So you are saying people have to work all their lives to afford a car, a house, and a pile of goodies, education, etc. And that to do so, they can get financing from banks.
So far, I am not really seeing the problem …
I suspect the real complaint is not the fact of this lifestyle, but the lack of this lifestyle: that is, even if people want to work all their lives to pay for it, there is a lack of soul-crushing corporate drone jobs for people who want 'em - particularly entry-level jobs.
I also think that expectations of the lifestyle one should aspire to live have increased while the average income has stagnated and the amount of time and difficulty necessary to get one of those ‘serf-like’ jobs has increased.
The numbers aren’t so rosy in the real world. In the US, 6% of children born to parents in the lowest quintile end up rich, nowhere near the 50% of your “example”. In the real life model, the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor, but hey, your fantasy world sounds awesome. Maybe if we did some of the things Evil Economist mentioned, it could even come true.
“Evil Economist” claimed that in principle if a lower percentage of poor than rich succeed in life, it would lead to increased stratification of society. I demonstrated that it wouldn’t.
That’s all true. But it is also true that the high-income worker has more in common with the investor class, socioculturally, than with middle-income-and-lower workers. He might even hope to marry his son or daughter into an investor-class family, happens all the time. In fact, the two families might be distant cousins already. (American history being what it is, the investor is also a very distant cousin to the African-American who drives him around, but nobody likes to think much about that.)
Actually, as I pointed out in a later post, you are wrong; your own model resulted in a stratified society. You hid your error by putting more than 50% of society into the top 50%, but once the model reaches equilibrium it becomes stratified.
Underrepresented relative to your population share? So if Hispanic-males-whose-fathers-were-immigrants-from-Central-America-whose-childhood-homes-had-dirt-floors make up 0.0001% of the population, they make up less than 0.0001% of the upper levels of society? Is it because, as **Terr **suggests, they’re (you’re) malnourished and their (your) culture is geared to failure?
Step 1: Figure out who’s successful.
Step 2: Figure out what they have in common.
Step 3: Rail against those things.
Seems to me like the suggestion is that we should just hate people who are successful, no matter the reason.
I’m also getting sick of the notion from the occupiers that we should resent the very corporations that employ people and make shit for us to buy. I’m not sure why everyone thinks their boss is the enemy, by virtue of his being the boss.
Why do people persist with this myth that it’s possible to buy an election? There’s a very weak correlation between having the most money and victory, not to mention that it stands to reason that the more popular candidate would get both more votes and more donations. There’s a much stronger correlation between electoral victory and incumbency/state of the economy than between campaign finance and victory.
Because your boss (or his boss) probably looks at you as the enemy. And because companies are working people harder for less. And because we can’t buy what they make when we aren’t paid enough or are unemployed. And because they did such a good job of driving the world economy into the ground. And because whenever possible they treat their employees terribly. And so on.
I wasn’t talking about buying elections, I was talking about buying politicians. Politicians vote according to the desires of whomever hands them the most money, not according to the desires of who votes for them. If you aren’t rich you can vote for whomever you like; they’ll ignore your needs and desires in favor of the company that just gave them more money than you make in a year.
It is funny, isn’t it? They sleep in tents made by evil corporations, eat food raised, processed and delivered to them by evil corporations, tweet and broadcast videos on computers and cell phones made by evil corporations and on networks run by evil corporations. But, as someone suggested in the OWS thread, they “nobly refuse” to work for those evil corporations. And of course, they rail and rant against the evil corporations.
What, are they supposed to carve cell phones out of wood? And since when did making things disqualify you as “evil”? Are corporations automatically immune to condemnation because they manufacture things now?
Just the opposite; there’s a culture of respect for the rich in America, sometimes blind respect; Americans are willing to forgive behavior by the rich which would never be tolerated in the poor. You’re seeing a handful of people who aren’t willing to kow-tow to the rich like they did in prior years, and interpreting that as hate.
Corporations are large, powerful, rich, and amoral. That’s a dangerous combination. And when you have a political administration that seems to be stripping away regulations that prevent corporations from exploiting the populace, in return for unregulated cash payments from those same corporations, then you have what we have here.
Because it doesn’t matter which candidate gets elected; they’re all beholden to their financiers, which isn’t any of the 99%.
Again, you claimed that the model reaches equilibrium. Equilibrium <> “increased stratification”. The fact that any society will have some stratification is a trivial result.
It’s an American thing. Far older than usages of words like “socialism” or “communism,” or even “republic” or “democracy,” on these shores. “Boss,” in fact, was a Dutch word borrowed because Yankees were too proud to work for a “master” (even though it means exactly the same thing).
I didn’t say anything about “noble”, that was you. And they buy those things from the corporations because they have no choice. Again; are they supposed to carve cell phones out of wood?