The career politicians, intelligencia, and c-suite technocrats have been running shit for the past half century or more - you see where it's gotten us, to the ruin you describe.

Fwiw afaic, the reason poverty persists is a product of the market solution we've elected. It's for all practical purposes and intents necessary for poverty to exist as it creates a class of people willing to invest their time at a deficit to themselves (relatively undervalued labor). More or less kin to introducing an artificial concentration gradient, where there likely was none. Without that poverty resources would become increasingly expensive because labor supply becomes more reticent to act on a deficit because they're no longer existentially threatened. Additionally, demand increases as there is more liquidity and velocity. The most compromising feature of this is the megalithic multinationals sinking all that money which destroys the natural local circularity. All the money ends up in Amazon, Nike, and Coca-Cola's accounts.

Stop this. It isn't an economics issue. This is a moral issue. Your tract of reasoning is precisely why the world is growing so untenable for the human element. There needn't exist laws or programs or any other edifice by which regulation is effected. People need to be made to realize that they're being wholly indiscretionate and their disposition to do so comes at a cost, and it should be personal to make the point manifest.

And since you can't grow a baby in a vacuum, the data is inexorably tainted. Not to mention that it decorrelates once you move out of the range of people with serious cognitive deficits, at least in terms of monetary success, with outliers showing 140IQ and $30k income per annum. And in terms of productivity there's too many arguments to be made to even begin considering how lackluster that argument is. Like productivity being tied to income, and that income isn't correlated with IQ, thus IQ can't be determined to have a correlation with productivity, right?

>liberal free-market utopia We're a psuedo-fascist democracy. Since the first time the government elected to choose a company to even acknowledge we departed from the liberal ideal. Corporations being people? Big fascist move there. But yeah, you keep laboring under that impression.

>growth, innovation, future-oriented Maybe we've figured out, collectively, that shit is fucked. That the finite world can't provide each generation consecutively with the same allotment of resources and the tangible decline in quality of life that we're already suffering is enough to push most everyone out of the reproduction cycle, voluntarily or not. Maybe people are (literally) sick from the constant goading we receive from our "culture" which is little more than emotionally appealing marketing in the vast majority of cases. It's a dissatisfying and vacuous sphere of garbage.

To the point of innovation, we're hilariously stagnant in every aspect. Always have been.

Future orientation is what allowed the communist revolution to justify the killing of millions. Future orientation is what the Nazi party used to justify their actions. We need to look to the now.

Last time I had a girlfriend I'd come off a 2 year spree of virtual homelessness and poverty. I was living with my parents (mom and dad, both separated) transiently. I was dirt poor, drugs problem, losing jobs etc... She was in college studying to become a nurse. It wasn't one of those asymmetrical relationships either. She wasn't on the goon squad.

Now that I have money, my own place, some direction and intention in my life... In most context where I have exposure there's some sort of hazard. Like trying to do anything at work when there might be a signal there seems like a terrible idea. Way too much potential for bad shit. At college, well shit I don't know if I'd be okay with dating anybody younger than 21, or a 21 year old for that matter (which is the rough majority). Even if we assume the age floor was 28 I still wouldn't dare approach anybody without evident interest, and networking at school is impossible because I'm swamped with work and work. I can get conversations started on Tinder, but they burn out fast and hard, no effort on the other end. I get a lot of matches, but I've only managed to finagle 2 dates out of what has to be hundreds of matches. I can't say how many I've actually opened, the odds look like shit regardless. Doesn't help that I live in an ultra-conservative rural cesspool where there's like... .5 degrees of separation.

And then what are you to take from all the man-bashing shit? All the vitriolic speech against white males? And so on and so forth.

I'll go to pornhub, thanks.

The really strange part, which seemed to me to be largely overlooked, is the ratio of violence to sex. The US in particular seems possessed by an interesting duality. One being that depictions of extreme violence are fine, but full frontal nudity is somehow verboten. And then another interesting point, the magnitude of which I'm not wholly aware of, is that we're almost certainly the porn capitol. Not in production alone, but in consumption as well, but I'm speculating on the basis of anecdotes.

What does it mean?