I’ve been coming to think that the following hypothesis may be true:

Increasingly, US citizens are concluding that society is really F’d up, but the reasons are subtle, hidden and complex. So each group picks their favorite simple enemy to blame. Problems go unfixed.

[THREAD]

1. This helps explain Trump’s election. Many rural Republicans and disaffected independents believed society was going down the tubes. They didn’t think that electing the same people (who would use the same old solutions) would fix it.

2. Covid exposed malfunctions at the FDA, Surgeon General and CDC, leading to a disappointing response. Liberals blame Trump for these failures, which may be fair, but another possibility is that these American institutions have been rotting for longer. I don’t know enough to say

3. Costs for health care, education, housing, infrastructure projects, and energy ($ per kWh) have (as far as I can tell?) been rising for a long time, with debates raging over the (surely complex) causes. Meanwhile, many argue that wages have stagnated and inequality increased.

4. An appalling number of people end up in jails and prisons in the US.

5. Student debt is totally out of control.

6. People don’t have adequate savings, and a disturbing number say they don’t have $500 to immediately cover a surprise expense with cash.

7. There is a huge racial wealth gap (even more so than an income gap I believe), contributing significantly to poorer quality of life for Black Americans.

8. Trump blames US problems on immigration, China, and the left. The left blames Trump, Wall Street, the right, and (sometimes) capitalism. Yang points to automation and globalization. The BLM movement points to racism and police violence.

9. @EricRWeinstein’s the Portal podcast, which seeks to give explanations about what the hell has gone wrong, rises extremely rapidly to popularity (its theories are quite interesting, in my opinion).

10. What seems to me to be the case: many of the explanations by different groups have truth in them, but they are pointing only at a part of the greater problem. Many of the biggest issues in society are simply not being addressed, and their root causes go largely undiscussed.

11. To solve complex problems we have to know what’s true. To know what’s true we need to resist political bias and avoid overly simplistic (yet appealing) explanations. To fix society we must unearth the (hard to spot) root causes, and cooperate to implement reasonable solutions