Category: Root Causes

Underlying causes of echo chamber polarization

*** Opinion Today: Your house doesn’t know your racial identity, right?

Keywords: home ownership race identity whiteness wealth value declines

Your neighbors and potential neighbors do.

By Jenée Desmond-Harris

Senior Staff Editor, Opinion

 

You know those conversations you have before you get married, when you try to get on the same page about your values and your hopes in terms of kids and money and work and household labor? I remember my husband saying he wasn’t sure about homeownership, because he didn’t think it was a smart way for Black people to build wealth. I was sort of skeptical; I mean, money is money, and your house doesn’t know your racial identity, right?

Yannick Lowery

 

Of course it doesn’t. But your neighbors and potential neighbors do. And as Dorothy Brown explained in an Op-Ed this weekend, their attitudes can inform whether you make or lose money when you sell. In the essay, which is adapted from her forthcoming book, “The Whiteness of Wealth: How The Tax System Impoverishes Black Americans — And How We Can Fix It,” she writes:

Black Americans are often unable to build wealth from homeownership in the same way their white peers are, in large part because home prices are generally set by the people who make up the majority of buyers: white Americans. White families typically prefer to live in predominantly white neighborhoods with very few or no Black neighbors. Homes in these neighborhoods tend to have the highest market values because most prospective purchasers — who happen to be white — find them most desirable.

 

That’s depressing. And it gets worse. Brown writes that “research has shown that once more than 10 percent of your neighbors are Black, the value of your home declines.” This is the truth behind our household joke that the real estate agent showing the house next door to ours must have a bad workday when their clients see us in our driveway.

Brown’s piece goes on to explain how the tax code pairs with this harsh, racist reality to perpetuate the racial wealth gap. She makes the case that changes to our tax system can make things fairer, and she’s cautiously optimistic that we might see those changes under the Biden administration.

 

Most of what you’ll read in her piece is not uplifting, but it’s important to understand. And yes, I’ve told my husband he was right.

Continue reading the main story

 

 

 

Watch – 21 Lessons for the 21st Century | Yuval Noah Harari | Talks at Google

Watch – 21 Lessons for the 21st Century | Yuval Noah Harari | Talks at Google

 

From the beginning.

https://youtu.be/Bw9P_ZXWDJU

 

From the quote below.

https://youtu.be/Bw9P_ZXWDJU?t=3186

YUVAL NOAH HARARI: “As I said in the very beginning, I don’t think we can predict the future, but I think we can influence it. What I try to do as a historian– and even when I talk about the future, I define myself as a historian, because I think that history is not the study of the past. History is the study of change, how human societies and political systems and economies change.  And what I try to do is to map different possibilities rather than make predictions.

 This is what will happen in 2050. And we need to keep a very broad perspective.  One of the biggest dangers is when we have a very narrow perspective, like we develop a new technology and we think, oh, this technology will have this outcome.  And we are convinced of this prediction, and we don’t take into account that the same technology might have very different outcomes. And then we don’t prepare.

And again, as I said in the beginning,  it’s especially important to take into account the worst possible outcomes in order to be aware of them. So I would say whenever you are thinking about the future, the future impact of a technology and developing, create a map of different possibilities.  If you see just one possibility, you’re not looking wide enough.  If you see two or three, it’s probably also not wide enough. You need a map of, like, four or five different possibilities, minimum.” 

 AUDIENCE QUESTION:

https://youtu.be/Bw9P_ZXWDJU?t=3289

 Hey, Mr. Harari.

So my question is– I’ll start very broad, and then I’ll narrow it down for the focus. I’m really interested in, what do you think are the components that make these fictional stories so powerful in how they guide human nature?

And then if I narrow it down is, I’m specifically interested in the self-destruction behavior of humans. How can these fictional stories led by a few people convince the mass to literally kill or die for that fictional story?

 YUVAL NOAH HARARI:

 It again goes back to hacking the brain and hacking the human animal. It’s been done throughout history, previously just by trial and error, without the deep knowledge of brain science and evolution we have today.

But to give an example, like if you want to convince people to persecute and exterminate some other group of people, what you need to do is really latch onto the disgust mechanisms in the human brain. Evolution has shaped homo sapiens with very powerful disgust mechanisms in the brain to protect us against diseases, against all kinds of sources of potential disease. And if you look at the history of bias and prejudice and genocide, one recurring theme

is that it repeatedly kind of latches onto these disgust mechanisms.  And so you would find things like women are impure, or these other people, they smell bad and they bring diseases. And very, very often disgust is at the center.

So you’ll often find comparison between certain types of humans and rats or cockroaches, or all kinds of other disgusting things.

 So if you want to instigate genocide, you start by hacking the disgust mechanisms in the human brain.  And this is very, very deep. And if it’s done from an early age, it’s extremely difficult afterwards.  People can– they know intellectually that it’s wrong to say that these people are disgusting, that these people, they smell bad. But they know it intellectually. But when you place them, like, in a brain scanner, they can’t help it. If they were raised– I mean, so we can still do something about it. We can still kind of defeat this.  But it’s very difficult, because it really goes to the core of the brain.

 WILSON WHITE:

 So I’ll end on a final question, because we’re at time. When Larry and Sergey, when they founded Google, they did so with this deep belief in technology’s ability to improve people’s lives everywhere. So if you had a magic wand and you could give Google the next big project for us to work on, in 30 seconds or less, what would you grant us as our assignment?

 

YUVAL NOAH HARARI:

 

An AI system that gets to know me in order to protect me and not in order to sell me products or make me click on advertisements and so forth.

 

WILSON WHITE:

 

All right.  Mission accepted.

 

[LAUGH]

 

Thank you, guys.

[APPLAUSE]

 From the beginning.

https://youtu.be/Bw9P_ZXWDJU

The book – 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Tectonic Forces Driving the Polarization that Caused the Current Echo Chambers to Form

This article from The Atlantic magazine discusses our current looming constitutional crisis with the presidential election.  It references the last time this happened in 1876. The deal reached then to avoid total chaos put the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in office and removed federal troops from the south – effectively ending Reconstruction.

This is a quote from the end of the article.

Only once, in 1877, has the Interregnum brought the country to the brink of true collapse. We will find no model in that episode for us now.

Four states sent rival slates of electors to Congress in the 1876 presidential race between Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. When a special tribunal blessed the electors for Hayes, Democrats began parliamentary maneuvers to obstruct the electoral count in Congress. Their plan was to run out the clock all the way to Inauguration Day, when the Republican incumbent, Ulysses S. Grant, would have to step down.

Not until two days before Grant’s term expired did Tilden give in. His concession was based on a repugnant deal for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, where they were protecting the rights of emancipated Black people. But that was not Tilden’s only inducement.

The threat of military force was in the air. Grant let it be known that he was prepared to declare martial law in New York, where rumor had it that Tilden planned to be sworn in, and to back the inauguration of Hayes with uniformed troops.

That is an unsettling precedent for 2021. If our political institutions fail to produce a legitimate president, and if Trump maintains the stalemate into the new year, the chaos candidate and the commander in chief will be one and the same.

https://www.echochamber2016.us/the-atlantic-the-election-that-could-break-america-2/

Our economic system based on capitalism has created great prosperity and relieved much human suffering.  It is a system that allows people with capital to exploit those without capital and public recourses like the environment.  This exploitation based economic system received a huge boost in 1619 when the first slaves arrived in Virginia from Africa. 

 

Today, we are witnessing and living through the calumnious convergence of two ruinous centuries old trends –  runaway monopolistic capitalism and a nearly out of control racially motivated police state and political system the capitalists require to control the increasing exploited classes of blacks and other marginalize groups.

 

We live in a world in which even the oppressed for the most part are better off over time while falling ever further behind the capitalists.