And I appreciate your being able to articulate yourself well, Ronan.
But we are also disagreeing on a fair number of grounds.
I don't think you are presenting all the facts correctly. I am reading an agenda in your words, more than once.
What is most obvious to me is that you write as if you are a winner yourself. I may be incorrect; sometimes losers associate themselves with the winners so they feel better about the whole. But in general, your presentation reads as if you are doing well yourself.
Each individual is entitled to their own story, and decide which value is valuable and what other value is not valuable. I am not going to interfere there.
I see in the United States a society that is pretty darn good for many. But then the edge appears and people drop off because society has given up on them. Our representatives only need to win over the majority; they don’t give a flying fish about the others.
The nations in which the bottom ten percent are doing better, there are actually quite a bit. I put that in a graph I made in 2006:
As you can see, the US is sitting pretty low in this graph. All other rich nations in the world are treating their bottom ten percent better than we do.
What you can also see is that different systems do end up delivering different outcomes. The outcomes are statistically significant, which means there is true value to the presentation and the (dis)connections we see among the different systems.
In as far as elections and a two-party system is concerned, the following truth:
If we have a box with pebbles and rocks in them of different sizes, then shaking the box up and down causes the bigger pebbles and rocks to move up and the smaller pebbles and rocks to move to the bottom.
In a two-party system, we can rock the box up and down, and that's it. The stratification solidifies and everyone thinks that is the natural order.
But in a nation with proportional voting in which everyone gets the same vote toward the end results, the box gets shaken up and down, and every now and then a turn is produced, too. The little pebbles and rocks can help change the distribution of society; they are not stuck, not held down. They are more free than the people in the Land of the Free. And if we were brave, we would give ourself the system in which we let ourselves be free, politically.
Again, Ronan, you write well. You articulate yourself very well, even when I don’t agree with all you say. I hope you keep doing what you are doing, investigating the world. I am sure you will write many great stories.
