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"As many commenters have noted in my related stories on Ruminato, it all started to go wrong when Reagan was elected." But Reagan rode a wave that started much earlier. One interesting book on the topic is Upswing by Putnam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_D._Putnam . He goes back to 1870 and tries to understand the long waves of change in American politics.

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I’m not a historian. However, I believe some of this goes much further back in time.

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Putnam argues that caring about the community, about the common good, reached a peak around and after WWII. Since the 1960ies communal values have been in decline and individual values became ever more important. He reports on interesting proxies that can be used to measure this, such as the frequency of words such as "I" and "we".

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When it comes to taxing wealth: There is the old idea of a land value tax. One could increase the size of the tax more than linear with the size of the land. This way owning for renting would be less profitable and owning ones own appartment would become more affordable.

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Interesting. A possible way to address the way private equity firms are snapping up apartment complexes and single family homes (mostly to flip or rent)? And I assume that by linear you are suggesting that a family farm would not be affected, but a building on a small plot would? And would there be an exemption if you inhabited the property so that homeowners wouldn’t get clobbered?

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Yes, for example the tax could be quadratic. Small landowners would pay 0 because x^2 is 0 for x=0 and grows very slowly for small x. But since the rent will increase with x^2 where x is the area of the owned land, large landowners will pay much higher tax. This will incentivize large landowners to sell to small landowners and thus result in a fair allocation of land. What counts as fair has to be determined by the political process, but that is exactly where it pays to live in a democracy. Taxes are beautiful because they can be adjusted in a democratic way by a small government and do not require any complicated regulation.

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I am glad you mention the important study "Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal" from the 1930ies. Arguably one of the most important works in sociology of the 20th century, but not widely known anymore afaik. I was just wondering the other day whether somebody is doing similar work today?

Btw, you may enjoy to look at https://www.dasrotewien.at/seite/die-arbeitslosen-von-marienthal for more background (I guess you can get an automatic translation).

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Thanks, I’ll look into it.

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I thought if "Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal" are still known today, it would be in Vienna. So I asked a friend from Vienna. He told me that he learned about it at school, but would agree that this study has been largely forgotten by now. (Just an anecdote.)

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I grew up and am proudly from the "rural indignation" areas. We've also been called "deplorable."

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The map appears to be delineated at the county level. My question is what exactly does the blue represent? Is the map showing which counties broke D v. R in the 2020 presidential election or is it representative of voter registration? Or something else? CA, AZ, WA, HI, NM, VT, MA, IL, RI, NH look correct. Maybe OR, NV, CT, NJ, GA, UT, FL and TX. But something looks off, especially in SD and MT (too much rural blue), CO (Denver red and Colorado Springs blue), and MS and SC (way too much blue).

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It is county level. I'm not going to go through each instance, but in Montana, the blue areas are counties with Indian reservations. Native Americans typically vote Democratic. I assume the same is true for South Dakota. MS and SC both have many Black majority rural counties.

Arapahoe County (Denver) is blue. Colorado Springs has 12 colleges/universities, offsetting the military, who did not vote as solidly for Trump in the last election as Republicans will have you believe anyway, and has a sizable minority demographic.

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Also glad to see the Colorado Springs student vote out vote the large right-wing evangelical community there.

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This makes sense. Thank you. Lightly populated Native American and persons of color minority counties was my suspicion.

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This is wild conjecture, but I think that one of the rare recent civil rights wins, giving more autonomy to Native Americans governance, has possibly helped counter voter suppression efforts. But I say that without any thing to back it up with. Just a hopeful hunch.

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