It's so strange because my experience is the opposite. I see a lot of content about reading and books (how there are no great books anymore, what was the best book, etc), fun facts and other trivia about authors, a few books getting made into movies (hello Dune, but I was thinking of the Martian and Ready Player One) ...
but I don't see any of this cultural expectation, this peer pressure. (One of my friends keep recommending me books and movies, but that's an exception. Okay, I saw Pikkety's Capital on a different friend's bookshelf. And that's it.)
...
and it's also interesting because I remember when half of the world was waiting for GRRM to stop trampolining!
I purposefully put down the last book somewhere around halfway because I thought the next one will be upon us soon, so it'll be great to pick it up and read the remaining story in one go. Hah.
And somehow after Banks died I stopped reading books. (Sure, no connection, but well, it would have been nice to get more of his funky space stories!)
I live in Pacific Heights, likely one of the top 5 richest neighborhoods in the world. Let me tell you this really directly… inequality is not going down, these people just have no fucking clue how extreme it’s become because they aren’t amoung it and keep comparing terrible datasets that completely lack the outlier data that makes up most of the extreme inequality.
And pacific heights won’t come up at the top 5 richest neighborhoods in the world because the data publicaly available is crap… you need to see know and run in the circles to see how much shadow wealth is going around
Data is always crap, but there are error bars. GDP is pretty well accounted for.
There was shadow wealth at every point of the last decade, so it's already factored in, the numbers (and studies) are already taking that into account, ... unless! Unless folks suddenly started to commit more tax fraud. (Which is hard to do if your money comes from capital.)
Sure it's not money on some C&D account, but it's just as visible (capital is stocks and other forms of equity, land, and other rights, like patents, royalties, options).
The US is still the wild west in many regards (from good old identity fraud to sheriffs/judges/prosecutors with license to bully anyone without the right connections) and of course the basically institutionalized various other scams come to mind (thriving MLMs, tax exempt religious orgs and megachurches, doctors turned sales-reps for opiates, payday loans, untouchable plants and mining operations polluting and leaving deadly open pits, you know ...), but if there's one thing you can't really fault the US for is getting lazy on private property regulations. And neither the IRS nor the CA FTB is known for being completely clueless.
but I don't see any of this cultural expectation, this peer pressure. (One of my friends keep recommending me books and movies, but that's an exception. Okay, I saw Pikkety's Capital on a different friend's bookshelf. And that's it.)
...
and it's also interesting because I remember when half of the world was waiting for GRRM to stop trampolining!
I purposefully put down the last book somewhere around halfway because I thought the next one will be upon us soon, so it'll be great to pick it up and read the remaining story in one go. Hah.
And somehow after Banks died I stopped reading books. (Sure, no connection, but well, it would have been nice to get more of his funky space stories!)