Obviously we disagree but the point I feel most compelled to push back against is your assertion that "living in the modern US is paradise in almost all quantifiable ways".

This is such a problematic statement that clearly labors heavily under the burden of its own premise. A crude metric is quite telling: suicide has trended upwards in the past 20 years. I presume if the data went back further the picture would be more stark.

Living in a time with gizmos and gadgets and economic plenty that is weakly distributed and calling that "paradise" is very insulting to people's lived experiences and part of the reason I think the economic message of the politics you represent alienates average folks.

Based on your posts it seems like you've been a wealthy developer for decades and likely have employed, or employ, cheap labor. Kind of feels like a rugpull, Ross.

Personally, I've managed many teams with cheap foreign developers, I'm just straight about it.

Also, when do you think I was born? You think the US hadn't been built in 1982? Absurd claims all around.

Suicide and basic needs being met is likely not highly correlated. On the other side suicide stats likely don’t include dependency related death, alcoholism can be a coping mechanism, if you didn’t commit suicide but instead murdered your liver and died early is that really a different statistic in your assessment?

The only way you can measure is access to basic needs, housing, shelter, medical care, nutrition. A century ago those things were significantly lower for the average person vs now. Could the world be in a better situation? Very likely yes, but is could also be much worse.

If you want to significantly change things then better, advocate for more social workers and to make sure the social welfare system works through them. They are in my experience very good at sussing out whether someone is a leech to society and is just looking for a handout of someone who is truly in need.

Advocate for adequate housing, more suburbs doesn’t help low-middle class people, you need more dense housing close to infrastructure or workplaces.

I just don't know how to express to you how philosophically naive I think the kind of utilitarian assertion you've made is.

We can easily construct a thought experiment world that you and I would both agree is a living hellscape where all human needs were simultaneously being met. Most horror science fiction is predicated on those premises.

I just think we don’t need to debate this, things are better than a century ago but they are still not great.

Quality of life isn’t solely based on basic needs alone, but for the vast majority of people those basic needs are now met when they weren’t before. That doesn’t mean we get to say, “That’s good enough let’s pack up” there’s still a lot of work to do.

Fundamentally the question to me becomes "what is the meaning of life" and I don't actually think the answer is even "to be extremely comfortable".

This is my core disagreement with tech enthusiasts (specifically AI) people. It's just a naive way of understanding the human organism.

(You know, it occurs to me that most Americans aren't even extremely comfortable because they live in comfort with a massive amount of real or perceived precarity.)

I can tell you my point of view is that we aren’t even sure what we should do. I know reasonably well how to solve the basic needs, in my experience that doesn’t mean you are going to be happy, I was the unhappiest in my life when I had the most I’ve had. Well maybe the second unhappiest, there was a point in my life I will never want to go back to, but I don’t think I will.

When everything was going well, I needed nothing, I was achieving all my life goals, I fought through the worst depression, I had to seek medical help.

At the turn of the previous century, suicide rates were markedly higher than today, even though today is worse than 20 years ago.

https://jabberwocking.com/raw-data-us-suicide-rates-since-19...

It's probably not causative, as that would be quite silly, but economic plenty for extremely wealthy people caused by a massive influx of cheap labor is clearly not a net boon on this metric.

The US made its bones well before this insane population explosion we only very recently had.

(Yes, we've had large amounts of immigration before. We also built infrastructure and were vastly less developed).

> A crude metric is quite telling: suicide has trended upwards in the past 20 years. I presume if the data went back further the picture would be more stark.

1. The data going back 70 years, which is 50 years more than 20, show that suicide has sharply risen.

2. The integrity of data much older than that is substantially in question.

> After two decades of slowly rising, the US suicide rate has stabilized over the past few years. It is now at the same level as the 1950s.

And yeah, the rates pre-1950 were much, much higher.

That doesn't sound right.

They said that the US population has grown by almost 100 million since they were born. That would put their birth year around 1989.

Some searching suggests that in 1989 about 50% of the population lived in suburban areas. That would have been about 120 million people.

It is still about 50% which is 170 million people today. That suggests that around 70% of the suburbs were already built when they were born.

Which is usually how these arguments go.

Are there more or fewer homeless people in the US than in 1982? There are fewer. Is the number of people per household larger or smaller than in 1982? It is smaller. Is the average home larger or smaller than in 1982? It is larger (very significantly so). Do the math. We're building housing faster than population growth. QED.

And, overwhelmingly, we're building that housing in suburban sprawl, because that's where it's cheap to build housing.

Now, there are many arguments about whether this is good or bad or whether policies could be better or worse. And I think you'd find you agree with me on more than you don't.

But statements like the above that seem to take as a prior that "massive immigration" (sigh, again) is somehow creating an infrastructure crises are simply wrong. Period. Start with correct arguments, then tune. Don't yell about one because your priors tell you it "doesn't sound right".