Something hard to account for is the recent change to an age of technology. Hard to say how many will not be able to adapt to this and most of our manufacturing jobs are gone. I have no doubt this will and has affected the number of those on public assistance of some kind.
I’d like to run with this a little bit…THROUGHOUT history has this been the case? I would assume it has been so. Whether you look at India and the untouchable population or Biblical times and the lepers (I mean, they’re sick, but its still kind of the same point.) you can point to a certain population that just stuck out and didn’t fit within the larger society.
BTW: HERE’S THE VIDEO OF SHANE SMITH TALKING ABOUT IT. He doesn’t say much extra about 10% but at least this is the video. - YouTube
Actually for this economic situation government should take some serious steps, it’s really huge population which is unemployed or not in good condition.
Indeed, the stereotypical peasant living in a leaky twig hut with no bed and only decaying rags for clothes was estimated by Barbara Tuchman to be only around – 10% of the population. The rest of the peasantry had more belongings and rights than we typically think.
Now, like you say, not even all of these poorest of the poor weren’t productive members of society. Some of them were serfs who just didn’t hold* much land or were down on their luck. But some of them were displaced workers without even ancestral rights to farm the land as a serf, surviving on odds jobs or working other people’s fields.
*I say hold rather than own because of course in theory the land belonged to their lord, unlike the freeholder peasant.
I’m highly dubious about this line of thinking, given the variance in the employment/population ratio for given age groups over long spans of time. In other words X isn’t fixed across societies or time: it varies. That said well over 2% in the US are institutionalized, recently institutionalized, elderly, under 16, or disabled and are therefore not suitable for highly productive employment.
ETA: That was a reasonable attempt to sharpen the OP though.
Thats pretty interesting. I never actually knew that to be honest. Maybe I’ve just watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail too much.
But hungry people don’t generally turn into angry mobs just because they are hungry. Let’s face it. Some lazy fuckup isn’t going to rise up in any meaningful way because no one sees injustice in a bunch of jobless stoners blazing up all day in their filthy flophouse. Not even the stoners themselves (beyond maybe some incoherent drug induced philosophical ramblings).
Angry mobs form when people who do all the right things and play by the rules of society feel that the system no longer works for them. When smart, hardworking, ambitious people are left out of society that their anger causes them to start using their intelligence, ambition and work ethic to bring down that system.