>Some are rooted, embedded in their communities; and some are trapped — because housing is unaffordable where the better paying jobs are. And the jobs that are high paying are not the jobs they built their lives on.
There's some texture and nuance to this statement. I remember on NPR, they interviewed a lady whom mentioned similar sentiments; her and her husband had built a family, worked in the blue-collar industry (precision machining) for decades, and now were losing their jobs. She also mentioned that they had been living in a small town for a long, long time.
That last part bothers me a lot. It seems a lot of people just don't want to move. Anecdotally I've moved nearly 6 times in the last 8 years. My parents have done the same.
People are stuck on this idea of living and dying in the same city once they buy a home or have children. That just isn't the case anymore.
Mobility and a willingness to learn new skills seems to prevail. It's what other generations have done, millions of immigrants (my parents included).
It's really not easy to uproot and move from an economically depressed area to an active metropolis. I've done it (Athens, GA to San Francisco in late 2012) and it was incredibly expensive and involved a large amount of personal credit use, cash assistance from family, and time. It was a huge stretch at the time for me to move across the country and break into a new industry, and I did it as a single man, willing and able to sleep on couches and occasionally a cheap hotel room (which left me going to the next job interview itching with flea bites). I spent a lot of days scrambling to figure out where I was sleeping that night while I navigated the terribly tight housing market in San Francisco. I would have never been able to do that with any sort of family.
If you are coming from a town where $28,000 is a really good salary for a job and your rent (as a single person with roommates) might be $250-$300 a month, how on earth do you save up enough to get two months rent in SF or even Oakland? Especially considering how little savings most families have in America, and that's when you haven't been laid off.
When you have certain highly fungible skills moving around is relatively easy. Now that I'm a programmer I can theoretically get a job in pretty much any American city I choose, and probably negotiate a starting/moving bonus so I'm not out-of-pocket for any costs associated with moving. That's true for all of my former coworkers and a lot of my friends out here in California, so I think it's easy to forget how abnormal that is.
What I don't understand is why people don't use the time they have in the low cost-of-living area to develop the skills (via the Internet) that would make them attractive to employers in big cities? That was my approach - I lived at home with my parents after graduation, basically did nothing but program (both for work and after work), and after 3 years Google came knocking and paid for my move out to Silicon Valley. This is fairly common among tech companies, or even any sort of wealthy corporation - if they want someone remote and the person is willing to relocate, they'll pay for the move.
I have several friends here with similar stories - they're from even more economically depressed areas (Alabama, Tennessee, Indiana, Cleveland, etc.), but spent their free time coding, and then Google came calling.
Honest question here - what's going through peoples' heads when they decide that reading Breitbart or watching TV is a better use of their time than developing the skills that will make them desirable to those evil corporations that are making all the money?
I believe you have a survivor's bias here – I have kind of the same track, I developed my initial skills while living with parents, being single and without having too much social interactions, so I was able to dedicate incredible amount of time to all this stuff.
But this is not always the case. Very often when you realize that you need to change something, you already work, and you have some obligations, so you have to keep up your work no matter what, and you might have not that much of energy in the evenings. Also, relationships can take a lot of energy from you as well, or you might just (surprise!) have another hobby, and you don't want to sacrifice it.
So, that's all can be broken as "not enough motivated", but seriously, does everybody want to change their life to become a top programmer?
And this is even without mentioning that not everybody can develop skills (and create good-enough self branding to present it) to be able to be hired by Google, or other big corps, which will pay for your relocation.
The last point I want to say that it is very hard to develop yourself without understanding how -- a lot of people don't read HN, they think that people working in Google, FB, etc are some semigods, and people around them seem to agree about that -- it is like another bubble, where nobody knows how to actually get into this SV one.
You may be right - I think about what I'd need to do to switch careers now, at 36, and it's a lot harder than when I was 19. Luckily I have a bit of a cushion, which was built up over those years as a computer programmer, so I wouldn't go homeless or anything while retraining. Many other people are not so lucky.
I wonder what sort of education would be necessary to bring that opportunity to everyone, though. I was lucky first of all in that my high school really stressed learning to think for yourself and make your own choices, and second that I got an education in basic economics (supply & demand, compound interest, savings, and prices) from my dad at an early age. Most people don't get that. Maybe personal finance and a basic introduction to how the economy functions should be a required course in public education, though it's probably not in the interests of the people who set the curriculum to have a population that can think for themselves and look out for their own interests.
Let's say everybody got the necessary education to follow your path. Can Silicon Valley absorb the 27 million unemployed or underemployed workers in the US?
I think this idea (not just you, it's been expressed by many on this thread) that it must be Silicon Valley or Google specifically that absorbs the 27 million unemployed or underemployed workers shows a remarkable lack of imagination.
What's likely to happen isn't that Google hires 27 million people. It's that Google hires 10,000 people, who learn the details of the new methods of production required in the information age. Some of those will quit (even though Google doesn't want them to) and found new businesses. Some of them will even leave Silicon Valley and go back to their hometowns or other cheaper areas, and bring the knowledge & culture back with them. They'll then hire other people, who will learn the skills & culture needed to thrive in the information age, and so on, until it's disseminated widely throughout society.
Instead of everyone moving to California, California will move to everyone.
My bewilderment is mostly at this avoidance of economic rationality. To me, the market is sending a very clear signal that certain ways of doing things - those that involve computers, and replacing human labor with them - are more efficient than the old ways of doing things, and that's why people who adopt them make lots of money. The logical thing to do is to adopt them too. Lots of people are not doing that, and assume that there must be something mystical or corrupt about how Silicon Valley makes its money.
I get your bewilderment, I'm just wondering if it's not a red herring in a discussion over the problems of the overall US society. I'm not convinced that even if the market for programmers (even accounting for more local companies and such) was flooded until the average wage dropped 50%, that it would make a significant dent in that number, which is likely to grow.
It doesn't really need to. That tremendous increase in supply would push wages to minimum wage. When devs are making minimum wage, they won't be in the bubble anymore.
If any industry would like to absorb the 27 million underemployed or unemployed, then they could if they were willing to invest in training them... versus offloading to upstream providers like schools. Of course, you could instate a hybrid approach between company training and traditional schooling as well. And it'd be a smart idea!
My question has always been: why aren't companies doing this?
We're talking multi-year (1-3 years) investment in training. Why not?
Seems crazy, but it's not so crazy if companies would:
1. Provide clear training milestones of accomplishment (tied to compensation advancement)
2. Support trainee with necessary personnel and materials
3. Backload compensation
Think about it, the company starts you out at say $8/hr. Then for each progressive level you ratchet up to $10, $12, $15, $18, $22, $26, etc. This ratcheting can happen as quickly as the trainee progresses -- no set time limits.
The beauty is that this provides ample motivation; it's easy for a candidate to see how they can achieve success. It also reduces the company's risk, should either side determine the relationship isn't a good fit; the company will have minimized their financial outlay.
I understand that most startups can't do this (unless it's an explicit part of their plan), but I don't understand why larger cash-rich corporations don't do this. It seems like there's massive untapped potential out there.
Don't we believe Google would be able to take a sufficiently motivated individual and turn them into a world-class engineer after 3 years, at the most, of focused training? I think the odds in favor are far greater than 50-50. I mean, who would turn down a job at Google starting at $8/hr with the chance to rocket up to $50/hr (ignoring wage depression as supply increases).
So why hasn't Google tested this? How much do they spend on trying to find the "best" instead of creating them... that's a question I wish I had the answer to.
Basic Civics, Finance & Economy should definitely be required courses in HS. When I talk to older people they generally tell me they had these classes, and are surprised they're no longer commonly taught. It's almost as if, by design?
IMO a lot of people were misled by marketing i.e "get a college degree, everything will be fine". The advance of technology (amongst other things) has majorly disrupted that model. I'm not an economist but the rest of the world has gotten more competitive as well, beyond just manufacturing. The U.S public K-12 education system is a major long-term liability IMO.
To your point about teaching yourself skills and getting hired - good on you that you did this but it's extremely difficult - the average person couldn't do this. That's even assuming that they saw out of their bubble and became aware that this was an option, which isn't as obvious as it might seem.
Also, not everyone has the ability nor desire to be a programmer - which is one of the few jobs I observed where if you have the skills, you have A LOT of leverage.
"That was my approach - I lived at home with my parents after graduation"
There's your answer: not everyone can, or wants, to do that. People have families, kids, second jobs already (to pay the bills they need to pay right now, or else bad consequences), maybe don't get on with their parents that well, or have absent parents, and are generally time poor.
Google doesn't come calling for everyone: not everyone has the aptitude, not everyone is smart enough no matter how hard they work. That might suck, but it's unfortunately true.
Or at least so I'd thought: the fact that you were apparently smart enough to get a job at Google yet still managed to overlook these fundamentals may have sown a few seeds of doubt in my mind.
Working on skills when young, or in off hours after a job, is a way to get better and land a job outside of whatever you're currently doing. Not saying it's easy by any means, though - and in some cases is quite near impossible if you must work two jobs just to keep the lights on.
I hope remote working spreads the well-paying jobs around more, so people in low-opportunity places no longer are limited to those few opportunities. They can bring in money from other places to their local community and help economic activity, even f it's simply having enough money to eat out more, go to the community theater, etc.
A lot of survivor bias among you and your friend group I would think. I did code in all my free time back in Georgia but I had no CS degree and I had never held a programming job. There were a lot of things that I didn't know I didn't know, as I soon learned when I showed up in SF.
I have a lot of friends and contacts back in the Atlanta area that are doing just what you described . . . and they will continue doing just what you described . . . and it will not lead to a job at Google or any West Coast tech company. Reading HN and messing around with your GitHub is one thing, but there are a ton of people who are talented but have no idea what employers out here are actually looking for, or how to focus on those skills or showcase them if they already have them. That's just within programmers, which is one of the best markets right now. If you are a skilled lathe operator what are you going to do, learn to code?
I'd like to think everyone could learn to code because it would mean I wouldn't have to consider the economic sorting going on, that I benefit from, and how a great many people are stuck on the other side of it. If everyone could learn how to code I not only can pat myself on the back for doing so and bettering my life, but I can also avoid having to empathize so much with people who never will and are in worsening economic straits because of it.
What other skills can you develop via the internet that make you appealing to employers in big cities?
> What other skills can you develop via the internet that make you appealing to employers in big cities?
Sales, digital marketing, community management, UX, and data science are some examples. Known "influencers" in online forums, for example, often get hired for digital marketing, because they have real-world on-the-ground experience that big corporations that lack (for an infamous example, see Saydrah on Reddit). If you can get a video to go viral on YouTube, you're often qualified for many marketing jobs; I had an English-major friend get a job at a startup (albeit a terrible one) for a rant he made on YouTube that went viral. Independent researchers who can come up with an interesting & rigorous blog post based on publicly-available data often get data science job offers. Redesign a major product and convince a significant number of people that your version is better (this is non-trivial) and oftentimes you'll get a job as a UX designer or PM for that product.
If you are a skilled lathe operator, but the only jobs near where you want to / need to live are coding jobs... yes, learn to program.
Just like if you were a blacksmith but nobody was riding horses much anymore, it's time to learn a new craft. It's not easy, but it's necessary.
Having programs to help with that is something that, I think, government can help out with some, especially if government policies are moving the jobs away from lathe operators/blacksmithers.
A fundamental understanding that not everyone can get positions at those companies because those companies will always take the top 30% (or whatever) of people with skills they desire.
If everyone decides to take your approach companies will simply become more selective, not employ more people than they need too, no matter how good they are.
Not just the top X%, but the top X% living within commuting distance.
There may be some interest in relocating specific highly desirable individuals, but they will already be industry insiders.
Industry outsiders will not get relocation benefits.
The problem is that jobs have been offshored to increase profits.
You really have to think about this to understand it. The Harvard Business Economy has made it impossible for most people with average skills and abilities to find work that pays a living wage that makes essentials - not luxuries, but essentials like housing, food, and transport - reliably affordable.
Developers have top X% skills and see a very skewed economy where their services are relatively in demand.
Most people see a very different economy, which has left them behind with no prospects and no safety net.
> There may be some interest in relocating specific highly desirable individuals, but they will already be industry insiders.
That is not in any way my experience. For most companies willing to do relocation (including almost any good tech company), the interview bar is the same regardless of your current location. If they decide to hire you, they'll pay for your relation—especially since it's a blip compared to your total comp as a developer.
That has been my experience too. There's a discontinuity along national borders, since green cards are a huge pain the in the regulatory ass, but when I've been interviewing for major tech companies nobody has mentioned within-US relocation expenses. They're too small to bother with, a few thousand bucks at most. Basically peanuts.
(Full disclosure: I went to college in a place so boring that you had to go by the cows and the horses to get to class. I got hired to an unrealistically amazing job via Skype. There was no in-between. It was a big surprise.)
> I don't understand is why people don't use the time they have in the low cost-of-living area to develop the skills (via the Internet)
I have thought about this question for a long time and I have observed people for a long time and I can sum it up with this phrase "You can't teach an old dog new tricks."
I have heard so many people (with or without jobs) that they cannot learn new skills now and then I shout in my mind that if you are not willing to learn new skills why should an employer hire you, of course I cannot say that to their face because I have to be polite.
That assumes an ordered ranking of people and of employers, a premise I reject.
Google is one of several thousand employers that are both hiring and pay reasonably well. Most of the other ones will also fly you out and pay for relocation if they want you. At the same time I was interviewing with Google, there was even a 3-person startup that was willing to fly me out to SF to interview, except that I didn't really care about their business. If you don't get into Google, there's still Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Stripe, AirBnB, Square, Twitter, Netflix, Tesla, Lyft, Dropbox, Cisco, Intel, Juniper, NVidia, EBay, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Ericsson, JP Morgan Chase, and many other companies. Most of those are perfectly acceptable employers; they may not have the prestige of Google, but you can make a good living and possibly even end up wealthier than at Google.
I don't think the parent assumes an "ordered ranking of people and of employers" as much as it assumes a limited supply of open positions that meet the criteria you're giving (i.e., employers that will pay to fly you out for interviews and pay your relocation expenses if they hire you). The Bureau of Labor Statistics gives June 2017 numbers for employment in the "Information" category as 76,300 in the San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara area and 102,400 in the San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward area (and another ~4000 if you throw in Napa, Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz). Even if we assume that all of those positions meet your criteria, and assume that there's a huge number of unfilled positions--say, 25% more than the filled ones--we're at around 250,000 total. And in practice, the first assumption there is, well, suspect. (There are technical writers, helpdesk support people, and entry level programmers at companies that won't pay relocation at that level.)
Bottom line: only a small fraction of people can get jobs in the tech industry, because even at its tremendous growth rate it's only creating enough jobs for a small fraction of the population. Increasing the pool of qualified applicants doesn't change that, it just makes the competition for the existing jobs harder.
> Google is one of several thousand employers that are both hiring and pay reasonably well.
I lived in Dallas for almost fifteen years. The vast majority of those companies ignored me even when I applied. Many of those same companies are now starting to beat my door down because I changed my location to New York. This industry seems to have a serious problem with geographic myopia.
Just from your list, Facebook ignored me until I moved to New York, Intel ignored me, nVidia ignored me, IBM ignored me, Microsoft basically ignored me. The only companies that approached me or responded to my applications were Google and Amazon, and only Amazon has been persistent.
Same here despite listing that I was willing to relocate on my own dime. Then I relocated took a job at Apple and every big name wanted to interview me. Got job offers at two other big tech names while I was in CA. until I worked in the valley I apparently wasn't smart enough despite 20 plus years experience outside CA.
there is a bias. it is real and speaks badly of the valley.
Did you indicate a willingness to relocate in your application? I was in Boston when I applied to Google etc, but had on my website, my resume, and my cover letter (when applicable) "Looking to move to Silicon Valley."
I mean I work at Google now, but when I was applying to move out west, my experience almost exactly mirrored GP's. Only Amazon responded to my resume. There is an awful lot of luck involved at landing a high paying job still.
I don't know where those downvotes are coming from: you're very much on the money, here.
There is a major set of blinders techies in the big centers have with respect to how good the market is...anywhere else. It might be easy to walk across the street and land another $120k/year (low for SF, but still respectable enough especially for a single person) job in one of these markets and be doing something a bit more interesting than simple CRUD, but not elsewhere.
The fact is most technology jobs outside these hotspots pay poorly (usually not more than a small premium over other professions in the area) and are just not common anyway. They also are much closer to "grunt worker on the line" than "build your resume by being able to work with lots of technologies". A typical software developer job isn't at a software company in these places. It's in the IT Department as a low-class cost-center line item, working on basic CRUD with little or no say in the infrastructure or even product development, or else a fixed specification project in which you're more or less tinkering around the edges of a pre-existing system.
Not true. You can probably get a job most anyplace that actually has employers who need programmers, but you'll find starting bonus and moving expenses are limited to major tech areas and employers. Where I live there's a university that employs a lot of tech folks, and several private tech companies, but nobody pays for relocation, and salaries are $50K - $100K or maybe a little more at the very top end.
A good real-estate agent makes way more money than a programmer in many areas of the US.
Not to mention a good accountant, good lawyer, decent optometrist, decent dentist, decent doctor.
Not only do lots of those jobs pay better than tech jobs in most places you can also live more easily in cheap, nice places where a nice house can be had for less than 300K.
And their jobs are much, much harder to offshore.
It's interesting how there is this great push to get people to code, pushed by politicians who are almost all lawyers.
You don't see a push for more lawyers or doctors to drop costs. They don't import H1Bs. Try getting a medical or legal licence from another country.
Oh I agree, I couldn't get anywhere near the salary, but if I wanted to find a programming job back home in Athens I could swing it. I would probably have to learn COBOL though, no joke.
And I'm in Santa Monica now, and my salary has been $0 for the last several months! Will finally be able to run payroll for myself next month though so that's exciting.
>That last part bothers me a lot. It seems a lot of people just don't want to move. Anecdotally I've moved nearly 6 times in the last 8 years. My parents have done the same.
How do we build any kind of community with so little permanence? If we can't bond with our neighbors, we become these empty, atomized husks floating from one economic opportunity to another.
Put another way, how can a village raise a child if there's no village, no permanent-ness, and eventually none of the social accountability that communities enforce?
Non-centralized churches are interesting. They are institutions that generally rely on community funding. They have the potential to easily last beyond any one person's lifespan, hopefully many generations. They are places where people meet not only for religious purposes, but also to gather, chat, and eat.
They are places where new parents trade knowledge and assistance. They are places where young people contribute their physical labor and tutoring abilities. Some churches directly provide daycare and tutoring services. Religious leaders often take on many hats, one of which is counselor to young people.
But how do you create churches without religious glue?
Or, how about even more basically, how do you convince people that it's worth building more publicly funded community meeting spaces for young and old, such as parks?
That would be a valid complaint if grand parent was arguing that we should move every six weeks, but here the argument might be that we should move every dozen years or so -- which should be plenty of time to figure out if your neighbours are worth keeping around as permenant friends or were just aquentences of accident.
Isn't that what Facebook and the like are for? I'm being serious here.
Since 2002 I have moved 5 times for work: Colorado, Texas, Guam, Maryland and now I'm in Virginia. My family is spread around Texas.
I mostly keep up with the people I made friends with through the years and my family on FB, Twitter etc...phone and then rarely on email.
The idea of a "local" community you have your whole life is antiquated - if it ever really made sense. Humans were traditionally nomadic - albeit in the same group. With the historically recent invention of agriculture, that stopped and we started staying put. I think remote work and technology means we can probably stay put more, but there is also a return to the nomadic work need, as employers seem to like to have workers on premises.
One of my early jobs had me bouncing around the country. Every time I moved I had to start all over from scratch. Where's the grocery store? Where do I meet people? Is the church or the bowling ally the place to be on Friday night around here?
It got old. I love exploring new places, but I want to know my way around where I live. Travel is different from endless relocation.
The irony is that many classic dystopian stories are actually written about today, the time and place where they were written, and not about some hypothetical future. 1984 was based on Orwell's experiences as a propaganda writer for Britain in WW2. Animal Farm was about the Soviet Union.
Fahrenheit 451 was inspired by McCarthyism. Saruman's orcs and trollocs in Lord of the Rings were supposed to represent industry, the factories and smelters that were destroying the English countryside in the 30s. The Hunger Games was about the Iraq war and how we numb ourselves on reality TV.
If you believe Jared Diamond (and I think he at least has a point), the point where we entered dystopia was when we invented agriculture 10,000 years ago. That was when humans began to accumulate surpluses that they could use to lord over other humans, and men began to serve men (and women to serve men too). Humans have a remarkable ability to adapt, though. Most of us don't think of agriculture as an evil soul-crushing machine, even though it was the beginning of large-scale repression, because it's so ingrained in our experience of how we live.
Not just Jared Diamond. There's a whole school of thought (albeit very small and disrespected) built around the concept. From wiki:
>Anarcho-primitivism is an anarchist critique of the origins and progress of civilization. According to anarcho-primitivism, the shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural subsistence gave rise to social stratification, coercion, alienation, and population growth.
If anything had been slightly different whole other sets of sperm would have fertilized the egg, so that's not such an impressive argument. Especially since all of us will be dead at some point, regardless. And funny how that "compassion" doesn't extend to the people crushed every day, the people shrieking in anguish as we speak.
The question isn't just how many people are "alive", but what life are they living. What would make someone seek power over others? Why has this defect been normalized?
Let's say even more abuse allows even more people to get squeezed on the planet. Big whoop? To me that's like overloading a truck to the point where it doesn't move one inch anymore, and not even seeing how counterproductive that is.
I'll just say it: one healthy person is worth more than an infinite number of clones of an alienated person. We can discuss "health" and how subjective that may be, but sheer number of people is worth nothing in my books, that's for sure.
> It's too late, Diana. There's nothing left in you that I can live with. You're one of Howard's humanoids. If I stay with you, I'll be destroyed. Like Howard Beale was destroyed. Like Laureen Hobbs was destroyed. Like everything you and the institution of television touch is destroyed. You're television incarnate, Diana: Indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split seconds and instant replays. You're madness, Diana. Virulent madness. And everything you touch dies with you. But not me. Not as long as I can feel pleasure, and pain... and love.
I'm in rather strong agreement with your post. There seems to be some brand of, I don't know, utilitarianism? That decided that any life, no matter how wretched, is equal to any other life in the evaluation of how bad things are, when this just can't be correct.
> What would make someone seek power over others? Why has this defect been normalized?
This one, though, I would say comes from biology. Power imbalance is the name of the game of everything in nature. You can find it in monkeys, you can find it in simpler life forms.
At some point, we need to accept where all this garbage originally came from (which is also why it's so resilient and strong) and oppose it, assuming it won't eat us first.
> This one, though, I would say comes from biology.
Yes, and no. I see big dogs never barking, because they don't need to. I see little dogs always fretting.
I think the misunderstanding might be in the phrase "seeking power". I don't mean wanting to survive, or wanting to mate. Nobody wants to be "powerless", of course. We want to not be coerced, and then to have some additional "power" to do something. We also want to be acknowledged, and so on. But that's still mostly a give and take, a live and let live -- not "either I have power over you or you over me", I think that sort of binary situation has to be produced with a lot of pain and destruction, it's not the default. Maybe that's idealistic, but at least in the human realm I think that's more or less true.
I mean the kind of hole that goes waaaay beyond "power as in opposite of powerlessness", and that never gets filled. People like Hitler are of course the most extreme examples, but still useful I think: in one sense he was a powerful man, because others obeyed his commands (or distilled wishes from his rants). But actually he was incredibly weak, he couldn't stand up to any person no matter how small as himself, he needed his role as Führer, his self-pity, the admiration, all that. And all of that didn't compensate his original issues, it compounded them. He made no difference to his own weakness, he just murdered a lot of people and then killed himself. He started out unhappy and ended up unhappier, and wreaked only murder and destruction. Actually powerful, or so weak that he had to become "powerful"?
Let's say someone is very strong: if someone tries to rob them they might break off their arm, and yay for that, but hopefully they're not going around robbing old ladies and beating up little kids. Those who do we consider sick, and when I examine their lives we always find something. Something they lack and seek outside of themselves, never getting it.
I'm sure that drive also sometimes produces works of art and inventions but on the whole, I don't think we need this. We already have curiosity, we already have ribbing on each other or topping what others do. We have better means to make art and inventions. And we have empathy, which means we can make each other gifts because it makes us happy to make others happy and get all the progress, all the fancy schmancy tech even, without any of the atrocities. There is competition with sportsmanship, which there should and always will be, and there is this cutthroat madness and lack of empathy for others because people haven't even hold of themselves. The latter has engulfed the planet, while the former is belittled as something naive, which to me is projecting the stunted development greedy people have on those who are more grounded.
Yes, we can also see this in wilderness, but not just it. Take this:
> In a study appearing today in the journal PloS Biology (online at www.plosbiology.org), researchers describe the drastic temperamental and tonal shift that occurred in a troop of 62 baboons when its most belligerent members vanished from the scene. The victims were all dominant adult males that had been strong and snarly enough to fight with a neighboring baboon troop over the spoils at a tourist lodge garbage dump, and were exposed there to meat tainted with bovine tuberculosis, which soon killed them. Left behind in the troop, designated the Forest Troop, were the 50 percent of males that had been too subordinate to try dump brawling, as well as all the females and their young. With that change in demographics came a cultural swing toward pacifism, a relaxing of the usually parlous baboon hierarchy, and a willingness to use affection and mutual grooming rather than threats, swipes and bites to foster a patriotic spirit.
> Remarkably, the Forest Troop has maintained its genial style over two decades, even though the male survivors of the epidemic have since died or disappeared and been replaced by males from the outside. (As is the case for most primates, baboon females spend their lives in their natal home, while the males leave at puberty to seek their fortunes elsewhere.) The persistence of communal comity suggests that the resident baboons must somehow be instructing the immigrants in the unusual customs of the tribe.
[..]
> Dr. Sapolsky, who is renowned for his study of the physiology of stress, said that the Forest Troop baboons probably felt as good as they acted. Hormone samples from the monkeys showed far less evidence of stress in even the lowest-ranking individuals, when contrasted with baboons living in more rancorous societies.
(That guy also has a LOT of super interesting lectures)
I mean, we also know proteins can fold in a way and get others to fold the same that causes Alzheimer's (if I'm not mistaken). Is that useful for something? I don't know, I think sometimes shit just happens. Another thing you can find in nature is this https://www.thedodo.com/inspiring-animal-families-958705512....
Just a random kitschy link, and you might say that that's just because the instincts which are supposed to strictly serve "their own species" are just misfiring, or that they're just practicing their survival skills which doesn't hurt them in these situations. But I like to think that when the basic needs are met, when nobody is feeling threatened, even animals naturally develop all sorts of friendships. This matches what I see in daily life much more than the claim that life is war, and everybody has to be fighting or dying all the time. After all, the energy comes from the sun, and we can neither take it nor reject it, it's just there so we, life in general, used it. That is a much more fundamental basis of life on Earth IMHO.
Well, you have convinced me. We should immediately switch back to a pre-agricultural, nomadic, very low technological, hunter gatherer society. I nominate you as the first headman.
The change will, of course, result in the near immediate death of, say, half of the people currently alive, including me. You get to explain to them what is going on (extra points for ending your speech with a dismissive "But, well, there you are."), but you also get to choose who is a "healthy person" and who is a "clone of an alienated person".
Funny, staying in the dead-end town you were born in with your grandparents' knitting circle supervising your dating life is an even greater dystopia to me.
Exactly this. I was fortunate enough to stay in one place for K->12, but in the world I grew up in it was totally normal for young adults to move for college, then after college, then a few more times before settling down, then again for retirement. My parents did it, my grandparents did it (including as refugees when they were children), my aunts and uncles are all over.
Soon my parents will move for retirement, and my original "village" will hold nothing for me anymore. So it goes. I have a few friends from high school or college in basically every city, and we meet up when we happen to be in the same place. Family picks a place and all flies there for Christmas. It works out.
Mobility and a willingness to learn new skills in the context of an established citizen and family is entirely different from the context of an immigrant family in almost every case.
Moving is generally very expensive, and proportionally more so for those with lower incomes.
The "nomadic" lifestyle you mention actually isn't normal, even today.
Other generations had much higher real wages, and much less risk. During the 1930s and 1940s there was a huge movement of desperate farmers to California. But wages in California were good, and California went 50 years without a recession -- from the 1930s to the 1980s was one long continuous boom.
Going back further, consider the events described in Little House On The Prairie. Laura Ingalls Wilder's family faced ruin after locusts ate all the food that the family was growing. So her father went away for awhile and found work where he was paid $1 a day. And that was enough money to completely reboot their lives. Not only could he keep his whole family fed on that, he also had spare money to buy seed and thus plant a crop the next year.
High real wages are the reason why millions of people, including all 4 of my grand-parents, left Europe to come to the USA.
Male wages have been in decline since 1973. Family income increased till 1999 only because more women started to work. Family income has been in decline since 1999.
Movement and migration can not be be justified rationally in a world where wages are stagnant or falling.
For people who have lived in the same area for several years, moving means losing all of your political capital that you've built up in the form of:
* votes / campaigning for your representatives
* learning about the local laws and maybe even having voiced yourself at town halls to make real changes
* all bonds you've made in your community which helps when wanting to make a push for local changes
Moving means losing all of that. The only exceptions to this are the wealthy, famous, or well connected. So I can very well see why some older people wouldn't want to move.
If everyone started living like the parent suggests then it would just increase the power disparity between the wealthy and everyone else. Only those wealthy enough to afford a home and be insulated from the need to follow employment opportunities would have any say in even local politics anymore
I'm also convinced that a willingness to relocate plays a huge role in upward mobility. In the past decade I've moved eight times, not always for a new job, but always for new opportunities.
However, I do acknowledge that it's easy to say that as a young single person. Marriage and children make that a lot harder, but not impossible. I moved as a child a number of times. Maybe that's why I don't find it so hard to do as an adult?
>Mobility and a willingness to learn new skills seems to prevail. It's what other generations have done, millions of immigrants (my parents included).
For an individual this might be a solution (even for me! I've moved around lots too)
But for a whole society it's not. Especially when we seem to be hearing similar stories across thousands of towns and cities. Is everyone supposed to move to the bay area, NYC, Boston, Seatle? What is the housing going to look like? Does the rest of the country just empty itself?
The answer to your last paragraph, for the majority of people, is yes. That's how urbanization looks like. That's what the other generations have done. That's how it worked a hundred years ago, with a huge portion of people leaving countryside to relocate in urban centers, that's how it transformed China recently (uncountable millions of people moving from inland farming to their east coast manufacturing), that's how it's ongoing now, and that's how it's going to happen in the future.
The current world increasingly favors centralization and economies of scale, so the "optimal" spread of people gets more and more centralized. Living on the fringe,
unless there's a specific economic need (we'll still need some (1%? less in the long term) people living as on site farmers) is increasingly becoming an expensive "hobby"/lifestyle choice, since you're going to get less services at a much higher cost and with less opportunities for income.
"That's how it worked a hundred years ago, with a huge portion of people leaving countryside to relocate in urban centers, that's how it transformed China recently (uncountable millions of people moving from inland farming to their east coast manufacturing),..."
There is the minor difference of moving from one location to take up relatively lucrative, but largely unskilled, jobs and moving from one location with a low-skilled job to try to find a high-skilled job. Or even from one high-skilled job to a completely different high-skilled job.
While the "less services" part is sometimes true, in semi-rural/sparse suburban areas it's often possible to get quite a bit more for a lot less. Car maintenance, food, land, recreation, all much cheaper outside of the major urban areas and high-cost states. This is yet another obstacle people face when trying to move to a big city. They can't afford to pay twice the price for half the food.
This may depend on the location, but for me the pattern is that services are much cheaper in the rural areas (including e.g. eating out) but goods are more expensive, including food - e.g. bread and butter will be noticeably more expensive in the rural small store than in a large town megastore. So if you're wealthy and consume lots of services of others, then that's a nice place to live; but if you're poor and would rather do everything yourself, then the basic necessities (except rent) are more expensive. Getting your oil changed is cheaper than in the big city, but buying oil to change yourself is more expensive. Getting dinner made by someone else is cheaper than in the big city, making dinner yourself is more expensive.
So (in my situation) if you're living in a rural community, you're spending less on your own community (and getting less from them), and spending extra to the other communities. Which is not that nice for the economic health of your community.
> Mobility and a willingness to learn new skills seems to prevail. It's what other generations have done, millions of immigrants (my parents included).
Yeah, but after all the moves I've done in the last 10 years, I'm starting to realize that the cost of moving isn't just the cost of a U-haul truck. The cognitive load of finding new grocery stores, new dentists, new mechanics, a new social scene, a new favorite restaurant, navigating a new city, working with new utility companies...
It's really a lot. It's more than I realized the first time I changed cities at age 17. That time, I thought I was depressed. Actually, it just took me a couple of years to achieve the stability that I had when I lived with my parents. I couldn't take on more cognitive load until I dealt with the basics, so stuff like relationships, socializing, and advancing my career all went really slowly at first. The second time I moved cities I also moved countries. I'm older now and much better mentally equipped to handle these problems, but I also notice it a lot more than I used to. Moving is _hard_. I don't expect to have a healthy social network for at least another year. My relationship seems to be standing up to the pressure, but trust me, there has been pressure.
The effort was worth it, but the cost is very real. If I could have avoided paying it, I would have.
Research backs you up- people are less willing to move than in the past. In the case of this lady though, I can understand moving being a really bad & undesirable option if you're only a few years away from retirement. That's not the best time to buy a new more expensive house in a more happening locale.
Mostly because rich parts of the US like the sillicon valley don't want these people to move there. The zoning regulations prevent building more housing. Rent control is a subsidy for long term tenants against newcomers. (Rent controlled apartment goes for $1500 but should actually go for $2000, land lord sells second apartment for $2500 to cover losses)
I can totally see this happening to an "older" generation - people who get decent jobs locally but then in their late 40s or so are forced to deal with the uncertainty if the industry they are in gets into a shaky state.
Also, these things are periodic in some industries. Construction, for example, is booming where I'm at right now - you have to wait a few weeks for anything semi-major to be done because there's a shortage of contractors. Back in 08 they'd come sweep your porch on a 5 min notice :)
One other point/observation - I personally know quite a few ppl who live/work in the country - all of them had their kids move to either a large metropolitan area in the same state or farther out after graduating from college. Kids who graduated HS also left for the most part, some stayed but mostly in situations where there's a family business for them to partake in.
Moving to where there's more work is what other generations did, before the rent there got too damn high. There was an economics paper about this recently, blaming ills of vaguely this sort (I'm sorry I don't remember better) on the housing restrictions in the American cities with growing economies.
Strict universal nomadism is incompatible with agricultural development. Most of human existence has been nomadic, but the recent default for ~10000 years has been sedentary (non-migratory) mainly because of agriculture. And we've replicated the "farmer schedule" in most all subsequent careers.
The rise of interdisciplinary personalities (or at least recognizing this is a thing) might just be a new old thing: the modern version of a nomad who had to become near expert at a wide variety of things for survival as well as intellectual stimulation.
It's not nomadic in the sense that nobody was moving thousands of miles in one fell swoop into completely foreign environments full of complete strangers and an unfamiliar culture.
Nomadism is entirely compatible with agriculture, actually. A lot of Native American tribes had a nomadic lifestyle while simultaneously relying heavily on intentional agriculture for a lot of their caloric intake.
"Strict universal" is doing a lot of work there. I suspect very few societies would end up even qualifying as nomadic with that.
These people don't want to move because they value community and social support over economics. This attitude is baffling to HN because it defies quantifiable metrics unlike money. Seeing everything as an economic problem is the essence of greed.
Actually, economic models often include such concepts as community and social support. In fact, they can often be quantified too: you can measure what's the necessary increase in salary to convince people to give them up.
There's nothing "greedy" about trying to formally model a situation, which is what seeing as an economic problem is about.
And people who expect others to pay for them to have the "community" they want (pay to support them living without jobs because there are no jobs they can do in that area) are not greedy? If Jane works hard to move to the city and do something others value enough to pay for, why should she have to support Jo staying back in their hometown because Jo doesn't want to experience the hardship of moving?
In my experience, people who call others greedy are expecting others to do something for them while giving nothing back in return. Economics means A gives B something B wants in exchange for B giving A something A wants. People who oppose this seem to think that A should give B something without B giving anything back in return.
There's some texture and nuance to this statement. I remember on NPR, they interviewed a lady whom mentioned similar sentiments; her and her husband had built a family, worked in the blue-collar industry (precision machining) for decades, and now were losing their jobs. She also mentioned that they had been living in a small town for a long, long time.
That last part bothers me a lot. It seems a lot of people just don't want to move. Anecdotally I've moved nearly 6 times in the last 8 years. My parents have done the same.
People are stuck on this idea of living and dying in the same city once they buy a home or have children. That just isn't the case anymore.
Mobility and a willingness to learn new skills seems to prevail. It's what other generations have done, millions of immigrants (my parents included).