Hardkill

That’s what I thought and that’s why I’ve been skeptical of how much individual hard work and learning from financially successful people can help most people.

Yeah, I agree that elite or exceptional success cannot scale. But I'm not asking whether most people can claw their way to the top. I'm asking whether most people can be financially comfortable and secure. Do you also believe THAT cannot scale? And if it can scale, how much does achieving it for most people depend on good economic institutions rather than individual hustle?

I have been thinking more about the argument that even in a terrible economy, people can still become financially successful if they work hard enough, educate themselves, stay disciplined, remain patient, experiment, learn from failures, and keep searching for opportunities. I agree that this can be excellent advice for an individual. What I am skeptical of is whether it scales to most people during a severe economic crisis. And I am not even talking about everyone becoming rich or becoming a millionaire. I mean something much more modest: Could most people remain financially comfortable and secure? Suppose nearly everyone during the Great Depression had done everything “right.” They worked extremely hard. They developed useful and marketable skills. They studied business and personal finance. They remained patient and disciplined. They tried different jobs and businesses. They experimented repeatedly and learned from failures. They saved whenever possible. They invested intelligently when they had money available. They constantly searched for unmet needs and economic opportunities. Would most Americans then have remained financially comfortable and secure? I am very skeptical. At the depths of the Great Depression, unemployment reached about 25% and U.S. output fell roughly 30%. The banking system was collapsing, deflation increased debt burdens, businesses and households went bankrupt, and consumer demand contracted dramatically. That damage obviously extended far beyond the unemployed. People who still had jobs could have their hours or wages cut. Businesses could lose customers. Families could lose savings when banks failed. Asset values could collapse. Credit could disappear. Someone could make responsible decisions and still be financially devastated by forces far larger than their individual choices. And we don't have to go all the way back to the Great Depression. Look at 2008. Between 2007 and 2010, median real family income fell about 7.7%, while median family net worth collapsed by 38.8%. Again, were tens of millions of Americans simply not hardworking enough? Were they all financially ignorant? Did they all lack patience, discipline, creativity, or entrepreneurial thinking? Obviously individual mistakes existed. But it seems implausible to explain a nationwide destruction of wealth on that scale primarily through individual psychology. This is where 2020 becomes especially interesting. COVID produced another massive economic shock. Millions of jobs disappeared almost immediately. And yet household financial outcomes looked surprisingly different from 2008 or the Great Depression. By the end of 2020, 75% of American adults said they were at least doing okay financially—40% said they were “doing okay” and 35% said they were actually “living comfortably.” That was essentially unchanged from the end of 2019. Why? It certainly wasn't because COVID somehow created an easier economy. The Federal Reserve specifically noted that expanded unemployment benefits and direct stimulus payments appear to have blunted the pandemic's negative financial effects for many families. Financial well-being initially fell in April 2020, then rebounded substantially by July as people returned to work and government assistance reached households. That comparison seems important. 1930s: catastrophic economic collapse + inadequate stabilization → widespread insecurity. 2008: severe financial crisis + major destruction of household wealth → years of financial strain. 2020: enormous economic shock + unusually aggressive income support and stabilization → most Americans still reported being at least financially okay by the end of the year. That doesn't prove government can make everyone financially secure. And it doesn't mean individual responsibility suddenly stopped mattering. Nearly one-quarter of adults in late 2020 still reported being financially worse off than a year earlier, and the effects of the pandemic were highly unequal. But it does suggest something important: Whether ordinary people remain financially secure during a crisis depends on more than their personal work ethic, knowledge, creativity, and discipline. The surrounding economic institutions matter too. And this brings me back to the distinction I keep coming to. There is a huge difference between: “Even during a depression or severe recession, some highly resourceful individuals can find opportunities and become financially successful.” and: “Most people could remain financially comfortable and secure during those conditions if they were sufficiently hardworking, knowledgeable, disciplined, patient, and creative.” I believe the first statement. I am skeptical of the second. Imagine everybody becomes entrepreneurial during a depression. Everybody learns sales. Everybody develops marketable skills. Everybody searches for underserved niches. Everybody becomes financially disciplined. Everybody experiments constantly. Everybody learns from failures. Everybody aggressively searches for opportunities. That would probably make the economy more adaptable and resilient. But it would not automatically restore purchasing power, repair failed banks, loosen frozen credit markets, restore collapsed investment, or create enough profitable opportunities for everyone simultaneously. At some point, the bottleneck stops being mindset. The bottleneck becomes the economic environment itself. This is also why I don't think saying, “The economy is enormous and trillions of dollars are constantly flowing through it,” completely answers the issue. Of course enormous amounts of wealth are flowing through the economy. But: Money existing somewhere in an enormous economy is not the same thing as most people having realistic access to enough of it to remain financially secure. Likewise, if someone successfully built a business during 2008, that proves something important: Success was possible. It does not prove: Most people could have done the same thing if they had simply tried hard enough. Those are two very different claims. And none of this means people should give up during bad economic times. Quite the opposite. If I were living through a depression or severe recession, I would still want to work hard, develop valuable skills, remain financially disciplined, be entrepreneurial, experiment repeatedly, learn from failure, and constantly search for opportunities. Those behaviors could dramatically improve my personal odds. But I don't think we should confuse: improving your individual odds with making systemic economic constraints disappear. And maybe 2020 illustrates this especially well. Individual resilience mattered. But institutional resilience mattered too. The strongest formula seems to be neither: “The system determines everything.” nor: “Your personal agency determines everything.” It seems much closer to: Personal agency determines how effectively you respond to the opportunities and constraints in front of you. Economic institutions determine, in significant part, what those opportunities and constraints actually are. So yes: Personal agency can make you much more resilient in a terrible economy. It can sometimes even make you wealthy during a terrible economy. But I remain skeptical that personal agency by itself can keep most people financially comfortable and secure during a genuinely severe economic collapse. At some point, individual resilience needs a functioning economic system to plug into. I'm curious where people here draw that line.

Porn was illegal until around the late 1960s and early 1970s and that failed largely because: 1. Too many Americans around that time got fed up with being sexually repressed by societal norms and the government. 2. Adults, especially men still searched for porn films, sex shows, or smut even when that was all illegal before the late 1960s and early 1970s, because of how great the desire for sex and different kinds of sexual activity has always been a part of human nature. Men, especially those who are young adults or middle-aged, crave for porn and sexual variety generally more so than women because of differences in levels of androgens such as testosterone between men and women.

European culture hasn’t been able to compete as well as the American culture when it comes to technology and innovation because how much smaller in national economic scale countries like the UK, Norway, France, Germany, Italy, and other individual EU countries are. Smaller national population and economy → smaller domestic market, capital pool, procurement capacity, and specialized ecosystem → greater difficulty supporting the entire innovation-and-scaling system independently. It’s also because of securities laws, pension system, federal research spending, immigration, universities, bankruptcy rules, and long history of venture finance in the US. That being said, the EU has for a very long time been trying to unify all of the countries in the union together so that Europe as a whole can one day compete with US and China at the continental scale. However, the United States and China each possess continental scale within a single national system, whereas Europe’s comparable scale is divided among separate countries. Institutional fragmentation then prevents Europe from using its collective size as effectively as the United States and China use theirs.

and why do you think that is?

I know we're not ready for something like Democratic Socialism and that we won't be until at least several decades or several centuries from now. We still need to get to Social Democracy as soon as possible to truly have the best form of free and fair capitalism. So, if most people are not woke enough to understand the structural problems of capitalism, then does that mean that most people don't know that American Capitalism or Capitalism in the West since the late 1970s/early 1980s has been gutting the middle class more and more to concentrate wealth at the top and cause the extreme corporate power which have corrupted our government?

I know that. Though if most people in the country cared enough about this problem then they or we would need to take collective action by forming the largest grassroots labor movement since the mid 1900s. People these days have lost all sense of sacrifice and the will to fight as warriors in solidarity.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DXzyKpjSqMk/?stkn=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==

Poverty was worse during the late 1900s and early 2000s.

Yeah, but those issues themselves don’t explain why people felt more optimistic about the country during the late 1900s and the aughts than during the 2010s and 2020s

Also, most Americans don’t trust or believe in the government, especially since the election of Reagan in 1980. They trust the private sector and business more and praise billionaires and corporate business leaders for being the “smartest and hardest working people in the world” who deserve to enjoy what they’ve earned and they know what is best for the economy and for the country. That’s part of what makes America so great, right? So, why do people care that the government is being corrupted by billionaires and corporations? I mean I wish most people in the country cared enough about this extreme economic inequality and extreme corporate power, but now I am not sure that they do.

Yeah, I get that. However, that’s always been part of the modern American culture or unchecked capitalism, and like you said before, people in this country have been so addicted to it that they believe that American capitalism is like God’s greatest gift to the country and to the rest of the world. Most Americans believe that’s part of the beauty of American exceptionalism. So, why aren’t most Americans happy with all of that and still believe in the American dream being possible like they were or did during the presidencies of Reagan, Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, and Obama? Also, what about people like Obama saying “Hope and Change”, “Yes, we can!”, “we’ll get through this”, or people like Biden and Bernie Sanders saying “I’ve never been more optimistic in my life about the future” and that “the youngest generations of our country today, who are the future of our country, are the least racist and the most progressive our country has ever had”. I’ll admit that I said before on here that I thought that maybe the 1950s, 1960s, 1980s, or 1990s were the “good old days.” Now, I’ve been reconsidering that. After learning so much more about what we have had since the mid 2010s compared to what we had anytime before that, I don’t think I would want to live in the 1950s, 1960s, 1980s, or 1990s. I definitely wouldn’t want to live in the aughts either. As you’ve mentioned before, the 2010s and 2020s have had so many positive things happen that didn’t happen during the mid to late 1900s or the aughts.

I’ve been wondering why Americans have been so persistently pessimistic about the country over roughly the past decade, especially compared with more optimistic periods in the mid-to-late 1980s, the 1990s, and parts of the 2000s before the 2008 financial crisis. To be clear, I’m not arguing that everything is fine today or that Americans have nothing legitimate to worry about. I still have very strong concerns about Trump and the Republican Party, while also remaining very disappointed with much of the Democratic establishment. I also really dislike what I would call the “slopulism” coming from some progressive populists and Leftists—the tendency to reduce extremely complicated economic and political problems to simplistic narratives in which everything is completely rigged, corrupt, collapsing, or controlled by a handful of elites. I’m still seriously worried about American democracy and civil liberties, extreme economic inequality, concentrated wealth and political influence, extreme partisan polarization, and the gridlock that has made governing the country much harder. So my argument isn’t that America has no serious problems. What I’m wondering is why those problems have seemingly prevented Americans from recovering the kind of national optimism that periodically existed during earlier decades, even while many other aspects of American life have improved. Those earlier decades certainly weren’t paradise. The 1980s had high crime, AIDS, the Cold War, and the aftermath of stagflation. The 1990s had recessions, racial unrest, political scandals, etc. The 2000s had 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, and growing polarization. Yet Americans still seemed capable of bouncing back into periods of fairly broad optimism. That became much harder after the Great Recession. And what makes this especially strange to me is that it can’t simply be explained by Americans becoming unable to survive economically. Consider what happened after 2008. The country went through the worst financial crisis and recession since the Great Depression. But the Obama years also produced a substantial recovery and reform period. The Recovery Act supported an economy that was hemorrhaging jobs. Dodd-Frank substantially changed financial regulation and created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The Affordable Care Act produced a major expansion of health-insurance coverage. Obama also signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act and the Fair Sentencing Act, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” was repealed, same-sex marriage became legal nationwide during his presidency, and the country elected its first African-American president. In 2011, American forces also finally killed Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, unemployment eventually fell from about 10% following the financial crisis to below 5% by the end of Obama’s presidency. Crime continued its long-term decline, while smartphones, medicine, entertainment, transportation safety, and access to information improved dramatically. So by the later Obama years, you could plausibly tell a relatively optimistic story: “We suffered the worst financial collapse since the Depression, avoided another Great Depression, recovered economically, strengthened financial regulation, expanded healthcare, brought unemployment back down, killed bin Laden, expanded civil rights, and continued advancing technologically.” Yet that never became anything resembling the sustained national optimism of the late 1980s or late 1990s. The economic expansion then continued through most of Trump’s first term. By 2017–2019, unemployment was extremely low, inflation remained low, household incomes were rising, and roughly three-quarters of American adults reported that they were doing okay financially or living comfortably. Crime was far below its early-1990s peak, while technology, medicine, entertainment, transportation safety, access to information, healthcare coverage, LGBT rights, and many other aspects of American life were much more advanced than several decades earlier. Leo himself has made this broader point. He has said that the world is “more peaceful and civilized than ever” and has pointed to declining crime, less pollution and smog, safer vehicles, incredible and inexpensive technology, greater social tolerance, and unprecedented access to knowledge. Then came the 2020s. COVID was obviously catastrophic, and the inflation shock imposed real costs on households. But the United States also recovered remarkably quickly from the pandemic recession. Employment rebounded rapidly, unemployment returned to very low levels, and inflation eventually fell dramatically without the severe recession that many economists feared. And I also think it is important not to understate how unusually ambitious Biden’s domestic-policy agenda was relative to recent Democratic administrations. The American Rescue Plan included direct household relief, expanded unemployment assistance, aid to state and local governments, and a temporary expansion of the Child Tax Credit. Census found that the Supplemental Poverty Measure child-poverty rate fell from 9.7% in 2020 to 5.2% in 2021, its lowest level on record at the time; the expanded Child Tax Credit alone lifted about 2.9 million children above the poverty line. The law also created a special financial-assistance program for severely underfunded multiemployer pension plans, protecting pension benefits for large numbers of union workers and retirees. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law committed major federal investment to roads, bridges, public transit, water systems, broadband, the electric grid, ports, and other infrastructure, while incorporating labor and domestic-manufacturing provisions. The CHIPS and Science Act put roughly $50 billion through the Commerce Department toward rebuilding domestic semiconductor manufacturing and research capacity, including $39 billion in manufacturing incentives and $11 billion for research and development. The Inflation Reduction Act represented another major departure from recent policy. It created large long-term incentives for clean energy and domestic manufacturing, including provisions encouraging prevailing wages and apprenticeships. It also changed Medicare prescription-drug policy by allowing negotiation of certain drug prices, capping covered insulin at $35 per month for Medicare beneficiaries, imposing a $2,000 annual Part D out-of-pocket cap beginning in 2025, and requiring rebates when certain drug prices rise faster than inflation. His administration also adopted a much more explicitly labor-oriented posture than had been typical of recent Democratic administrations. Biden created a White House task force specifically aimed at encouraging worker organizing and collective bargaining, and his appointees to the NLRB adopted rules and decisions more favorable to union organizing, including the 2023 Cemex framework. The administration also substantially expanded access to Public Service Loan Forgiveness; by October 2024, the Education Department said more than one million public-service workers had received forgiveness through the program, compared with about 7,000 before the administration took office. So Biden’s domestic agenda combined things that had often been treated separately in recent decades: stronger labor policy + industrial policy + climate investment + infrastructure + expanded healthcare subsidies + prescription-drug reform + redistribution toward families + manufacturing policy + pension protection. Whether someone agrees with all of those policies is a different question. My point is that this was not an administration doing nothing while the country stagnated. The United States also finally ended its 20-year military involvement in Afghanistan, although the withdrawal itself was chaotic and controversial. And yet Americans remained deeply pessimistic about the country and distrustful of its institutions. So what explains this disconnect? Maybe economic inequality is much more important than raw living standards. Even if most people are materially better off than several decades ago, perhaps extreme inequality makes people feel that economic progress is unfairly distributed and gives wealthy individuals and corporations excessive political influence. Maybe it’s political polarization and gridlock. The two sides have become so hostile to one another that perhaps America can no longer have a broadly shared feeling that “the country is doing well.” Whichever party governs, tens of millions of Americans on the other side believe the country is moving in a disastrous direction. Maybe the modern media environment is a huge part of it. We now have 24/7 access to every war, crime, scandal, inequality statistic, political outrage, and cultural conflict happening anywhere. Social-media algorithms also reward anger, fear, and outrage in ways that simply did not exist during the 1980s or 1990s. There’s also accumulated institutional distrust from Iraq, Afghanistan, the financial crisis, congressional gridlock, money in politics, government shutdowns, the disputes surrounding the 2020 election and January 6, COVID politics, etc. But even that raises another question. America went through the Great Depression and WWII, which were vastly more catastrophic than Iraq or the Great Recession, yet institutional trust eventually became extremely high afterward. Maybe the difference was that Americans eventually developed a clear shared narrative: “We survived the Depression, defeated fascism, came home victorious, built a booming economy, expanded the middle class, and made life better.” Something similar could theoretically have developed after 2008: “We survived the financial collapse, avoided another depression, reformed Wall Street, expanded healthcare, brought unemployment back down, killed bin Laden, expanded civil rights, and continued advancing technologically.” And another version could theoretically have developed after COVID: “We survived a once-in-a-century pandemic, rapidly developed vaccines, recovered millions of jobs, brought inflation back down without mass unemployment, finally left Afghanistan, rebuilt infrastructure, invested in domestic manufacturing and clean energy, expanded labor protections, and continued advancing technologically and medically.” But neither became a broadly shared national narrative. Today, even when something goes relatively well, Americans often can’t agree that it was a success. One side sees the ACA as major progress; another sees government overreach. One side sees tighter financial regulation after 2008 as necessary reform; another sees excessive regulation. One side sees COVID vaccines as a triumph of science; another focuses on mandates and government restrictions. One side sees industrial and climate investment as rebuilding American productive capacity; another sees excessive federal spending and intervention. One side sees the post-COVID economy as an impressive recovery and soft landing; another focuses on inflation and permanently higher prices. One side sees leaving Afghanistan as finally ending a failed 20-year war; another sees the withdrawal as humiliating. So maybe the problem isn’t simply that America has stopped progressing. Maybe progress no longer translates into shared national optimism. And that is what I find interesting. It seems possible to recognize enormous material, technological, medical, and social progress while also taking seriously concerns about democracy, civil liberties, extreme inequality, concentrated political power, polarization, gridlock, and failures of both major parties. Those ideas don’t necessarily contradict each other. So why do you think Americans have been so much less optimistic about the country over the past decade than during the more optimistic periods of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s? Is it mainly inequality and concentrated economic power? Political polarization? Gridlock? Social media? Declining social cohesion? Housing affordability? Cultural change? Loss of trust in institutions? Or something deeper psychologically? And if many aspects of American life really have improved, what would actually need to change for Americans to feel broadly optimistic about the country again?

Jews have always been persecuted for centuries by everyone else who aren't them.