This is never really discussed directly. Only using a proxy like race or caste.
The idea of "it takes a few generations" is also widely critiqued with respect to racial progress in the US: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/09/the-myt...
I remember when I saw this for the first time and it left me speechless. I'd work with a team of Indians, all officially with the same job title and qualifications. But while most of the guys (this was a long time ago, it was all guys) would really work hard, there would always be one who knew nothing about the job and didn't even bother to pretend he's working. He would literally just walk around acting like the CEO on inspection, or even like a slave owner, wearing a suit that cost as much as the yearly salary of the other guys. He was of course paid a lot more then the rest of the team even if he couldn't find his way out of a wet paper bag.
But what shocked me the most was that the rest of the guys, even when they knew I'm (very publicly) on their side, still talked as if this is the natural order of things. It was not only normal, it was expected. I realized that it's not like a prisoner obeying the guards because they have guns, it's like someone obeying a priest because "he talks to God".
Those colleagues accepted that their position is immutable, that those things were happening exactly the way they were supposed to happen. The "natural order of things". Maybe things changed in recent times, I certainly hope nobody accepts their position just because someone wants an easier time discriminating them.
Many people studying today had poor parents that never had any form of higher education. I don't think the US systems is good at this. It concentrates on excellence or at least the appearance of it, although there are probably exceptions if you parents are rich or influential. Bad thing is that it works to a degree because the smartest heads get concentrated while others need to be content with lower quality education. A system that should be obsolete with modern logistics of information. Tech is currently leveraging that weakness by building an even worse alternative with their own campuses. While integrating the industry in universities can be quite the advantage, I doubt this will be a helpful basis. There will be people that like to live in infrastructure belonging to their employer, it is just the modern version of a cult.
I don't know about the issues in India, but perhaps lower caste members just don't have access to education. Financing education in the US is difficult because economic imbalance and ridiculous prices on education. Of course that works as a selector if you don't get a scholarship.
I think it is fairly possible to have a broad education system that doesn't determine your future if you fuck up elementary school. Instead there need to transient systems that allow to build upon your educational career, because pupils learn at different speed and had different advantages like private tutors.
The caste system is about natural born status not tied to economics, but ancestral in nature. You're born into your caste and there isn't mobility within the system. So, try as you might, if you're in the lower caste you're in the lower caste and people higher up are going to treat you that way regardless.
I'm not overly familiar with it myself, but I understand it's a deeply ingrained cultural thing that sounds damaging beyond belief and incredibly bad idea, yet somehow inescapable.
The current inequality increasing systems in the west will lead to all kinds of equivalent effects. Multi-generational debt etc.
The big help the not-poor get is parents help their education. Not monetary help (that exists, but the poor get scholarships which in theory makes up the difference), but help as in a background that values education. If your peers and family expect you to get pregnant and drop out at 14 - it isn't really possible to get ahead in modern society the way most of us take for granted.
Inheritance is just like caste, you are born with an advantage over others.
What I've noticed from observing people in all classes is that money is an amplifier. Lazy rich people who are dumb are more likely to lose their wealth than smart rich people that are hardworking.
I do agree that the game is still heavily skewed in their favor, but that doesn't mean they can get away as easily as their more virtuous counterparts.
This is a ridiculous over-exaggeration in the age of internet.
I post this not really as a rebuttal to your post, or the grandparent, but more of a "here's what success a couple of generations later" actually looks like and what some of its characteristics may be.
Luck is important too. I read an article about a widow in India being giving a loan for a tractor. 2 months payments on the loan have to amount to about a year of her previous income (note that the other 10 months need to be repaid - this is a loan not a gift). A tractor is such a force multiplier that she is able to make the payments all year and save up enough to dream of sending her son to a good school. This whole thing depends on someone being willing to risk giving someone a loan who clearly doesn't make enough to pay it off.
As the anthropologist Maurice Godelier puts it in the L'idéel et le matériel, it is not about seeing another reality behind reality but about seeing the same reality with a different look.
https://www.businessinsider.com/countries-where-intergenerat...
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ranked-the-social-mobility-...
And on Wikipedia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_mobility
India unfortunately fairs quite poorly on these metrics
And most billionaries are first-generation: https://www.cnbc.com/2014/07/16/how-to-stay-rich-for-three-g...
"Oh look at those poor backward indians!!"
Well, most of the rich people I know had rich parents.
If you can live with your parents while building your company or they gift you a few thousand dollars, that's often the make or break factor that saves your ass when pivoting a few times.
There are mechanisms (and we can discuss their effectiveness) that try to balance the playing field in provision of opportunity - but there's a huge gap in "provision to cope with failure"
e.g. Two people graduate with equal abilities and are offered an opportunity to found a start-up. One of those people knows his parents can cover rent/food if things don't go to plan, and the other will be homeless (or maybe more likely would have accumulate personal debt, or leave the city and move back to parents). One of those people is more likely to be able to take that risk and therefore more likely to reap a reward.
I'm not even sure I can think of a fair way to level this.
The only way is to reduce the pre-existing wealth inequality. Which is why a lot of people are in favour of strongly progressive taxation.
I don't actually think this is a better solution than progressive taxation and decent welfare though (and I'd also have no idea how you'd coax the market in that direction anyway), because it doesn't also solve the problem of the economy losing out on potential successful businesses because their owners weren't wealthy enough to start them.
You really think inequality is stablizing instead of compounding at the moment? Wealth ratios between highest and lowest have gone through the roof over the last 50 years.
Yes. But those indians in favor of the caste system remain "backward" - it's not just something like poverty keeping the lower castes back and the rich getting an extra advantage over others to have their kids be rich.
It adds a further layer of pure discrimination akin to very heavy racism.
Imagine the poor considered not only poor, but inferior human beings -- and not allowed (or accepted by "civilized" upper caste people, when legal) to do many things even if they have the money to do them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient
In countries with good and available education, competent people from poor families can get good careers. It makes a lot of sense to run companies there as well, as recruiting works well - people are sorted by ability rather than money.
If the economy is organized so that a small minority is rich, and the vast majority is poor, then even if the fraction of people of different castes, races, genders, whatever at each echelon of wealth is similar. And even if you have a good chance = uniform-distribution draw - of ending up as "one of the rich" - that chance can never be anything but lousy for the vast majority of people.
(Also, social inequality skews the focus of production and consumption so that things masses of people need and want just aren't available.)
Part of the definition of class that is often overlooked in discussions is that it's not just about money. This is why the socio qualifier gets added into the "socio-economic" designation... even though people sometimes use the dash and then ignore it.
A class implies a hereditary, cultural and quasi-ethnic aspect. So does caste, obviously.
AFAICT it seems to be taboo outside these circles.
* I should mention that many people make big point that you shouldn't use economic points like this to ignore things like racism, i.e.: while racism intersects with economics you can't treat it like it's the same problem.
I also should have been clearer: racism is definately also a factor. Poor minorities fare so badly because they get both racism AND classism (or whatever the appropriate term is for the natural increase of both wealth and poverty).
I think one of the major upsides of the cold war was that western countries were very eager to show we could do better than those dirty commies. That birthed all sorts of programs to give people a chance of improving their lots. Most of those are dead now.
I see it discussed constantly all over the internet. Also it's not entirely true; there's a bunch of examples where people did make it big.
All too often this position boils down to "Capitalism bad" which then just attracts the "Communism bad" opposition and ends in a pointless shitshow buzzword exchange.
That's totally irrelevant though. People are not saying it's impossible for poor to start a company and make it big (in which case those would be counter-examples), they say it's many times harder.
The discrimination lies in the extra difficulty. As someone said, the rich kids starting a startup get to play startup in "easy mode" (which also doesn't mean they'll succeed easily in the market -- just that devoting time to and trying to succeed is far more easy and less rick prone for them).
What I find curious about this discussion, which often occurs when people discuss what advantages are fair and unfair, estate tax and the like, is that they perceive each human being as a completely independent actor. Whereas for me, at least, it's more natural to think in terms of families. If the first generation achieved success, should it be reset in the next one? Why? The example you're talking about, with people reaching incredibly high success from nothing, are exceptions; usually it takes two or three generations at least.
And it's never only about money. Family culture, outlook toward education, work ethic, etc, these things survive when the family loses all of it's fortune or goes through even more dramatic events — though it's easier to notice when you live in a country that lived through a couple of revolutions, bloody wars and a couple of genocides in the last century than in US.
I often think people that grow up in disadvantaged circumstances have a major problem a) Learning the wrong game. Sometimes one that ultimately gets you in trouble. b) not knowing how to play the other game. The one that unlocks all the opportunities.
Perhaps because you know those two things are linked?
Because it's absolutely toxic for society as a whole if inequality gets amplified over generations.
Estate tax should ideally be 100% above a reasonable cap. And by "reasonable" I mean a sum definitely below "never needs to work to support a middle class lifestyle".
> If the first generation achieved success, should it be reset in the next one?
Yes, absolutely.
> Why?
Because many opportunities are essentially zero-sum.
But at the same time it seems the pursuit of wealth engenders risk taking that brings about benefits for large swathes of society and turns society into a machine that constantly improves itself.
I like the game as it is, but perhaps a healthy modification would be to add a reset button where every couple of hundred years the slate is wiped clean and it all just starts again.
Tbh, I think that happens naturally though usually after a society has destroyed itself due to the first problem.
It'll happen to this one too eventually, so I don't see the need specifically to try to structure things in a way that will never go wrong or end badly. I don't think you can actually accomplish that with any one structure. It seems to be a game where some people win until it's game over and everyone loses.
Just my 2c.
It's bad longe before it gets to that point, just less obvious.
> But at the same time it seems the pursuit of wealth engenders risk taking that brings about benefits for large swathes of society and turns society into a machine that constantly improves itself.
Putting a cap on inheritance would not impede that in the least. Quite the opposite: inequality prevents a lot of risk taking and improvement from happening.
> I like the game as it is, but perhaps a healthy modification would be to add a reset button where every couple of hundred years the slate is wiped clean and it all just starts again.
That doesn't sound healthy at all because it represents an unneccessarily huge disruption.
It's no different than you or I dying, just on a much bigger scale. It's a huge disruption, sure, but that's sort of the point. Civilizations come and go, as do the people in them. There are just too many variables for things to be able to persist in a stable state in perpetuity.
Very telling are those "ands" and what's left out: "successful and capable (implied: rich)". "marginalised and useless (implied: poor)". Those traits don't go together automatically at all unless you use circular logic to define them in the first place.
I perfectly understand why this stance makes people angry, but you haven't provided a single argument on why is it false.