This would also reduce the tendency to stratify, as those at the bottom would have more freedom to go after the various opportunities that already exist.
The idea is that it shouldn’t matter how poor you grew up or even how academically talented and intelligent you are. What should matter in theory is how much actual value you can create. Starting a business or learning to be a good engineer or salesperson or whatever. In theory, jobs that require intelligence and academic talent pay more because they tend to require more skills, expensive education and training, require people to make intelligent decisions that have a bigger impact, and ideally should produce more value.
In practice, there’s a lot of politics and hierarchy and institutional inertia that impacts people’s access to education and opportunities.
What I think is frustrating for many men (if not people in general) is the feeling that they have been given a set of rules and guidelines for being successful in society and those rules keep changing over time. I’m highly educated and by most accounts highly intelligent. I’m not interested in “a decent quality of life at the bottom of the hierarchy”. I’m interested in creating as much value as I can so I can live a better than average life.
So I tend to get frustrated when I find myself out of a job because some dipshit I probably never met wants to shave some random lines on a budget spreadsheet or talk about how all these middle management and knowledge worker roles are just “administrative bloat” or how college has become so expensive people can barely afford to pay it off in their lifetime.
Now obviously times change and shit happens. But I think a lot of people feel like they were sold a bill of goods as roadmap to a successful and productive life and now feel that the goalposts keep getting moved. Or there are no longer goalposts, a goal or any rules at all so everyone is sort of left to figure shit out for themselves.
Sure, but who decides what “value” is? A bunch of sociopaths on Wall Street?
I have to define it for myself, what is a life of value. Define it and then do it. Not easy work. It’s a lifetime’s work, with the answer always changing.
As Frankl said, “The meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day, from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment.”
You want to talk about a person who got a raw deal and ran with it to create something of value… Read Man’s Search for Meaning.
I’ve always thought if a man can find meaning in the Holocaust, I can surely find meaning in whatever situation I find myself.
Yes.
Which I think is one of the major reasons so many people find modern life unsatisfying; no matter how hard they work or how skilled or smart they are, all the benefits go to those sociopaths.
The definition of “decent quality of life” varies, but by most takes the lower quartile or decile is experiencing a quality of life that is pretty good by historic standards. Yes any experiencing housing, food, or medical insecurity, is too many, and post pandemic has seen some upticks, but to me the bigger problem is this understated comment:
Wealth is power and power is wealth. The degree of wealth inequality, of relative concentration of power into the hands of a smaller and smaller percent, is both inherently problematic, even if the lowest rung was fed and housed, and persistently increasing.
Agreed that wealth stratification is not a problem in and of itself, capitalism and the invisible hand is less poor of a system than most in practice, but its magnitude is.
For better and worse “we” in aggregate decide what we value by what we “demand”. If that is a woman doing marathon sex stunts on OnlyFans, well that’s what it is to society writ large. “Demand” though can be expressed by multiple means: capitalist willing to pay relative to supply, sure, but also through demands to our government for services of the greater good.
So to bring this back to the theme of the thread - the rules always change. When the rules are such that those “like you” can maintain your place in the hierarchy or move up, people are mostly fine with rule changes. And there’s the rub. White not college educated folk, a group increasingly male, have had the rules change to ones that lower their place in the hierarchy. And the rule that college education was going to at least maintain your place isn’t holding as frequently either, not with the debt that it comes with, and the power gap between the very top and the other 99.9% of us.
Hierarchy of needs comes in. Relevant to the above is that many define value at least partly by having more than the other guy.
To the extent that’s even true, so what? That’s basically admitting that we can’t say anything good about how such people live, so all we can do is compare their conditions to the distant past when things were even worse. It’s the same way that people often compare America to some war-ton failed state in order to claim it’s a great place to live.
It’s not a “decent quality of life”; it’s awful. And it being more awful in the past doesn’t change that.
The majority of the population of America appears to be miserable.
And I think that’s a major point of frustration today in that men (and women for that matter) don’t feel like they have the means to effect any sort of change on their status. The system often feels such that decisions like hiring and firing and what is actually valuable has been so abstracted that people often don’t really know what the “rules” actually are.
As a man, I’m not fine with just sitting passively and letting the “rules” define my place in society. That’s why men have traditionally set out to accomplish great things. To improve their standing and be the ones to set the rules. Even going to war.
And that’s the big danger. History has shown that it’s never great for society to have large numbers of men sitting around idle and bitter at the world. If they can’t find something constructive to put their energies to, they often find some destructive outlet.
Expect that the ones who set the rules have always been a very small group. Sure, maybe in the distant past when most humans lived in small bands of hunter gatherers that wasn’t true, but for any society larger than that, it has always been the case. Even when we’ve tried otherwise, like with communism, those at the top seem to be unable to resist become tyrants (Jospeh Stalin, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, etc.). What seems to happen is that the followers somehow are able to trick themselves into thinking that they are one of the “haves” just because they share some set of characteristics with the actual rulers. It could race / skin color, language, religion, tribe, place of birth, whatever - if they look and talk and worship the same as the actual rulers, then hey, they must be one as well. The ordinary man has never been “equal” to the very top 0.1%. What changes is whether or not that ordinary man identifies as being part of the same group as those 0.1%.
You don’t need everyone to be equal. You just need to have some clear paths for finding a better job that pays more or getting a bit more social standing and maybe offers the opportunity for a better life. In America you could go off to college to get educated, pursue opening a business, join the military, pursue some artistic endeavor, whatever. Maybe you won’t be successful, but I don’t thing that’s the point. The point is having something to work at to try and improve your life and give you purpose.
I think that’s partially how tyrants work. They find enough disenfranchised people and give them a purpose.
Right. I would dial back our current wealth inequality considerably. But I’m not a communist, everyone having exactly the same as everyone else is not a utopia to me. And I think it runs counter to how people are - especially Americans. Status obsession is one of our hobbies.
It’s how humans are wired. It’s my understanding that in aggressively egalitarian societies people live under high stress because they have to keep their heads down, deliberately avoid doing anything that makes them stand out and fit in. I recall an account by an anthropologist who interviewed members of a tribe whose culture mandated that level of egalitarianism, and many expressed extreme frustration, including one man who broke down during the interview and started screaming and pounding the ground with his fists.
Maybe so when you look in the mirror, and Americans overall are less happy than they have been in the past, a problem no doubt, but more are happy than unhappy.
Despite a modest dip in the new millennium, American adults have been happy over the past 50 years, on average, the research indicates. Survey takers reported a mean happiness score of 22, which translates to 22 more happy people than sad ones out of every 100 Americans. …
Of course happiness is unequally distributed as well. Mostly by … marriage.
One factor stands out in terms of happiness: marriage. Married people were persistently 30 points happier than unmarried people, whose average scores hovered near zero.
And both income (the lowest quintile negative) and education.
Income is another important factor. Americans in the top 20 percent in terms of income were happier than others, even if their happiness level remained relatively flat. Levels declined for Americans with the lowest incomes. The difference in level between the two groups widened to more than 40 points in the 2000s.
Education also matters. Happiness scores jumped on average by about 10 points upon graduation from high school and 20 points upon graduation from college. Between 1972 and 2018, happiness declined over time for everyone except college graduates.
Interesting to this thread is that both men and women have declined, both are more happy than unhappy, and both to currently about the same degree.
The rich people and evil people are getting what they want, so I expect they are happy. That doesn’t help the rest of us.
The data is the data.
Yes to some degree money buys happiness, although no happier now than other times in the past half century. Or maybe better understood that lack of status, being in the lowest quintile for income and not being college educated, let alone no High School education, buys unhappiness.
And why would you think that? The wealthy are getting more and more power and privilege all the time, and everyone else is getting poorer.
I’m mostly happy, FWIW. Nobody has a perfect life so I can’t expect to.
We don’t have the most by a long shot, but we don’t have the least, either.
Folks looking at this more from an occupational / economic POV may find this current thread is at least tangentially on-point.
I’m in agreement as well. Status obsession is fine. The problem is that those at the very top, at least for the most part, didn’t actually earn that status. If status is earned through applying one’s talent and working hard, then great, more power and money to that person. But if power and status are earned by taking the lions’ share of the profits from a business where the people at the top just push around paper rather than actually working, then I have a problem with it.
IMHO what money actually buys is the absence of certain kinds of unhappiness. Once those specific types of unhappiness have been eliminated, additional money doesn’t result in additional gains in happiness.
I think that because that is what the data, as cited, as quoted, (and apparently as ignored) shows. The top quintile is fairly flat over the past fifty years.
I was gonna back you up with research but it looks like reality is a little more complicated.
Happiness may increase up to $500,000 in annual income, however about 15% of people have no noticeable happiness improvement with income.