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Sure I'd prefer a world where money is spread out more evenly. But if Tesla sold say 500 million cars, and Musk pocketed $2,000 each; while yes, I object to any one person having a trillion dollars, if he sold 500 million cars because they really were the best cars available, there was good competition, no monopoly violations, he was just the best, I'd think ok, like no one needs that much money sure, but at least the economy seems to make basic sense. People make money because they create things of value.
But when Tesla's value is totally disconnected from the actual value the products provide, and instead is just based on Musks's ability to hype the stock. It's not great. And we are getting to this place where the wealth is so concentrated in the magnificent seven it's even making trad right-leaning capitalists get concerned. So no, I don't think his pay package should be aligned towards things that are bad for the national, if not global economy.
I tend to think that long-term trends tends to be a better explanatory factor. There was this interview with this divorce lawyer that really helped shape my view on where we were as a society which basically said we’re in a place with too much post-modernism. The idea of how we imagine the world is just too flexible, there’s too much “freedom” and we’re on a trend back towards a more concrete view of the world. I tend to think this is correct, and that if there is backlash to Trump, or the public and popular notion of conservatism, we’re still, broadly speaking influenced by a group of folks who are ready for a more concrete or “conservative” popular culture. Gender roles, Right and wrong.
But I also think the trend sort of definitionally is already moving back in the other direction, it will just take ~ 10 years to play out as those in their formative years grow into a more liberal mindset(it’s probably just sort of barely impacting a few months of the psyche of the youngest pre-teens now and as that cohort ages they’ll influence the culture back in the other direction)
I tend to think that long-term trends tends to be a better explanatory factor. There was this interview with this divorce lawyer that really helped shape my view on where we were as a society which basically said we’re in a place with too much post-modernism. The idea of how we imagine the world is just too flexible, there’s too much “freedom” and we’re on a trend back towards a more concrete view of the world. I tend to think this is correct, and that if there is backlash to Trump, or the public and popular notion of conservatism, we’re still, broadly speaking influenced by a group of folks who are ready for a more concrete or “conservative” popular culture. Gender roles, Right and wrong.
But I also think the trend sort of definitionally is already moving back in the other direction, it will just take ~ 10 years to play out as those in their formative years grow into a more liberal mindset(it’s probably just sort of barely impacting a few months of the psyche of the youngest pre-teens now and as that cohort ages they’ll influence the culture back in the other direction)
I think this gets to a lot of people’s criticism of Democrats as being perceived as not having a message.
A lot of things suck right now. Social media definitely give us the ability to see that. Using your personal ideology to link correlations is not the same thing as finding causation.
There will be undoubtedly be some damaging aspects of social media, simply because it is large and complex. It would be highly unlikely that all those factors always aligned in the direction of good.
All too often a collection of cherry picked studies are presented in books targeting the worried public. It can build a public opinion that is at odds with the data. Some people write books just to express their ideas. Others like Jonathan Haidt seem to think that putting their efforts into convincing as many people as possible of their ideology is preferable to putting effort into demonstrating that their ideas are true. There is this growing notion that perception is reality, convince enough people and it is true.
I am prepared to accept aspects of social media are bad. Clearly identify why and how and perhaps we can make progress addressing each thing. Declaring it's all bad acts as a deterrent to removing faults. I become very sceptical when many disparate threads of the same thing seem to coincidentally turn out to be bad. That suggests either there is an underlying reason that has been left unstated and unproven or the information I have been presented with is selective.
But I do keep thinking about the fact that the move to the right among young men, will probably pretty quickly reverse itself, if they keep going after media/video games/porn, etc.