On the Meet The Press yesterday, David Brooks reminded us all just how completely loaded with bullshit most cultural criticism actually is in America:
MR. BROOKS: I always look at passionate outsiders. Who are the passionate outsiders who are going to come into the mainstream? Because the people with passion really can control the decade--the feminists in the 1970s, the evangelicals in the 1980s. And so when I look around the world at who are the real passionate outsiders, one, the people that we've already talked about, which are the, the democracy protesters in Iran. But two, and I have to say that I'm not a huge fan of them, but the tea party people. They have real passion. They're now at the outside. If they can merge with responsible leadership and become a real movement--there's real disgust at government, there's real disgust about fiscal issues--they could become maybe a destructive force in the Republican Party, maybe a positive force. But, to me, those are the people with real passion who may play a much larger role in the coming decade and so forth.
WTF does any of this actually mean? Define "passionate." Define "outsiders." For that matter, define "mainstream." And, while you are at it Mr. Brooks, please provide some justification for how any single group "controls" a decade, and what causality mechanism allows a qualitative group to do this.
Everything Brooks says here is purely bullshit masquerading as knowledge. It reminds me of why I like to ground my writing in actual facts, rather than subjective, vague, qualitative terminology that doesn't actually mean anything.
To that end, here are some things that are actually going to happen over the next decade:
1. Continuing, gradual identity changes
The people of the United States are going to become:
2. Societal and economic changes
- Lower crime rates (due to aging population)
- Higher voter turnout rates (due to aging population)
- Higher public spending as a % of GDP (partially due to older population, largely because that never really drops)
- More tolerant (because, generally speaking, more tolerant people tend to be younger)
- Equal, or greater, overall income inequality (because that has been happening for so long, and current policies will only slow the trend, not reverse it.) However, economic inequality between ethnic and gender groups will probably continue to decline.
3. International changes
- The world, as a whole, will become more African and South Asian.
- The European Union will continue to pull away from the United States as the #1 economic region in the world. While China will not catch up to the USA, they will firmly establish themselves as a third world Superpower in this regard. These three Superpowers will dominate the world for decades.
- Even as China and the EU gain on the United States economically, and even as the rest of the world gains on all three of those regions in terms of population, the Anglophone world will become an increasingly larger percentage of the wealthy world. This is because per capita income in China remains very low, and because Australia, Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom all sport population growth rates far exceeding Japan and Western Europe.
- The world will get hotter.
That's all stuff that is actually going to happen. After a month of maddeningly vague and meaningless predictions of the sort quoted above, I thought this would provide a useful counterweight.
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