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I feel compelled to repost a comment I've posted before, so here goes:

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Thinkpieces lately have had a trend of reaching harder and harder to link the news de jour to a higher, abstract concepts....The result feels hystrionic to me... it is just designed to raise the excitement for people in the correct echo chamber. By calling on increasingly abstract concepts the author can reign in an appeal to authority and emotion that has more appeal than actual facts and statistics.

The author, and his inward-looking media peers, are all drinking eachother's Kool-Aid a bit too much. It's like some sort of outrage porn that keeps getting remixed over and over again, and becoming some sort of fractal version of itself.

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This particular article is strange in the fact even though it presents a bunch of statistics, it doesn't use them well to advance a cohesive argument- it mostly just goes on to state that everything sucks. It just throws spaghetti at the wall, to see what sticks in the mind of the reader, and anything that doesn't stick is hoped to be given a fair pass. This is the sort of divisive thinking that does little to solve problems, because it is so engulfed in the turbulence of pessimistic rage that it cannot correctly identify just what the problem is, if it exists.

As someone who has worked for several corporations and startups over the past decade, the problem of corporate monopolies is very obvious to me so I don't need to see any third party academic references; I've seen first hand how inefficient and wasteful corporations are and how they keep extracting free money out of the system using government regulations, vendor lock-ins and and media monopolies to lock out competition.

This article resonates with me on many different levels and it references ideas that are as obvious to me as the theory of gravity.

Besides, the current economic system is not founded on rigorous science; so we should not need to resort to scientific proof to point out its many flaws. Social consensus is enough.

Also, academic studies require funding; no corporation would fund research which could potentially work against their own interests.

It took many decades to collect funding to do the research which linked smoking and cancer... And that was comparatively easy because at least rich people get cancer too.

Here we have a disease which is caused by the rich and which only infects the poor... I don't see how such research will ever get funded.

This is a great analysis, thanks for saving me some time :) I've noticed this pattern too.

You should write a pithy blog post and link it in response to these types of articles.

I've thought of doing that for posts on HN that are preaching some technology without showing what the author did with it.

In other words, I want to see what you did; I don't care what you say. I ignore "advice"; it often seems to come from someone trying to be a "thought leader".

If you show me what you did, then I can decide if that approach is worth emulating.

Maybe I should call it "Against Histrionic Journalism".

To explore your thread of thought a bit, and a bit of my own tangent...

Thinkpieces with actionable advice, advocacy of personal economic virtue, or related personal anecdotes, by their nature of advocating for pragmatically solving your own problems, have very conservative-appearing optics in today's political landscape. As such, they are extremely taboo within the same social circle as that of the article above, and taboo at large in many circles. I wish that such pieces were more popular, because I feel that they could reduce the cynicism of our zeitgeist, which is a leading problem in online media. The optics are too poor, though. And I suppose they don't make for a lot of click-driven ad revenue.

In my reading of the news, in the long run, I want to be able to develop a feeling for how the world is comparatively changing over time, and to plan and make decisions based off of this. Even in the absense of articles that prescriptively tell you things that are good to do, fact-based, comparison-driven reporting of change in the world should not be laden with histrionic shouting.

When we only read this histrionic shouting, perception becomes reality. Cynicism becomes emotional mailaise, and makes the world less dignified. If the book "Enlightenment Now" has even a speck of truth in it, the momentum of the world is a tremendous lot more positive than the zeitgeist feels it to be. The challenge is to change the zeitgeist.

Is such histrionic journalism a byproduct of the current cultural infatuation of "victimization"? Living in a Golden Era doesn't fit the narrative.
I think that we aren't exactly in a Golden Era, mostly due to a strong perception of middle class economic stagnation. This is regardless of the fact that material conditions around the world are improving very quickly. I think the victimization infatuation is just one of the symptoms of economic anxiety. The "Elephant Curve" (ref. enlightenment now, or googlable) has more explanatory power for middle class economic stagnation than anything else. If you are rich, things are great. If you are first world middle class, the amount of economic stagnation you've seen over the last decade or so probably provides a lot of anxiety. If you are living in a third world country, things are booming. This boom is fueled by geographic arbitrage of wages that in turn leads to the economic stagnation of the first world middle class. These middle class folks are paying a not-too-terrible price to pay in order to raise billions of people from extreme poverty. In net, it's an extremely good thing.

But for the middle class at large, a lot of self-percieved human happiness is determined by the hedonic treadmill. If things aren't showing constantly material improvement, the feel like they are gettting worse, because humans are insatiable without progress. At an individual level, mindfulness and stoicism can help you get off the hedonic treadmill. At a societal level, the zeitgeist will become very anxious when this stagnation occurs, and if you let this zeitgeist infect you, you risk becoming cynical, depressed, and developing a victim mentality.

>Thinkpieces lately have had a trend of reaching harder and harder to link the news de jour to a higher, abstract concepts

Is that not what a 'think piece' is?

However I agree with your observation of the general trend, with news in general, and would attribute it to the commodification of raw, unfiltered info. For many types of news, we don't have to watch the news at 10 anymore - the primary sources are available to everyone. Every political speech, every citizen recording of police brutality, every draft legislation - it's all on the internet. Intelligent analysis is the scarce resource that's in demand.

With a "think piece", one would hope for serious thought as opposed to pure id.
Still, these are true facts which need some explanation, and no simple explanation will do, so we do have a need of deep analysis:

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The mood in America is arguably as dark as it has ever been in the modern era. The birthrate is at a record low, and the suicide rate is at a 30-year high; mass shootings and opioid overdoses are ubiquitous.

The mood in America is arguably as dark as it has ever been in the modern era.

That requires some evidence. Is the mood in the US darker than at the peak of the 1930's depression? After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor? During the 1960's race riots?

I'd say all of those were a darker time for the US than now.

They were objectively darker times. Was the mood as dark, though? Or were people more optimistic even though the circumstances were worse?

I don't know the answer, by the way - I don't go back far enough. But I think the question is interesting.

> It's like some sort of outrage porn that keeps getting remixed over and over again, and becoming some sort of fractal version of itself.

This is such a good description of the problem. Right now it feels like people are angry about being angry, and the mood seems to me somewhat detached from the reality around us. By historical standards things right now are not that bad, but a lot of people act like we’re living through the apocalypse.

My personal take is that this is the natural product of the social media / hyper media era. It’s easy to make a lot of money making people angry (“outrage porn”), but there’s no money in calming people down. I wish that weren’t the case.

This is true, but it’s also true (if you are American, at least) that we’re living through a major upheaval in our governing institutions. So another way of reading this outrage is that when your president is permitted to do outrageous things daily, to collude with a foreign power to meddle in our elections, to defend that power on the international stage, and to help his family profit by that power... well, you may start to feel a little panicked, outraged, or out of control.

The norms of democracy are starting to show their weaknesses. The assumed reasonable limits have proven themselves to have never been there. And it comes with a bizarre dissonance because locally speaking you may be doing just fine, stock market is up, etc. etc. That atmosphere also creates a kind of helpless anger that goes looking for targets and attention. It’s almost an existential coping mechanism, I think.

> The assumed reasonable limits have proven themselves to have never been there.

I think that's going too far. They were there. And then, over succeeding presidents of both parties, they were a little less there. And then, with this president, suddenly "reasonable limits" was a totally foreign concept.

But the reasonable limits were there, and really did limit behavior.

We are living through the apocaypse! We aren't totally triumphant over The Other Side like we should be!
I think the central premise is that faith in the American Dream is dying. I think its goal is to appeal to emotion, and it clearly succeed at it.

Perhaps you yourself would be more persuaded by facts and figures, but that's a personal preference thing. Regardless, when I've looked at the figures, I think they agree with the author (concentration of wealth in the .1%, affordability of a house for median-income individual, affordability of college)

This is basically what conspiracy theories (and theorists) do. They make connections between things and then pin that connection on whatever their conspiracy is about. Find a new topic of concern for your intended audience/echo chamber and repeat.

Leader of X country is related to leader of Y country. This is evidence of a back room secret cabal, a nepotistic dynasty stretching all the way back to the [American revolution, English Monarchy, time of Christ, Catholic church]. Now that we've cleared up that bit of history it's clear to see that the current situation is designed to [undermine, enslave, confuse, take over, destroy, conceal] the fact that [popular news item, pop culture figure, first world leader, common everyman problem] is actually a secret ... bah I'm tired of this, you get the point.

It seems like it’s just sensationalism repackaged under disguise for educated masses.
Having graduated in 2008 and being totally unable to find employment in education with a STEM degree, it's not totally sensational to me to say that I spent several years with extremely low earnings as a result of having to take any job that would hire me. There's probably $250,000 of lifetime earnings that I've lost so far because I graduated a year too late. And the things I had to do at that point to survive have made me extremely cautious about building up a safety net and not taking on debt.

For reference, school districts in my area were not hiring mathematics teachers. I had to take a job clerking in a warehouse for a technology company, and I spent the next 4 years working my way over to their engineering team. I was incredibly lucky, and I suspect there are a ton of people in my cohort who are still severely underemployed.

So no, it's not total sensationalism. It's just not rigorously scientific, which is not the same thing.

I got laid off in '08 when the market crashed. I looked everywhere in SV for jobs and had a solid resume, experience and education but hiring was frozen. To pay the bills I was forced to start my own business which ended up being very successful.

I know my experience was a vast outlier from the norm and how seriously the downturn affected mass amounts of people. But the downturn left me no choice but the option I had been too scared to pick before: being an entrepreneur.

In a successful economy I would have happily sat in my 5-figure job for years. The downturn helped motivate me like I never had been before. When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose.

Yeah, and I was willing to take jobs that I would never have considered in the past. I labored for a production framing contractor, lumped boxes in a receiving warehouse on swing shift, and all kinds of other stuff to make ends meet. If I had been at all inflexible about that stuff I would have been totally screwed.

I didn't have much of a resume to speak of, and I had no real professional network except in the education field.

I'm right there with you even with different experiences. When you have nothing to lose you can do anything at all.

Not that it detracts from everything else you said, but graduating a year earlier likely wouldn't have made much of a difference.
or later for that matter.
> education with a STEM degree, > There's probably $250,000 of lifetime earnings that I've lost so far because I graduated a year too late.

Curious which degree that jobs vanished after crash. quants?

Frankly, I can barely tell the difference between pre-2008 and post-2008. It's nothing compared to the Great Recession, just look at some archival footage of the time.

Also, the blame is once again put on "corporations" and "wall street gangsters" instead of the failed government policy that caused it (and continues to cause it).

How could Millennials be some massively in debt? Price inflation of higher education caused by government-forced loans backed by fantasy money. Literally the same reason why the housing bubble became a bubble in the first place. And the government gets away with it by blaming those "evil corporations" for taking all that money that was presented on them on a platter.

How could so many people die from opiate overdoses? A government that allows opiates for doctors to prescribe, but then bans those same doctors from prescribing them for the resulting addicts, turning them to black-market.

It was the government that created a health insurance system that doesn't make sense and continues to not make sense under both republican and democratic administration.

Lastly, upward mobility is hampered by preventing the rural population to move to cities that have become unaffordable because of zoning laws and taxes.

Blame the damned government, at least a little bit.

Lobbying. Even though lobbying is not the only factor explaining why government made such policies, it is an important factor that should not be dismissed. And since corporations have much more resources than NGOs and such to do lobbying, it is fair to put part of the blame on them for pushing policies that make them more powerful.
Everybody is lobbying for their interest, not just corporations. Corporations may finance a party, but they're not casting the votes. There's an endless number of special interest groups, large and small, corporate or public.

If a government is so vulnerable to lobbying, that's still a government failure, it's not the failure of those trying to defend their interest.

Remember that "the government" is not an independent entity. It gets elected by the people and influenced by special interests. So the blame should go to voters and the people who are influencing the government.
If the average voter buys into the government narrative of out-of-control private enterprise and the requirement of all these regulations, that's the government influencing the people. The government in itself is a special interest group.

When the media (such as in this piece) perpetuates that same narrative, are they defending their special interest? Seems more like ignorance to me.

> Median household wealth collapsed. > 2007: $126k > 2016: $97k

> The number of Americans worried about the economy multiplied nearly sixfold. > 2007: 16 percent > 2008: 86 percent

> The market value of all publicly traded companies was cut > in half. > October 2007: $63 trillion > March 2009: $28.6 trillion

These numbers are all over the place first stat is comparing 2007 to 2016 while the very next stat is comparing 2007 to 2008 and the next one is comparing 2007 to 2009.

I can't make any sense of those numbers how were those particular years selected for comparison for a particular stat( whats so special about mar 2009) .

I haven't read the article, but I saw your question - I believe March 2009 was the low point for the market index.

At least, I remember saying to myself, "Self, you should totally find a way to come up with cash and dump it in the market right now!" Of course, I did not. But I was right. Of course, ideas are worthless without execution...

When GE went to $6/share, I knew it was massively undervalued. I thought about borrowing money to buy shares. I would have easily tripled my money in the next year or two, but I lacked the courage to do it in that economic climate.

Buffet's maxim: "Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful." But I was too fearful to be greedy...

Yea I think article should have been called

* worst things that happened in last 10 yrs after crash*

not

* still living *

Because markets are not still at mar 2009 level.

What an idiotic article.

It's just doing the standard low effort scarestory stats trick. Here are some really big numbers picked entirely for visual impact, not because relevant.
Trump derangement syndrome