
May reason trump the Trump in all of us - ikeboy
http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2931
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blackflame7000
There is no reasonable choice in this election and the ends don't justify the
means. If even 5% of what either of them are are accused of doing is true,
it's horrifying. However, the worst part about this election season has by far
been the incessant need for bloggers to write articles claiming the moral and
intellectual high ground while talking down towards the other side, completely
oblivious to the hypocrisy in the words they write.

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relics443
I was about to scoff at the notion of reading more drivel (regarding the
subject, not the content), but I'm happy I didn't. This was well written.

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smegel
I really hope Trump wins. It will be the biggest smackdown of screaming SJW
types (not to mention Buzzfeed) and whiny black-lives-matter-but-only-when-
the-killer-is-a-white-police-officer agitators for years.

~~~
bzzat
Trump will lose. Badly.

And it will be precisely because of bigotry, really terrible ideas, irrational
anger, and outright ignorance.

Exactly like those expressed in your comment.

~~~
candiodari
The financial press is full of these statements. They do, however, often
mention just how sure they were about the Brexit vote.

Essentially, Trump will win if he can put "normal America" against the 10%.
There is a (very) large part of America that is very very much not happy with
how things are going. If Trump can be the anti-establishment candidate I am
convinced he will win. There's a number of things that could easily happen,
for instance, if the establishment were to appear to screw up in the next 3
weeks (a war, a terror attack, a stock market crash, a large bankruptcy, a
huge layoff, ...*) Trump would be pretty much assured victory. That seems to
be the strategy. Of course, that's never going to get him anywhere on Hacker
News.

But that doesn't even appear necessary:

[https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N)

US households have slowly lost living standards since about 2000. The
difference in experience for most households since 2000 would be small, until
the 2008 crisis happened. Then it was extremely noticable and it still hasn't
recovered. This means that there is in fact a basis for a large part of
America to be unhappy about how the country's going.

2 comments about this graph:

1) It's an average. Because of outliers at the top, the "normal" experience is
really below it, even more so since 2008 because for "the 1%", ie. the top,
there was little downward slope, and in fact a constant upward slope since
about 2003-2004. This came at the expense of the large majority of the US.

2) it's using PCE deflator inflation statistics, not CPI, which is what is
felt by ordinary Americans. PCE deflator is often criticized for being an
underestimate of real inflation, so there is an argument you should take out
about 0.2% year-on-year starting in 2000. That makes the graph much worse than
it already is.

I'm not counting Trump out.

