A lot of people are pissed of about the electoral college, including many on this forum. It has also been widely discussed in the media as a possible weak spot in American democracy.
This drives political will which is what makes people vote!
It’s better to have trump win the popular vote because a bunch of people who didn’t get their way choose to sit out?
Apparently to corrupt system is why many of you liked Bernie but now you question a chance to demonstrate that corruption by running up the score on blue states.
I think we should run up the score in blue states only because Trump’s butthurt when he finds out he’s the first Pres in US history to lose the popular vote twice will be hilarious. It will be nice to have something to laugh about on my way to the camp.
This was true 6 weeks ago, it’s true today, and I’m going to continue reposting it wherever appropriate until this forum acknowledges that Bernie is responsible for his own failures:
Also if Warren had dropped out, and 100% of her supporters went to Bernie, he would’ve only cracked 50% in Vermont (where he cracked 50% anyway), Colorado, and possibly Utah. The US electorate overwhelmingly chose Biden yesterday. The movement! theory never came true because it was never a thing outside of bubble isolated online communities. I’m sorry that your antidemocratic fantasy of a split centrist vote and delegates lost due to threshold limits didn’t come true either.
White Americans moving to Canada will get a first small taste of what it’s like to be an undesirable “other.” American has a negative connotation in most parts of the country.
Financialization, and the gold standard is probably related, changed the way large corporations are funded and their incentives in a way that put more pressure on wages and less concerned with long term results. It increased borrowing and the relative importance of stock prices and put CEOs with those specialties in charge.
The other theory is that “productivity” is a bit of BS. It is something like GDP per hour worked and the rise of bullshit middle management administrative consulting jobs are being counted as productivity when they really aren’t. Insofar as that’s true, productivity didn’t necessarily keep going up and leaving wages so lonely on the famous graph.
Another possibility is the late stage capitalism thing. Efficiencies are so high that there’s a big diminishing return on labor and it’s become worth less, but there’s no real incentive to have people work fewer hours when they can be paid less and still survive.
It is when that sentiment crosses into strategizing how to get your candidate elected anyway when voters clearly signal their preference for someone else, and blaming other candidates for not going along with the plan, denying your candidate the very narrow circumstances required to steal a victory.
Symbolically, if it matters, to push the dems to the left it is probably better for progressives to show there anger by not running up the vote this time.
Productivity is a messy economic term, not a fundamental physical property. And on top of fuzzy definition and difficulty of measurement the point is really about how meaningful it is and whether or not that’s changed. Certainly not all productivity is equal in terms of improving people’s lives.
I mean I’m no market fundamentalist, and plenty of econ is bs, where the exceptions swallow the rules, but productivity is a among like the 5-10 core ideas of economics and deeply embedded in its broader theoretical structures. It’s not a physical property, but I doubt you could have much economics without it.
Anyway something dramatic happened between like 1973-1975 and productivity involved. Perhaps the way GDP is measured or something else that’s used to calculate productivity needs to be reconsidered. Or maybe not. It’s just a theory, but I think at least it’s not obviously false.
The professor was just wrapping up a very long proof. All the chalk boards (they don’t have these anymore do they?) were full. She gets to the end and says “and so obviously A is true”. Then she pauses and thinks and starts scribbling in a notebook furiously for twenty minutes while the class waits. After twenty long minutes she looks up and exclaims “yes! It is obvious!”