A study [1] I was looking at recently was extremely informative. It's a poll from UCLA given to incoming classes that they've been carrying out since the 60s. In 1967 86% of student felt it was "essential" or "very important" to "[develop] a meaningful philosophy of life", while only 42% felt the same of "being very well off financially." By 2015 those values had essentially flipped, with only 47% viewing a life philosophy as very important, and 82% viewing being financially well off as very important.

It's rather unfortunate it only began in 1967, because I think we would see an even more extreme flip if we were able to just go back a decade or two more, and back towards Keynes' time. As productivity and wealth accumulation increased, society seems to have trended in the exact opposite direction he predicted. Or at least there's a contemporary paradox. Because I think many, if not most, younger people hold wealth accumulation with some degree of disdain yet also seek to do the exact same themselves.

In any case, in a society where wealth is seen as literally the most important aspect in life, it's not difficult to predict what follows.

[1] - https://www.heri.ucla.edu/monographs/50YearTrendsMonograph20...

Well, keep in mind students at UCLA at 1967 were probably among the most wealthy in the country. A lot more average people at UCLA nowadays. Of course being financially well off wouldn't be the most important thing if you were already financially well off.

I wonder what would be the proportion of answers between different society economic levels.

What we know so far though is that many of the traditional values were bound to the old society structures, based on the traditional family.

The advent of the sexual revolution, brought by the contraception pill, completely obliterated those structures, changing the family paradigm since then. Only accentuated in the last decade by social media and the change in the sexual marketplace due to dating apps.

Probably today many young people would just prioritize reputation (eg followers) over wealth and life philosophy. As that seems to be the trend that dictates the sexual marketplace dinámics.

The paradox is that the general principles of the market work, but the market is invisibly dysfunctional in its details.

It is generally true that higher income jobs are allocated to higher productivity workers, but it does not follow that high incomes imply high productivity and vice versa for low incomes.

If you combine the above with a disequilibrium market where supply of labor exceeds the demand for labor, then from a naive perspective it would appear as if the unemployed would deserve their unemployment.

After all, the most productive members are all employed and rewarded for their efforts. The unemployed are just lazy (voluntarily unemployed) and incompetent (society is better off without them). Any form of punishment is seen as justified and not some structural failing of the system.

The problem is that if there is a labor market disequilibrium, there will always be unemployed people and even if you think the productivity ranking is a good thing, it just means that if one of the "lazy" people suddenly becomes "hard working", they will just take the place of someone else and nothing has changed other than that the standard for laziness has risen.

Even if people notice that the system is fundamentally broken, they realize that individually, they are either a beneficiary of the system and therefore don't see a reason to change it or they don't have the ability to change the system and rather focus on taking someone else's place.

This will result in an artificial Darwinian rat race where people see each other as competitors to defeat.

This is my explanation for why immigrants make a good scapegoat even though immigration doesn't affect the rules of the game at all.

Here is an analogy via a game of musical chairs. There is the perception that more immigrants means more players competing for chairs. This is a naive interpretation that looks obvious. What is being forgotten is that each player is bringing a new chair and the number of missing chairs is a percentage of the number of players. The truth is that having more immigrants means you can take their chair away for yourself. So immigration is not causative here. The problem is that there were never enough chairs to begin with no matter how many people are playing the game.