That sounds bad if you're a white non-rich kid.
That's why there's so much talk of "disparity" or "inequality" vs. actual improvements to standards of living and quality of life. Almost all economic growth creates inequality for the simple reason that the more wealth there is, the more potential you have for skew.
In China, for instance, there was much less income inequality back in the 60's but I don't think too many folks want to go back to those days.
Similarly, I don't really care how much a CEO makes, I care about my own quality of life. To hear the new American left tell it though, we'd be better off all being equally poor instead of generally wealthier with a big differences between individual incomes.
Today, if you look at the preceding 40 years of economic growth in the US, the reality is "rich get richer, poor get poorer."
Clearly, magic capitalism beans aren't the only ingredient in an economy that improves everyone's lot. My theory is that the other key ingredient is growth. Growth is chaotic and stirs money around, it's one of the precious few strong market forces that pushes towards equality rather than winner-take-all, even though it does so purely on entropic grounds and isn't strong enough to actually arrive anywhere near the maximum-entropy state.
Of course, once the growth stops, the market settles out again, and the real question is how to deal with that. "Try to stimulate growth at all costs" just creates bubbles. It's a tough question, but whatever the answer is, I'm pretty sure it involves stirring money around, and I'm pretty sure big monied interests are going to fight it tooth and nail out of self-interest.
Your quality of life depends very much on how much other people make. It's all relative. If the average income in an area goes up by 50% but your own income only goes up 5%, then you are worse off than you started, because prices for everything will rise with the market. If you don't believe me, look at Bay Area housing. Inject a couple thousand new millionaires into an area and tell me things don't become worse for the existing modest-income people.
On a percentage basis, the world is zero sum. If someone else captures (or creates) an additional 1% of something, that comes at the expense of 1% collectively from everyone else.
This is circular statement. Percentage is defined as a fraction of a some specified thing, so of course it's fixed. Ten percent of something is ten percent no matter how big or small that thing gets...
Anyway, I'm still not following your reasoning here. If you cut everyone's salaries where I work by 50% and only cut mine by 20%, that's still a bad day for me, even though I'm getting a bigger share of the total compensation paid out. People can argue about whether or not, or to what extent, wealth should be redistributed, but zero sum thinking is a bad path to go down and completely ignores humanity's ability to better its lot through innovation, trade, etc. It's a depressingly pessimistic worldview that prioritizes taking from others instead of creating things that others find valuable. At it's core it's a selfish ethos.
Please provide examples because I am not aware of any.
In "other countries left" the left tag is defined by this topic (and this topic alone).
So, for someone not from america, your statement is a bit weird...
If the narrative was mostly about economic status, we would hear more about that and about universal programs. Rather than disparities and identity politics.
Like.... Universal healthcare? One of the most (perhaps THE most) discussed topics at democratic presidential debates?
Just because neither Bernie nor Elizabeth Warren didn't win the nomination doesn't mean that their ideas aren't part of the left.
—
Many poorer people already get Medicaid which is quite good. If that was expanded a bit more to slightly higher incomes and [conservatives] states couldn’t deny so many people who should get it. That would be many times cheaper than Medicare for all. It would help the most marginalized.
Millions of people on good Medicaid right now could actually see their health insurance worsen under some universal health measures.
Her exact proposal was to phase-in full universal by starting with a subsidized public option and then spending more time building out a full universal plan, i believe.
You can argue this is a cop-out but i'd say it's more of a technocratic play - offering full universal would be a massive undertaking and not something that can just pop up overnight, but offering a subsidized insurance plan in the existing system is comparatively easier and could be implemented easily in a president's first year in office (with a cooperative congress, anyways)
Regardless, that's all aside the point
If I'm a 21yo man in North Dakota working the oil fields to support my young family, how would you expect me to react to the idea of increasing my taxes so that white collar kids don't have to pay as much?
Tanstafl.
Frankly though- the American education problem is just people talking about the loss of manufacturing jobs at two degrees removed.
You're using education in an ambiguous way here. Either you're including vocational training, in which case the argument for universal college doesn't follow, or you only mean college, in which case the premise is false.
Free college education will not help the marginalized anywhere close to as it will others.
We essentially don’t even have free high school. If a teen has work a full time job or more while attending high school to support their family. That’s awful. That should be tackled before something as status quo as free college.
Liberals making conservatives personas non-grata means they have half as many people to compete with for a coveted spot at the top of the pyramid of power.
Anyone poor won’t have the means to play the subjective system, and any left/liberal admin officer/provost in the Ivy’s knows that.
Champagne corks are flying tonight.
Rich whites were less threatened when they could game the system, but once Asian Americans began to become overly represented per capita academically and Affirmative Action lawsuits on descrimination against Asians began working up the courts... problem solved now.
There’s no outright conspiracy, these people know their position and what’s best for them. They’re probably not bad people but they’re not going to give away what they’ve got.
How would you change the incentives to make what you described less viable?
It’s too many trying to get into too few colleges. We need more, smaller universities. Federal funds/grants should be reoriented away from the Ivies. Zero Federal funds for schools that don’t have lower than 30:1 class sizes. That would stop admin bloat overnight.
The Musks, Gates and Bezos’ of the world should be building new colleges, not dumping more into the olds.
Ivies don’t need fed funds - they play a different game since the underlying markets tend to be asymptotic - the upper end of students, the upper end of professors, the upper end of athletes, the upper end of wealthy legacies.
Fund those with few resources or create new ones away from the Ivies. You can’t democratize the Ivies but you can give a lot more people a better education. The status quo is that the Ivies have their cake and eat it too.
> full $41.59 billion of the Ivy League’s money could be traced back to taxpayer-funded payments and benefits.
Traces back.
So part of it is tax breaks to educational institutions- which is natural, they have the biggest endowments combined so the tax benefits will be massive.
They point out that major research happens at these institutions so they have more money from that as well.
This meshes less with the “have their cake and eat it too” line of thinking and more a result of the distortions from reputation and network effects.
How well "Whites" as a group are doing says nothing about "poor whites" and how they're doing. It's a fallacy of division, and anyway you shouldn't pre-judge things about people based on race... it's literally racial prejudice.
How so? "Poor whites" are just a subset of "whites". The parent comment claimed that "poor whites" are worse off. This is making 2 claims: that they are worse off because they are poor, and that they are worse off because they are white. I'm not denying that they're worse off because they're poor, that should be fairly obvious to anyone that knows anything about the American university admissions system. But the parent added the extra claim about race, and I'm refuting that for being inaccurate.
> and anyway you shouldn't pre-judge things about people based on race... it's literally racial prejudice.
Where in my comment did I make any racially prejudiced or racially divisive statements? The parent comment was the one that decided to divide the group of poor further by race.
Anyway, it's Harvard (and the other Ivy Leagues) that are pre-judging people by race. Is me discussing that fact somehow also "prejudging by race" and "racial prejudice"? I don't follow what you're trying to imply.
Edit: Looks like I confused the parent comment with the grandparent comment. The parent comment was about the "left" not caring about poor white kids. I think most of what I'm saying still applies, just replace "worse off" with "not cared about by the left". Ie. The left doesn't care about the poor too much, but they're definitely neutral towards whites, if not biased in favour.
"A fallacy of division is the error in logic that occurs when one reasons that something that is true for a whole must also be true of all or some of its parts."
Yes, vast majority did not have to work while going to HS (which is possibly why some angles toward free HS should be focused on. Not free college). But they also weren’t freely going to Haiti.