Authoritarianism and anti-authoritarianism: do they exist?

[malloc]

I don't see that the conclusion is that more people should live in the cities. Of course there's no automatic effect that turns people conservative or socialist.

If cities correlate with liberal or leftist politics and we want people to move leftward, then it seems reasonable to conclude that urbanization would help.

That said, if you don't believe urbanization matters that much, then what do you think really pushes people to left? If you can point to something that correlates even better with leftward politics than urbanization, I would favor focusing on that.

[Torco]

I'm all for people becoming more left wing, but isn't there something dishonest in advocating for the continuation of a global foodgrowing model that'll cause vast amounts of environmental damage simply because the alternative might make more people disagree with one's political ideas?

[Ares Land]

I don't see that the conclusion is that more people should live in the cities. Of course there's no automatic effect that turns people conservative or socialist.

If cities correlate with liberal or leftist politics and we want people to move leftward, then it seems reasonable to conclude that urbanization would help.

Or in other words, changing people's lifestyle in the hopes that they vote the way we want afterwards... That does not seem reasonable.

I'd add that the correlation wasn't valid a generation ago, at least in France(*) and who knows how valid it'll be twenty years from now.
((*) I don't know about the US but as I recall Reagan was popular everywhere)

That said, if you don't believe urbanization matters that much, then what do you think really pushes people to left? If you can point to something that correlates even better with leftward politics than urbanization, I would favor focusing on that.

There are a multiple of factors and also... if only I knew how to make people vote the way I want

I do have an idea about the urban/left correlation. Judging by the last map I shared, it's clear that some urban area are very bright red. One such place is the Parisian east, as it happens it's a place I know very well.
The Parisian east has been an area of very high immigration for quite a while; it follows that a) minorities aren't going to vote for the far-right b) if you're a far-right sympathizer, this is about the last area on Earth where you want to live. c) conversely, if you live there you certainly aren't bothered by minorities and most likely you like the diversity, so you're not going to vote for the far-right.
So all in all it's not surprising the area is an exception to the general trend of increasing far-right success.

Another factor is... Well, most politicians think like you do. They write off people living in the country as hopeless. They think even worse of what we call the périurbain (think American Midwest suburbia for a rough equivalent). So unsurprisingly they don't get a lot of votes there. The far-right doesn't care either, but they're very good at taking advantage of resentment.

[Travis B.]

They think even worse of what we call the périurbain (think American Midwest suburbia for a rough equivalent).

I thought the suburbs in France did not map well to the suburbs in the US, as the American suburbs are often wealthier and more right-wing (they are at least in the American Midwest) while the suburbs in France are closer to the American inner city (i.e. poor and heavily minority).

[Ares Land]

That's correct, but this rough schema may help:



There's a lot less urban sprawl here, so both ville-centre and banlieue are very densely populated and heavily built while what we call périurbain is more a cluster of half-rural towns and villages, usually middle-class and more conservative.

As a rough approximation downtown will be pretty wealthy while the closest suburbs will be pretty poor and heavily minority. It's really not hard to find exceptions. For Paris, the inner city is very wealthy but there are still quite a few poorer neighborhoods. The eastern suburbs are the poorest part of the country, but by contrast the western suburbs are the wealthiest parts of the country. Nonetheless your understanding is correct because by les banlieues people usually mean the poor ones.

[Raphael]

They think even worse of what we call the périurbain (think American Midwest suburbia for a rough equivalent).

I thought the suburbs in France did not map well to the suburbs in the US, as the American suburbs are often wealthier and more right-wing (they are at least in the American Midwest) while the suburbs in France are closer to the American inner city (i.e. poor and heavily minority).

That reminds me of a brief discussion in the Random Thread that I took part in five years ago:

Random question that just occurred to me: What are your relations to city, suburban, and rural environments? Personally, I've mostly spent my life in more or less suburban or exurban neighborhoods so far, but I've also lived in inner-city neighborhoods for a few years, and while I was growing up, I also visited places in the city pretty often. But I've also visited some places in the countryside a lot while I was growing up, I lived in a hut in the forest for a while, and the suburban and exurban places in which I've lived have often been physically pretty close to the countryside. However, being an introvert, I don't think I've ever been really a part of either a city or a rural community.

I bring all this up because I've heard that there are people who are either so completely used to city surroundings that they'd be completely confused and disoriented if they'd find themselves in a small town or village or in between small towns or villages, or so completely used to rural surroundings that they'd be completely confused and disoriented if they'd find themselves on a busy sidewalk next to a busy road in a major city. And that's something I can't really relate to.

I grew up in a suburb: to be precise, one of the "New Towns" planned by the French government in the 1960s. So, the typical cookie-cutter suburb without any local identity. And when I say "cookie-cutter", I mean it: they had 4 ground plans for individual houses and 1 for apartment buildings, and repeated them over and over for several square kilometers (at least they didn't align everything on a grid, so the street layouts are somewhat distinctive). Also, unless you have a car, there is nowhere to go and nothing to do except school, a local bakery, and the occasional gym.

I'm a bit surprised to hear that. I thought that type of suburb would be typical for the USA, the UK, and some other places, and that suburbs in France would be places where poor people live in high-rise buildings.

Well, this sort of suburb also exists, of course: entire blocks of high-rise council houses, largely populated by immigrants (mostly from the Maghreb), and notorious for being poverty traps. The French word "banlieue" covers both.

[Raphael]

As a rough approximation downtown will be pretty wealthy while the closest suburbs will be pretty poor and heavily minority. It's really not hard to find exceptions. For Paris, the inner city is very wealthy but there are still quite a few poorer neighborhoods. The eastern suburbs are the poorest part of the country, but by contrast the western suburbs are the wealthiest parts of the country. Nonetheless your understanding is correct because by les banlieues people usually mean the poor ones.

Interesting. One feature of Hamburg that may or may not be unusual - I don't know enough about other cities, in Germany or elsewhere, to judge this - are neighborhoods that were middle- or upper class suburbs back when they were first built back in, I think, the 19th century, and that are now, because of the general growth of the city, inner city neighborhoods, but that somehow managed it to stay middle- or upper class throughout that.

[malloc]

I'm all for people becoming more left wing, but isn't there something dishonest in advocating for the continuation of a global foodgrowing model that'll cause vast amounts of environmental damage simply because the alternative might make more people disagree with one's political ideas?

It's not a matter of disagreement over political ideas but the rights and indeed lives of marginalized people. Bigotry kills people, whether through direct physical violence or exclusion from employment, housing, and healthcare. Even aside from that, it results in worse quality of life: disproportionate poverty, harsher treatment from police and courts, constant expressions of hatred from society at large. You and I are both white cishet men with nothing to fear from the rising onslaught of political reaction, but I know many people who honestly don't expect to survive Trump and other reactionaries.

Now admittedly, I am no expert in ecology or agronomy and have no advice on the best way to organize agriculture. Even so, I feel there must be some alternative to ecological collapse or deurbanizing society. It really surprises me that staunch defenders of AI (itself quite harmful to the environment) are now arguing that we should turn back the clock on technological innovations.

Or in other words, changing people's lifestyle in the hopes that they vote the way we want afterwards... That does not seem reasonable.

Unfortunately the reactionaries don't share your squeamish attitude toward such things. They are aggressively indoctrinating people at every turn while kneecapping public education. Meanwhile we are barely doing anything to push people leftward. Furthermore, I simply don't believe humans are naturally inclined toward tolerance and generosity, no more than they are naturally inclined toward eating healthy. They must be actively taught such things and incentivized to act on them.

[Travis B.]

Or in other words, changing people's lifestyle in the hopes that they vote the way we want afterwards... That does not seem reasonable.

Unfortunately the reactionaries don't share your squeamish attitude toward such things. They are aggressively indoctrinating people at every turn while kneecapping public education. Meanwhile we are barely doing anything to push people leftward. Furthermore, I simply don't believe humans are naturally inclined toward tolerance and generosity, no more than they are naturally inclined toward eating healthy. They must be actively taught such things and incentivized to act on them.

Trump is at his least popular ever. Obviously their indoctrination isn't working.

[Nortaneous]

That's a very correct picture. But farming being kind of miserable job is not an absolute law of nature. There are very concrete reasons why this is so.
The key thing here is that farmers have to sell at extremely low prices, often at a loss. There are several reasons for this:

• Retail and supermarket chains are extremely greedy.
• The global supply chain means farmers have to compete at a global level. That means competition with countries with very different cost of living and labor standards (very close to slavery at times), and sometimes very low standards when it comes to food production.

This is a problem that will have to be solved one way or another, because again, none of this is environmentally sustainable.

Can retail and supermarket chains afford to be greedy? Maybe if they're the only place to buy food within a reasonable range for their customer base, but 80% of Americans live in urban areas. If Safeway charges too much for rice, I can go to Giant, or to the Chinese supermarket, or the Korean one, or the Indian one. Grocery store profit margins are typically very low: 1%, one cent of profit per dollar of product sold, isn't abnormal. If they tried to raise their profit margins by raising costs, people would shop elsewhere - who has brand loyalty to Safeway or Tesco or whoever? The consumers want lower prices. A dollar you spend on rice is a dollar you can't spend on something else.

The weird inscrutable Latinate technocrat priesthood that runs society has not done a very good job of explaining how it works to the uninitiated. This is a legitimate problem, especially in a democracy. But part of the job of a public-facing institution is to bear public backlash to visible problems, whether or not they caused them.

Maybe there are issues of sticky prices in the wake of shortages. If there's an outbreak of chicken flu, eggs become scarcer and prices rise; once egg production returns to normal, customer-facing egg prices could take a while to fall. Ideally this would be studied. Maybe it has been. The grocery chains definitely know each other's prices, but equally definitely wouldn't publish any research they have. (Maybe this is a case for Mamdani's government-run grocery stores?)

It really does surprise me to hear the link between rurality and conservatism disputed. Pretty much everything I have read and heard over the years has emphasized that link, from election results in various countries to my own experiences. If you really do consider the correlation spurious, then what would you say is actually causing it?

People choose where to live.

[rotting bones]

Rich people choose where to live. The only thing I've ever chosen is the flavor of ice cream I want and things like that.

Regarding grocery markups: https://youtu.be/sqEu2cJXSY4

[malloc]

Rich people choose where to live. The only thing I've ever chosen is the flavor of ice cream I want and things like that.

Quite. I have always wanted to move somewhere remotely enlightened but the logistics and expense are simply too much.

[rotting bones]

Anyway, I think that slowly euthanizing capitalism (essentially what Piketty suggests) might get better results in the long run. It worked on the rentiers the first time.

In the past, I have explained at length why I don't think it will work, but I will support it in case it works, especially since no one supports doing the right thing.

Essentially: expropriate the capitalists at once will drain all of your energy, lots of thing will go unadressed, people are unhappy; the conservatives win the next election, everything is privatized back. A wealth tax, or workplace democracy are more dangerous. The conservative government will try to end these of course, but then they will have to deal with institutional inertia.

Just to be clear, my proposal is:

1. Enshrine human rights in the constitution. Uphold the rule of law.

2. Create jobs by popular vote. Expropriate means of production if the people vote for enough essential goods to be produced through the government that the government doesn't have the resources to do it otherwise. Do not expropriate means of production unless necessary. Do not expropriate means of production to let the government produce non-essential goods. The government can produce non-essential goods. It cannot expropriate means of production to do so.

The purpose of this proposal is to free the poor from dependence on the capitalists in various ways: capitalists can't stop creating jobs because line not go up, capitalists can't stop selling essential goods because line not go up, capitalists can't move capital abroad because line not go up, etc.

What it doesn't do is ban buying and selling.

[Ares Land]

Can retail and supermarket chains afford to be greedy? Maybe if they're the only place to buy food within a reasonable range for their customer base, but 80% of Americans live in urban areas. If Safeway charges too much for rice, I can go to Giant, or to the Chinese supermarket, or the Korean one, or the Indian one. Grocery store profit margins are typically very low: 1%, one cent of profit per dollar of product sold, isn't abnormal. If they tried to raise their profit margins by raising costs, people would shop elsewhere - who has brand loyalty to Safeway or Tesco or whoever? The consumers want lower prices. A dollar you spend on rice is a dollar you can't spend on something else.

The weird inscrutable Latinate technocrat priesthood that runs society has not done a very good job of explaining how it works to the uninitiated. This is a legitimate problem, especially in a democracy. But part of the job of a public-facing institution is to bear public backlash to visible problems, whether or not they caused them.

None of this is arcane knowledge -- that's the standard explanation being offered. Over here we have a very media-savvy head of a retail chain; you can hear him state exactly what you explain here on the morning news.

There's obviously something wrong with that story though. The 1% profit is technically true; yet it doesn't make sense. Why would anyone go to the trouble of running a supermarket? Why do the Waltons even bother? You could get better performance out of pretty much any other investment.

So of course the money is made in other ways... One I'm aware of is that stores don't buy directly from producers (it happens, but it's marginal) -- they buy from a group purchasing office, which negotiates with producers, with a margin of course.
Most chains are franchises; it's worth looking into how the store owner pays for that; it's probably also worth looking into who owns the real estate, if stores pay rent, and if they buy, how they fund it.

Anyway... Of course the profit margin is a lot more than 1%.

As for competition, well, we could quibble on some details, but as far as I know what you say is correct. A very interesting example of the market coming with a solution that turns out to cause serious issues further down the line. In that case, pressure to push the price down causing severe economic consequences on key actors, plus of course the environmental damage.

Maybe there are issues of sticky prices in the wake of shortages. If there's an outbreak of chicken flu, eggs become scarcer and prices rise; once egg production returns to normal, customer-facing egg prices could take a while to fall. Ideally this would be studied. Maybe it has been. The grocery chains definitely know each other's prices, but equally definitely wouldn't publish any research they have. (Maybe this is a case for Mamdani's government-run grocery stores?)

True. Your example is also interesting: we have food shortages. This points out to fundamental issues: efficient systems that bring prosperity to all should not create food shortages! And as for the causes -- the severity of asian flu is a direct product of industrial farming.
I take it as a pretty bad sign. I don't remember any shortages in developed countries until recently.

People choose where to live.

Rich people choose where to live. The only thing I've ever chosen is the flavor of ice cream I want and things like that.

I think you're both halfway right. I'd say you begin to have a decent selection of places to live in with a middle-class income; being white also helps. That probably explains a lot in terms of vote and geographical patterns.

The purpose of this proposal is to free the poor from dependence on the capitalists in various ways: capitalists can't stop creating jobs because line not go up, capitalists can't stop selling essential goods because line not go up, capitalists can't move capital abroad because line not go up, etc.

We could quibble all day long on the specifics, but I think we basically agree.

[rotting bones]

The purpose of this proposal is to free the poor from dependence on the capitalists in various ways: capitalists can't stop creating jobs because line not go up, capitalists can't stop selling essential goods because line not go up, capitalists can't move capital abroad because line not go up, etc.

For context: I have tinnitus from growing up in a ghetto.

[Raphael]

This is a problem that will have to be solved one way or another, because again, none of this is environmentally sustainable.

Can retail and supermarket chains afford to be greedy? Maybe if they're the only place to buy food within a reasonable range for their customer base, but 80% of Americans live in urban areas. If Safeway charges too much for rice, I can go to Giant, or to the Chinese supermarket, or the Korean one, or the Indian one. Grocery store profit margins are typically very low: 1%, one cent of profit per dollar of product sold, isn't abnormal. If they tried to raise their profit margins by raising costs, people would shop elsewhere - who has brand loyalty to Safeway or Tesco or whoever? The consumers want lower prices.

That logic only works as long as different businesses are run in different ways. If you get a situation where all the businesses supplying a specific service are run by the same kind of people pulling the same kind of shit, customers who want or need that product don't have the option of switching to a business that doesn't pull that kind of shit.

[zompist]

Can retail and supermarket chains afford to be greedy? Maybe if they're the only place to buy food within a reasonable range for their customer base, but 80% of Americans live in urban areas. If Safeway charges too much for rice, I can go to Giant, or to the Chinese supermarket, or the Korean one, or the Indian one.

That logic only works as long as different businesses are run in different ways. If you get a situation where all the businesses supplying a specific service are run by the same kind of people pulling the same kind of shit, customers who want or need that product don't have the option of switching to a business that doesn't pull that kind of shit.

In the US grocery market, different businesses are run in different ways. E.g., in my area:

Jewel (owned by Albertsons) - the baseline supermarket
Trader Joe's (owned by Aldi Nord) - saves costs by being almost all house brand
Whole Foods (owned by Amazon) - upscale
Pete's - independent Chicago area place, so far as I know
Costco - wholesale prices, mostly because you buy stuff in bulk
Wal-Mart, Target - sell groceries alongside everything else
Sugar Beet - local health-food-oriented co-op
Fresh Thyme - health-food-oriented chain
88 Marketplace - Asian supermarket

These are different strategies: e.g. Jewel focuses on groceries; Wal-Mart can sell groceries as a loss leader to get people in the stores; some sell higher-end products; some emphasize health food.

The thing is, the base cost of entry into the industry isn't that large. If the market leaders (Kroger and Albertsons) twirled their moustaches and raised prices for no reason, it's just not that hard for a new place to gain traction. A few years ago our other major chain closed and most of its locations were bought up— e.g. our local store became a Pete's.

How they all make money, I have no idea. Albertsons seems to grow mostly by mergers and adding stores— it has 2,250 nationwide. Maybe the basic fact is that people need grocery stores, so if Albertsons sold all its stores and went into blockchain instead, someone would buy and operate those stores. There's money to be made, just not huge profits.

[zompist]

I'd also add— if a corporate raider came in and wanted to sell all the stores... well, these days, who wants a big box store except another supermarket? Big retail stores are losing money or going out of business; we still have big empty buildings where the big retailers were, and this is a relatively upmarket suburb. You can't build a factory there, it's zoned commercial and no one wants to build factories anyway. I suppose you could tear the box down and build houses, but then you've decreased their value because no supermarket is in walking distance.

[jcb]

I suppose you could tear the box down and build houses, but then you've decreased their value because no supermarket is in walking distance.

I doubt that they (both the buyers and the sellers) account for this, at least in my neck of the woods. After all, my city keeps getting whole new megablocks of expensive suburban housing where *nothing* is within walking distance, and all the houses still sell anyways.

[jcb]

The thing is, if you bracket off a class of jobs as shitty, only for young people who won't be in it for long, you pretty much remove any motivation to upgrade it, automate it, or even take it seriously. They won't be done well and yet they'll be done the same way forever. Who's going to design a sewer maintenance machine if there is a new class of noobs assigned to do it every year?

I don't think the perpetual noobness of the workers matters. The American South resisted mechanization for years because they had slaves, who weren't going anywhere, after all.

The problem is with the categorization of jobs into "shitty" and "good". The idea of some jobs being undeserving of respect (AKA "shitty") creates it's own incentive to just dehumanize the people that do work those jobs, as a way to retroactively justify why they're treated so poorly. This manifests in many forms, such as: "They live with their parents, so they don't need that much money, so it's alright for me to underpay them." or "They are genetically inferior subhumans, so it's alright for me to enslave them." or "This job doesn't even require a college degree, so it can't be that important, so it's alright for me to underpay them.".