A frustrating thing about the discourse in with this specific song is that the gripe appalachian populists have with welfare programs is generally not with food stamps, but with social security disability payments. Upwards of 25% of some Appalachian counties are on SSDI getting ~600/month. High school kids have 2 paths “get a job” or “get checks”, and there is a lot of legitimate derision of the abuse of disability income in Appalachia.
My girlfriend is disabled (Ehler-Danlos Syndrome, pots, fiber myalgia, ????), and she knows all these horror stories about the hoops some disabled folks have to jump through for many years just to get some meager help and it kills some of them. I'd rather more people abuse the system if it means less suffering hassle red tape etc.
Im not saying the system shouldn’t exist. The issue is that in some places in appalachia, there is a culture of whole families fraudulently obtaining disability and doctors are fraudulently declaring people are disabled when they aren’t.
"The issue is that in some places in appalachia, there is a culture of whole families fraudulently obtaining disability and doctors are fraudulently declaring people are disabled when they aren’t."
Investigate, prosecute, and jail. The Sacklers were at the heart of this type of conspiracy for opioids in Appalachia and elsewhere. They were able to negotiate an immunity agreement against prosecution in exchange for money (a judge has put a stop order on that).
The US has gotten too soft on white collar crime while jailing too many poor people for nickel-and-dime crimes. It is good to see that they are aggressively prosecuting the PPP fraud now from the Covid dumping of money from helicopters. But they should also be aggressively prosecuting Medicare and disability insurance fraud.
Well-off people now assume they can do what they want with impunity (other than running Ponzi schemes). That needs to change.
There's also the benefits cliff issue. You get a couple trial work periods and you lose your benefits. You save a few thousand dollars and you lose your benefits. You get married and you lose your benefits. My wife has MILD-CP and was on disability since childhood. Fortunately she has worked part time in a library for a long time and is most of the way through her MLS degree. Getting off benefits to work at a 7/11 would be a terrifying and possibly ruinous decision.
"That’s…not a lot. It’s important for the professional-managerial class types who read blogs like this one to remember that that’s the kind of income the average American lives on."
/me makes about the same amount, looks around, wonders how many other readers are evidently not in my shoes.
I make 100k a year, and I support two kids and a stay-at-home mom on that income. I pay very little in tax. All my siblings and in laws are teachers and small town journalists and truckers and such, and most of them have families while making far less and not paying much less tax. The level of entitlement I see from my coworkers who have household incomes two or three times mine is just galling. You see people with household incomes in excess of 400k saying "It really is just hard to get ahead these days..." And there are *millions* of people like this.
Completely endorse your comment but... my strong sense is that for most of us, "rich" means "a lot more than I've got". Kind of like a race, whether in track or for a pennant - unless you're in the lead you focus on the people in front of you.
My favorite examples, torn from the front pages of politics, are:
1 - Hillary Clinton. What's a $100 million net worth when so many of your friends have private jets and multiple palatial estates (which they are happy to lend to you)? The price range for a new Gulfstream is $20 - $70 million. Folks with a mere $100 mil are flying first class, cadging from friends, or (I suppose) buying used. From her futures trading days, through Whitewater, and onto her Goldman Sachs speeches Hillary has always wanted more.
2 - Sheldon Adelson. The late Mr. Adelson was a real estate developer with a net worth aroud $30 - $40 billion. In many years he'd donate over $100 million to Republican Party candidates and causes. A mere billionaire like Tom Steyer probably believes he can't afford to buy that level of political sway and is hopelessly outgunned.
I think Adelson felt rich but he made rich people feel poor.
Well the 400 highest income American tax payers who according to “some economists” (I understand the reluctance to name Saez and Zucman) pay only 24% tax (if you fraudulently include the enterprise income of the stocks they own as income to make your desired number) don`t read your blog, but I do and my income is well above median but my taxes are never less than 40% of my income. The song is pretty dumbed down, but I think many of the statistics you use are also pretty simplistic.
I live in a third world country so my knee jerk reaction to these kinds of posts (and similar ones from the left that you see on places like /r/antiwork) is that Americans sure are a bunch of entitled whiners despite being the richest group of people in the history of the world.
I usually try to get past that knee jerk reaction since it isn't especially useful but still.....
I'm from a developing country too, but I've lived in the US for a while now. Still, the thought frequently crosses my mind: dang, these Americans have no idea how good they have it, what are they complaining about?
But then if you think about it some more: is it so bad to want your situation to be better? And sure, Americans have a lot materially, but they have pretty severe problems with mental health, loneliness, addiction, and suicide, that are much less severe in developing countries with richer, thicker family and social networks. At the end of the day we derive true joy and fulfillment from hope and love and connection, not material things.
One more thing it's hard to appreciate until you live here is how much disdain the educated middle class has for the working class, and how little empathy. In developing countries the rich feel sorry for the poor, and there is occasionally a sense of noblesse oblige. Not here. That disrespect is really corrosive. Sometimes it's obvious, like Hillary Clinton's "deplorables" line. Sometimes it's subtle and unintentional, like Noah Smith here admitting he'd never heard of a fudge round till he googled it for this post, thereby signaling that he is not the sort of person who eats cheap unhealthy convenience store pastries.
Imagine knowing that not only do you have less materially than a lot of people in your country, but that those same people look down on you for it, rather than just attributing it to fate or karma. Imagine living your whole life that way.
Good art speaks emotional truth, not necessarily objective or statistical truth.
I'm an American and have lived my whole life here, but I used to travel extensively for work, much of the time to countries in Asia, and the difference between the "have" and the "have nots" was shocking. I've seen people living in conditions that would be unfathomable here in the U.S. In South America, especially in big cities like Sao Paolo, it was even worse. Are there middle-to-upper class Americans that lack empathy for the working class? Sure. Does the current crop of billionaires lack the noblesse oblige of the ultra wealthy from past gilded eras? Yes. But if anything, the educated and well off in America are infatuated by the working class. This is why we're routinely subjected to the ultra-elite, like Clarence Thomas, contorting themselves to show their working class bonafides while flying around on private jets owned by billionaires. Its why we have Silicon Valley billionaires funding right wing populist politicians like JD Vance. Its why in the Fox News interview with Oliver Anthony - who does appear to be a genuinely good guy, BTW - you mostly see people with $200 sunglasses and $1100 iPhones, singing along to his working class anthems in front of a parking lot filled with $80K pickup trucks and SUVs. To the extent that Americans have disdain for the working class, it is because they go to great efforts to convince themselves and others that they are part of the working class, which results in pandering to them rather than addressing their actual needs. I'll also add that many Americans who escape their lower class roots - my Mom was one of them - find this romanization of working class America to be perplexing. My mother wasn't ashamed of her background at all, but she was also honest about how difficult it often was. She died many years ago, but I have not doubt she'd find the fetishization of the working class and the populist politics that accompany it today to be shallow and superficial.
For reference, as a Canadian I earn about the equivalent ($40k CAD) and rent for my one bedroom apartment costs just over $11k/yr... and I'm lucky to pay that little, as the average in my city is nearly $17k/yr now. Power/water/phone add another $3k/yr.
Purchasing power parity is a cruel mistress.
(edited to add:) My effective tax rate is also roughly the same, with an at-source deduction of roughly 24%.
1) I misread the figure as $36k for some reason; I blame lack of coffee and and whatever virus (hopefully not COVID) is haunting my throat.
2) Yes, though I'm above the threshold for dental care as a single male with work-provided coverage.
3) Higher sales tax, yes, but the carbon tax is rebated. I actually make a modest profit off the rebates as my consumption emits much less CO2 than the average citizen here. (Intended function, to encourage reduction of heavy carbon emitting goods & services.)
All of which, however true, is aside from my intended point that one cannot directly compare US incomes to those of developing nations due to PPP discrepancies.
The problem with that thinking is that relatively speaking, the US is an expensive place to live. So even if the average American makes more than someone in a country harmed by colonization, they also pay many times more for food, for rent, for clothes. They have to drive most places.
I don’t care for Oliver or his stupid song, but the problem for many Americans is not that they are entitled. It’s that they’re barely getting by.
In 2006 I graduated making 32k. Before gas spiked it was around $1.80, I could get a hamburger, drink and fries for around $4 and I rented a place with two other people and was paying $1,200 per month. It was tough but I still had a small amount to invest on top of student loan payments. That same 32k/36k is significantly less in 2023 dollars than 2006 dollars. You can do the calculation to back out the CPI and download CPI rates from yahoo finance. It's a big difference.
The point being when you graduated and where you lived matter a hell of a lot towards how much 36k is.
Yeah - I also make the same amount and I'm from a PMC background. 'Course, I'm a new college graduate and have a much cushier job than factory worker, but on the other hand I'm in one of the highest cost of living areas in the US.
"real erosion in purchasing power that people in his social class have experienced in recent years."
Given the adulation of wealth in this country, this alone would be enough to drive the average man who's trying to support a family crazy. I'm not surprised that many would think, “I'm worthless. and I'm getting more worthless.”
"It’s important for the professional-managerial class types who read blogs like this one to remember that that’s the kind of income the average American lives on."
Ya don't say??!!!
BTW, Food stamps are great, and I wouldn't mind if they couldn't be used for unhealthy snacks like soda, sugar, and chips.
I wonder how much of the obesity problem in the United States (and to a lesser extent in the rest of the Western world) is the result of car dependency (especially if people are forced to be idle as they sit in traffic jams) and/or of addictive processed foods?
Don’t forget the “You don’t tell me what to do!” Authority is universally annoying, whether it’s due to subject matter, workplace/family role, or legal/administrative policy - it’s an insane trigger in American culture, where most people seem to enjoy presuming authority is always corrupt. America has a range of cultures with a perpetual-adolescence problem, and food and diet is prominent as one of its many deflections. Look at the avocado toast debacle. Fangs and claws come out when you make sensible suggestions that maybe you don’t need to do X if you want to later do Y.
I'm genuinely confused what you mean by the avocado toast debacle. Wasn't that mainly that some politician said avocado toast was the reason millennials were poor, when the reality was that they were poor because they had both bad jobs and lived in expensive cities, and avocado toast really had nothing to do with it?
editing to note that I don't personally like avocado toast and am not here to defend it
You've got the gist of it. The "avocado toast" guy wasn't a politician but some real estate businessman in Australia who wrote an opinion piece and became a Twitter Main Character because of it. And deservedly so.
It was the rankest example of splaining imaginable. It was smug, condescending, tone deaf and snarky. The world was made stupider for him having written it.
The refusal to forego luxuries-as-necessities (dining out is always a luxury, only a necessity if your workplace makes such lunches the way to get ahead) to explain away (i.e. excuse yourself) from saving 10-15% of your paycheque. Only by having such savings enables you the security to make job choices and ultimately gather your down payment for housing. And you do have to skip out on several esteem endeavours (weekend trips, living in the “right” neighbourhood) to do so as well, and so this feels painful when your friends are all doing it and may sideline you for foregoing it. So many choices, but they are choices.
Right, but I’m pretty sure it’s been clearly established that this generation is actually like every other generation with regard to luxuries. The idea that young people are eating a bunch of avocado toast rather than save in comparison to other generations is actually nonsense
Any argument taken to any logical conclusion is nonsense. This is why arguing on the Internet is a silly waste of time I should be spending on more personable pursuits. All I can say is I have an ability to avoid the marshmallow, and it has had social costs, but taking care of that 10-15% is Don’t Make Excuses territory regardless of employed circumstances
Oh they’re equally guilty. Both types as individuals and small cohorts can’t contain their emotions and see that _they’re_ the problem, it’s always everybody else (Leftist-libertarians, who are basically “my beliefs are correct [politically truthy, but a dubious claim] so I can do what I want,” are all “it’s not my consumption that’s driving the global problems, so until we collectively make changes, why should I constrain myself!”). Meanwhile the centrists abide/hang on for dear life while putting up with this nonsense
Obesity rates in Europe are lower than in North America, but Europe (and the Middle East) are still much closer to North America in that respect than to East Asia.
Your comment on sugary drinks though does remind me of the claim that Coca-Cola created Mexico's obesity crisis pretty much single-handedly!
You can’t just say that and not link to the research. I’m not aware of any study that has successfully separated activity from diet in any conclusive fashion
"Nothing to do with level of physical activity" seems suspicious. If true, this would invalidate what we understand about kinesiology, nutrition and metabolism.
1. It's good manners to link studies one is referencing
2. Given that thermodynamics is real, I highly doubt it has nothing to do with physical activity. What I can believe is, however, that if the sample is all sedentary people, or people whose physical activity is all incidental, then it might not explain much *in the sample*. It's like saying IT skills have no effect on wages based on a study from the 80s!
Try to do a causal study, or just expand the sample to non-Americans, and the effect will probably show up, bc it cannot not exist, it's basic physics
Who decides what is or isn't unhealthy? I'd rather a bonus for healthy food than a penalty for unhealthy food. Probably simplest thing to do would be make all fruits ⅓ off and all vegetables ½ off when using food stamps. And even this has nuance like which fruit juices count (some are incredibly unhealthy and dont even contain any juice) or whether all salads count or baked potatoes, etc.
I just want them to stop charging so much for broccolini lol
Indeed--you actually start to see health go down in populations that lose access to highly processed food due to US regulations requiring that such food be fortified with all kinds of essential vitamins and minerals. Not having enough of those will also do bad things to you, some of which can have similar or more immediately worse effects than obesity. The tradeoff here between intense sugar/carbs and access to vital nutrients is not a good one and we need to get to work on BOTH expanding access to fresh fruits and veggies AND making better, less fattening but also highly nutritious processed foods that are cheap and shelf-stable so they can be found in food deserts.
Yeah, could pretty easily just exclude foods where x% of calories come from added sugars, etc. The list wouldn’t be perfect and would be gamed, but even that might not be terrible if that means cereal makers cut back on added sugar, less soda consumption, etc.
There are certainly debates to be had, and individual variation due to allergies and stuff, but on the whole, this isn't rocket science. Fresh fruit and vegetables, whole grains, legumes, lean protein, a modest amount of plant-based fats, nuts and seeds = healthy. Candy, chips, sugary drinks, deep-fried stuff, highly refined carbs, animal fat = unhealthy. This is common knowledge, not some kind of mystery.
It may be common knowledge, but it is also completely hogwash. Look up actual RCTs, not correlation studies, on the relation between animal fat consumption and endocrine morbidities and/or overall mortality. Steak is a health food, and chips are at least better than eg. white rice and potatoes, both of which have a higher glycemic index than pure sucrose.
Healthy foods:
- Meat, especially organ meat
- Carrots for their Vitamin A
- Leafy vegetables like broccoli, spinach, etc
- Low-fructose, fibrous fruits like oranges
Unhealthy foods:
- Most starchy vegetables and grains
- Whole grains in particular due to lignin, lectins, and phytic acid
- Anything with a high glycemic load, especially sugary drinks
- Polyunsaturated fatty acids
Nuts vary wildly from very healthy to very unhealthy, peanuts being an example of the latter.
Ditto, I wish broccolini was cheaper, but then again, try to grow it and you’ll find they deserve that money. (I can’t grow anything to feed myself, just my rabbits!) And I just can’t stay on board with “cheap food” because we already ran that into the ground, maybe it was too cheap. Of course leftists were all mad when the Republicans rewrote SNAP so that you couldn’t get ready-made canned/frozen goods and pre-sliced and pre-grated cheese, but I’m totally down with that. Convenience foods cost more, teach nothing about capacity for thrift and skill (home economics), and they’ve helped blow up the costs of groceries with the trade-off that food processing provides employment. But (and this is my hobby horse) the expansion of food processing also grinds down what farmers get, and I will always be on the side of the small and/or ecological farmer (you don’t have to be small to be ecological, and for ecology’s sake it can help to be big).
Jane, I'll punch back at the GOP rewriting the SNAP laws. With GOP policy, The Cruelty Is The Point and once you see it you notice it everywhere.
Hoary notions of "thrift" and "home economics" are after-the-fact codpieces that can be set aside because they create the illusion of an idea to be debated earnestly. Debating gives life to a lie.
You know who need convenience foods? POORS! They are after all working, and multiple jobs to boot, to maintain their SNAP benefits. This doesn't even go into how their household situation is like and what dysfunction may be present to even get their heads right into nostrums like thrift and home economics.
Ever cook? Do you know how much time goes not only into the heating of food, but also the preparation and cleanup of it? Oh, and by taking away "convenience" of food ready to cook, you're forcing poors to buy kitchen equipment and utensils that cannot be paid for with SNAP benefits and imposing a time penalty on food preparation. There's also a knock-on psychological penalty to the time penalty of cooking -- the lived experience of cooking becomes miserable and poors will go out of their way to avoid it and stretch their benefits to more costly options like eating out or processed foods not banned under the new terms.
Let's also put the racism ball in play. In Iowa, one of the places that did implement SNAP restrictions, made ineligible several food items that are staples in the Latino households of an overwhelmingly White state: tortillas, beans, shredded cheese, etc. It's a small, mostly immigrant, low-visibility underclass in the state to prop-up a low-value agricultural sector with little opportunity for social mobility and advancement. The policy is tailor-made to starve people of the very nutrients they need for a physically intensive job, and there's no "color-blind" justification to warrant such a draconian rollback of benefits.
As someone who cooks every day, has a grocery bill and recycling bin half the size of what you (probably) waste (and not being American, makes less money than you), I’m finding your pearl clutching patronizing: Do you really think poor people don’t have, are unwilling to get, and unable to pick up and use (as if most of them don’t already) the equipment and skills for basic cooking, and roll with it? That poor people must necessarily be so dysfunctional that the “lived experience of cooking” is something to avoid? You ever consider that maybe the “racist” policy is trying now to intervene at an earlier stage for a the latest set of beneficiaries, before the deskilling takes place (don’t tell me Latinos don’t know how to cook, they surely do!) that the previous generation of policies couldn’t have seen coming for its recipients (who are now the “deplorables,” by the way, and so if you’re catching them too, you’re benefiting them by accident).
I just find this stance (firstly, to be from someone who doesn’t cook much!) to be clever but unrealistic, and a rather patronizing set of luxury beliefs— and you’re arguing that people who can’t afford to have these luxury beliefs ought to be entitled to them. Which is different than saying that in some cases, regardless of all factors, that’s the way that week panned out for someone. No, that things happen doesn’t make them an acceptable par for a month or for a life. To treat it as so is derisory. And I cannot get behind any litany that teaches derision of what’s basically good habits as being too much to expect, that the state has no role even within K-12 to educate its people, but instead should just dole out. The poor see the inefficiencies and waste in doling out, and it pisses them off to no end, too. Policy absolutely has a role in buttressing, rather than defunding, individuals’ capacities for self- and collaborative help.
OTOH, if you’d wanted to argue, say, that certain kinds of processed foods actually are more economical to the user and have better employment and environmental benefits and so merited inclusion, that’d get my attention, and the politicians (or at least their policy wonks) as well. Just attributing it to “we did this because ha ha F U” is ideological, and tidily folds into the “Don’t tell me what to do” adolescence argument. God I deplore American politics. Or any politics. It rewards the wrong folks every time.
You write all of this and you make my day easier by making my reply a short, sweet "OK Karen" and that'll be the end of it. You've freed up time for me to cook and clean up afterwards. :)
Jane, I'd like you to meet Fundamental Attribution Error.
"Pearl-clutching" and "patronizing" are low-effort insults that value tone over content. It implies that you'd appreciate my arguments if I had sealioned you.
A fundamental attribution error is a category error that is magnitudes worse because it makes you hold on to logically, ethically and morally untenable positions.
Does America have a significant problem with deficiency diseases, in the sense that people literally cannot afford a nutritionally complete diet?
Or does it merely have a problem with obesity, in which case the problem is that highly processed foods (which are more affordable) are likely to be designed by their manufacturers to be addictive in order to increase their profits?
So far the only counter was lentils. You find me food that stretches as well that’s healthy, similarly cheap, and takes similar prep time as a bag of chips
A bag of chips isn’t a meal. Also I’m pretty dubious that there really is enough calories for a week in a bag of Doritos , or even a day. So at the moment we are being asked to counter point against a largely fictional example.
And lentils stands in for most vegetables. Only protein is relatively expensive in a simple home cooked meal.
I’m not American but where I live fast food is a treat, cooking at home is much cheaper.
Set the example aside then. Frankly, the only reason I'm arguing this point is because I grew up in a poor house that needed food stamps, and it screwed up my relationship with food for a long time. I still remember as we got near the end of the month, every dinner would be pancakes, because they were something all of us kids liked and they're cheap to make from scratch.
If you force a family to eat a government approved list, you're mainly just teaching the kids in the family that that list is poor people food and they'll do everything in their power to avoid it when they have the money to do so.
I honestly don't really understand why so many of us on here are totally cool with creating a class system based around food, where the families that have money can choose what they eat, while the families who are poor have to eat only approved meals.
It's a Prussianesque optimization fetish and it underpins a lot of progressive ideology. Poor people should just cut out waste, also we need central planning to avoid waste in production processes, etc. I'm afraid the issue here is simply progressivism itself.
Lentils have pretty good protein though. Another easy one is sardines, a 4 oz can has 18 gm of protein and 150 calories, about as much as half cup of uncooked lentils all for under $2. 12 Cool Ranch Doritos have only 2 gm of protein, so to get the same protein you would need to eat a large $6 bag and would end up with 1800 calories plus lots of fat and sodium.
We always had canned refried beans and tortillas. Refried beans are pretty nutrient dense and the easy nate is looking for. We lived in a trailer in Hyder valley AZ. Do look it up, nothing there. I'm sure we didn't have chips until some time around 5th grade when we had moved had a bit better circumstances.
A 5lb bag of carrots is cheaper than a bag of Doritos, has more nutrients, would be more filling for longer, and both have less than a day’s worth of calories for one person (about 1000 for carrots and 1500 for Doritos).
The thing about these foods isn’t that they are expensive or difficult to prepare-it’s that they don’t light up the dopamine receptors in the brain the way highly processed foods in the US diet do. It’s an addiction problem based on poor habits, not a money issue per se.
Not if you have a slight knowledge of cooking. I can make a crockpot chicken soup on $10 which’ll make four meals easy. Unless you’re obsessed with ethical sourcing of food (which to a struggling family is not high on the priority list) it’s really not that hard.
So just to be clear, this is a conversation about forcing poor people to only buy healthy food, while well off people can buy whatever they want. Even if you disagree with me on whether it's cheaper and easier to eat unhealthy, where do you stand on enforcing a class divide at the grocery store?
It really isn't. It's a conversation about making choices. Even the richest assholes on earth, lets say Gates and Bazo's have to make choices. I drive the same Honda Civic 2005 I bought after college even though I could afford a porche now with cash. Why would I waste good money though?
Sorry, I'm not following. This conversation started because someone said food stamps are fine, but we should not allow poor people to choose what food they buy. They should only be allowed to buy foods we deem as healthy. Effectively, the person advocated taking away the choice of poor people. All the conversation that followed is about that idea.
You can get a bag of Doritos for like $3 and it'll provide calories and a weeks worth of snacks for your kids, all while you don't have to cook an entire meal for them from lentils (?) after having spent 8-10 hours that day on your feet at Walmart and your second backup job, because Walmart doesn't allow full-time work. You name a vegetable that can do the same thing for $3.
So a 1/2 pound bag of Doritos runs about $6. It has 9 very small servings, each with 150 calories (a full bag has about 75% of the daily calories for one person). It will get you fat but not make you feel full.
Alternatively, you could spend less on a 5lb bag of carrots. It would have about 950 calories, or about 33% fewer total calories than the bag of Doritos. But it will have some nutrients, fiber to fill you up, etc. That will make you fuller than Doritos and not make you fat.
Obesity isn’t because calories are too hard to come by in this country. But the carrots don’t have the same dopamine response. We’re addicted to processed foods.
A pound of lentils has over 1600 calories, costs less than the Doritos and can be slow cooked in a few fours with about 10 minutes of labor for rinsing and putting the pot on the stove. Add some rice or pasta for just another 10 minutes of labor and another couple dollars. The reason obesity is common among lower income households is because of preference for Doritos and Slushies instead of spending 10 minutes to make some healthy rice and beans. Obesity is cheap to acquire but you’re going to pay for it in the end in healthcare expenses and shorter lifespans. Maybe giving out Ozempic along with nutritional advice in addition to food stamps would end up lowering overall health costs.
Mentioning Ozempic, another thing mostly only rich people get, is kind of a funny add in your comment.
I get the feeling a lot of you didn’t grow up poor with food stamps, and don’t really get how aware kids are that the family is poor and clearly doesn’t have as much as all the other families. We already limit what food stamps can acquire. Choosing to limit it more so poor kids are even more aware that they don’t get what other families get might help them. Or it might just make them hate their mom or primary caregiver.
If you want to fix the diet of America, fix the diet of America. Don’t run experiments on poor kids because they’re a captured group who can’t control who their parents are
I grew up working class, never on food stamps that I know of, but never went out to eat, never had Doritos and learned how to cook beans and other foods. I’m not trying anything as insurmountable as changing American’s diets, or even reform food stamps which now do allow you to buy Doritos and other junk food. I’m just saying that there are easier solutions to obesity and hunger, that may involve basic skills, and a small amount of labor. I wasn’t implying that everyone should buy Ozempic, let alone mandate it, but since it does successfully reduce obesity and the related diseases, then it may actually be worth it in the long run as far as healthcare spending and longevity are concerned.
Man, you need to get out of whatever weird bubble you’re in that you think anyone that works all day is going to be good with spending hours cooking lentils
In my weird bubble, I worked 12 hours a day for long periods, making lentils takes less than 10 minutes to rinse them and put them in a slow cooker in the morning and they will be done when you get off work. In the time you wrote that comment, or to go to Seven-eleven to buy a bag of Doritos, you could have got them going. Maybe in your bubble cooking is a very hard, exhausting job.
The convenience store in your poor neighborhood carries the Doritos. To get the lentils and carrots you have to figure out how to get to the Walmart or grocery store that is not in your poor neighborhood. Poor areas of the country are often food deserts.
The food industry “graciously” provides materials on “nutrition” for schools. And lobbyists “help” lawmakers write USDA guidelines & food assistance programs. Look at school lunches. All packaged crap.
This overstates the role of economics as a cause of suicide. It's the logic of Homo economicus carried to a dark conclusion (i.e., taking one's life is a rational, economically optimal act). There was probably an economist in the 1930s who thought along these same lines in the Soviet Union and engineered the Holodomor.
Suicide is fundamentally a psychological and psychiatric pathology.
Migration to where? All flaws considered the West is the place to be as evidenced by the migration crises. Where do the saints go when Heaven’s economy tanks?
The adulation of wealth is a much broader than the wealth of presidential candidates. If you know anything about the United States, you know that money is a way we know how to keep score.
Idk, i like the song. At least until i found out it wasn’t backed up by aggregate statistics. Now I’m not sure how i feel about it. Actually I’m not sure I like when other people enjoy things come to think of it.
Insightful analysis- your writing won’t change the minds of die hard right wingers, but folks like David Brooks should read before making claims that elites caused people to go MAGA.
Brooks is just a whiny Conservative, who is trying to deflect blame for his role in creating the Right Wing Fairy Land of Alternative Reality that resulted in MAGA. And Cancel Culture wasn’t the Internet’s fault, it just supersized it like 7/11 did to soft drinks and slurpees. Newt Gingrich and Pat Robertson created it with their RHINO purge of the Republican Party, who wouldn’t goose step in formation with their kind of Conservatism. Once you’ve destroyed a Senator, who lost a limb diving on a grenade in VietNam as a limp waisted coward, it doesn’t take much to brow beat on the Internet behind a shield of anonymity. Which then invites a backlash, which then invites a counter whiny backlash against wokeness and more pity party song about people too angry to see that the angry man behind the curtain is just a piece of crap grifter.
It’s not even that. Who cares if someone is mean to you on the internet? The problem is the entrenched DEI bureaucracy in companies, schools and other employers who can fire someone because they don’t want to be seen condoning some viewpoints expressed there that they consider “harmful” or “dangerous”.
Cancel doesn't meet the necessary or sufficient conditions of anthropology or sociology to be a culture. :)
The last word goes to Twitter's @BerrakBiz: "It's only Cancel Culture if it originates in the Cancelle region of France. Otherwise, it's just sparkling consequences."
I believe you meant "at a later age than Boomers or Gen X".
How much of the restraint shown by younger generations today do you think is a product of sky-high housing costs (which likely mean more are stuck living with their parents)?
Nope, there's an absence of parallels to puritanism.
Puritanism was an intentional and religiously dedicated form of social organization. It wasn't merely chaste, austere behavior.
For one thing, millennials and zoomers are the most non-religious generations America has had, and by all accounts are not going to turn religious as they grow older.
They're not really committed to their behavior as a lifestyle choice, OTOH they're really into "wellness" cults, so the lack of interest in sex or living with their parents as adults isn't necessarily intentional behavior.
It's a combination of circumstance (a lot of the social frontiers open to boomers and Xers don't exist for them) and practical choice without any grand claim behind it.
I do think millennials and zoomers are choosing not to have sex as a form of rebellion against older generations because they hate boomers and Xers. Who do you think made the insults "OK Boomer" and "OK Karen" a thing? They're choosing not to mimic the worst behaviors and personalities of their parents.
Calling wokism a religion is a category error. I like John McWhorter's work and find him engaging, but for a scholar like him to conflate the w-word with religion is being disingenuous.
Why x-idpol is NOT a religion: All religions throughout human history -- the Abrahamic desert tribes (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), Hindu, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, Paganism; deprecated ones like artifacts from Greece, Rome and Scandinavia that are reduced to mere mythology; and even modern ones like Mormonism, Scientology and Qanon -- all offer some otherworldly explanation for practical, earthly problems. Roughly, the practical, earthly problems we as mortal humans experience are the consequence of some divine cause and toward the service of some moral point to be made.
X-idpol (short for intersectional identity politics, better known in the public imagination by the snarky and risible "woke") makes no claims to the supernatural and divine. In fact, we know the origin story of x-idpol and can even be explain by boring plain facts. X-idpol didn't come from Mount Sinai, but the ivory tower originated by tenured academics and intellectuals. X-idpol is philosophy and theory, not theology -- that's a huge difference right there. Academicians and theoreticians know they are writing output to be scrutinized, argued, proved and defended (like a postgrad thesis or dissertation), not making a claim of revealed truth to be interpreted.
This narrative is total and utter nonsense it's almost laughable. Newt Gingrich and Pat Robertson caused the blue hair trigglypuffs? And they're also apparently just like Nazi's as well. American political discourse from the left is honesntly pathetic. Max Cleland lost his election fair and square because the voters chose his opponent, you don't get to make him a martyr because the people chose someone you didn't approve of.
It's kind of shocking that someone still pays Brooks for his constantly wrong opinions. The "economic anxiety" myth was a weak excuse from the moment NYT trotted it out
The shift in the relative prices of manufactures v services has little to do with NAFTA or accession of China the WTO. [Some, but little] Rather credit/blame a) lower costs of transporting goods internationally b) CPC deciding that it wanted China to be part of the world economy, c) secular fiscal deficits due mainly to Regan, Bush and Ryan-Trump tax cuts for the rich.
"Putting in the zip code for Anthony’s hometown, I found that someone who makes $49,240 in Virginia will take home $36,960, or $3,080 a month. That’s…not a lot."
I suggest you take a drive through the counties of upper Wisconsin or Michigan's Upper Peninsula to see the devastating effects of depopulation has had on these communities. Not to mention the rust-belt cities of Detroit, Akron and northern Indiana. Depopulation driven by de-industrialization due to "free trade" policies. Ross Perot was right back in 1992 to decry the effects of disastrous free trade policies on the American Heartland.
Wasn't it imports from China after they joined the WTO that gutted American manufacturing, far more than the NAFTA that Ross Perot campaigned against in the 1990s?
AIUI China was particularly attractive to American executives, as the lack of rule of law there provided them with opportunities to corruptly enrich themselves at the expense of both their (Chinese) workers, and their shareholders back home.
WTO and NAFTA are of a piece, and if you look at the history of the origins of NAFTA to the culmination of China in the WTO, history and economy would've ended up the way it did even if you asked a counterfactual (i.e., what if NAFTA had been voted down or Clinton had vetoed it, or what if China had not been admitted to the WTO).
NAFTA was a yearslong negotiation that began in Reagan's second term and was finalized early in Bill Clinton's first term. NAFTA's effects didn't become instantaneous, and the manufacturing job losses took place fortuitously around the time of Clinton's second term, during the time of the internet and computer boom. In the aggregate, so many jobs were created in technology and services that they were covering the losses in manufacturing.
The deindustrialization that began in the Great Lakes and later spread throughout the Midwest largely happened because the manufacturing plants were reaching the end of their life cycles and the manufacturers had the bind of needing to expand to international markets while also being uncompetitive on costs. The first wave of deindustrialization that was felt in Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, northern Indiana, Chicago and east Wisconsin was happening in the 1960s and 70s, because of the Marshall Plan that rebuilt the ruins of European and Japanese cities, which were able to leapfrog ahead of the U.S. with state-of-the-art manufacturing capacity offering goods at lower price or higher quality.
The opening of markets in Europe, Japan, Canada and Mexico would have happened and manufacturing had to get its costs down and quickly.
China's industrialization began well before the WTO, and was a policy pursued by Deng Xiaoping after he had ascended to power and wanted to rebuild China from the depredations of his enemy Mao. He'd pursued an industrialization and maritime trade with mixed success -- he wanted industrialization all across China. That failed, but where it succeeded it was wildly successful -- Shanghai and the southern mainland in proximity to Hong Kong. This success in the coasts allowed China to negotiate its way into the WTO, and once in, that's when industrialization was possible nationwide because China's large size and population allowed it to be the world's bottom-line cost producer. No one in the world could get under China's prices.
Good point that the American golden age in the 1950s was a historical aberration: the result of almost all the industry in Europe and Asia being destroyed in World War II.
I've often wondered to what extent the anti-Ukraine leanings of American Trumpists is because they don't want the imperialist aggressors of this century to be defeated _too_ early: perhaps they're hoping for Xi and Putin to destroy America's industrial competitors (both themselves and their enemies in Europe in Asia), much as Hitler and Tojo did in the previous century?
A frustrating thing about the discourse in with this specific song is that the gripe appalachian populists have with welfare programs is generally not with food stamps, but with social security disability payments. Upwards of 25% of some Appalachian counties are on SSDI getting ~600/month. High school kids have 2 paths “get a job” or “get checks”, and there is a lot of legitimate derision of the abuse of disability income in Appalachia.
What's also interesting is that this looks like it's basically over, or at least has reverted to the pre-2008 norm...
My girlfriend is disabled (Ehler-Danlos Syndrome, pots, fiber myalgia, ????), and she knows all these horror stories about the hoops some disabled folks have to jump through for many years just to get some meager help and it kills some of them. I'd rather more people abuse the system if it means less suffering hassle red tape etc.
Im not saying the system shouldn’t exist. The issue is that in some places in appalachia, there is a culture of whole families fraudulently obtaining disability and doctors are fraudulently declaring people are disabled when they aren’t.
"The issue is that in some places in appalachia, there is a culture of whole families fraudulently obtaining disability and doctors are fraudulently declaring people are disabled when they aren’t."
Puerto Rico: "Hold my beer"
Wait a minute. You wrote the song. Am I right?
Investigate, prosecute, and jail. The Sacklers were at the heart of this type of conspiracy for opioids in Appalachia and elsewhere. They were able to negotiate an immunity agreement against prosecution in exchange for money (a judge has put a stop order on that).
The US has gotten too soft on white collar crime while jailing too many poor people for nickel-and-dime crimes. It is good to see that they are aggressively prosecuting the PPP fraud now from the Covid dumping of money from helicopters. But they should also be aggressively prosecuting Medicare and disability insurance fraud.
Well-off people now assume they can do what they want with impunity (other than running Ponzi schemes). That needs to change.
There's also the benefits cliff issue. You get a couple trial work periods and you lose your benefits. You save a few thousand dollars and you lose your benefits. You get married and you lose your benefits. My wife has MILD-CP and was on disability since childhood. Fortunately she has worked part time in a library for a long time and is most of the way through her MLS degree. Getting off benefits to work at a 7/11 would be a terrifying and possibly ruinous decision.
Since Reagan, "welfare" as a word and a concept has been coded for blackness.
Not in Appalachia.
"That’s…not a lot. It’s important for the professional-managerial class types who read blogs like this one to remember that that’s the kind of income the average American lives on."
/me makes about the same amount, looks around, wonders how many other readers are evidently not in my shoes.
Well, lots probably are, but they're not the ones I want to make feel a little bit more guilty about inequality... 😉
I make 100k a year, and I support two kids and a stay-at-home mom on that income. I pay very little in tax. All my siblings and in laws are teachers and small town journalists and truckers and such, and most of them have families while making far less and not paying much less tax. The level of entitlement I see from my coworkers who have household incomes two or three times mine is just galling. You see people with household incomes in excess of 400k saying "It really is just hard to get ahead these days..." And there are *millions* of people like this.
Completely endorse your comment but... my strong sense is that for most of us, "rich" means "a lot more than I've got". Kind of like a race, whether in track or for a pennant - unless you're in the lead you focus on the people in front of you.
My favorite examples, torn from the front pages of politics, are:
1 - Hillary Clinton. What's a $100 million net worth when so many of your friends have private jets and multiple palatial estates (which they are happy to lend to you)? The price range for a new Gulfstream is $20 - $70 million. Folks with a mere $100 mil are flying first class, cadging from friends, or (I suppose) buying used. From her futures trading days, through Whitewater, and onto her Goldman Sachs speeches Hillary has always wanted more.
2 - Sheldon Adelson. The late Mr. Adelson was a real estate developer with a net worth aroud $30 - $40 billion. In many years he'd donate over $100 million to Republican Party candidates and causes. A mere billionaire like Tom Steyer probably believes he can't afford to buy that level of political sway and is hopelessly outgunned.
I think Adelson felt rich but he made rich people feel poor.
Well the 400 highest income American tax payers who according to “some economists” (I understand the reluctance to name Saez and Zucman) pay only 24% tax (if you fraudulently include the enterprise income of the stocks they own as income to make your desired number) don`t read your blog, but I do and my income is well above median but my taxes are never less than 40% of my income. The song is pretty dumbed down, but I think many of the statistics you use are also pretty simplistic.
I live in a third world country so my knee jerk reaction to these kinds of posts (and similar ones from the left that you see on places like /r/antiwork) is that Americans sure are a bunch of entitled whiners despite being the richest group of people in the history of the world.
I usually try to get past that knee jerk reaction since it isn't especially useful but still.....
I'm from a developing country too, but I've lived in the US for a while now. Still, the thought frequently crosses my mind: dang, these Americans have no idea how good they have it, what are they complaining about?
But then if you think about it some more: is it so bad to want your situation to be better? And sure, Americans have a lot materially, but they have pretty severe problems with mental health, loneliness, addiction, and suicide, that are much less severe in developing countries with richer, thicker family and social networks. At the end of the day we derive true joy and fulfillment from hope and love and connection, not material things.
One more thing it's hard to appreciate until you live here is how much disdain the educated middle class has for the working class, and how little empathy. In developing countries the rich feel sorry for the poor, and there is occasionally a sense of noblesse oblige. Not here. That disrespect is really corrosive. Sometimes it's obvious, like Hillary Clinton's "deplorables" line. Sometimes it's subtle and unintentional, like Noah Smith here admitting he'd never heard of a fudge round till he googled it for this post, thereby signaling that he is not the sort of person who eats cheap unhealthy convenience store pastries.
Imagine knowing that not only do you have less materially than a lot of people in your country, but that those same people look down on you for it, rather than just attributing it to fate or karma. Imagine living your whole life that way.
Good art speaks emotional truth, not necessarily objective or statistical truth.
I'm an American and have lived my whole life here, but I used to travel extensively for work, much of the time to countries in Asia, and the difference between the "have" and the "have nots" was shocking. I've seen people living in conditions that would be unfathomable here in the U.S. In South America, especially in big cities like Sao Paolo, it was even worse. Are there middle-to-upper class Americans that lack empathy for the working class? Sure. Does the current crop of billionaires lack the noblesse oblige of the ultra wealthy from past gilded eras? Yes. But if anything, the educated and well off in America are infatuated by the working class. This is why we're routinely subjected to the ultra-elite, like Clarence Thomas, contorting themselves to show their working class bonafides while flying around on private jets owned by billionaires. Its why we have Silicon Valley billionaires funding right wing populist politicians like JD Vance. Its why in the Fox News interview with Oliver Anthony - who does appear to be a genuinely good guy, BTW - you mostly see people with $200 sunglasses and $1100 iPhones, singing along to his working class anthems in front of a parking lot filled with $80K pickup trucks and SUVs. To the extent that Americans have disdain for the working class, it is because they go to great efforts to convince themselves and others that they are part of the working class, which results in pandering to them rather than addressing their actual needs. I'll also add that many Americans who escape their lower class roots - my Mom was one of them - find this romanization of working class America to be perplexing. My mother wasn't ashamed of her background at all, but she was also honest about how difficult it often was. She died many years ago, but I have not doubt she'd find the fetishization of the working class and the populist politics that accompany it today to be shallow and superficial.
For reference, as a Canadian I earn about the equivalent ($40k CAD) and rent for my one bedroom apartment costs just over $11k/yr... and I'm lucky to pay that little, as the average in my city is nearly $17k/yr now. Power/water/phone add another $3k/yr.
Purchasing power parity is a cruel mistress.
(edited to add:) My effective tax rate is also roughly the same, with an at-source deduction of roughly 24%.
1) That $C40K is much lower than the $US49K (about $C66K) used in Noah's example.
2) Your effective tax rate includes a larger basket of goods, notably, health and (recently) dental care.
3) Your discretionary expenses face higher sales taxes and a carbon tax.
1) I misread the figure as $36k for some reason; I blame lack of coffee and and whatever virus (hopefully not COVID) is haunting my throat.
2) Yes, though I'm above the threshold for dental care as a single male with work-provided coverage.
3) Higher sales tax, yes, but the carbon tax is rebated. I actually make a modest profit off the rebates as my consumption emits much less CO2 than the average citizen here. (Intended function, to encourage reduction of heavy carbon emitting goods & services.)
All of which, however true, is aside from my intended point that one cannot directly compare US incomes to those of developing nations due to PPP discrepancies.
I had assumed that the 24% tax rate was inclusive of rebates and benefits, such as the carbon tax rebate. Overall though, small beer.
Your intended point is well taken, although it's sad to see Canada cast as a developing nation. Canada is not the UK, yet. <g>
The only way to measure this is like for like. Westerners have advantage in global goods but not necessarily local goods.
The problem with that thinking is that relatively speaking, the US is an expensive place to live. So even if the average American makes more than someone in a country harmed by colonization, they also pay many times more for food, for rent, for clothes. They have to drive most places.
I don’t care for Oliver or his stupid song, but the problem for many Americans is not that they are entitled. It’s that they’re barely getting by.
So it’s not so much that your reaction is useless, it’s that it’s ignorant and incorrect.
None of those skills are at all scarce except EMT
Seriously.
In 2006 I graduated making 32k. Before gas spiked it was around $1.80, I could get a hamburger, drink and fries for around $4 and I rented a place with two other people and was paying $1,200 per month. It was tough but I still had a small amount to invest on top of student loan payments. That same 32k/36k is significantly less in 2023 dollars than 2006 dollars. You can do the calculation to back out the CPI and download CPI rates from yahoo finance. It's a big difference.
The point being when you graduated and where you lived matter a hell of a lot towards how much 36k is.
Yeah - I also make the same amount and I'm from a PMC background. 'Course, I'm a new college graduate and have a much cushier job than factory worker, but on the other hand I'm in one of the highest cost of living areas in the US.
"real erosion in purchasing power that people in his social class have experienced in recent years."
Given the adulation of wealth in this country, this alone would be enough to drive the average man who's trying to support a family crazy. I'm not surprised that many would think, “I'm worthless. and I'm getting more worthless.”
"It’s important for the professional-managerial class types who read blogs like this one to remember that that’s the kind of income the average American lives on."
Ya don't say??!!!
BTW, Food stamps are great, and I wouldn't mind if they couldn't be used for unhealthy snacks like soda, sugar, and chips.
I wonder how much of the obesity problem in the United States (and to a lesser extent in the rest of the Western world) is the result of car dependency (especially if people are forced to be idle as they sit in traffic jams) and/or of addictive processed foods?
Don’t forget the “You don’t tell me what to do!” Authority is universally annoying, whether it’s due to subject matter, workplace/family role, or legal/administrative policy - it’s an insane trigger in American culture, where most people seem to enjoy presuming authority is always corrupt. America has a range of cultures with a perpetual-adolescence problem, and food and diet is prominent as one of its many deflections. Look at the avocado toast debacle. Fangs and claws come out when you make sensible suggestions that maybe you don’t need to do X if you want to later do Y.
I'm genuinely confused what you mean by the avocado toast debacle. Wasn't that mainly that some politician said avocado toast was the reason millennials were poor, when the reality was that they were poor because they had both bad jobs and lived in expensive cities, and avocado toast really had nothing to do with it?
editing to note that I don't personally like avocado toast and am not here to defend it
You've got the gist of it. The "avocado toast" guy wasn't a politician but some real estate businessman in Australia who wrote an opinion piece and became a Twitter Main Character because of it. And deservedly so.
It was the rankest example of splaining imaginable. It was smug, condescending, tone deaf and snarky. The world was made stupider for him having written it.
The refusal to forego luxuries-as-necessities (dining out is always a luxury, only a necessity if your workplace makes such lunches the way to get ahead) to explain away (i.e. excuse yourself) from saving 10-15% of your paycheque. Only by having such savings enables you the security to make job choices and ultimately gather your down payment for housing. And you do have to skip out on several esteem endeavours (weekend trips, living in the “right” neighbourhood) to do so as well, and so this feels painful when your friends are all doing it and may sideline you for foregoing it. So many choices, but they are choices.
Right, but I’m pretty sure it’s been clearly established that this generation is actually like every other generation with regard to luxuries. The idea that young people are eating a bunch of avocado toast rather than save in comparison to other generations is actually nonsense
Any argument taken to any logical conclusion is nonsense. This is why arguing on the Internet is a silly waste of time I should be spending on more personable pursuits. All I can say is I have an ability to avoid the marshmallow, and it has had social costs, but taking care of that 10-15% is Don’t Make Excuses territory regardless of employed circumstances
Oh they’re equally guilty. Both types as individuals and small cohorts can’t contain their emotions and see that _they’re_ the problem, it’s always everybody else (Leftist-libertarians, who are basically “my beliefs are correct [politically truthy, but a dubious claim] so I can do what I want,” are all “it’s not my consumption that’s driving the global problems, so until we collectively make changes, why should I constrain myself!”). Meanwhile the centrists abide/hang on for dear life while putting up with this nonsense
Yeah, “centrists.”
The processed foods are the main cause of obesity. And the big food manufacturers lobby to keep it on the food stamps & school lunch programs.
There’s big money to be made, heath of the people be damned.
Obesity rates in Europe are lower than in North America, but Europe (and the Middle East) are still much closer to North America in that respect than to East Asia.
Your comment on sugary drinks though does remind me of the claim that Coca-Cola created Mexico's obesity crisis pretty much single-handedly!
You can’t just say that and not link to the research. I’m not aware of any study that has successfully separated activity from diet in any conclusive fashion
"Nothing to do with level of physical activity" seems suspicious. If true, this would invalidate what we understand about kinesiology, nutrition and metabolism.
1. It's good manners to link studies one is referencing
2. Given that thermodynamics is real, I highly doubt it has nothing to do with physical activity. What I can believe is, however, that if the sample is all sedentary people, or people whose physical activity is all incidental, then it might not explain much *in the sample*. It's like saying IT skills have no effect on wages based on a study from the 80s!
Try to do a causal study, or just expand the sample to non-Americans, and the effect will probably show up, bc it cannot not exist, it's basic physics
Who decides what is or isn't unhealthy? I'd rather a bonus for healthy food than a penalty for unhealthy food. Probably simplest thing to do would be make all fruits ⅓ off and all vegetables ½ off when using food stamps. And even this has nuance like which fruit juices count (some are incredibly unhealthy and dont even contain any juice) or whether all salads count or baked potatoes, etc.
I just want them to stop charging so much for broccolini lol
Does "unhealthy" food here mean fattening food, or does it mean food of low nutritional value? Those aren't necessarily the same thing...
Indeed--you actually start to see health go down in populations that lose access to highly processed food due to US regulations requiring that such food be fortified with all kinds of essential vitamins and minerals. Not having enough of those will also do bad things to you, some of which can have similar or more immediately worse effects than obesity. The tradeoff here between intense sugar/carbs and access to vital nutrients is not a good one and we need to get to work on BOTH expanding access to fresh fruits and veggies AND making better, less fattening but also highly nutritious processed foods that are cheap and shelf-stable so they can be found in food deserts.
Yeah, could pretty easily just exclude foods where x% of calories come from added sugars, etc. The list wouldn’t be perfect and would be gamed, but even that might not be terrible if that means cereal makers cut back on added sugar, less soda consumption, etc.
"Who decides what is or isn't unhealthy?"
There are certainly debates to be had, and individual variation due to allergies and stuff, but on the whole, this isn't rocket science. Fresh fruit and vegetables, whole grains, legumes, lean protein, a modest amount of plant-based fats, nuts and seeds = healthy. Candy, chips, sugary drinks, deep-fried stuff, highly refined carbs, animal fat = unhealthy. This is common knowledge, not some kind of mystery.
It may be common knowledge, but it is also completely hogwash. Look up actual RCTs, not correlation studies, on the relation between animal fat consumption and endocrine morbidities and/or overall mortality. Steak is a health food, and chips are at least better than eg. white rice and potatoes, both of which have a higher glycemic index than pure sucrose.
Healthy foods:
- Meat, especially organ meat
- Carrots for their Vitamin A
- Leafy vegetables like broccoli, spinach, etc
- Low-fructose, fibrous fruits like oranges
Unhealthy foods:
- Most starchy vegetables and grains
- Whole grains in particular due to lignin, lectins, and phytic acid
- Anything with a high glycemic load, especially sugary drinks
- Polyunsaturated fatty acids
Nuts vary wildly from very healthy to very unhealthy, peanuts being an example of the latter.
Ditto, I wish broccolini was cheaper, but then again, try to grow it and you’ll find they deserve that money. (I can’t grow anything to feed myself, just my rabbits!) And I just can’t stay on board with “cheap food” because we already ran that into the ground, maybe it was too cheap. Of course leftists were all mad when the Republicans rewrote SNAP so that you couldn’t get ready-made canned/frozen goods and pre-sliced and pre-grated cheese, but I’m totally down with that. Convenience foods cost more, teach nothing about capacity for thrift and skill (home economics), and they’ve helped blow up the costs of groceries with the trade-off that food processing provides employment. But (and this is my hobby horse) the expansion of food processing also grinds down what farmers get, and I will always be on the side of the small and/or ecological farmer (you don’t have to be small to be ecological, and for ecology’s sake it can help to be big).
Jane, I'll punch back at the GOP rewriting the SNAP laws. With GOP policy, The Cruelty Is The Point and once you see it you notice it everywhere.
Hoary notions of "thrift" and "home economics" are after-the-fact codpieces that can be set aside because they create the illusion of an idea to be debated earnestly. Debating gives life to a lie.
You know who need convenience foods? POORS! They are after all working, and multiple jobs to boot, to maintain their SNAP benefits. This doesn't even go into how their household situation is like and what dysfunction may be present to even get their heads right into nostrums like thrift and home economics.
Ever cook? Do you know how much time goes not only into the heating of food, but also the preparation and cleanup of it? Oh, and by taking away "convenience" of food ready to cook, you're forcing poors to buy kitchen equipment and utensils that cannot be paid for with SNAP benefits and imposing a time penalty on food preparation. There's also a knock-on psychological penalty to the time penalty of cooking -- the lived experience of cooking becomes miserable and poors will go out of their way to avoid it and stretch their benefits to more costly options like eating out or processed foods not banned under the new terms.
Let's also put the racism ball in play. In Iowa, one of the places that did implement SNAP restrictions, made ineligible several food items that are staples in the Latino households of an overwhelmingly White state: tortillas, beans, shredded cheese, etc. It's a small, mostly immigrant, low-visibility underclass in the state to prop-up a low-value agricultural sector with little opportunity for social mobility and advancement. The policy is tailor-made to starve people of the very nutrients they need for a physically intensive job, and there's no "color-blind" justification to warrant such a draconian rollback of benefits.
The Cruelty Is The Point.
As someone who cooks every day, has a grocery bill and recycling bin half the size of what you (probably) waste (and not being American, makes less money than you), I’m finding your pearl clutching patronizing: Do you really think poor people don’t have, are unwilling to get, and unable to pick up and use (as if most of them don’t already) the equipment and skills for basic cooking, and roll with it? That poor people must necessarily be so dysfunctional that the “lived experience of cooking” is something to avoid? You ever consider that maybe the “racist” policy is trying now to intervene at an earlier stage for a the latest set of beneficiaries, before the deskilling takes place (don’t tell me Latinos don’t know how to cook, they surely do!) that the previous generation of policies couldn’t have seen coming for its recipients (who are now the “deplorables,” by the way, and so if you’re catching them too, you’re benefiting them by accident).
I just find this stance (firstly, to be from someone who doesn’t cook much!) to be clever but unrealistic, and a rather patronizing set of luxury beliefs— and you’re arguing that people who can’t afford to have these luxury beliefs ought to be entitled to them. Which is different than saying that in some cases, regardless of all factors, that’s the way that week panned out for someone. No, that things happen doesn’t make them an acceptable par for a month or for a life. To treat it as so is derisory. And I cannot get behind any litany that teaches derision of what’s basically good habits as being too much to expect, that the state has no role even within K-12 to educate its people, but instead should just dole out. The poor see the inefficiencies and waste in doling out, and it pisses them off to no end, too. Policy absolutely has a role in buttressing, rather than defunding, individuals’ capacities for self- and collaborative help.
OTOH, if you’d wanted to argue, say, that certain kinds of processed foods actually are more economical to the user and have better employment and environmental benefits and so merited inclusion, that’d get my attention, and the politicians (or at least their policy wonks) as well. Just attributing it to “we did this because ha ha F U” is ideological, and tidily folds into the “Don’t tell me what to do” adolescence argument. God I deplore American politics. Or any politics. It rewards the wrong folks every time.
You write all of this and you make my day easier by making my reply a short, sweet "OK Karen" and that'll be the end of it. You've freed up time for me to cook and clean up afterwards. :)
Jane, I'd like you to meet Fundamental Attribution Error.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error
"Pearl-clutching" and "patronizing" are low-effort insults that value tone over content. It implies that you'd appreciate my arguments if I had sealioned you.
A fundamental attribution error is a category error that is magnitudes worse because it makes you hold on to logically, ethically and morally untenable positions.
Bob, please, for your own sake, get a life…
Problem is, you can stretch $10 a lot further with unhealthy food than you can with healthy food.
Does America have a significant problem with deficiency diseases, in the sense that people literally cannot afford a nutritionally complete diet?
Or does it merely have a problem with obesity, in which case the problem is that highly processed foods (which are more affordable) are likely to be designed by their manufacturers to be addictive in order to increase their profits?
Not really.
So far the only counter was lentils. You find me food that stretches as well that’s healthy, similarly cheap, and takes similar prep time as a bag of chips
A bag of chips isn’t a meal. Also I’m pretty dubious that there really is enough calories for a week in a bag of Doritos , or even a day. So at the moment we are being asked to counter point against a largely fictional example.
And lentils stands in for most vegetables. Only protein is relatively expensive in a simple home cooked meal.
I’m not American but where I live fast food is a treat, cooking at home is much cheaper.
Set the example aside then. Frankly, the only reason I'm arguing this point is because I grew up in a poor house that needed food stamps, and it screwed up my relationship with food for a long time. I still remember as we got near the end of the month, every dinner would be pancakes, because they were something all of us kids liked and they're cheap to make from scratch.
If you force a family to eat a government approved list, you're mainly just teaching the kids in the family that that list is poor people food and they'll do everything in their power to avoid it when they have the money to do so.
I honestly don't really understand why so many of us on here are totally cool with creating a class system based around food, where the families that have money can choose what they eat, while the families who are poor have to eat only approved meals.
It's a Prussianesque optimization fetish and it underpins a lot of progressive ideology. Poor people should just cut out waste, also we need central planning to avoid waste in production processes, etc. I'm afraid the issue here is simply progressivism itself.
Lentils have pretty good protein though. Another easy one is sardines, a 4 oz can has 18 gm of protein and 150 calories, about as much as half cup of uncooked lentils all for under $2. 12 Cool Ranch Doritos have only 2 gm of protein, so to get the same protein you would need to eat a large $6 bag and would end up with 1800 calories plus lots of fat and sodium.
We always had canned refried beans and tortillas. Refried beans are pretty nutrient dense and the easy nate is looking for. We lived in a trailer in Hyder valley AZ. Do look it up, nothing there. I'm sure we didn't have chips until some time around 5th grade when we had moved had a bit better circumstances.
A 5lb bag of carrots is cheaper than a bag of Doritos, has more nutrients, would be more filling for longer, and both have less than a day’s worth of calories for one person (about 1000 for carrots and 1500 for Doritos).
Rice, beans, carrots, bananas, potatoes, frozen broccoli, cauliflower, add in some slightly more expensive salsas, etc. for taste.
The thing about these foods isn’t that they are expensive or difficult to prepare-it’s that they don’t light up the dopamine receptors in the brain the way highly processed foods in the US diet do. It’s an addiction problem based on poor habits, not a money issue per se.
Rice is literally pure starch. Not exactly healthy. Why don't you look up diabetes rates in India?
Not if you have a slight knowledge of cooking. I can make a crockpot chicken soup on $10 which’ll make four meals easy. Unless you’re obsessed with ethical sourcing of food (which to a struggling family is not high on the priority list) it’s really not that hard.
So just to be clear, this is a conversation about forcing poor people to only buy healthy food, while well off people can buy whatever they want. Even if you disagree with me on whether it's cheaper and easier to eat unhealthy, where do you stand on enforcing a class divide at the grocery store?
It really isn't. It's a conversation about making choices. Even the richest assholes on earth, lets say Gates and Bazo's have to make choices. I drive the same Honda Civic 2005 I bought after college even though I could afford a porche now with cash. Why would I waste good money though?
Same thing goes for food. Why do you want to pollute your body with crap just because some fat asshole with money does it?
Sorry, I'm not following. This conversation started because someone said food stamps are fine, but we should not allow poor people to choose what food they buy. They should only be allowed to buy foods we deem as healthy. Effectively, the person advocated taking away the choice of poor people. All the conversation that followed is about that idea.
You can get a bag of Doritos for like $3 and it'll provide calories and a weeks worth of snacks for your kids, all while you don't have to cook an entire meal for them from lentils (?) after having spent 8-10 hours that day on your feet at Walmart and your second backup job, because Walmart doesn't allow full-time work. You name a vegetable that can do the same thing for $3.
So a 1/2 pound bag of Doritos runs about $6. It has 9 very small servings, each with 150 calories (a full bag has about 75% of the daily calories for one person). It will get you fat but not make you feel full.
Alternatively, you could spend less on a 5lb bag of carrots. It would have about 950 calories, or about 33% fewer total calories than the bag of Doritos. But it will have some nutrients, fiber to fill you up, etc. That will make you fuller than Doritos and not make you fat.
Obesity isn’t because calories are too hard to come by in this country. But the carrots don’t have the same dopamine response. We’re addicted to processed foods.
I don’t know anywhere that a bag of Doritos costs more than a bag of carrots.
Lol. Do you even shop for groceries yourself? Do you check prices when you do?
I literally just pulled up the prices at my local target. Doritos 9.25 Oz bag was $5.19. A 16 Oz bag of carrots is $1.29.
A pound of lentils has over 1600 calories, costs less than the Doritos and can be slow cooked in a few fours with about 10 minutes of labor for rinsing and putting the pot on the stove. Add some rice or pasta for just another 10 minutes of labor and another couple dollars. The reason obesity is common among lower income households is because of preference for Doritos and Slushies instead of spending 10 minutes to make some healthy rice and beans. Obesity is cheap to acquire but you’re going to pay for it in the end in healthcare expenses and shorter lifespans. Maybe giving out Ozempic along with nutritional advice in addition to food stamps would end up lowering overall health costs.
Mentioning Ozempic, another thing mostly only rich people get, is kind of a funny add in your comment.
I get the feeling a lot of you didn’t grow up poor with food stamps, and don’t really get how aware kids are that the family is poor and clearly doesn’t have as much as all the other families. We already limit what food stamps can acquire. Choosing to limit it more so poor kids are even more aware that they don’t get what other families get might help them. Or it might just make them hate their mom or primary caregiver.
If you want to fix the diet of America, fix the diet of America. Don’t run experiments on poor kids because they’re a captured group who can’t control who their parents are
I grew up working class, never on food stamps that I know of, but never went out to eat, never had Doritos and learned how to cook beans and other foods. I’m not trying anything as insurmountable as changing American’s diets, or even reform food stamps which now do allow you to buy Doritos and other junk food. I’m just saying that there are easier solutions to obesity and hunger, that may involve basic skills, and a small amount of labor. I wasn’t implying that everyone should buy Ozempic, let alone mandate it, but since it does successfully reduce obesity and the related diseases, then it may actually be worth it in the long run as far as healthcare spending and longevity are concerned.
Man, you need to get out of whatever weird bubble you’re in that you think anyone that works all day is going to be good with spending hours cooking lentils
In my weird bubble, I worked 12 hours a day for long periods, making lentils takes less than 10 minutes to rinse them and put them in a slow cooker in the morning and they will be done when you get off work. In the time you wrote that comment, or to go to Seven-eleven to buy a bag of Doritos, you could have got them going. Maybe in your bubble cooking is a very hard, exhausting job.
Lentils and rice casserole take about an hour in the oven let's take about 30 min on stovetop.
The convenience store in your poor neighborhood carries the Doritos. To get the lentils and carrots you have to figure out how to get to the Walmart or grocery store that is not in your poor neighborhood. Poor areas of the country are often food deserts.
The food industry “graciously” provides materials on “nutrition” for schools. And lobbyists “help” lawmakers write USDA guidelines & food assistance programs. Look at school lunches. All packaged crap.
This may be the answer for my post above as to why Westerners choose suicide instead of migration.
This overstates the role of economics as a cause of suicide. It's the logic of Homo economicus carried to a dark conclusion (i.e., taking one's life is a rational, economically optimal act). There was probably an economist in the 1930s who thought along these same lines in the Soviet Union and engineered the Holodomor.
Suicide is fundamentally a psychological and psychiatric pathology.
Migration to where? All flaws considered the West is the place to be as evidenced by the migration crises. Where do the saints go when Heaven’s economy tanks?
I would; it’s not my fucking job to deny people with difficult lives some comfort food.
Which presidential candidates recently have more adulated wealth?
The adulation of wealth is a much broader than the wealth of presidential candidates. If you know anything about the United States, you know that money is a way we know how to keep score.
Idk, i like the song. At least until i found out it wasn’t backed up by aggregate statistics. Now I’m not sure how i feel about it. Actually I’m not sure I like when other people enjoy things come to think of it.
Insightful analysis- your writing won’t change the minds of die hard right wingers, but folks like David Brooks should read before making claims that elites caused people to go MAGA.
Brooks is just a whiny Conservative, who is trying to deflect blame for his role in creating the Right Wing Fairy Land of Alternative Reality that resulted in MAGA. And Cancel Culture wasn’t the Internet’s fault, it just supersized it like 7/11 did to soft drinks and slurpees. Newt Gingrich and Pat Robertson created it with their RHINO purge of the Republican Party, who wouldn’t goose step in formation with their kind of Conservatism. Once you’ve destroyed a Senator, who lost a limb diving on a grenade in VietNam as a limp waisted coward, it doesn’t take much to brow beat on the Internet behind a shield of anonymity. Which then invites a backlash, which then invites a counter whiny backlash against wokeness and more pity party song about people too angry to see that the angry man behind the curtain is just a piece of crap grifter.
Isn't cancel culture less a creation of the Internet in generation, and more a creation of centralized social media platforms in particular?
It’s not even that. Who cares if someone is mean to you on the internet? The problem is the entrenched DEI bureaucracy in companies, schools and other employers who can fire someone because they don’t want to be seen condoning some viewpoints expressed there that they consider “harmful” or “dangerous”.
Cancel doesn't meet the necessary or sufficient conditions of anthropology or sociology to be a culture. :)
The last word goes to Twitter's @BerrakBiz: "It's only Cancel Culture if it originates in the Cancelle region of France. Otherwise, it's just sparkling consequences."
I believe you meant "at a later age than Boomers or Gen X".
How much of the restraint shown by younger generations today do you think is a product of sky-high housing costs (which likely mean more are stuck living with their parents)?
Nope, there's an absence of parallels to puritanism.
Puritanism was an intentional and religiously dedicated form of social organization. It wasn't merely chaste, austere behavior.
For one thing, millennials and zoomers are the most non-religious generations America has had, and by all accounts are not going to turn religious as they grow older.
They're not really committed to their behavior as a lifestyle choice, OTOH they're really into "wellness" cults, so the lack of interest in sex or living with their parents as adults isn't necessarily intentional behavior.
It's a combination of circumstance (a lot of the social frontiers open to boomers and Xers don't exist for them) and practical choice without any grand claim behind it.
I do think millennials and zoomers are choosing not to have sex as a form of rebellion against older generations because they hate boomers and Xers. Who do you think made the insults "OK Boomer" and "OK Karen" a thing? They're choosing not to mimic the worst behaviors and personalities of their parents.
Calling wokism a religion is a category error. I like John McWhorter's work and find him engaging, but for a scholar like him to conflate the w-word with religion is being disingenuous.
Why x-idpol is NOT a religion: All religions throughout human history -- the Abrahamic desert tribes (Judaism, Christianity and Islam), Hindu, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, Paganism; deprecated ones like artifacts from Greece, Rome and Scandinavia that are reduced to mere mythology; and even modern ones like Mormonism, Scientology and Qanon -- all offer some otherworldly explanation for practical, earthly problems. Roughly, the practical, earthly problems we as mortal humans experience are the consequence of some divine cause and toward the service of some moral point to be made.
X-idpol (short for intersectional identity politics, better known in the public imagination by the snarky and risible "woke") makes no claims to the supernatural and divine. In fact, we know the origin story of x-idpol and can even be explain by boring plain facts. X-idpol didn't come from Mount Sinai, but the ivory tower originated by tenured academics and intellectuals. X-idpol is philosophy and theory, not theology -- that's a huge difference right there. Academicians and theoreticians know they are writing output to be scrutinized, argued, proved and defended (like a postgrad thesis or dissertation), not making a claim of revealed truth to be interpreted.
This narrative is total and utter nonsense it's almost laughable. Newt Gingrich and Pat Robertson caused the blue hair trigglypuffs? And they're also apparently just like Nazi's as well. American political discourse from the left is honesntly pathetic. Max Cleland lost his election fair and square because the voters chose his opponent, you don't get to make him a martyr because the people chose someone you didn't approve of.
I still cannot forgive what they did to Max Clelland.
It's kind of shocking that someone still pays Brooks for his constantly wrong opinions. The "economic anxiety" myth was a weak excuse from the moment NYT trotted it out
Folks like Brooks made his name a long time ago and is now rehashing his greatest hits.
The shift in the relative prices of manufactures v services has little to do with NAFTA or accession of China the WTO. [Some, but little] Rather credit/blame a) lower costs of transporting goods internationally b) CPC deciding that it wanted China to be part of the world economy, c) secular fiscal deficits due mainly to Regan, Bush and Ryan-Trump tax cuts for the rich.
What led to the rise of Trump: Eight years of the Black Man in the White House.
Source: Every meme and internet comment from every maga ever.
"Why were all those minorities voting for the white supremacist?"
Moral kevlar.
"Putting in the zip code for Anthony’s hometown, I found that someone who makes $49,240 in Virginia will take home $36,960, or $3,080 a month. That’s…not a lot."
I suggest you take a drive through the counties of upper Wisconsin or Michigan's Upper Peninsula to see the devastating effects of depopulation has had on these communities. Not to mention the rust-belt cities of Detroit, Akron and northern Indiana. Depopulation driven by de-industrialization due to "free trade" policies. Ross Perot was right back in 1992 to decry the effects of disastrous free trade policies on the American Heartland.
I lived in Michigan...I have seen.
Wasn't it imports from China after they joined the WTO that gutted American manufacturing, far more than the NAFTA that Ross Perot campaigned against in the 1990s?
AIUI China was particularly attractive to American executives, as the lack of rule of law there provided them with opportunities to corruptly enrich themselves at the expense of both their (Chinese) workers, and their shareholders back home.
WTO and NAFTA are of a piece, and if you look at the history of the origins of NAFTA to the culmination of China in the WTO, history and economy would've ended up the way it did even if you asked a counterfactual (i.e., what if NAFTA had been voted down or Clinton had vetoed it, or what if China had not been admitted to the WTO).
NAFTA was a yearslong negotiation that began in Reagan's second term and was finalized early in Bill Clinton's first term. NAFTA's effects didn't become instantaneous, and the manufacturing job losses took place fortuitously around the time of Clinton's second term, during the time of the internet and computer boom. In the aggregate, so many jobs were created in technology and services that they were covering the losses in manufacturing.
The deindustrialization that began in the Great Lakes and later spread throughout the Midwest largely happened because the manufacturing plants were reaching the end of their life cycles and the manufacturers had the bind of needing to expand to international markets while also being uncompetitive on costs. The first wave of deindustrialization that was felt in Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, northern Indiana, Chicago and east Wisconsin was happening in the 1960s and 70s, because of the Marshall Plan that rebuilt the ruins of European and Japanese cities, which were able to leapfrog ahead of the U.S. with state-of-the-art manufacturing capacity offering goods at lower price or higher quality.
The opening of markets in Europe, Japan, Canada and Mexico would have happened and manufacturing had to get its costs down and quickly.
China's industrialization began well before the WTO, and was a policy pursued by Deng Xiaoping after he had ascended to power and wanted to rebuild China from the depredations of his enemy Mao. He'd pursued an industrialization and maritime trade with mixed success -- he wanted industrialization all across China. That failed, but where it succeeded it was wildly successful -- Shanghai and the southern mainland in proximity to Hong Kong. This success in the coasts allowed China to negotiate its way into the WTO, and once in, that's when industrialization was possible nationwide because China's large size and population allowed it to be the world's bottom-line cost producer. No one in the world could get under China's prices.
Good point that the American golden age in the 1950s was a historical aberration: the result of almost all the industry in Europe and Asia being destroyed in World War II.
I've often wondered to what extent the anti-Ukraine leanings of American Trumpists is because they don't want the imperialist aggressors of this century to be defeated _too_ early: perhaps they're hoping for Xi and Putin to destroy America's industrial competitors (both themselves and their enemies in Europe in Asia), much as Hitler and Tojo did in the previous century?