In the first 45 minutes, Mark Blyth explains why were are going through global turmoil. The rest are solutions I disagree with because they will add to the unrest.
Long story short, the transition to a global economy and the internet age was poorly managed due to destructive interventions (as is the result of central planning). This caused resentment amongst different classes.
Here in America, The middle and upper classes over the past two generations crafted tax, drug, and immigration laws that allowed them to build McMansions while sending the lower economic classes to prison and limiting market access. Only in the last decade has an effort been made to reform education (which was led by Conservatives) to correct this imbalance. As families were destroyed and policing became more militarized, resentment grew in communities of color and low-income white areas.
Meanwhile, millennials were told, as I was, in high school by guidance counselors that they’d have no problem finding a job upon graduation from college with a salary of $60K a year. We graduated high school in the middle of the 2002 recession. We graduated from college in the middle of the 2008 recession. We entered our peak earning years in the middle of the COVID-19 downturn. Millennials have limited upward mobility because Boomers cannot or will not retire as the cost of living goes up, and medical advancements have people living longer.
So you have a highly educated millennial generation that grew up in wealth and are unable to recreate the lifestyle their parents had due to the higher cost of living and a lack of employment opportunities. (Look up the 1830 revolution in France for a parallel.) They’re saddled with massive student debt they can’t repay. You have some communities of color or economically disadvantaged people that have an even harder time accessing job markets for a myriad of reasons. They can include poorer education, criminal records, a lack of knowledge on things like applying to college or filling out resumes, troubled home lives, and other terrible outcomes from the Drug War and 80/90s Crime Bill policies.
The comfortable are now faced with the consequences of their political choices since the 1970s by these groups uniting to change the system they see as oppressive and the cause of their misery.
The left rightly blames those bad policies. The right rightly blames the elites that deny they’ve been massively wrong for 50 years. Those elites don’t want those two groups uniting against them, so politicians pit everyone against each other.
We have to focus on the root: Bad economic, foreign, and domestic policies that led to alienation, division, and poverty. If the voter didn’t ask the politician to overlegislate, the cop wouldn’t have so many interactions with the public, Blake doesn’t get shot, unrest doesn’t happen, Kenosha shooter never goes on the streets, and two people live. We have to stop arguing over step five in this process.
This talk is a start to the origins of unrest.
