the little wussies [1] we see today and I mean it.
[1] the little snowflakes whose feelings shouldn't be hurt do comes to mind
> Perhaps due to those experiences, you will be the only generation that votes more left as you age.
I doubt it. My dad lived through the Great Depression, and fought desperate battles in WW2 and Korea.
As a young man, he was a socialist. His experience in fighting for American freedoms changed all that. Before he passed, he told me he regretted leaving me in a country that was significantly less free than when he was young.
I don't believe you'll find many communists in the greatest generation, especially among the war veterans.
Democrats in 1994 were a very different proposition when compared to today. They had the union vote locked up, and the greatest generation benefited greatly from unions.
> Also, the Democrat party has steadily moved leftwards over time.
the only way someone thinks this is if they have fox news blaring all day every day. the dems keep moving rightward step by step to appeal to "moderates" while the right wing keep moving the overton window even further right.
> Also, the Democrat party has steadily moved leftwards over time.
What an absurd statement. During the Great Depression FDR was considering a worker's bill of rights that would guarantee employment. In the '60s LBJ used the specter of a dead president to push through the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts (which have been considerably undone). In the '90s, Clinton undid the what remained of the Federal welfare state in this country. In the '10s, Obama was barely able to pass legislation that forced people to buy health insurance. In the '20s, Biden's major achievements were largely spending related. So in what universe has the party steadily moved leftward?
LBJ's "Great Society" programs still exist and are greatly expanded. The scope of federal entitlements have steadily expanded. And there are strident calls for Medicare for all.
Have you not noticed the recent elections of Democrat Socialists, and the Democrat leaders are endorsing them? This was unthinkable just a few years ago.
The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act are not socialism. I am not sure the VRA has been undone - didn't Los Angeles just enact a law to allow non-citizens to vote?
And none of those things are a move leftward, simply a return to FDR's Democratic Party, where universal healthcare and equal rights first had a chance of passing. That a handful of democratic nominees (most of the Democratic Socialists you allude to simply won their primaries, they aren't in power yet) are on the ballot for the first time demonstrates that the party itself has, in fact, moved rightward, as they wouldn't otherwise need to be described separate from the party itself. And your equation of left and socialism is deeply flawed. Ensuring equal rights with the CRA and VRA wasn't socialism (which is largely an economic framework, not political), but it was certainly a move to left. So much so the country essentially repolarized around those positions. Oh, and you do realize the difference between federal legislation and local laws about who can vote, right?
Endorsing and electing Democrat Socialists is not a move leftward?
Sanders, AOC, Jayapal, Mandami, Katie Wilson, Bass, etc., are already elected and in power.
> Ensuring equal rights with the CRA and VRA wasn't socialism (which is largely an economic framework, not political), but it was certainly a move to left.
“Left” doesn’t mean socialism. In the long run, it comes out of the enlightenment period, quite literally.
Traditionally, the left is associated with small “L” liberalism, and the right is associated with small “C” conservatism.
Generally speaking, it has been a historic debate between whether the “natural” way things are is good and prudent (e.g., monarchs, religion, castes, roles, and norms), or if the way things are should be challenged to try something that seems better (e.g., liberté, égalité, fraternité).
When one of these ideas is successfully, it is often adopted by the right, when one fails, it is often abandoned by the left. Whether or not socialism is part of the left depends on whether folks on the left think it’s an idea worth trying. In America, right now, the vast majority are still quite hesitant to include it in their platform.
It's confusing because different people mean different things when using political terms. The political compass (https://www.politicalcompass.org) has two axes: left-right and libertarian-authoritarian. On it, socialists are definitely left wing (and communists far left), regardless of what the left/right wing meant at the time of the French Revolution.
Suffices to say, if we look at politics through a two party, first past the post framework, I still think small letter conservatism vs liberalism is the best frame, simply because it is vague enough to be used generally.
Again, "the left" is not a homogeneous entity. When talking about "the left" we should look at the left's coalition. We don't really have significant party platforms anymore, but I can assure you "rent control" would not get passed by the Democratic Party coalition in the House of Representatives right now, much less the Senate.
Associating a political coalition with their most extreme or noisy members is counterproductive. When looking for what a coalition stands for, it's better to look at the coalition member who are most productive with legislation in places they have control.
Statewide rent control was recently enacted by Oregon and Washington. It's also statewide in California. Not coincidentally, all three have Democrats completely controlling the governorship and legislature.
I'd appreciate it if you found any free market proposals in it (I didn't read the whole thing).
I did notice the advocacy of rent control: "the Administration has
eased rising rents by capping rent hikes in 2 million federally-funded apartments."
and
"It offers corporate landlords a basic choice for the next two years: either cap rent increases at 5 percent, or lose a valuable federal tax break."
and
"the Administration is going after unfair rental “junk fees,” like fees people are charged just to pay rent online or to receive sorted mail. And, we will crack down on corporate landlords who are gouging tenants, for example by capping the amount they can raise the rent each year"
> Perhaps due to those experiences, you will be the only generation that votes more left as you age.
They grew up in an era when various flavors of communism were serious considerations and they saw state power "save the world". Of course they couldn't get enough of it after that.
One kind of wonders if that sort of automatic deference to group (government and otherwise) solutions which they very much passed onto their huge numbers of kids is actually what undid the quality of those institutions.
You are off by a generation. The Greatest Generation was born in the 1920s. This was the generation that produced the Boomers.
I knew my great grandparents. Most were born in the last part of the 1800s and lived through the First World War as young adults. They always seemed significantly less scarred by the Great Depression than their children (the Greatest Generation). There was a communist undercurrent to the Greatest Generation but they didn't get it from their parents.
Nit: movies with sound were around as early as the 1800s; 1927 is just considered the turning point when they became commercially viable and widely available (with the release of The Jazz Singer).
Great article. Just reminds me of how much societies resemble a pendulum; swinging from one extreme to the other. And of course you have the problem that some people want to freeze it mid-swing, or worse tear the damn thing down completely.
I’m really not sure, if you look at things before the 20th century it’s difficult to see a pendulum swing pattern. That works relatively well between the 20th and 21st centuries, but I don’t think we can see it as a general rule. It’s also pretty dependent on the region you look at, and movements you decide to take in consideration or filter out. There is just so much room for biases, it’s easy finding a pattern because that’s what our brains are good at doing, but it doesn’t mean it is predictive of anything
That being said, this video from Three Arrows (aka Dan Arrows) “America coming Weimar moment” has interesting things to say on that specific comparison: https://youtu.be/CFDDf48nj9g
> Just reminds me of how much societies resemble a pendulum; swinging from one extreme to the other. And of course you have the problem that some people want to freeze it mid-swing, or worse tear the damn thing down completely.
Or keep pushing it to further and further extremes with each swing until it inevitably breaks under the strain. :(
I discovered the pendulum of social movements after reading Bertrand Russell's "The Ancestry of Fascism" at a relative young age (~16 years old), it only really made sense after my 30s though.
It required me watching, experiencing how things I had considered settled and humanity was over them started to turn back: the rise of fascistic tendencies in different societies, anti-intellectualism, etc. things that as a teenager/young adult I never considered could become societal issues again.
Basically we've been in a "4th Turning" for about two decades, and the 4th turning typically ends in some sort of crisis (hence the name for it, "Crisis"): Great Depression/WWII in the previous one, the US Civil War before that, the "Age of Revolution" before that, etc.
The idea behind it is lessons learned last until the people who lived through the previous one die. So the 4 "turnings" repeat every 80-100 years, and some sort of major crisis is expected around now - hence talk of another Great Depression or WWIII.
I don't see what GP means by "hijacked", GGP is pretty much a direct reference to exactly what it talks about.
Yeah, that's my guess as to what Avicebron meant as well. Various flavors of extremists use it (like others have used "social darwinism") as a justification or excuse for their accumulation and abuses of power. "We are the 'hard men' this time needs! Shut up and do what we tell you!"
It has felt inevitable to me for a few years now. The market != the economy but a major crash can still trigger a credit crunch that will materially affect regular people. Look at the insane valuations on some of these companies. They can't continue forever.
As for WW3, well, there's a diaper-wearing senile old man, with an inferiority complex to boot, in charge of a nuclear arsenal and major conventional forces.
If so, we haven't hit the equivalent of Sept 1 1939 yet. That's when WW2 is generally considered to have started, but residents of Manchuria, Austria and the Sudetenland probably consider it to have started earlier.
Sep 1 1939 is when it escalated from a small number of 2-party wars to a massive multi-party war. It's not the day the war started, it's the day it became a "World War".
China supplying weapons to Iran and Russia. North Korea sending troops to Russia to fight in Ukraine, and along with Russia, conducting hybrid warfare across Europe and the United States. The US sending weapons to Ukraine and other EU allies. SOF from MANY countries operating in conflict zones and deep inside China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran.
The only thing that hasn't really happened is a full economic mobilization. And Russia... may be close to that.
> As for WW3, well, there's a diaper-wearing senile old man, with an inferiority complex to boot, in charge of a nuclear arsenal and major conventional forces.
> As for WW3, well, there's a diaper-wearing senile old man, with an inferiority complex to boot, in charge of a nuclear arsenal and major conventional forces.
How naive one must be to consider this NPC as the biggest threat to human kind since the dawn of man.
It's not that single person who threatens the world, it's the complete American elite and the whole American society who push for wars and more wars, and the current NPC of the day in the office is just their tool.
> It's not that single person who threatens the world
The question is: is he enabling them, or are they enabling him? I suppose it could be working in both directions. That said: while the "elite" were problematic before his second rise to power, they were also more constrained.
I also have some question as to who the elite are? Certain individuals are more prominent these days, while others have faded in the background. While it may feel good to apply a singular label to the wealthy (or any other group we disagree with), they are not a single ideological entity. It's probably more beneficial to align ourselves with those who agree with us, rather than alienating them based upon a metric that is only tangentially related to their values.
It depends on how closely you tie the metrics and the values. Do you consider someone becoming a billionaire/trillionaire a reflection of their values or just a metric they happen to have?
Both. A person who places the interests of others above their own and lacks ambition is unlikely to achieve wealth in their life. Yet that doesn't mean a wealthy person has limitless ambition, nor does a willingness to place their interests above others mean that they are willing to sacrifice others in their own interest. While one needs to hold certain values to acquire or maintain wealth, there is still an element of "luck" to it (even if part of that luck has to be manufactured).
Take someone like Gates. He is a famously immoral businessman. Kildall once remarked that he had the urge to keep one hand on his wallet and the other on his source code listings when in Gates' presence. Yet Gates also has an interest in the human condition, something he has backed with both influence and money. I have no doubt that his rationale behind these interests differ from his less wealthy kin, but that is not sufficient reason to disregard it just because of his wealth. Now contrast that to someone like Musk. He has arguably done more for the environment by actually getting electric vehicles into mass production and he has arguably done more for science (without actually doing scientific research) through financing the development of launch vehicles. That said, it is doubtful that he has any form of grasp on reality. His morality appears to be of the sort where a pacifist wouldn't trust themselves in Musk's presence.
Anyhow, I've forgotten where I was going beyond that. Hopefully it is enough to illustrate that wealthy people have different values and that wealth should not be used as a metric of their values. That said, I'm not sure that I've convinced anyone (even myself), that some wealthy people have sensible values.
To both of your points: the beer hall demagogue wouldn't have gotten to Chancellor if the German elites hadn't decided that he really couldn't do that much damage and we may as well let him be chancellor to quiet down his followers. Even after the putsch, he got a very light sentence because the judge was sympathetic with his right-wing cause. You're both right to some extent. A huge amount of damage was done by one man, but he got to where he did because the German elites thought that he might be useful to their cause.
Indeed, and that is perhaps the most important lesson of Hitlers rise - dangerous people will always exist, and so it is critical to have systems that are resilient to them, and not allow them to be hollowed out just because the current crop of leaders looks like they can be trusted with more power and less oversight, because who knows what kind of madman will get power next.
Obviously, calling out for violence and building organizations that commit atrocious acts of violence is a bad thing.
However, it is really hard to do without the help of others.
If you start arguing that your country should invade your neighbors and mass murder various types of people, the people listening have a choice in how they react -
do they politely remind you that we're generally happier and richer if we're nice to each other and "treat others like we'd like others to treat us", or shout "JAWOHL MEIN FURHER" and go invade neighbors and mass murdering undesirables?
The problem isn't always the guy shouting hate, it's the crowd listening and implementing hate.
>It's not that single person who threatens the world, it's the complete American elite and the whole American society who push for wars and more wars, and the current NPC of the day in the office is just their tool.
I agree that Americans themselves are the root cause. Americans as a society are deeply, pathologically unwell and Trump is entirely their fault. I have no sympathy for any of them.
But only one person is the commander in chief of the US military, and the checks and balances that are supposed to keep him in control are not functioning.
Is this some sort of a paid advertising piece, to make you feel better about inflation, lack of affordable medical care, lack of affordable housing, lack of jobs for recent graduates, etc...?
"Life is much better in 2026. We live healthier, richer, and longer lives, with better medicine and more self-determination." - I can't speak for 1926, but compared to 1980s or 1960s, this is so patently not true. The US population is much sicker and more obese, as one example. People are not starving, but at the cost of eating "manufactured" foods that will make them sick in 20 - 40 yrs. And so on. I don't see a lot of happy faces on the streets of America.
> I can't speak for 1926, but compared to 1980s or 1960s, this is so patently not true. The US population is much sicker and more obese, as one example.
If you're a woman, would you rather live in the 1960s or 2020s? If you were black or any other minority, in the 1960s or 2020s? If you're gay, would you rather live in the 1960/80s or in the 2020s?
Average US life expectancy was in about 70 in the 1960s, and mid-70s in the 1980s, and approaching 80 until COVID hit. Cancer survivorships has improved (not only because better screen and treatment, but also because of less cigarette smoking). The infant mortality rate now is a fifth of what it was in the 1960s.
Of course for all these numbers non-US developed countries are much better.
Generally, to say that life is better now is not to say it's perfect or to deny that improvements can still be made.
> People are not starving, but at the cost of eating "manufactured" foods that will make them sick in 20 - 40 yrs.
Groceries have gone from being 14% of household spending in the 1960s to being less 6% (takeout from 4% to 6%). In 1900 food was 40%:
> Is this some sort of a paid advertising piece, to make you feel better about inflation, lack of affordable medical care, lack of affordable housing, lack of jobs for recent graduates, etc...?
I don't see how anything in the article would influence anyone to feel better about those things.
The piece compares the USA and 100 years ago.
He notices that we are still in a time of large social change, often in some of the same areas, while also noting that we are materially more comfortable.
I don't think "this some sort of a paid advertising piece, to make you feel better about inflation, lack of affordable medical care, lack of affordable housing, lack of jobs for recent graduates, etc...", I think it's just a historical retrospective.
Author is pointing out that material, we're more comfortable than 100 years ago, and it's true.
It was arguable also true in 1926 - I I'd rather have been 26 in 1926 than 26 in 1826 (especially if I were a woman or black), and I'd rather be 26 today than 1926.
Being educated enough to whine on the internet about how despite recently graduating from university, I've not found a job that pays me enough to buy a home in a super expensive metropolitan area, while not ideal, is still, in my opinion, than moving from the farm to go work in various factories and shops in the city.
Have you ever seen a graph of the stock market?
It doesn't always go up all the time, but in the long run, it generally goes up on average.
That's exactly what a good propaganda is: We are now arguing whether we are better off than exactly 100 yrs ago, instead of focusing on the lack of jobs for recent grads, significantly higher prices than pre-COVID, etc...
When I read articles, in addition to thinking "good information", I now always ask 3 more quesitons: (1) why was it written? (2) who benefits? (3) who paid for it (not necessarily with money)?
> That's exactly what a good propaganda is: We are now arguing whether we are better off than exactly 100 yrs ago, instead of focusing on the lack of jobs for recent grads, significantly higher prices than pre-COVID, etc...
We are only arguing about that because you brought it up.
Meh, seems he's using arbitrary metrics to make arbitrary claims (which is fine). But to just state that "Life is so much better in 2026 than in 1926 for Americans" is obviously a pretty nebulous statement. It's like saying "Beaches in 2026 are so much better than beaches in 1926". Sure you could cherry-pick some metrics to make the case, and someone else could cherry-pick metrics to make the opposite case. Sort've a "talking just to hear yourself talk" kind've thing.
> But to just state that "Life is so much better in 2026 than in 1926 for Americans" is obviously a pretty nebulous statement.
Given that there was no antibiotics in 1926, no chemotherapy or radiation therapy for cancer, no public pensions (so good luck getting old), hardly any indoor plumbing (even by 1940 it was about half), I think life is much better now that one hundred years ago.
What were infant mortality rates in 1926? Maternal mortality? Average life span? How many years did people live after retirement?
Can you list the ways in which you think life was better in 1926?
And to say life is better now is not to say it's perfect or to deny that improvements can still be made.
Even if food quality remained exactly the same… By definition Americans would still be on average slightly less healthy, and so on… since the population grew so much? (and grew older)
There’s no magical low effort way to avoid regression to the global mean, as the population more than doubles in size.
That takes serious, coordinated, and sustained work across decades to avoid.
I think it’s important to acknowledge that today U.S. citizens in the bottom economic decile live longer lives and do so with more comfort and convenience than even the wealthiest and most powerful people of 100 years ago. Not even the infamous robber barons, such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, with all their staggering wealth, had access to anything approaching modern health care (and dentistry!); air-conditioned comfort; television, instant communication across the planet via text, voice, and video; computers, let alone supercomputers in their pockets giving them the internet, Google, GPS, and approximately free and instant access to the world’s information.
Yes, there is still much work to be done to improve the United States, but I’d rather be poor in the United States today than wealthy in the United States 100 years ago. I suspect that most educated people would choose likewise.
yeah, that is honestly a good win, going from awful side effects of prohibition to intelligent legalization. Even cannabis has been largely legalized, although there is the opiate epidemic to worry about now.
Still, overall, I feel like drug policy now beats 100 years ago :)
I don’t know. There are other countries that have those properties.
I am envious of Western Europe’s healthcare, social safety net, healthier food and holidays that you don’t work on.
The comment came about from the last charts show religion, patriotism, etc down while money rose. It clicked.
Grass is greener. I’m currently in Spain. I don’t have access to the public healthcare system. Don’t have access to unemployment. A third of the population can’t even afford a holiday. People are getting more obese every year. Rent is higher than minimum wage.
EU is a good place to be but some people have this overly optimistic view of the place.
Water tastes pretty gross in coastal Spain. In countries like Albania I wouldn’t even drink it at all. On Greek islands it is safe but everyone buys water from the stores.
Due to the age of many places in Europe there is also still a lot of copper pipe used for tap water. Not deadly but also not very healthy. In Amsterdam over 20 percent of homes have copper pipes.
A few places in the US have tap water that tastes famously bad, largely due to where they get the water from. San Diego is a famous example. The water is safe and clean but discolored and the flavor is pretty awful.
Geography isn't just climate. The US has exceptional soil for agriculture at incredible scales, one of the richest mineral belts in the world, and pervasive waterways outside of the Great Basin. Add to that just about every biome that exists within its borders.
Many people find Europe to be gloomy -- too little sun and too much rain. The US is only "harsh" if that is your platonic ideal for weather. The Pacific Northwest is a sunnier version of this climate. Most of the US is well within the range people can naturally adapt to and be comfortable in. The US is also an incredibly sunny place by comparison, even the parts not known for heat. The US does have unusually extreme weather but those events don't define the day-to-day and the built environment is adapted to it.
There are only a few parts of the US with irredeemable weather in my opinion. The low deserts of the southwest (e.g. Mojave) are literally among the hottest places on Earth. The northern Plains reach Arctic temperatures during winter. This is why almost no one lives in these places. The South famously has tropical heat/humidity during the summer, which Americans complain about, but that is like tropics everywhere and is quite pleasant during the winter.
That said, the best weather in the US (and arguably the world) is widely considered to be in San Diego. Perfect sunny days at an almost ideal temperature with no humidity for virtually the entire year.
Lots of good farmland, and it has lots of mineral resources that we often ignore rather than cut margins to mine safely.
The US's problems are entirely political. Geologically and climate wise it is a really great place. And it already has an educated populous and a significant amount of industrial hardware.
Freedom to say (almost) anything, publicly, including criticism of the elite and powerful.
Freedom to do, to create a business with far fewer roadblocks than in, say, Europe.
Freedom to go, to travel anywhere in a really large country, with no borders or restrictions.
Yeah, you can quote me all the caveats. They're there; I don't deny them. But: Freedom to say, freedom to do, and freedom to go. Those are really big deals.
> Freedom to say (almost) anything, publicly, including criticism of the elite and powerful.
Most European nations strongly protect free speech, allowing open public critique and satire of politicians, the wealthy, and the powerful.
> Freedom to do, to create a business with far fewer roadblocks than in, say, Europe.
Several European countries actually lead global easy business rankings, some offering fully digital, single-day company registration, very little bureaucracy (not mine, sadly)
> Freedom to go, to travel anywhere in a really large country, with no borders or restrictions.
The schengen zone grants passport-free travel across 29 nations, spanning thousands of miles without a single border checkpoint.
> The schengen zone grants passport-free travel across 29 nations, spanning thousands of miles without a single border checkpoint.
Not anymore. I got stopped between The Netherlands and Germany, between France and Spain, Denmark and Sweden. Germany has border checkpoints with most of its bordering countries.
That is unheard of in the USA. You can travel thousands of kilometers without getting stopped by authorities for checking your passport or identity card.
The numbers aren’t very clear but from what I can read online I see that the border checks in Germany resulted in a couple thousand deportations. Hundred of thousands of people checked.
Not comparing that to ICE as deportations in the EU are typically peaceful.
If you can be compelled to produce your papers or get arrested by ICE then everyone will have to have their papers on them. ICE and leaders in this admin are also stating that they are aiming for millions of deportations.
Europe isn’t a single country. We have multiple countries where you can create a company in no time, with little capital. And have freedom of movement within the whole EU
I moved to Spain from The Netherlands as a Dutch citizen. It was a lot of paperwork, lots of planning, needed close to €10k in my bank account and needed to get private healthcare with a pretty serious health check. I had to do multiple trips to the national police office and municipalities.
That is not needed when you switch states in the US. You just need to update your address and tax records. You do not needed to show financial means and you do not need private healthcare.
Some of every industrial resource, seemingly for every new technology to need one. As a country it’s been like playing civ and every tech upgrade you lucked out in a resource node popping up on your territory.
I love that I got downvoted above for literally suggesting they ask someone who was recently in America for their opinion as to what America has to offer.
yeah but America 1926 didn't have a billion dollars a day being extracted from the economy by a totally useless war (that is going to start again in 60 days)
or a President extracting billions from his own government for a plane, golf, inexplicable illegal destruction and renovations to national sites
the government was also not purposely imploding academia, science and medicine
there are also now over a THOUSAND billionaires "silo-ing" their wealth, barely paying any taxes and trying to eliminate the cost of employing anybody
we cannot recover this decade, maybe not even next century, and that assumes this horror show doesn't have a "part 2"
You might be surprised to hear that wealth concentration was worse a hundred years ago than it is now. It's very easy to assume otherwise when the numbers are so much larger now across the board.
The definition of homeless was quite different at that time --- note that there was an entire class of people defined as hobos/migrant workers who began the year helping out with cutting lumber and harvesting maple sugar in the winter, then working south to help with the planting of truck crops (lettuce, spinach, broccoli, peas...) in the spring, pruning fruit trees and harvesting early crops in the summer, then in the fall helping with the harvests and picking cotton and so forth, then helping to plant cover crops and so forth and moving north to repeat the process.
Louis L'Amour writes on this a bit in his wonderful book:
That's an interesting point - we may be keeping people alive better now. And the rate of people experiencing homelessness is 5-10x lower now than it was during the Great Depression.
I did a quick check, and the HUD point-in-time counts show the rate of homelessness was dropping slowly from 21.5 per 10000 in 2007 (the first year of a national standard), to around 17.5 per 10000 in 2020, then rose in 2023-2024 up to 22.9, and in 2025 was back down to 21.9. During the Great Depression this rose up to 100-200 per 10,000.
Keep in mind that "more homeless than ever" (and I would prefer "more people experiencing homelessness than ever") may be technically true, but per capita we've seen a post-covid bump that's likely already back to 2007 levels. Without understanding the trends I wouldn't predict what happens next.
I've done some research to try to help you understand more - can I ask you to think about your frame and beliefs and consider changing them?
I an a completely unabashed leftist who has been "radicalized" (if you call free school lunches "radical", which apparently it is in modern America) by seeing the rapidly accelerating wealth and income inequality since 2008. I mean it really kciked off in the 1970s but the effects post-2008 became impossible to ignore.
In the spirit of all models are wroong but some models are useful and that generational politics is overly reductive (which it is), I still see the Millenials as the new Lost Generation. The original Lost Generation were born 1883 to 1900. They came of age in the devastation of WW1 and the Spanish flu. What happened after 2008 was that all the entry-level jobs disappeared. Millenials had taken and continued to take on massive student debt and otherwise "do the right thing" yet found there were limited opportunities at the end of that pipeline. Baby boomers still had a stranglehold on academic and they both refused to quit or die (something which is still true). This is where the trope of the college educated millenial barista came from.
Obama's presidency was a massive lost opportunity to correct some of this. It directly led to Trump being elected (over Hilary "more of the same" Clinton). Trump, for all his many, many faults, talked to the rising anger in young people at the lack of opportunity, the possibility that they'd never own a house or have a good-paying job or they'd have a family. The disillusionment and anger has only grown.
So, as a leftist, the irony is that I get shit on constantly for essentially trying to preserve the current system by those people who like the current system but are contributing towards us bouldering towards war and revolution. Because those are the ultimate form of wealth redistribution [1] and become increasingly inevitable as material conditions worsen.
Even more ironic, many of those same people fetishize the 1950s where the top marginal tax rate was 91%, the CEO-to-median-wage ratio was a fraction of what it is now and the corporate tax rate was 40-50%. But then came along the likes of McKinsey who justified greed witht he patina of executives being "underpaid" [2] and then the social destruction of Nixon, Reagan and Clinton.
It took FDR in the 1930s to repair the damage of 1920s pro-business slavishness of Coolidge and Mellon. And let's not forget there was an attempted coup in 1933 [3]. But you see the same messages (as the author notes) in the 1920s of lower taxes, destroying unions and being pro-big business. Sound familiar?
> talked to the rising anger in young people at the lack of opportunity, the possibility that they'd never own a house or have a good-paying job or they'd have a family. The disillusionment and anger has only grown.
This should be the absolutely only thing that Democrats talk about. Every single day, with a big graph and call in number, so people can call in to say if this was fixed for them or not. And if it's not fixed, they should outline steps on how it gets fixed that day. It's insane they aren't using this opportunity.
Personally, I think GenX are the lost. (I'm a late GenX) Our colleages took the brunt of the global war on terror, and because we entered the workforce at the peak boomer pivot away from the pre-Internet era of business those of us that were in the corporate/government workforce were basically stuck waiting for people to die to move up. We're the people who got computers and internet in a way that neither our elders or children understand.
The millennials are the recipients of the great dumbing down. They get the inherit the wealth of their parents and grandparents, just in time for it to be inflated away to nothing.
I don’t know any millennials who are inheriting anything. Everyone’s boomer parents who inherited family wealth are either losing it to healthcare costs extracting everything at their end of life or (literally in at least one friends case) saying “you can’t take it with you” and burning the family wealth on luxuries while their kids struggle.
Maybe there’s a handful of ultra wealthy families tending the family wealth well but most of the middle class boomers don’t even have a concept of leaving something for future generations.
Fellow GenXer here and no, the millenials have it way worse. We paid a pittance for college and had to buy literally any house in the 1990s and we're fine. Now if you didn't buy a house in the 1990s, yes, you're screwed.
We have our own problems, namely that we were raised by boomers who went from Flower Power in the 1960s to voting for Reagan in the 1980s. We were the last free range generation but that wasn't freedom. It was neglect. Many of us also grew up with things like ADHD and Type 1 Autism long before anyone knew what those things were so that, too, was fun for us.
Baby boomers as a whole seem terrified of dying. So they don't retire but also they don't leave anything for their children. Tehy can't take it with them but by God they're going to spend it before they go. Or it'll just get eaten up on end-of-life care.
I can barely contain my rage at the baby boomer generation who took the fruits of prosperity from FDR in the post-war era and pissed it all away voting for Reagan while bringing people into the world then making sure to pass absolutely nothing onto them in a world they can scarcely afford.
Given all that I still say millenials got shafted way worse.
I read Sinclair Lewis' Babbit last year and it was kind of depressing how little has changed since 1922. The political climate (at least as portrayed in the novel) seemed eerily similar to now. Maybe we continually go through oscillations.
In the same vein, his It Can't Happen Here is also well worth reading, as is Jack London's The Iron Heel. The more things change the more they stay the same.
I'm shocked how much the average American knows about how things work. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. I'm not surprised how quickly Americans are giving up their liberty.
46% dont even know what America 250 is... Worse 61% of <30 year olds dont' know. Dont like them but here is poll source (while not crazy maga i dont fully trust it's not push-poll or biased question structures wo reading full xtabs): https://www.cato.org/blog/gen-z-fails-basic-civics-quiz-amer...
a gross percent can't name the 3 branches or their Reps.
For the non-Americans in the room, is "America 250" anything other than the 250th anniversary of the war of independence?
Did you mean to say “how little”?
How much and how little are logically equivalent, although in vernacular usage it is of course common to use how little when implying the amount is less than one might expect, and how much to imply the amount is more than one might expect.
English is a very context dependent language, so the phrases "surprised by how much" and "surprised by how little" actually have opposite denotations. Mechanically, sure, they're interchangeable, but using the "incorrect" form carries extra connotations. You've used the counterintuitive form, demanding the reader more carefully consider your meaning, which heavily implies you're making a point beyond what appears in the text.
If the second half of that reader engagement doesn't pay off, the sentence reads as clunky or incorrect, likely a mistake from a second language speaker.
Natural languages are not code and words can't be swapped arbitrarily. Word choice and construction carries meaning in and of itself, totally divorced from the actual words used.
What do you mean by "I've used"?
Practical communication is not an exercise in logical deduction. The meaning of those terms is not equivalent for exactly the reason you noted.
obviously you can use much to mean little with a how in front but generally with a little snarky aside like ", which is not much at all," after the "how much", but yes, in typical usage they are not interpreted the same, although I'd say the difference really only becomes important in comparative usage as in "how little for how much" and similar examples.
on edit: took out hows to avoid confusion.
"Surprised by how much" pretty directly means the amount is higher than expected. It has the opposite meaning the person intended. The neutral phrasing would be more like "surprised by the amount".
"vaccines cause autism"
"well, I'm certainly surprised by how much you know, good day."
I laughed but I think that example undermines your own point. I read "how much" in that context as dripping sarcasm.
human beings are not always perfect communicators, regrettably.
Luckily, other humans can 'clear things up' :)
You're a 26 year old in 1926. You're part of what history would later call the Greatest Generation. You will suffer through both the Great Depression and World War II. Perhaps due to those experiences, you will be the only generation that votes more left as you age.
If you were born in 1900 you probably are at the tail end of the Lost Generation — the Greatest Generation is considered to be those born between 1901 and 1927.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greatest_Generation
They started the report in 1929 and completed it in 1933. Easy enough to just tweak the year slightly to fit the stated generation.
Lost Generation describes those who experienced WW1. Given that he turned 18 in 1918 it's certainly possible he enlisted or was drafted. The article implies he didn't join WW1. It's that experience rather than his exact birthday that would categorize him into Lost vs Greatest IMO.
In the US, something like 98% of eligible men enlisted in WWI. There was no draft.
So yes, VERY high probability of service.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_Service_Act_of_1917
Wild to think there were people who as adults lived through all of the railroad buildout, WWI, the 20s, the depression, and then WWII. Complaining about AI buildouts causing electronics prices to regress by a decade or so begins to seem rather trite in comparison.
> Wild to think there were people who as adults lived through all of the railroad buildout, WWI, the 20s, the depression, and then WWII.
My great-grandmother was born in the late 1890s and lived until 99 years old. I knew her very well (she died when I was 17).
Her husband died in his sleep: they had a house built and it wasn't finished yet, but he was so excited he decided to sleep a first night in it, alone. Gas leak.
They had two daughters, 4 and 2 years old. My grandmother and my great-aunt, whom I both knew very well too.
I've got a letter signed by Eisenhower, before he was president, thanking my great-grandmother for her "galant service" during WWII: she was part of the resistance and hid, for months, a UK pilot that had been shot down by the nazis over Belgium. Before helping him regain the UK.
They were a though generation, really nothing like the little wussies [1] we see today and I mean it.
[1] the little snowflakes whose feelings shouldn't be hurt do comes to mind
Well, then and the millennials
> Perhaps due to those experiences, you will be the only generation that votes more left as you age.
I doubt it. My dad lived through the Great Depression, and fought desperate battles in WW2 and Korea.
As a young man, he was a socialist. His experience in fighting for American freedoms changed all that. Before he passed, he told me he regretted leaving me in a country that was significantly less free than when he was young.
I don't believe you'll find many communists in the greatest generation, especially among the war veterans.
In 1994, the Greatest Generation voted D+7, higher than any other generational cohort.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/04/30/a-different-...
Democrats in 1994 were a very different proposition when compared to today. They had the union vote locked up, and the greatest generation benefited greatly from unions.
Your link doesn't seem to cover the Greatest Generation.
Also, the Democrat party has steadily moved leftwards over time.
I don't have statistics, but combat veterans voice very negative opinions on Jane Fonda and her support for N Vietnam.
Look at the 1994 graph. They're n/a in the 2014 for obvious reasons.
> Also, the Democrat party has steadily moved leftwards over time.
the only way someone thinks this is if they have fox news blaring all day every day. the dems keep moving rightward step by step to appeal to "moderates" while the right wing keep moving the overton window even further right.
> Also, the Democrat party has steadily moved leftwards over time.
What an absurd statement. During the Great Depression FDR was considering a worker's bill of rights that would guarantee employment. In the '60s LBJ used the specter of a dead president to push through the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts (which have been considerably undone). In the '90s, Clinton undid the what remained of the Federal welfare state in this country. In the '10s, Obama was barely able to pass legislation that forced people to buy health insurance. In the '20s, Biden's major achievements were largely spending related. So in what universe has the party steadily moved leftward?
LBJ's "Great Society" programs still exist and are greatly expanded. The scope of federal entitlements have steadily expanded. And there are strident calls for Medicare for all.
Have you not noticed the recent elections of Democrat Socialists, and the Democrat leaders are endorsing them? This was unthinkable just a few years ago.
The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act are not socialism. I am not sure the VRA has been undone - didn't Los Angeles just enact a law to allow non-citizens to vote?
And none of those things are a move leftward, simply a return to FDR's Democratic Party, where universal healthcare and equal rights first had a chance of passing. That a handful of democratic nominees (most of the Democratic Socialists you allude to simply won their primaries, they aren't in power yet) are on the ballot for the first time demonstrates that the party itself has, in fact, moved rightward, as they wouldn't otherwise need to be described separate from the party itself. And your equation of left and socialism is deeply flawed. Ensuring equal rights with the CRA and VRA wasn't socialism (which is largely an economic framework, not political), but it was certainly a move to left. So much so the country essentially repolarized around those positions. Oh, and you do realize the difference between federal legislation and local laws about who can vote, right?
> And none of those things are a move leftward
Endorsing and electing Democrat Socialists is not a move leftward?
Sanders, AOC, Jayapal, Mandami, Katie Wilson, Bass, etc., are already elected and in power.
> Ensuring equal rights with the CRA and VRA wasn't socialism (which is largely an economic framework, not political), but it was certainly a move to left.
No, it was not a move left.
“Left” doesn’t mean socialism. In the long run, it comes out of the enlightenment period, quite literally.
Traditionally, the left is associated with small “L” liberalism, and the right is associated with small “C” conservatism.
Generally speaking, it has been a historic debate between whether the “natural” way things are is good and prudent (e.g., monarchs, religion, castes, roles, and norms), or if the way things are should be challenged to try something that seems better (e.g., liberté, égalité, fraternité).
When one of these ideas is successfully, it is often adopted by the right, when one fails, it is often abandoned by the left. Whether or not socialism is part of the left depends on whether folks on the left think it’s an idea worth trying. In America, right now, the vast majority are still quite hesitant to include it in their platform.
It's confusing because different people mean different things when using political terms. The political compass (https://www.politicalcompass.org) has two axes: left-right and libertarian-authoritarian. On it, socialists are definitely left wing (and communists far left), regardless of what the left/right wing meant at the time of the French Revolution.
I’m trying to keep things simple in terms of left vs right.
Yes, the reality of politics is that they are highly multipolar. The political compass is useful, but maintaining only two axes is wildly simplistic.
Moral Foundations Theory suggests there are five axes for political views. I think this theory is one of the best for explanatory power, but is still limited: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_foundations_theory
Suffices to say, if we look at politics through a two party, first past the post framework, I still think small letter conservatism vs liberalism is the best frame, simply because it is vague enough to be used generally.
> “Left” doesn’t mean socialism.
In American english it does.
> when one fails, it is often abandoned by the left
Rent control has never worked out (it results in a housing shortage), but proposals for more rent control constantly flow from the left.
Again, "the left" is not a homogeneous entity. When talking about "the left" we should look at the left's coalition. We don't really have significant party platforms anymore, but I can assure you "rent control" would not get passed by the Democratic Party coalition in the House of Representatives right now, much less the Senate.
Associating a political coalition with their most extreme or noisy members is counterproductive. When looking for what a coalition stands for, it's better to look at the coalition member who are most productive with legislation in places they have control.
https://www.lawdistrict.com/articles/rent-control-laws-by-st...
Statewide rent control was recently enacted by Oregon and Washington. It's also statewide in California. Not coincidentally, all three have Democrats completely controlling the governorship and legislature.
Here's the DNC official platform:
https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/2024-Democr...
I'd appreciate it if you found any free market proposals in it (I didn't read the whole thing).
I did notice the advocacy of rent control: "the Administration has eased rising rents by capping rent hikes in 2 million federally-funded apartments."
and
"It offers corporate landlords a basic choice for the next two years: either cap rent increases at 5 percent, or lose a valuable federal tax break."
and
"the Administration is going after unfair rental “junk fees,” like fees people are charged just to pay rent online or to receive sorted mail. And, we will crack down on corporate landlords who are gouging tenants, for example by capping the amount they can raise the rent each year"
> Perhaps due to those experiences, you will be the only generation that votes more left as you age.
They grew up in an era when various flavors of communism were serious considerations and they saw state power "save the world". Of course they couldn't get enough of it after that.
One kind of wonders if that sort of automatic deference to group (government and otherwise) solutions which they very much passed onto their huge numbers of kids is actually what undid the quality of those institutions.
You are off by a generation. The Greatest Generation was born in the 1920s. This was the generation that produced the Boomers.
I knew my great grandparents. Most were born in the last part of the 1800s and lived through the First World War as young adults. They always seemed significantly less scarred by the Great Depression than their children (the Greatest Generation). There was a communist undercurrent to the Greatest Generation but they didn't get it from their parents.
Lost Generation: adults during WW1
Greatest Generation: adults during WW2
Silent Generation: children during WW2
People born in the 20's would be split between Greatest & Silent.
Nit: movies with sound were around as early as the 1800s; 1927 is just considered the turning point when they became commercially viable and widely available (with the release of The Jazz Singer).
Great article. Just reminds me of how much societies resemble a pendulum; swinging from one extreme to the other. And of course you have the problem that some people want to freeze it mid-swing, or worse tear the damn thing down completely.
I’m really not sure, if you look at things before the 20th century it’s difficult to see a pendulum swing pattern. That works relatively well between the 20th and 21st centuries, but I don’t think we can see it as a general rule. It’s also pretty dependent on the region you look at, and movements you decide to take in consideration or filter out. There is just so much room for biases, it’s easy finding a pattern because that’s what our brains are good at doing, but it doesn’t mean it is predictive of anything
That being said, this video from Three Arrows (aka Dan Arrows) “America coming Weimar moment” has interesting things to say on that specific comparison: https://youtu.be/CFDDf48nj9g
A lot of folks forget that ancient Egypt existed for thousands of years without major changes.
Pre-industrialization, civs tended to come and then go(dispersing with other groups), as power structures came and went.
> Just reminds me of how much societies resemble a pendulum; swinging from one extreme to the other. And of course you have the problem that some people want to freeze it mid-swing, or worse tear the damn thing down completely.
Or keep pushing it to further and further extremes with each swing until it inevitably breaks under the strain. :(
I discovered the pendulum of social movements after reading Bertrand Russell's "The Ancestry of Fascism" at a relative young age (~16 years old), it only really made sense after my 30s though.
It required me watching, experiencing how things I had considered settled and humanity was over them started to turn back: the rise of fascistic tendencies in different societies, anti-intellectualism, etc. things that as a teenager/young adult I never considered could become societal issues again.
So, we're about to have Great Depression 2 and WW3? Fun.
Sometimes I wish Strauss–Howe theory hadn't been hijacked. It seems noteworthy how similar (cyclical?) things are even if it's a coincidence..
A key feature of the human condition is thinking "this time will be different"
What do you mean hijacked? I'm not familiar with that theory.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
The relevant sections for these comments:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
Basically we've been in a "4th Turning" for about two decades, and the 4th turning typically ends in some sort of crisis (hence the name for it, "Crisis"): Great Depression/WWII in the previous one, the US Civil War before that, the "Age of Revolution" before that, etc.
The idea behind it is lessons learned last until the people who lived through the previous one die. So the 4 "turnings" repeat every 80-100 years, and some sort of major crisis is expected around now - hence talk of another Great Depression or WWIII.
I don't see what GP means by "hijacked", GGP is pretty much a direct reference to exactly what it talks about.
Aside, this meme is based on this theory: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/hard-times-create-strong-men - "hard times" represents the 4th Turning, though it's oversimplified, which makes it not really a great match.
Crazy/extemist people use it as a way to justify their nonsense.
Yeah, that's my guess as to what Avicebron meant as well. Various flavors of extremists use it (like others have used "social darwinism") as a justification or excuse for their accumulation and abuses of power. "We are the 'hard men' this time needs! Shut up and do what we tell you!"
We're kind of already having the WW3 part.
More like Cold War 2
Not even close, unfortunately. WW3 would be massively worse than what we have now.
Unfortunately?!?!?!
I mean, if WW3 is coming, then that difference is very unfortunate.
It has felt inevitable to me for a few years now. The market != the economy but a major crash can still trigger a credit crunch that will materially affect regular people. Look at the insane valuations on some of these companies. They can't continue forever.
As for WW3, well, there's a diaper-wearing senile old man, with an inferiority complex to boot, in charge of a nuclear arsenal and major conventional forces.
I think there's a compelling case to be made that WW3 started in 2014 when Putin invaded Crimea.
If so, we haven't hit the equivalent of Sept 1 1939 yet. That's when WW2 is generally considered to have started, but residents of Manchuria, Austria and the Sudetenland probably consider it to have started earlier.
It's only considered to have started then because that's when France and Britain declared war on Germany, and that's who wrote the history books.
Sep 1 1939 is when it escalated from a small number of 2-party wars to a massive multi-party war. It's not the day the war started, it's the day it became a "World War".
China supplying weapons to Iran and Russia. North Korea sending troops to Russia to fight in Ukraine, and along with Russia, conducting hybrid warfare across Europe and the United States. The US sending weapons to Ukraine and other EU allies. SOF from MANY countries operating in conflict zones and deep inside China, North Korea, Russia, and Iran.
The only thing that hasn't really happened is a full economic mobilization. And Russia... may be close to that.
Putin started before that in 2008 when he invaded Georgia and no one said anything.
I’m not sure it’s a world war but Pax Americana definitely died then.
And a rapid increase in construction for new Chinese nuclear launch silos and actual underground nuclear testing.
Things are getting spicy.
> As for WW3, well, there's a diaper-wearing senile old man, with an inferiority complex to boot, in charge of a nuclear arsenal and major conventional forces.
Wait, which one are you talking about?
Putin? Trump? Nethanyayu? Kim Jong-un?
> As for WW3, well, there's a diaper-wearing senile old man, with an inferiority complex to boot, in charge of a nuclear arsenal and major conventional forces.
How naive one must be to consider this NPC as the biggest threat to human kind since the dawn of man.
It's not that single person who threatens the world, it's the complete American elite and the whole American society who push for wars and more wars, and the current NPC of the day in the office is just their tool.
> It's not that single person who threatens the world
The question is: is he enabling them, or are they enabling him? I suppose it could be working in both directions. That said: while the "elite" were problematic before his second rise to power, they were also more constrained.
I also have some question as to who the elite are? Certain individuals are more prominent these days, while others have faded in the background. While it may feel good to apply a singular label to the wealthy (or any other group we disagree with), they are not a single ideological entity. It's probably more beneficial to align ourselves with those who agree with us, rather than alienating them based upon a metric that is only tangentially related to their values.
It depends on how closely you tie the metrics and the values. Do you consider someone becoming a billionaire/trillionaire a reflection of their values or just a metric they happen to have?
Both. A person who places the interests of others above their own and lacks ambition is unlikely to achieve wealth in their life. Yet that doesn't mean a wealthy person has limitless ambition, nor does a willingness to place their interests above others mean that they are willing to sacrifice others in their own interest. While one needs to hold certain values to acquire or maintain wealth, there is still an element of "luck" to it (even if part of that luck has to be manufactured).
Take someone like Gates. He is a famously immoral businessman. Kildall once remarked that he had the urge to keep one hand on his wallet and the other on his source code listings when in Gates' presence. Yet Gates also has an interest in the human condition, something he has backed with both influence and money. I have no doubt that his rationale behind these interests differ from his less wealthy kin, but that is not sufficient reason to disregard it just because of his wealth. Now contrast that to someone like Musk. He has arguably done more for the environment by actually getting electric vehicles into mass production and he has arguably done more for science (without actually doing scientific research) through financing the development of launch vehicles. That said, it is doubtful that he has any form of grasp on reality. His morality appears to be of the sort where a pacifist wouldn't trust themselves in Musk's presence.
Anyhow, I've forgotten where I was going beyond that. Hopefully it is enough to illustrate that wealthy people have different values and that wealth should not be used as a metric of their values. That said, I'm not sure that I've convinced anyone (even myself), that some wealthy people have sensible values.
It sometimes is a single person. Consider the failed beer hall demagogue who wrecked a nation, a continent, and nearly a world.
To both of your points: the beer hall demagogue wouldn't have gotten to Chancellor if the German elites hadn't decided that he really couldn't do that much damage and we may as well let him be chancellor to quiet down his followers. Even after the putsch, he got a very light sentence because the judge was sympathetic with his right-wing cause. You're both right to some extent. A huge amount of damage was done by one man, but he got to where he did because the German elites thought that he might be useful to their cause.
Indeed, and that is perhaps the most important lesson of Hitlers rise - dangerous people will always exist, and so it is critical to have systems that are resilient to them, and not allow them to be hollowed out just because the current crop of leaders looks like they can be trusted with more power and less oversight, because who knows what kind of madman will get power next.
All events have multiple causes. But history turned on what he did, and would have been very different otherwise.
> what he did
Obviously, calling out for violence and building organizations that commit atrocious acts of violence is a bad thing.
However, it is really hard to do without the help of others.
If you start arguing that your country should invade your neighbors and mass murder various types of people, the people listening have a choice in how they react - do they politely remind you that we're generally happier and richer if we're nice to each other and "treat others like we'd like others to treat us", or shout "JAWOHL MEIN FURHER" and go invade neighbors and mass murdering undesirables?
The problem isn't always the guy shouting hate, it's the crowd listening and implementing hate.
>It's not that single person who threatens the world, it's the complete American elite and the whole American society who push for wars and more wars, and the current NPC of the day in the office is just their tool.
I agree that Americans themselves are the root cause. Americans as a society are deeply, pathologically unwell and Trump is entirely their fault. I have no sympathy for any of them.
But only one person is the commander in chief of the US military, and the checks and balances that are supposed to keep him in control are not functioning.
Still reading the article but it reminds me that I need to watch Metropolis now, I think it came out in 1928 or so.
Is this some sort of a paid advertising piece, to make you feel better about inflation, lack of affordable medical care, lack of affordable housing, lack of jobs for recent graduates, etc...?
"Life is much better in 2026. We live healthier, richer, and longer lives, with better medicine and more self-determination." - I can't speak for 1926, but compared to 1980s or 1960s, this is so patently not true. The US population is much sicker and more obese, as one example. People are not starving, but at the cost of eating "manufactured" foods that will make them sick in 20 - 40 yrs. And so on. I don't see a lot of happy faces on the streets of America.
> I can't speak for 1926, but compared to 1980s or 1960s, this is so patently not true. The US population is much sicker and more obese, as one example.
If you're a woman, would you rather live in the 1960s or 2020s? If you were black or any other minority, in the 1960s or 2020s? If you're gay, would you rather live in the 1960/80s or in the 2020s?
Average US life expectancy was in about 70 in the 1960s, and mid-70s in the 1980s, and approaching 80 until COVID hit. Cancer survivorships has improved (not only because better screen and treatment, but also because of less cigarette smoking). The infant mortality rate now is a fifth of what it was in the 1960s.
Of course for all these numbers non-US developed countries are much better.
Generally, to say that life is better now is not to say it's perfect or to deny that improvements can still be made.
> People are not starving, but at the cost of eating "manufactured" foods that will make them sick in 20 - 40 yrs.
Groceries have gone from being 14% of household spending in the 1960s to being less 6% (takeout from 4% to 6%). In 1900 food was 40%:
* https://archive.is/https://www.theatlantic.com/business/arch...
Being able to cook healthy meals for yourself has probably never been easier and less expensive than it is now.
> Is this some sort of a paid advertising piece, to make you feel better about inflation, lack of affordable medical care, lack of affordable housing, lack of jobs for recent graduates, etc...?
I don't see how anything in the article would influence anyone to feel better about those things.
Since he is explicitly comparing 2026 to 1926 I think his statement holds up.
That's how good propaganda reads. You have to be both subtle and partially true.
I’d love to hear what you think 1926 was like for the average person.
Why do you refer to "good propaganda"?
The piece compares the USA and 100 years ago. He notices that we are still in a time of large social change, often in some of the same areas, while also noting that we are materially more comfortable.
I don't think "this some sort of a paid advertising piece, to make you feel better about inflation, lack of affordable medical care, lack of affordable housing, lack of jobs for recent graduates, etc...", I think it's just a historical retrospective.
Author is pointing out that material, we're more comfortable than 100 years ago, and it's true.
It was arguable also true in 1926 - I I'd rather have been 26 in 1926 than 26 in 1826 (especially if I were a woman or black), and I'd rather be 26 today than 1926.
Being educated enough to whine on the internet about how despite recently graduating from university, I've not found a job that pays me enough to buy a home in a super expensive metropolitan area, while not ideal, is still, in my opinion, than moving from the farm to go work in various factories and shops in the city.
Have you ever seen a graph of the stock market?
It doesn't always go up all the time, but in the long run, it generally goes up on average.
That's exactly what a good propaganda is: We are now arguing whether we are better off than exactly 100 yrs ago, instead of focusing on the lack of jobs for recent grads, significantly higher prices than pre-COVID, etc...
When I read articles, in addition to thinking "good information", I now always ask 3 more quesitons: (1) why was it written? (2) who benefits? (3) who paid for it (not necessarily with money)?
> That's exactly what a good propaganda is: We are now arguing whether we are better off than exactly 100 yrs ago, instead of focusing on the lack of jobs for recent grads, significantly higher prices than pre-COVID, etc...
We are only arguing about that because you brought it up.
Meh, seems he's using arbitrary metrics to make arbitrary claims (which is fine). But to just state that "Life is so much better in 2026 than in 1926 for Americans" is obviously a pretty nebulous statement. It's like saying "Beaches in 2026 are so much better than beaches in 1926". Sure you could cherry-pick some metrics to make the case, and someone else could cherry-pick metrics to make the opposite case. Sort've a "talking just to hear yourself talk" kind've thing.
> But to just state that "Life is so much better in 2026 than in 1926 for Americans" is obviously a pretty nebulous statement.
Given that there was no antibiotics in 1926, no chemotherapy or radiation therapy for cancer, no public pensions (so good luck getting old), hardly any indoor plumbing (even by 1940 it was about half), I think life is much better now that one hundred years ago.
What were infant mortality rates in 1926? Maternal mortality? Average life span? How many years did people live after retirement?
Can you list the ways in which you think life was better in 1926?
And to say life is better now is not to say it's perfect or to deny that improvements can still be made.
People smoke a lot less. We have antibiotics. Life expectancy is up.
Even if food quality remained exactly the same… By definition Americans would still be on average slightly less healthy, and so on… since the population grew so much? (and grew older)
There’s no magical low effort way to avoid regression to the global mean, as the population more than doubles in size.
That takes serious, coordinated, and sustained work across decades to avoid.
I think it’s important to acknowledge that today U.S. citizens in the bottom economic decile live longer lives and do so with more comfort and convenience than even the wealthiest and most powerful people of 100 years ago. Not even the infamous robber barons, such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, with all their staggering wealth, had access to anything approaching modern health care (and dentistry!); air-conditioned comfort; television, instant communication across the planet via text, voice, and video; computers, let alone supercomputers in their pockets giving them the internet, Google, GPS, and approximately free and instant access to the world’s information.
Yes, there is still much work to be done to improve the United States, but I’d rather be poor in the United States today than wealthy in the United States 100 years ago. I suspect that most educated people would choose likewise.
> According to the historian Bill Bryson, 1920s Kansas alone had more vehicles than France
Humorous and informative writer. Not a historian. Thompson refers to him as a historian several times in the article.
no one is talking about the alcohol part?
yeah, that is honestly a good win, going from awful side effects of prohibition to intelligent legalization. Even cannabis has been largely legalized, although there is the opiate epidemic to worry about now.
Still, overall, I feel like drug policy now beats 100 years ago :)
No offense but outside of money does the US have anything going for it?
Natural parks.
Tasty drinkable water from the tap in nearly the entire country. Being able to flush toilet paper. Free toilets almost everywhere.
Being a country for 250 years is also quite an achievement.
I’m European and have witnessed many wars on my continent in my lifetime. A childhood friend was shot down with a Russian surface to air missile.
I don’t know. There are other countries that have those properties. I am envious of Western Europe’s healthcare, social safety net, healthier food and holidays that you don’t work on.
The comment came about from the last charts show religion, patriotism, etc down while money rose. It clicked.
What food does Europe have that the US does not?
Its what’s not in the food like additives, preservatives, pesticides, gmos and growth hormone. EU has stricter regulations.
Not stricter, just different emphasis. For example, the US famously has stricter controls on bacterial contamination than much of Europe.
You can buy the same food here.
> EU has stricter regulations.
Different, not stricter perse. In the EU it is allowed to sell food with non-edible parts inside or cheese with maggots.
Grass is greener. I’m currently in Spain. I don’t have access to the public healthcare system. Don’t have access to unemployment. A third of the population can’t even afford a holiday. People are getting more obese every year. Rent is higher than minimum wage.
EU is a good place to be but some people have this overly optimistic view of the place.
The water is drinkable but in many places not what I would call tasty.
Water tastes pretty gross in coastal Spain. In countries like Albania I wouldn’t even drink it at all. On Greek islands it is safe but everyone buys water from the stores.
Due to the age of many places in Europe there is also still a lot of copper pipe used for tap water. Not deadly but also not very healthy. In Amsterdam over 20 percent of homes have copper pipes.
A few places in the US have tap water that tastes famously bad, largely due to where they get the water from. San Diego is a famous example. The water is safe and clean but discolored and the flavor is pretty awful.
Much of the US has great tasting tap water.
I'm confused, you're saying that copper piping is not healthy for water lines? Any info you could help link to?
Apologies, I meant lead pipes. Plenty of pre-war homes have lead pipes.
The best geography of any country by a large margin and a non-ethnic culture that believes anything is possible and celebrates the ambition to try.
The money is largely a side effect of these two things.
Europe probably has the “best geography” and the climate, though?
Coastal California is probably one of the nicest places on earth but generally US is quite harsh.
Geography isn't just climate. The US has exceptional soil for agriculture at incredible scales, one of the richest mineral belts in the world, and pervasive waterways outside of the Great Basin. Add to that just about every biome that exists within its borders.
Many people find Europe to be gloomy -- too little sun and too much rain. The US is only "harsh" if that is your platonic ideal for weather. The Pacific Northwest is a sunnier version of this climate. Most of the US is well within the range people can naturally adapt to and be comfortable in. The US is also an incredibly sunny place by comparison, even the parts not known for heat. The US does have unusually extreme weather but those events don't define the day-to-day and the built environment is adapted to it.
There are only a few parts of the US with irredeemable weather in my opinion. The low deserts of the southwest (e.g. Mojave) are literally among the hottest places on Earth. The northern Plains reach Arctic temperatures during winter. This is why almost no one lives in these places. The South famously has tropical heat/humidity during the summer, which Americans complain about, but that is like tropics everywhere and is quite pleasant during the winter.
That said, the best weather in the US (and arguably the world) is widely considered to be in San Diego. Perfect sunny days at an almost ideal temperature with no humidity for virtually the entire year.
The US has pretty much all the possible biomes within its borders. Even active volcanoes
You can’t have the best geography if you share a land border with an expansionist power, as Europe does with Russia.
The Mississippi river. Few understand what an advantage that river is.
And that’s in spite of the fact that we’ve in some ways crippled it with the Jones Act
Lots of good farmland, and it has lots of mineral resources that we often ignore rather than cut margins to mine safely.
The US's problems are entirely political. Geologically and climate wise it is a really great place. And it already has an educated populous and a significant amount of industrial hardware.
Some of the most interesting cities in the world, NYC is so interesting and full of subcultures and energy.
Freedom to say (almost) anything, publicly, including criticism of the elite and powerful.
Freedom to do, to create a business with far fewer roadblocks than in, say, Europe.
Freedom to go, to travel anywhere in a really large country, with no borders or restrictions.
Yeah, you can quote me all the caveats. They're there; I don't deny them. But: Freedom to say, freedom to do, and freedom to go. Those are really big deals.
> Freedom to say (almost) anything, publicly, including criticism of the elite and powerful.
Most European nations strongly protect free speech, allowing open public critique and satire of politicians, the wealthy, and the powerful.
> Freedom to do, to create a business with far fewer roadblocks than in, say, Europe.
Several European countries actually lead global easy business rankings, some offering fully digital, single-day company registration, very little bureaucracy (not mine, sadly)
> Freedom to go, to travel anywhere in a really large country, with no borders or restrictions.
The schengen zone grants passport-free travel across 29 nations, spanning thousands of miles without a single border checkpoint.
> The schengen zone grants passport-free travel across 29 nations, spanning thousands of miles without a single border checkpoint.
Not anymore. I got stopped between The Netherlands and Germany, between France and Spain, Denmark and Sweden. Germany has border checkpoints with most of its bordering countries.
That is unheard of in the USA. You can travel thousands of kilometers without getting stopped by authorities for checking your passport or identity card.
Eh, we kinda can’t crow about that with ICE now, especially since it’s not just at known checkpoints where they are demanding papers.
Free speech is also on the outs since we’re having people getting jailed for not carrying the flame appropriately with regards to the late Mr Kirk.
Oh, and people getting prosecuted for 8647 as the powers at be decided to interpret that as a death threat instead of call to impeach.
The numbers aren’t very clear but from what I can read online I see that the border checks in Germany resulted in a couple thousand deportations. Hundred of thousands of people checked.
Not comparing that to ICE as deportations in the EU are typically peaceful.
If you can be compelled to produce your papers or get arrested by ICE then everyone will have to have their papers on them. ICE and leaders in this admin are also stating that they are aiming for millions of deportations.
Europe isn’t a single country. We have multiple countries where you can create a company in no time, with little capital. And have freedom of movement within the whole EU
> And have freedom of movement within the whole EU
To a certain degree. In the US you can drive to another state thousands of kilometers away and decide to just live there for the rest of your life.
I can do the same within the EU, what difference are you pointing at?
I moved to Spain from The Netherlands as a Dutch citizen. It was a lot of paperwork, lots of planning, needed close to €10k in my bank account and needed to get private healthcare with a pretty serious health check. I had to do multiple trips to the national police office and municipalities.
That is not needed when you switch states in the US. You just need to update your address and tax records. You do not needed to show financial means and you do not need private healthcare.
Some of every industrial resource, seemingly for every new technology to need one. As a country it’s been like playing civ and every tech upgrade you lucked out in a resource node popping up on your territory.
Ask those returning home from world cup visits. They'll be in the best position to compare to their home country.
I love that I got downvoted above for literally suggesting they ask someone who was recently in America for their opinion as to what America has to offer.
yeah but America 1926 didn't have a billion dollars a day being extracted from the economy by a totally useless war (that is going to start again in 60 days)
or a President extracting billions from his own government for a plane, golf, inexplicable illegal destruction and renovations to national sites
the government was also not purposely imploding academia, science and medicine
there are also now over a THOUSAND billionaires "silo-ing" their wealth, barely paying any taxes and trying to eliminate the cost of employing anybody
we cannot recover this decade, maybe not even next century, and that assumes this horror show doesn't have a "part 2"
You might be surprised to hear that wealth concentration was worse a hundred years ago than it is now. It's very easy to assume otherwise when the numbers are so much larger now across the board.
https://americanbusinesshistory.org/superwealth-a-historical...
yes almost all americans now have running water and indoor toilets
except we have more homeless than ever so they don't even have that
with taxes slashed for billionaires and safety-nets for food and healthcare being destroyed, we are actually headed back to 1926 on purpose
The definition of homeless was quite different at that time --- note that there was an entire class of people defined as hobos/migrant workers who began the year helping out with cutting lumber and harvesting maple sugar in the winter, then working south to help with the planting of truck crops (lettuce, spinach, broccoli, peas...) in the spring, pruning fruit trees and harvesting early crops in the summer, then in the fall helping with the harvests and picking cotton and so forth, then helping to plant cover crops and so forth and moving north to repeat the process.
Louis L'Amour writes on this a bit in his wonderful book:
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/828165.Education_of_a...
The people that are homeless now would have been institutionalized or dead back then.
That's an interesting point - we may be keeping people alive better now. And the rate of people experiencing homelessness is 5-10x lower now than it was during the Great Depression.
I did a quick check, and the HUD point-in-time counts show the rate of homelessness was dropping slowly from 21.5 per 10000 in 2007 (the first year of a national standard), to around 17.5 per 10000 in 2020, then rose in 2023-2024 up to 22.9, and in 2025 was back down to 21.9. During the Great Depression this rose up to 100-200 per 10,000.
Keep in mind that "more homeless than ever" (and I would prefer "more people experiencing homelessness than ever") may be technically true, but per capita we've seen a post-covid bump that's likely already back to 2007 levels. Without understanding the trends I wouldn't predict what happens next.
I've done some research to try to help you understand more - can I ask you to think about your frame and beliefs and consider changing them?
Thanks for providing some actual facts.
Feels like a bit of a dramatization.
I an a completely unabashed leftist who has been "radicalized" (if you call free school lunches "radical", which apparently it is in modern America) by seeing the rapidly accelerating wealth and income inequality since 2008. I mean it really kciked off in the 1970s but the effects post-2008 became impossible to ignore.
In the spirit of all models are wroong but some models are useful and that generational politics is overly reductive (which it is), I still see the Millenials as the new Lost Generation. The original Lost Generation were born 1883 to 1900. They came of age in the devastation of WW1 and the Spanish flu. What happened after 2008 was that all the entry-level jobs disappeared. Millenials had taken and continued to take on massive student debt and otherwise "do the right thing" yet found there were limited opportunities at the end of that pipeline. Baby boomers still had a stranglehold on academic and they both refused to quit or die (something which is still true). This is where the trope of the college educated millenial barista came from.
Obama's presidency was a massive lost opportunity to correct some of this. It directly led to Trump being elected (over Hilary "more of the same" Clinton). Trump, for all his many, many faults, talked to the rising anger in young people at the lack of opportunity, the possibility that they'd never own a house or have a good-paying job or they'd have a family. The disillusionment and anger has only grown.
So, as a leftist, the irony is that I get shit on constantly for essentially trying to preserve the current system by those people who like the current system but are contributing towards us bouldering towards war and revolution. Because those are the ultimate form of wealth redistribution [1] and become increasingly inevitable as material conditions worsen.
Even more ironic, many of those same people fetishize the 1950s where the top marginal tax rate was 91%, the CEO-to-median-wage ratio was a fraction of what it is now and the corporate tax rate was 40-50%. But then came along the likes of McKinsey who justified greed witht he patina of executives being "underpaid" [2] and then the social destruction of Nixon, Reagan and Clinton.
It took FDR in the 1930s to repair the damage of 1920s pro-business slavishness of Coolidge and Mellon. And let's not forget there was an attempted coup in 1933 [3]. But you see the same messages (as the author notes) in the 1920s of lower taxes, destroying unions and being pro-big business. Sound familiar?
[1]: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2017/01/stanford-historian...
[2]: https://observer.com/2013/08/the-godfather-of-ceo-megapay-mc...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
> talked to the rising anger in young people at the lack of opportunity, the possibility that they'd never own a house or have a good-paying job or they'd have a family. The disillusionment and anger has only grown.
This should be the absolutely only thing that Democrats talk about. Every single day, with a big graph and call in number, so people can call in to say if this was fixed for them or not. And if it's not fixed, they should outline steps on how it gets fixed that day. It's insane they aren't using this opportunity.
> This should be the absolutely only thing that Democrats talk about.
Democrats are half of the uniparty of capital interests. They only exist to prop up the illusion of a functioning democracy.
"Look guys, the election was so close! Democracy is still alive! We just need to vote harder [for the lesser of two evils] next time!"
> It's insane they aren't using this opportunity.
Instead they're taking the opportunity to be insane. But the faithful are not allowed to admit that.
Personally, I think GenX are the lost. (I'm a late GenX) Our colleages took the brunt of the global war on terror, and because we entered the workforce at the peak boomer pivot away from the pre-Internet era of business those of us that were in the corporate/government workforce were basically stuck waiting for people to die to move up. We're the people who got computers and internet in a way that neither our elders or children understand.
The millennials are the recipients of the great dumbing down. They get the inherit the wealth of their parents and grandparents, just in time for it to be inflated away to nothing.
I don’t know any millennials who are inheriting anything. Everyone’s boomer parents who inherited family wealth are either losing it to healthcare costs extracting everything at their end of life or (literally in at least one friends case) saying “you can’t take it with you” and burning the family wealth on luxuries while their kids struggle.
Maybe there’s a handful of ultra wealthy families tending the family wealth well but most of the middle class boomers don’t even have a concept of leaving something for future generations.
Why leave wealth to generations that joblessly leech off their parents for decades and then refuse to reproduce?
Fellow GenXer here and no, the millenials have it way worse. We paid a pittance for college and had to buy literally any house in the 1990s and we're fine. Now if you didn't buy a house in the 1990s, yes, you're screwed.
We have our own problems, namely that we were raised by boomers who went from Flower Power in the 1960s to voting for Reagan in the 1980s. We were the last free range generation but that wasn't freedom. It was neglect. Many of us also grew up with things like ADHD and Type 1 Autism long before anyone knew what those things were so that, too, was fun for us.
Baby boomers as a whole seem terrified of dying. So they don't retire but also they don't leave anything for their children. Tehy can't take it with them but by God they're going to spend it before they go. Or it'll just get eaten up on end-of-life care.
I can barely contain my rage at the baby boomer generation who took the fruits of prosperity from FDR in the post-war era and pissed it all away voting for Reagan while bringing people into the world then making sure to pass absolutely nothing onto them in a world they can scarcely afford.
Given all that I still say millenials got shafted way worse.