It's not about "dont give a fuck". This is about intergenerational poverty, and the costs that we all will have to pay because the elites decided to destroy social mobility for the poverty-stricken classes.
When you are born and live in poverty, hold jobs that amount to minimum wage or tiny bits above it, have no way to *see* a future of any sort of success; happiness, alcohol, drugs, and sex are the primary forms of feeling good or not feeling pain....
Yeah, you're going to have massive problems at a societal scale.
The elites of this country, along with governments bribed, gerrymandered, and installed by said elites made the volitional changes to social programs that keep people down in poverty. And we're living with those changes since Reagan went off about that "black welfare fraud woman". That was the start of poverty-austerity movement: the idea that cutting off most/all funding would get them to not be lazy.
The credit system instituted in the late 80's only has further cemented the idea that "if you were poor now, you'll still be poor and we wont help you". And housing has gone stratospheric, as have all other bills. And insert homeless numbers talk here - homeless are used as a tool of the elites to show what happens if you don't play along monetarily.
That's an entirely separate, perhaps even more dire, problem. And it undoubtedly compounds for those men intersecting both categories. But the passive men phenomenon is not directly caused by intergenerational poverty. That is evident by how men in all socioeconomic classes are "affected."
Do the elites really get to choose the degree of social mobility in their societies? Do you have any comparative figures to back this up or further data? All I have is anecdote having grown up in poverty in what would likely be considered a relatively left wing first world economic environment, and to the best of my knowledge, none of the kids I grew up with except me ever escaped poverty.
Maybe it's wrong and I'd love to know if that's the case but from personal experience the only way I've seen out of poverty is interest in an in demand field leading to the building and maintenance of marketable skills that allow you to earn a living sufficient to attain economic escape velocity. That seems to me to be a whole lot do with luck at the ground floor. And fiscal and social policy can be as much of a burden as it is a boon all the way along the pipeline.
That said, that escape velocity was directly mediated by both the tax burden of the jurisdiction coupled with the economic opportunities of the jurisdiction and at the end of the day it meant the correct choice was to leave for greener pastures, both lowering the necessary target for escape velocity as well as reducing economic drag getting there.
In the meantime all those kids I knew back in the old neighbourhood are still there, mostly on subsistence handouts, firmly in poverty, and show no signs of that changing.
The elites in the US lowered the top tax brackets considerably, and intentionally moved education funding from grants to loans in previous decades. Both of these moves feel like they have lowered social mobility, but I haven’t seen studies.
Same thing happened to Australia where I'm from originally, and it doesn't seemed to have changed a thing anecdotally except of course the aforementioned escape velocity equation, and still not nearly enough to be competitive with the leaving option.
Would be interested to see any studies that indicate conclusively that any of this stuff does any good, rather than just making those who are politically aligned with it feel good, for anybody reading this that knows, not necessarily just the respondent.
>It's not about "dont give a fuck". This is about intergenerational poverty, and the costs that we all will have to pay because the elites decided to destroy social mobility for the poverty-stricken classes.
I'm sorry but that is just an asinine thing to say and a textbook case of solving "my pet issue will fix the world" thinking.
Inter-generational poverty was the norm until the industrial revolution. While it certainly sucked for the people living it and we should definitively be taking steps to reduce it it is demonstrably tangential to societal stability.
I don't know if I would call it exactly tangential to societal stability, since we have multiple historical examples of what happens when inter-generational poverty goes too far. And usually the end result is not pretty for those in charge.
It seems easy to say that societal stability isn't dependent on social mobility until the lower class decides that it's time to bring out the guillotines.
When you are born and live in poverty, hold jobs that amount to minimum wage or tiny bits above it, have no way to *see* a future of any sort of success; happiness, alcohol, drugs, and sex are the primary forms of feeling good or not feeling pain....
Yeah, you're going to have massive problems at a societal scale.
The elites of this country, along with governments bribed, gerrymandered, and installed by said elites made the volitional changes to social programs that keep people down in poverty. And we're living with those changes since Reagan went off about that "black welfare fraud woman". That was the start of poverty-austerity movement: the idea that cutting off most/all funding would get them to not be lazy.
The credit system instituted in the late 80's only has further cemented the idea that "if you were poor now, you'll still be poor and we wont help you". And housing has gone stratospheric, as have all other bills. And insert homeless numbers talk here - homeless are used as a tool of the elites to show what happens if you don't play along monetarily.
I'm honestly surprised that the political elites haven't instituted ST:DS9's "Sanctuary Districts" (https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Sanctuary_District) . Out of sight, out of mind.