I feel like it's not exactly a problem of not caring, but rather a problem that is in fact composed of many things. For one, there's no clear solution. For another, part of why there's no clear solution is that the people that encourage the income inequality gap are very, very good at selling people who do not benefit from the income inequality gap, on the idea that they do. They're also excellent at withholding or obscuring information that would help people to fight against policies and practices that do not benefit the American public. Again, I don't know that it's that people don't care, but I do feel like it's often hard to know what to care about and certainly hard to know what one can do to make things better for the public. Plus, people have their daily worries about what it will take to get them through the day, the week, the year, the whatever. It seems to me that what the American public really needs is some strong leadership and strong allies.
Very well said. “people have their daily worries about what it will take to get them through the day, the week, the year, the whatever.” This reminds me of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. People are focused on feeding their children, keeping a roof over their heads etc. If they do find some time to think critically there’s a bevy of groups/corporations just waiting to pump them full of toxic misinformation. This is not to mention the fact that many under-class people are disenfranchised or simply don’t vote, though I have heard that is slowly changing. (Anecdotally, growing up in government housing I can recall the popular consensus being that it’s pointless to vote because “they’re all crooks anyway.”)
It's easy to see how this happens, too. It's a negative reinforcement loop; vote, nothing happens except for money being spent and the voters see none of it. Why then vote? But, that's part of how people gain confidence in marginalizing others. If people don't express opinions and do so in ways that get attention, then they are ignored or seen as accepting of whatever behaviors.This is not to mention the fact that many under-class people are disenfranchised or simply don’t vote, though I have heard that is slowly changing.
How bad do things have to get here before people stop coming do you suppose? Here's an interesting article about the slowing of Mexican immigration:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/24/us/mexican-immigration-to-... From the article....
"The report presents a striking change from earlier findings by the Pew Hispanic Center on the number of Mexicans who have been returning to their country. While earlier Pew studies said the data did not show any exodus, the report published Monday includes new data from the 2010 Mexican census revealing that about twice as many Mexicans returned home from 2005 to 2010 than in the previous five years. In all, about 1.4 million people moved from the United States to Mexico in that time, the Mexican census showed"
Perhaps. I'm thinking that the comparison of income top 20% to income bottom 20% isn't really the most illustrative statistic about income inequality, yet the distinction between that ratio in the US compared to the rest of the developed world is pretty striking. But why is it so different? A small, ludicrously rich class? A super-poor class? That ratio doesn't really tell you, but there's something obviously different about the US.
So would you say you are classified as "poor" in the US? If so, you realize that you are on a computer right now, likely know where your next meal is coming from and have consistent shelter, right? My guess is that if you were injured or sick you could receive emergency care. The poor in some other countries don't have these key needs. If you take a man, put him in the desert without water, food, shelter or clothing for two days he will be miserable. Take that same man and give him clothes, food, shelter and water and he will be happy. These are the most basic needs, everything beyond that is gravy. The poor in the US, for the most part, seem to have the basic needs. I'm not suggesting that the disparity between rich and poor isn't horrendous, it is. But the reason they may not seem to "care" as much as other nations is because our "poor" are rich by other nations standards.
I spent a while thinking about your comment. While doing so, I remembered these two tables that I encountered in the book Social Class in America: The Evaluation of Status (1960). Here they are: http://imgur.com/xoKlu6l,LJ977Ns Keep in mind this was written in 1960, and I'm not sure how much it has changed. I imagine that it has stratified even more. Based on this classification, I most closely identify with Upper-Lower, but I'm sure I grew up somewhere in between LM and UL. But, having traveled and lived in various places in the "third world," the kind of jobs I get out there put me into a higher class. It is thus a tempting aspect of emigrating. Judging by your pairing me with people in fight-or-flight, impoverished mode, I'm going to guess you're UM.
The point I'm trying to make is that comparing the poor in United States with the poor in extremely impoverished countries is like comparing apples and oranges. In order to confirm or deny your guess of where I fall on that diagram I'd need to know more about the criteria. But it's probably a good guess. Look, I don't think the poor in the US have it good by my standards but by others standards they may be doing quite well. It's all perspective.
Compared to places like Nigeria or Pakistan, the poor in the US live pretty large. Most people that fall in to the classification of "poor" will never starve and often have consistent shelter.
Yeah, but saying that encourages the gap. "The world needs ditch diggers too!" We have lost any sense that America has a group goal, a reason we should help each other toward something. We gave up somewhere, or we lost hope on hitting goals and stopped picking up new ones. For a goal-oriented nation, that's a bad thing. Various presidents have tried to come up with replacements goals, but they've been crap. Some of this was because the replacement goals were images of the previous goals without the same need. The last Giant Honkin' Goal, "stop communism" (stupid as that was, it ran several giant economies of production), ended when the Soviet Union unceremoniously ran out of funding for the Warsaw Pact. Gorbachev told Poland's General Jaruzelski that he was not going to fund any martial action, so Jaruzelski said the equivalent of "I'm done with being dictator, the Pope's right, and price controls can be someone else's problem." We "won", right? Unfortunately it freaked out Bush the Elder, who was president when the Berlin Wall fell in the fall of '89. He'd been a director of the CIA. He had spent his entire life preparing to be the fusion of Yale elite and Cold War insider. Suddenly there was no Cold War and he was left with blue balls -- oh, and a recession. GHWB (Bush the Elder) tried his hand at making up a war in Kuwait. That worked in that it cheered up a lot of Americans -- it finally cleared up the stink from losing Vietnam, something that even the prosperity of the 1980s couldn't do. Then the war ended but the economy was still sagging. The War on Terror? another attempt at a replacement for the Cold War. This has lasted longer, but it's clear that the only propaganda war we've come close to winning in a long time has been the War on Cancer. Let's see if I can tie my tangents back in. We waste time focusing on how much better off we are than economies that have never come close to ours (or whom we've bombed one too many times into their present states). That's like an alcoholic saying "yeah, but I hold down my job. I'm not a smackhead or a crackhead. Rehab is for losers." We're one of the top economies in the world. Shame is clearly not enough to get us to stop screwing more and more people into poverty. We need to give business a financial incentive for fighting the split it has been encouraging.
How sad, that it's come to this -that'd you have to compare the US to places like this. You're essentially saying "at least our poor are not as bad off as they are in some of the poorest nations on earth".Compared to places like Nigeria or Pakistan ...
What I'm saying is that this is likely why they aren't as up in arms, in no way am I saying this is a good state of things. The reality is most of the poor people in the US aren't going to starve to death or die of malaria. Does that mean that I think they live in an enviable state of conditions or that there is justice in their circumstance, not it doesn't. When 6 people have more wealth than the bottom 30% of your country, there's something wrong.
The only problem I have seen mentioned that results directly from income diversity is envy. No one says they are envious, but they worry that others are. I can't bring myself to feel bad for people if their biggest problem is that they are not the richest folks in town. As you say, America's poor do well compared to people in most countries, and they are also better off than America's poor in the past. I don't see why it is "sad" to welcome the fact that American poor have a better standard of living than those in Nigeria or Pakistan. Thought experiment: Imagine that Carlos Slim (net worth: US$70 billion) moves from Mexico to the United States. Imagine, if you can, that he is able to get a working visa and then becomes a citizen. Obviously, this will result in reduced wealth diversity in Mexico and increased wealth diversity in the United States. Do you argue that this change would be good for Mexico and bad for the United States? I asked a similar question here but so far got no reply.there's something wrong
I am one of the silver-tongued apologists for the gap that humanodon mentions. I don't understand what is wrong.
I have no problem with people being wealthy. I aspire to be wealthy so that I can afford comfort for my family and future generations of my family. I'm also a big proponent of "teaching a man to fish." That said, there's no doubt in my mind that the way our system is set up, the system is rigged to advantage the wealthy with little regard for raising the station of the poor. I'm not talking about a guy that is worth a few million, I'm talking about the big-dogs, the ones that are worth hundreds of millions and more. They're able to grease the wheels of legislation in a way that benefits that which they manufacture, wield or aspire to. It's cyclical, it's systemic and it's not changing. The people that are somewhat wealthy have just enough to lose to not ever want to disrupt the system. The middle class is shrinking and the poor have very little chance of making it out of their situations. I'm not in favor of just handing people money, because I really think it would do little to change the generational cycle's of poverty, but I do think we need to take vastly more resources and allocate them towards "teaching the poor how to fish." But the power brokers aren't interested in that.
I think we may find we have more in common than you think in regards to this topic. I have no time at the moment for the comment I'd like to leave. Hopefully, I can get back to this this afternoon or evening. I just wanted you to know I wasn't ducking the comment. It's worth discussing. I welcome the conversation.