The New Normal - Beyond Doom

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Bird on a Fire
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Re: The New Normal - Beyond Doom

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sun Jan 23, 2022 1:25 pm

Sciolus wrote:
Sat Jan 22, 2022 8:24 pm
lpm wrote:
Sat Jan 22, 2022 9:44 am
Millennie Al wrote:
Fri Jan 21, 2022 11:54 pm
There have always been... etc
The problem with this view, Millennie Al, is it ignores the concept of brittle.

In other words is 2022 society less able to cope with a discontinuity than, say, 1939 society.

For example, a drought used to mean hunter gatherers migrating to lands one of the Elders remembered as being good during droughts. Today land ownership and borders enforce them to stay put - until they end up in a refugee camp.

Things always get better, with downs as well as ups, is a view that works - until a discontinuity arrives. And it's not much comfort to know that 2121 will be better than 2021, if 2051 is going to be a horror show. Germany in 2013 was so much better than 1913 but...
That applies even more to non-human lifeforms. Typically they respond to higher temperatures by moving to higher latitudes or higher altitudes. To take a trivial and parochial example, if you're a marsh fritillary living on a five-hectare nature reserve surrounded by mile after mile of barren desert in all directions, and the only other suitable habitat another couple of hectares 50 miles away, you're stuffed. Whole ecosystems are like this: so fragmented they are unable to adapt to any environmental change.

(Warm-blooded humans have a habit of thinking that a change of 1.5 degrees is negligible, because we don't even need to take off a jumper, but most lifeforms are far more sensitive to ambient temperatures.)
Yes, climate change will probably be the final nail in the coffin for a lot of biodiversity, though loss and fragmentation of habitat is by far the greater driver.

There's also the impact of different bits of variation around the long-term mean. Lots of things need X days of frost to germinate or to kill pathogens/parasites, for instance - above/below 0°C is a qualitative change within the quantitative temperature scale, and quite an important one. Precipitation becoming "peakier" is another issue, especially where it's compounded by overgrazing, soil compaction and canalized rivers.

DEFRA are still, in a vague wibbly way, talking about broader landscape restoration, so the UK might be able to sightly ameliorate its hugely brittle set of postage-stamp reserves masquerading as conservation policy.
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Re: The New Normal - Beyond Doom

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sun Jan 23, 2022 1:33 pm

Fishnut wrote:
Fri Jan 21, 2022 10:10 pm
I feel the same way, boaf. I look to the future with fear these days. I am so angry that we've come to this position, that there are people who have actively worked so that we have come to this position. And plenty of others who have looked the other way while they did.

I don't think there's any chance of 'fixing' things, the best we can do is manage the consequences and try and minimise the number of people badly affected.

I've been reading Hillsborough - The Truth by Phil Scraton and in the description of the disaster what really struck me was how it was other fans who did their best to save those injured in the crush. The authorities, in the words of Scraton, "did not recognise... the distinction between disorder from distress" and refused to help. Instead it was ordinary people pulling people out and taking them to safety and doing what they could to keep them alive. It was the failure of the authorities that led to the disaster and it was the actions of ordinary people that stopped it from being even worse.

It feels like a parable for many disasters, including climate change. The authorities have ignored all the signs of impending doom and have treated those trying to warn them as criminals and people intent on causing disorder, rather than honourable people trying to prevent harm. But where I take comfort is that ordinary people are starting to take action. We know it will take top-down change to have any meaningful impact, but that change will only come reluctantly and will only come through collective pressure from ordinary people in large enough numbers that they cannot be ignored. That's starting to happen. So while I don't think we're going to manage to derail the trolley, I have hope that there's enough people who will try to get in there to help the victims and campaign to ensure that the rails aren't left in a state of disrepair again, to stretch a metaphor.

Though that sounds more optimistic than I really feel. We're going to see people dying natural disasters and conflicts caused by lack of access to basic resources. We're going to see even more inequality, more nationalism and authoritarianism as more people become refugees. Things are going to get so much worse before they get better.
It's good hear from so many people that I'm not alone in this. I expected more pushback, to be honest.

And yes, I really think power is the missing bit of the puzzle we don't talk about enough. "People power" is achieving some good stuff, whereas the people with power are mostly degenerate c.nts.

I just finished Andreas Malm's How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which is a useful history and discussion of environmental activism and how it can evolve to win concessions against fossil capital in a more appropriate timeline. I'll probably post more about it at some point, but I'd recommend it.
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Re: The New Normal - Beyond Doom

Post by discovolante » Sun Jan 23, 2022 2:34 pm

There's a London Review of Books article on that book and other stuff, if you're interested: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n22 ... l-leninism
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Re: The New Normal - Beyond Doom

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sun Jan 23, 2022 5:11 pm

Millennie Al wrote:
Fri Jan 21, 2022 11:54 pm
You are in the richest 1%. You can easily move elsewhere if your environment gets too uncomfortable. But you care about other too.
I just checked this, btw.

By wealth, the richest 1% have a net worth of at least US$871,320. Those people have about half of the world's wealth.

I'm not even close to being in the top 10%, who have US$93,170. (My net worth is about negative US$55000, thanks to student debt, low income and lack of assets lol.) But I could indeed stick a ticket on a credit card.

By income, the top 10% are making £92,150. I don't know anyone on that kind of money. I guess the vice chancellor of the uni is up there, and possibly my old GP?

It's easy to forget how freakishly even rich the top 10% are, I think.

Wealth: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/01/how-muc ... dwide.html

Income: https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... super-rich
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Re: The New Normal - Beyond Doom

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sun Jan 23, 2022 5:51 pm

discovolante wrote:
Sun Jan 23, 2022 2:34 pm
There's a London Review of Books article on that book and other stuff, if you're interested: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n22 ... l-leninism
Thanks!

I'm reading MotF with a pint, up to chapter 22 and enjoying it so far. I'm liking the collage of vignettes effect.
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Re: The New Normal - Beyond Doom

Post by discovolante » Sun Jan 23, 2022 6:20 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sun Jan 23, 2022 5:51 pm
discovolante wrote:
Sun Jan 23, 2022 2:34 pm
There's a London Review of Books article on that book and other stuff, if you're interested: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n22 ... l-leninism
Thanks!

I'm reading MotF with a pint, up to chapter 22 and enjoying it so far. I'm liking the collage of vignettes effect.
Nice! The short chapters do make it a quicker read for sure ;)
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Re: The New Normal - Beyond Doom

Post by shpalman » Sun Jan 23, 2022 7:38 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sun Jan 23, 2022 5:11 pm
Millennie Al wrote:
Fri Jan 21, 2022 11:54 pm
You are in the richest 1%. You can easily move elsewhere if your environment gets too uncomfortable. But you care about other too.
I just checked this, btw.

By wealth, the richest 1% have a net worth of at least US$871,320. Those people have about half of the world's wealth.

I'm not even close to being in the top 10%, who have US$93,170. (My net worth is about negative US$55000, thanks to student debt, low income and lack of assets lol.) But I could indeed stick a ticket on a credit card.
The link for wealth is getting its information from the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report and there's a link to the pdf of the latest version there. The "global wealth pyramid" given in Fig. 1 is only schematic and doesn't make it easy to quantify where you are in the distribution. The Global Wealth Databook has numbers though. If I'm reading Table 4-5 Part II correctly, a personal wealth of say $50,000 would put you in the 9th decile in the world but you'd only be somewhere in the 5th decile in Europe or the 4th one in North America. (Other tables discuss the difference between financial and non-financial assets, and debt).

(the columns are deciles 1-9 and then top 10%, 5%, and 1%.)
Tab4-5_II.png
Tab4-5_II.png (78.35 KiB) Viewed 2170 times
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sun Jan 23, 2022 5:11 pm
By income, the top 10% are making £92,150. I don't know anyone on that kind of money. I guess the vice chancellor of the uni is up there, and possibly my old GP?
The link for income says "On average, an individual from the top 10% of the global income distribution earned $122,100 (£92,150) a year" which doesn't mean that £92,150 is the lower threshold to get into the top 10%. They're basing it on the World Inequality Report and I'd have saved a lot of time if I'd found this first:

Income and wealth comparator. Now, I'm never sure when it asks for income if it means before or after tax (it says "Please add up all income sources... before paying the income tax..." but does that mean it wants the total before I pay it or that it wants me to pay it?) but anyway.

You can even download their datasets and simulate a wealth tax on https://wid.world/
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sun Jan 23, 2022 5:11 pm
It's easy to forget how freakishly even rich the top 10% are, I think.

Wealth: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/01/how-muc ... dwide.html

Income: https://www.theguardian.com/business/20 ... super-rich
tl;dr yeah we're nowhere near the global 1%.

(various edits to fix linking)
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Re: The New Normal - Beyond Doom

Post by shpalman » Sun Jan 23, 2022 7:57 pm

(oh by the way, to get into the top 10% in the world in terms of income you seem to need somewhere over €3000 a month)
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Re: The New Normal - Beyond Doom

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sun Jan 23, 2022 8:20 pm

Amazing how far the progression from PhD to postdoc would push me in the global rankings.

Can't wait to join the moustache-twiddlers* at the top!

*pretty sure this is cockney rhyming slang
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Re: The New Normal - Beyond Doom

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sun Jan 23, 2022 8:27 pm

But thanks for digging up the numbers.

I reckon it would have been pretty easy for someone born in a working-class family in the UK in the 1950s to have got into the world top 10% of wealth by now. Just save and buy a house, basically.

Whereas, I'm not sh.tting you here, the only people my age (31) I know who've bought houses in the UK inherited at least the deposit.

In places like the USA and England, with an entire generation stuck with rising student loans, soaring rents but stagnant wages, they've created a whole generation with basically no buy-in to the whole fossil-capital house of cards.

It kind of matters, because if we abolished the top 10% globally the climate crisis would be solved: that's how much they emit. (How this could be achieved is left as an exercise to the reader, but large numbers of angry disenfranchised young people may or may not be relevant).
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Re: The New Normal - Beyond Doom

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sun Jan 23, 2022 8:45 pm

According to that calculator I'm bottom 17% of the world! How's that for street cred? ;)
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Re: The New Normal - Beyond Doom

Post by Sciolus » Sun Jan 23, 2022 9:11 pm

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sun Jan 23, 2022 8:27 pm
Whereas, I'm not sh.tting you here, the only people my age (31) I know who've bought houses in the UK inherited at least the deposit.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2022/ ... ys-halifax

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Re: The New Normal - Beyond Doom

Post by Fishnut » Sun Jan 23, 2022 9:20 pm

Hmmm....
“Over time more people have chosen to go on to higher education, go travelling, or move around for work, which are all factors in the increase in first-time buyer age,” she said.
Yes, we have all chosen to go on to higher education and move around for work. It's not that we've been told the only way to get a decent job is to have a degree or because permanent jobs with career progression are pretty much a thing of the past.
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Re: The New Normal - Beyond Doom

Post by Bird on a Fire » Sun Jan 23, 2022 11:10 pm

To say nothing of the avocados.
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Re: The New Normal - Beyond Doom

Post by dyqik » Mon Jan 24, 2022 1:50 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sun Jan 23, 2022 11:10 pm
To say nothing of the avocados.
If you stopped saving up for that house deposit that you'll never reach, you'd be able to afford the odd avocado.

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Re: The New Normal - Beyond Doom

Post by Millennie Al » Mon Jan 24, 2022 3:11 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sun Jan 23, 2022 5:11 pm
Millennie Al wrote:
Fri Jan 21, 2022 11:54 pm
You are in the richest 1%. You can easily move elsewhere if your environment gets too uncomfortable. But you care about other too.
I just checked this, btw.

By wealth, the richest 1% have a net worth of at least US$871,320. Those people have about half of the world's wealth.

I'm not even close to being in the top 10%, who have US$93,170. (My net worth is about negative US$55000, thanks to student debt, low income and lack of assets lol.) But I could indeed stick a ticket on a credit card.
...
Wealth: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/01/how-muc ... dwide.html
There are clearly some serious problems with that data. According to it, if your net worth is -USD55,000 then you're in the poorest 10%. I hope you would not seriously claim that this is true. The reason is that the data is taken from the perspective of bankers, to whom everything is money. This is stated in the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report:
Net worth, or “wealth,” is defined as the value
of financial assets plus real assets (principally
housing) owned by households, minus their
debts. This corresponds to the balance sheet
that a household might draw up, listing the items
which are owned, and their net value if sold.
Private pension fund assets are included, but not
entitlements to state pensions. Human capital is
excluded altogether, along with assets and debts
owned by the state (which cannot easily be
assigned to individuals).
But wealth is a lot broader than that. Even from a financial perspective, the ability to spend $55,000 is a form of wealth, even if you theoretically must pay it back later. And there's much more. Someone who is a research scientist can obtain visas to immigrate into countries which are closed to other people. That, too, is a form of wealth, and one particularly important when considering the ability to move away from bad circumstances. And, of course, the data only covers people currently alive (and not all of them - only adults). There are considerably more people dead than alive and most of them lived in extreme poverty by modern standards.

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Re: The New Normal - Beyond Doom

Post by Millennie Al » Mon Jan 24, 2022 3:26 am

Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sun Jan 23, 2022 8:27 pm
if we abolished the top 10% globally the climate crisis would be solved: that's how much they emit. (How this could be achieved is left as an exercise to the reader, but large numbers of angry disenfranchised young people may or may not be relevant).
A look at history will show both how it could be achieved and the likely consequences.

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Re: The New Normal - Beyond Doom

Post by TimW » Mon Jan 24, 2022 8:21 am

Millennie Al wrote:
Mon Jan 24, 2022 3:26 am
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sun Jan 23, 2022 8:27 pm
if we abolished the top 10% globally the climate crisis would be solved: that's how much they emit. (How this could be achieved is left as an exercise to the reader, but large numbers of angry disenfranchised young people may or may not be relevant).
A look at history will show both how it could be achieved and the likely consequences.
Too right, I'd rather have rising sea levels than end up like France.

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Re: The New Normal - Beyond Doom

Post by Sciolus » Mon Jan 24, 2022 9:25 am

Sciolus wrote:
Sun Jan 23, 2022 9:11 pm
Bird on a Fire wrote:
Sun Jan 23, 2022 8:27 pm
Whereas, I'm not sh.tting you here, the only people my age (31) I know who've bought houses in the UK inherited at least the deposit.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2022/ ... ys-halifax
Mind you, my parents became first-time-buyers when they were 65, using my Dad's pension lump sum to buy their council house (thanks Maggie). So, you know.

Also, science point: Those stats don't mean what they superficially mean, because they are a snapshot of current purchases and exclude life-long renters.

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Re: The New Normal - Beyond Doom

Post by lpm » Mon Jan 24, 2022 9:39 am

All the stats have gone badly wrong somehow. Can't be bothered to work out the errors, but an income of £92,150 would be more like top 3% rather than top 10%, from memory. And young couples without children not owning their own home has always been fairly common.
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Re: The New Normal - Beyond Doom

Post by shpalman » Mon Jan 24, 2022 10:04 am

lpm wrote:
Mon Jan 24, 2022 9:39 am
All the stats have gone badly wrong somehow. Can't be bothered to work out the errors, but an income of £92,150 would be more like top 3% rather than top 10%, from memory.
Or, from all the links and explanation I posted above. Like I said, £92,150 was given as the average for the top 10%, not the threshold beyond which you're in the top 10% which would be roughly half that.
lpm wrote:
Mon Jan 24, 2022 9:39 am
... And young couples without children not owning their own home has always been fairly common.
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Re: The New Normal - Beyond Doom

Post by Bird on a Fire » Mon Jan 24, 2022 10:29 am

Yes sorry I misquoted the income stat.

From Sciolus link:
Rates of homeownership among young adults have fallen dramatically in recent decades, plunging from a peak of 51% in 1989 to just 25% in 2016, according to the Resolution Foundation.
which I don't think is a controversial point, though UK specific. Surely you all know that house prices have outpaced wages so young people can't buy them?

My general point is that, post-2008 crash, it's been much harder to save money and acquire capital. People who were 18 in 2008 could have been working for 10+ years without having much at all in the way of wealth, so I suspect they'd be less concerned about the financial upheaval of fossil abolition that homeowning pensioners.

As for being childless, it's worth pointing out that climate anxiety is putting off about 40% of young people from having kids https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ate-crisis (plus it keeps your carbon footprint finite)
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Re: The New Normal - Beyond Doom

Post by lpm » Mon Jan 24, 2022 11:00 am

Another problem to add to the New Normal is the bitter tribalism of politics. Even over the life of this forum and its predecessor we've seen ourselves losing the ability to discuss conflicting policies. Using abuse to drive out people with similar progressive views but with differing policy prescriptions is now a thing.

For example there's no such thing as natural disasters, they are always poverty disasters. When a hurricane hits New Orleans it's the poorest who die. A hurricane hitting Haiti makes a million people homeless and with cholera, if it hits Dominican Republic then the damage can be absorbed. Which means it's always a valid argument to say that economic development should be the priority. Make a country richer and you reduce natural disasters, even if climate change is creating more natural disasters. A prospering world can lift Haiti out of poverty faster than a world beset by economic stagnation - as demonstrated by the way economic and technological development in the west has led to the basic elimination of extreme poverty everywhere except Africa.

Which means that progressive people who share a genuine desire to see Haiti become richer can have different policy answers for how it should be done.

Climate policy doesn't happen in a vacuum away from all other policies. There has to be a balance between investing resources in heat pumps and investing in fibre broadband, or between building high speed rail and building social housing. We all accept these trade offs in reality, no matter our rhetoric - I've not seen anyone hear argue that we should rip out all gas central heating boilers by 2025, instead there's an acceptance that we go for more economically efficient wins in the short term and allow ourselves a longer timeframe for more costly switch overs. "I was intending to keep discussion to environmental matters and ignore poverty" simply doesn't work as a way to discuss doom.

In every healthy democracy the centre right parties tend to do well, winning votes consistently across the decades. It's a perfectly respectable position to hold. There's nothing too wrong with arguing "social benefits should be held low, to enable tax cuts for hard workers, to get a lively entrepreneurial economy, to make the country richer, which will enable us to allocate resources to better education and health, which will benefit the poorer decile much more in the long term than giving benefits now".

Many of us will disagree with this. But we've now reached the point where this viewpoint is a tribal enemy rather than a difference of opinion. Express that view on this forum today and there'd be abuse, led by the mods, to drive you out. Even on the couple of pages of this thread we've got claims that "the right"/capitalists/the enemy are "degenerate c.nts" who are actively working for climate destruction, plus basically an expectation that a bl..dy civil war is going to be needed to sort all this out. Come back to reason for god's sake.

It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future. In the past month alone we've all got our predictions about Omicron significantly wrong and that should make us pause for thought. One minute we're calling people we disagree with us on pandemic policy Nazi murderers, the next minute their policy is proved OK (even if more by luck than judgement). But does that make us add a grain of caution to our predictions? No, because that would be surrendering to our evil tribal enemies. We're not all that different from people so committed to Trumpism that they'll risk Covid unvaccinated rather than give an inch to the enemy side.

Real advances come from patient political compromises, involving lengthy negotiations and genuine listening to opposing viewpoints, eventually muddling through to an imperfect step forward. That's not happening in the current political landscape. The "you can f.ck right off" approach works nicely if you want attention on twitter or social reinforcement from the tribe on a forum; it works really badly in addressing genuine problems that require a bit of nuance.
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Re: The New Normal - Beyond Doom

Post by Stephanie » Mon Jan 24, 2022 12:35 pm

I don't think views expressed on the forum are any worse than they always were (recall discussions between gimpy, tomp, jobbins, hidey et al), though I accept that the stakes were lower and we had a good outgroup to target anger against - homeopaths, antivaxxers, etc. There are number of strong personalities here, coupled with people who may be very smart in one area, thinking that this means they can apply that across all other areas. People who write very decidedly and confidently (and sometimes persuasively) can make it hard for people who are patient and nuanced from joining in those conversations, because if feels as though you too have to be more decided and persuasive before you can post. For me - I watch how people like Fishnut are treated - she engages sincerely, honestly, makes the effort to find links, and for her time, gets quoted and compared to Enoch Powell. How does that demonstrate patience? Nuance? Reasonableness? How do you think this would persuade her towards a different view?

As a PS, and for my bit of provocative trolling, I also think you're wrong about the social reinforcement on this particular forum. If you really want to be loved by this place, start lengthy threads on how much you love cheese, cycling, Radio 4, how the left have really gone too far, or an analysis of how wonderfully forensic Starmer is at PMQs.
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Re: The New Normal - Beyond Doom

Post by IvanV » Mon Jan 24, 2022 12:59 pm

lpm wrote:
Mon Jan 24, 2022 11:00 am
... A prospering world can lift Haiti out of poverty faster than a world beset by economic stagnation - as demonstrated by the way economic and technological development in the west has led to the basic elimination of extreme poverty everywhere except Africa.
...
In every healthy democracy the centre right parties tend to do well, winning votes consistently across the decades. It's a perfectly respectable position to hold. There's nothing too wrong with arguing "social benefits should be held low, to enable tax cuts for hard workers, to get a lively entrepreneurial economy, to make the country richer, which will enable us to allocate resources to better education and health, which will benefit the poorer decile much more in the long term than giving benefits now".

Many of us will disagree with this. But we've now reached the point where this viewpoint is a tribal enemy rather than a difference of opinion. Express that view on this forum today and there'd be abuse, led by the mods, to drive you out.
A prospering world long failed to help Haiti lift itself out of poverty. Haiti is a failed state. Failed states stay poor regardless of the economic condition of the outside world. WIthout security, there is nothing. Anyone with money will have it extracted from them, one way or another. Hardly anyone makes investments in such conditions, because they know it is so hard to retain the fruits of them.

I agree that there are attempts especially in the US and UK to make politics a matter of identity. It works in the same way as in Northern Ireland - the two sides mostly vote for Sinn Fein and DUP, because those are the parties that represent the identity of the two sides. But neither can be described as centrist. The centre was hollowed out. And actually most people are really centrist, but don't really have anyone to vote for. How was it that the DUP stole the identity from the centrist UUP, and SF stole the identity from the centrist SDLP?

I would argue that the issue of abuse etc here is driven by the hollowing out of the traditional centre right. Places in Europe, which is where we might find the healthy democracies, have centre rights presiding over states with rather more to a lot more redistribution and social service funding than Britain. OK, so the Swedish welfare state isn't quite as generous as it used to be, after some centre right governments replaced the long-standing centre left ones. But it is still chalk to Britain's cheese. The centre rightists in healthy democracies are not small state rightists, arguing to keep the poor deprived.

The question, as in Northern Ireland, is, how have the small state rightists, who destroy inclusive society, stolen the conservative identity from the centre rightists who represented an inclusive state which is necessarily a bigger state? Do all the people voting for the small state rightists really look at the US and think, that's the kind of country I'd like to live in? Or have they somehow been dragged to support something they wouldn't really want if they understood it?

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