I genuinely don't know if that's extremely snarky sarcasm or extremely earnest opinion.
(if I said it it would be completely sarcastic, but some people do idealize the far past and probably mean it honestly, presumably because they mentally imagine / assume they wouldn't be in one of the sucky classes of society)
Government likes to terrify people with stories of depression (and fascism and climate change) in order to grab more power for themselves and the elite. If you play the game then you too can get paid - get a PhD, keep your eyes down and march like they say, and they'll pay you to play with numbers that make them look credible.
But people are waking up. The Internet has democratized information (sorry, it's popularized it), and now the elite gatekeepers in colleges can't stop anyone from gathering economic data with their own eyes and doing economic analysis. I can see how much a loaf of bread costs; I can see my basket of goods and my supermarket receipt.
Just kidding. I really think the lack of humanities education, especially history and literature, makes people - especially in SV and the wider less-educated world - very vulnerable to this nonsense. It's transparent nonsense if you understand it, but if you toss away generations of understanding about its technique and manipulative power and effects, you are a babe in the woods.
"Not to know what happened before one was born is always to be a child." - Cicero
The tricky bit is interwebs make sarcasm really hard to detect, especially when today there's ample real and honest examples of extreme opinions along any given scale. I may be socially inept, but I'm still perplexed as to which of the couple of different points of view separated by "just kidding" phrase you are genuinely putting forward; apologies if I'm being obtuse, it is not deliberate.
