
Ten Years After the Crash, We Are Still Living in the World It Brutally Remade - pseudolus
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/08/america-10-years-after-the-financial-crisis.html
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CompelTechnic
I feel compelled to repost a comment I've posted before, so here goes:

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Thinkpieces lately have had a trend of reaching harder and harder to link the
news de jour to a higher, abstract concepts....The result feels hystrionic to
me... it is just designed to raise the excitement for people in the correct
echo chamber. By calling on increasingly abstract concepts the author can
reign in an appeal to authority and emotion that has more appeal than actual
facts and statistics.

The author, and his inward-looking media peers, are all drinking eachother's
Kool-Aid a bit too much. It's like some sort of outrage porn that keeps
getting remixed over and over again, and becoming some sort of fractal version
of itself.

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This particular article is strange in the fact even though it presents a bunch
of statistics, it doesn't use them well to advance a cohesive argument- it
mostly just goes on to state that everything sucks. It just throws spaghetti
at the wall, to see what sticks in the mind of the reader, and anything that
doesn't stick is hoped to be given a fair pass. This is the sort of divisive
thinking that does little to solve problems, because it is so engulfed in the
turbulence of pessimistic rage that it cannot correctly identify just what the
problem is, if it exists.

~~~
burlesona
> It's like some sort of outrage porn that keeps getting remixed over and over
> again, and becoming some sort of fractal version of itself.

This is such a good description of the problem. Right now it feels like people
are angry about being angry, and the mood seems to me somewhat detached from
the reality around us. By historical standards things right now are not that
bad, but a lot of people act like we’re living through the apocalypse.

My personal take is that this is the natural product of the social media /
hyper media era. It’s easy to make a lot of money making people angry
(“outrage porn”), but there’s no money in calming people down. I wish that
weren’t the case.

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ordinaryradical
This is true, but it’s also true (if you are American, at least) that we’re
living through a major upheaval in our governing institutions. So another way
of reading this outrage is that when your president is permitted to do
outrageous things daily, to collude with a foreign power to meddle in our
elections, to defend that power on the international stage, and to help his
family profit by that power... well, you may start to feel a little panicked,
outraged, or out of control.

The norms of democracy are starting to show their weaknesses. The assumed
reasonable limits have proven themselves to have never been there. And it
comes with a bizarre dissonance because locally speaking you may be doing just
fine, stock market is up, etc. etc. That atmosphere also creates a kind of
helpless anger that goes looking for targets and attention. It’s almost an
existential coping mechanism, I think.

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AnimalMuppet
> The assumed reasonable limits have proven themselves to have never been
> there.

I think that's going too far. They _were_ there. And then, over succeeding
presidents of both parties, they were a little less there. And then, with this
president, suddenly "reasonable limits" was a totally foreign concept.

But the reasonable limits _were_ there, and really did limit behavior.

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xigma
Frankly, I can barely tell the difference between pre-2008 and post-2008. It's
nothing compared to the Great Recession, just look at some archival footage of
the time.

Also, the blame is once again put on "corporations" and "wall street
gangsters" instead of the failed government policy that caused it (and
continues to cause it).

How could Millennials be some massively in debt? Price inflation of higher
education caused by government-forced loans backed by fantasy money. Literally
the same reason why the housing bubble became a bubble in the first place. And
the government gets away with it by blaming those "evil corporations" for
taking all that money that was presented on them on a platter.

How could so many people die from opiate overdoses? A government that allows
opiates for doctors to prescribe, but then bans those same doctors from
prescribing them for the resulting addicts, turning them to black-market.

It was the government that created a health insurance system that doesn't make
sense and continues to not make sense under both republican and democratic
administration.

Lastly, upward mobility is hampered by preventing the rural population to move
to cities that have become unaffordable because of zoning laws and taxes.

Blame the damned government, at least a _little bit_.

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maeln
Lobbying. Even though lobbying is not the only factor explaining why
government made such policies, it is an important factor that should not be
dismissed. And since corporations have much more resources than NGOs and such
to do lobbying, it is fair to put part of the blame on them for pushing
policies that make them more powerful.

~~~
xigma
_Everybody_ is lobbying for their interest, not just corporations.
Corporations may finance a party, but they're not casting the votes. There's
an endless number of special interest groups, large and small, corporate or
public.

If a government is so vulnerable to lobbying, that's still a government
failure, it's not the failure of those trying to defend their interest.

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dominotw
> Median household wealth collapsed. > 2007: $126k > 2016: $97k

> The number of Americans worried about the economy multiplied nearly sixfold.
> > 2007: 16 percent > 2008: 86 percent

> The market value of all publicly traded companies was cut > in half. >
> October 2007: $63 trillion > March 2009: $28.6 trillion

These numbers are all over the place first stat is comparing 2007 to 2016
while the very next stat is comparing 2007 to 2008 and the next one is
comparing 2007 to 2009.

I can't make any sense of those numbers how were those particular years
selected for comparison for a particular stat( whats so special about mar
2009) .

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neogodless
I haven't read the article, but I saw your question - I believe March 2009 was
the low point for the market index.

At least, I remember saying to myself, "Self, you should totally find a way to
come up with cash and dump it in the market right now!" Of course, I did not.
But I was right. Of course, ideas are worthless without execution...

~~~
dominotw
Yea I think article should have been called

* worst things that happened in last 10 yrs after crash*

not

* still living *

Because markets are not _still_ at mar 2009 level.

What an idiotic article.

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Ntrails
It's just doing the standard low effort scarestory stats trick. Here are some
really big numbers picked entirely for visual impact, not because relevant.

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md2be
Trump derangement syndrome

