New research from the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) released on Wednesday shows that intergenerational financial support — flowing from older, wealthy family members to younger ones — is increasingly driving inequality.
New research from the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) released on Wednesday shows that intergenerational financial support — flowing from older, wealthy family members to younger ones — is increasingly driving inequality.
It’s not taboo. Rich people own the vast majority of news outlets, and the topic is taboo to THEM
…and the people who are mindlessly influenced by the media outlets.
I think ‘mindlessly’ is a bit harsh. I mean, people have to get their information from somewhere. Each person must learn how all the different sorts of taxes work, and why they are like that, and what consequences and effects there are for different types of taxation; and what the money is used for, and how much money is needed, etc. It’s very complex, with many interdependencies with different parts of the wider economic system. There’s some intuitive stuff, but there is also some less obvious stuff learnt from historical experience.
A person could become a bit of an expert by studying taxes and economics and related fields and university or some other way - but very few people will actually do that, for all sorts of good reasons. So really almost all of us must instead rely on information that we source from other people. But who? Should we trust the leaders of our country, the politicians? Should we trust some random youTuber who says they’ve “done their research” and worked out the truth? Should we trust the ‘expert options’ being cited by a media outlet that has being publishing news for decades?
It’s not easy. Really it isn’t. Well established media outlets kind of do deserve more trust in these issues than most sources, despite some very obvious problems with that. And although its fair to say that we should use a variety of sources and cross-check / ananlyse them, that’s easier said that done too. There are many different media outlets. What may look like different sources are sometimes controlled by the same set of people in non-obvious ways. And as for newer / non-mainstream sources, there are thousands of them; many set up for doing their best effort to tell the truth, but many others set up to do their best effort to distort and manipulate the truth. It’s not always easy to tell the difference without becoming an expert oneself.
My point is that although it is possible to push through misinformation and manipulation to get a real sense how things are, that is by no means easy. And it often takes special effort for almost every different topic that we are making decisions about; taxes, foreign policies, tobacco laws, housing policies, etc. All these things are potentially affected by different conflicts of interest or biases, and so it just really is not easy to avoid being “mindlessly influenced by the media outlets”. Probably all of us have badly twisted views about at least some topics, even if we do our best to get it right.
You are correct, I was a bit harsh. There are quite a few people in my life who have been fully indoctrinated by know unreliable sources of news, who are actively hostile reliable sources of news.
Facts are facts, but truth is subjective. They prefer news agencies who adhere to the truth that they have been told to believe, despite their truths contradicting facts.