141–150 of 462 posts
Ugh, this thread is disgusting. The problem is complex and takes no sides. The poor are unskilled with money because of their environment, upbringing, relationships, and situation; and also because of inherent features. The rich are rich because of their luck, circumstances, upbringing, and situation; and also because of inherent features. The combinations of all of those factors and the interaction between them defi…
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Depends, if you distribute resources aka stock land etc then you are going to end up with a different set of rich people. If you just redistribute money then it's like handing out money in monopoly after every property is bought, it might make the game take longer but the end game is not going to change.
I wonder how Monopoly would play if you got assessed for Income Tax when you passed Go, or perhaps every fifth turn, instead of when you landed on a particular square.
Ugh, this thread is disgusting. The problem is complex and takes no sides. The poor are unskilled with money because of their environment, upbringing, relationships, and situation; and also because of inherent features. The rich are rich because of their luck, circumstances, upbringing, and situation; and also because of inherent features. The combinations of all of those factors and the interaction between them defi…
There is also something about an empathic gap that exists primarily because of both the way poverty is racialized in the United States, but also in how it is /spatialized/. Poor people are seen as the other, because they are the other -- it is very rare that a city in the United States has places where people of all classes (and all races) mingle together. There is much less "public space" in the US as a whole (exception, a city like NYC where literally everyone rides the subway together, even if they are going to different stops) so it is much easier to rationalize systemic outcomes as some kind of inherent failure of the other.
Ugh, this thread is disgusting. The problem is complex and takes no sides. The poor are unskilled with money because of their environment, upbringing, relationships, and situation; and also because of inherent features. The rich are rich because of their luck, circumstances, upbringing, and situation; and also because of inherent features. The combinations of all of those factors and the interaction between them defi…
It's painfully demotivating and depressing that so many folk think this way. I'm at a complete loss of words when people talk like that. Where's the empathy for your fellow man?
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OK, say those "exploitive" businesses didn't exist. That doesn't subsequently mean "non-exploitive" alternatives would exist, it just means those customers/employees would have no options (not even "exploitive" ones). Is having no option better than having a bad option, when good options aren't available?
That doesn't subsequently mean "non-exploitive" alternatives would exist, it just means those customers/employees would have no options (not even "exploitive" ones). The hidden assumption here is that producing the goods and services required to keep a single human being alive in relative comfort (fed, sheltered, educated, healthy) necessarily requires an expenditure of manual effort roughly equivalent to what that h…
In any system, some folk will always squatter and some will always attempt to gain power/advantage.
Your world sounds too much like Atlas Shrugged.
There is an old saying that "if you took all the money away from all the rich people, and spread it around evenly to everyone else, within 2 or 3 years, all the formerly rich would be rich again having taken advantage of the poor who don't know how to make and keep money". This adage, although heartless to be sure, has some degree of truth to it in my view. The problem is twofold, 1) a lot of people become rich not b…
Yes, knowledge of social class issues (who you know and how to act to get people with money to trust you) can itself be used to make money, in the right environment.
It doesn't mean that educating everyone to behave like the upper classes makes sense. Those skills may not actually work for people who don't look the part or don't have the connections. To the extent that they're adaptive rather than arbitrary class indicators, they might actually be dangerous for someone living in a different environment.
You cash your check for a good percentage of it. If they had a bank account they wouldn't need to spend that money. I don't know how it is in other states but the last time I opened a bank account in California it was a pain. The amount of information needed is certainly not possible for a huge chunk of people.
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That doesn't subsequently mean "non-exploitive" alternatives would exist, it just means those customers/employees would have no options (not even "exploitive" ones). The hidden assumption here is that producing the goods and services required to keep a single human being alive in relative comfort (fed, sheltered, educated, healthy) necessarily requires an expenditure of manual effort roughly equivalent to what that h…
Isn't Communism very similar to your perfect world? All the people were provided for and they worked for everyone and everyone was equal. However, that didn't work out too well. In any system, some folk will always squatter and some will always attempt to gain power/advantage. Your world sounds too much like Atlas Shrugged.
The issue is getting over the mental hurdle of enabling such a society. The technology is actually pretty straightforward, but the politics of it is full of people who just can't stand the idea of that filthy leeching parasite, he doesn't work as hard as I do, why does he get anything at all! He doesn't deserve it! Which in turn is an artifact of an economic system that's already firmly in the past of many developed nations (i.e., one in which all people needed to work constantly in order to produce enough to keep themselves alive).
Of course this is a fundamentally irrational position to hold when one already lives in a society that's content to let people who never work a day in their lives have all their needs taken care of (see: inheritance). It also disregards the fact that many people who have everything literally handed to them from birth still feel a drive to try to do something meaningful with their lives. There are trust-fund parasites who don't do anything, of course, but it certainly isn't 100% of them. Plus, it's pretty well empirically established that humans do get bored and seek things to do even when they have no life-sustaining work left to perform (see: retirement).
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You need money to buy into a housing cooperative, and even more to start one (i.e. build a whole new apartment building). The poor people who are renting the apartments in the linked article don't have it; they are living paycheck to paycheck, and frequently falling behind even on that. I'm not seeing a workable alternative beyond government-provided housing, but that doesn't have a good history of success in the US.
Let's for a second assume that people stay in the same house for 30 years[1]. Why can't they just purchase the house cooperative slowly with each rent payment ? My grandma in Israel paid rent in a public housing that had exactly such an arrangement, and after becoming a pensioner, she was finally able to purchase her house. And i have no doubt such arrangements are one reason why Israel, a nation establshed from poor…