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What Oxford taught me about posh people

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Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#201

Post by coopierez »

ksec wrote: post #108

20 years later all I could remember from Uni was Drink, Drink and Drink. LOL All the people I know who interviewed for OxBridge were so god damn clever and smart I sometimes ( even til this day ) think whether they are human or not. They could learn a new subject far quicker than I do. And spend more time doing other mostly creative things. But nearly all of them ( at least those I knew ) quit their high paying job f…

This is purely anecdotal, but there is a certain pretension to Oxford that doesn't seem to be present at Cambridge.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#202

Post by jseban »

WalterBright wrote: post #144
coffeecat wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Progressive people believe that society is not fair but could be. Conservatives believe it is not possible, and it's silly to even try. Having recently decided that I dislike leftist politics and that I align more with right-wing politics (in theory, if not in practice), the thing that switched in my mind is: why does it matter whether or not society is fair? I think that's the wrong question; I don't see any intri…

You can never make life fair for someone who is disabled. I wouldn't trade my health for a billion dollars. There are endless people taller, smarter, faster, younger, handsomer, healthier, etc., than me. Obsessing over the implicit and inevitable unfairness of that is a total waste of time and energy. More generally, no two people are the same. It's not possible to make it fair even for two people, let alone billions…

I absolutely agree, the idea of a fair society needs to go away, it's just a dead end that only leads to fighting over crumbs and stifling productivity, what we need to do is get rid of jealousy and resentment.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#203

Post by kowlo »

agent008t wrote: post #191

I expected Oxford undergraduates to be the best from all over the world, intensely passionate about their subjects. What I found were kids more passionate about drinking and clubbing and gossiping than studying. There seemed to be some weird hierarchy about who sits where in the dining hall that was completely bizarre. 'Default' social activities organized by the various committees all involved brain-dead clubbing an…

This contributed to my departure from academia (UK professor). The majority of students didn't care, the staff cared even less, and senior management just wanted bums on seats.

Gaining a position in academia is something that takes a lot of time, so the disappointment is still with me.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#204

Post by WalterBright »

saiya-jin wrote: post #163
WalterBright wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US raised scores of millions of immigrants from poverty to the middle class. Poor people immigrated to the US, people with nothing but a suitcase. The US has seen the most spectacular rise from poverty to wealth ever seen in history. In WW1, for example, the German soldiers knew they had lost when the Americans arrived, well equipped, tall, and fat with food. The Japanese soldiers had a similar reaction when faci…

That's all nice and rosy but current picture is veering from this away more and more. Class mobility in US is largely a self-perpetuating myth. And US, say compared to Europe is clearly class-based social system where divider is your wealth. So when you come in poor, you stay relatively poor, and can hope your children will fare better (and most don't). Your WWI remarks are not correct (any fresh joining recruits wou…

> Class mobility in US is largely a self-perpetuating myth.

I personally know several millionaires who arrived in America with a suitcase and a dream.

> class-based social system where divider is your wealth.

The usual definition of a class is legal privilege based on your parents. This does not exist in the US.

> So when you come in poor, you stay relatively poor, and can hope your children will fare better (and most don't).

People aren't desperately trampling 1000 miles and throwing their kids over the wall just to be poor. In America, they have freedom and a darn good chance to do well. Communist countries are different, they have to build walls to keep their citizens from escaping Utopia.

> Read some german WWI literature

I've read about WW1 from actual historians.

What do think the beaten down German soldiers would have thought encountering masses of American troops better equipped and far better fed than they ever were?

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#205

Post by jseban »

anoncake wrote: post #181
WalterBright wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one's claiming we can achieve total equality I haven't seen any end to raising the bar. Where do you think it should end?

Obviously you cannot redistribute things that cannot be redistributed, for starters.

It's not uncommon among leftist to suggest systemic punishments and disadvantages for people who are born with certain physical and/or mental strengths and talents.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#206

Post by WalterBright »

FranzFerdiNaN wrote: post #158
WalterBright wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US raised scores of millions of immigrants from poverty to the middle class. Poor people immigrated to the US, people with nothing but a suitcase. The US has seen the most spectacular rise from poverty to wealth ever seen in history. In WW1, for example, the German soldiers knew they had lost when the Americans arrived, well equipped, tall, and fat with food. The Japanese soldiers had a similar reaction when faci…

The US could do all that because they removed the free market from the economy. Everything was turned into a planned economy to feed the war effort. Free markets would have completely failed in this case.

Um, the government contracted with and paid private companies to produce armaments, because B-17s are of no use to consumers.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#207

Post by makomk »

notahacker wrote: post #182
chcknsammich wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm sorry. Did you just claim that getting 1000€ would improve the quality of life of Jeff Bezos, you and me, and a beggar on the street, by an equal amount? Jeff Bezos does not buy bread with every incremental thousand dollars. He builds institutions that provide bread for a cent cheaper to millions of people. The assumption that you can equate these utilities is exactly the fallacy that caused so many to starve i…

Jeff Bezos does not buy bread with every incremental thousand dollars, he spends $42million of them on a monumental clock. But perhaps it is more allocatively efficient to ensure that the beggar, lacking the funds to buy bread from Whole Foods, dies of starvation. The assumption that because someone has more money, they would make better decisions on how to coordinate it was also what caused so many people to starve…

Jeff Bezos does not buy anything with every incremental thousand dollars. In some important sense, it's not even money that can be spent. When people talk about Bezos' wealth being $200 billion dollars, almost all of that is just the last trade price of Amazon stock times his shareholding. (In some sense, it represents the value of an institution that supplies people with stuff more efficiently.)

Suppose we take that $200 billion from Bezos, who only spends a tiny fraction of that on actual things for his personal use that use actual resources like land, materials, workers' time, etc, and instead try and spend all of it on stuff that uses those actual resources like food, healthcare, etc. The only way to do that is to find people who'll do the reverse trade - who'll take hundreds of billions of dollars they'd otherwise have spent on things made with actual resources that'd make their lives better, and instead buy shares of Amazon with them. This actual money that represents an actual claim on limited resources cannot come out of the pockets of Bezos or other billionares, because they don't have that much - it has to come out of ordinary people's pockets. Same with the shuttering of businesses during coronavirus; it's ordinary people who'll have to feel the consequences of all the goods not produced and services not provided, because they're the ones who consume them.

The approach where people like Bezos become billionaires through coming up with ways to supply goods and services to people more efficiently doesn't have this problem, because it works by making the pie bigger for everyone rather than just trying to change the size of people's slices. And I'd personally trust Bezos to do this much more than all the people who seem ideologically opposed to the idea such a thing is even possible...

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#208

Post by WalterBright »

thu2111 wrote: post #189
mulvya wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In WW2, the US was able to fight two major wars simultaneously, and supply the allies, and move all that stuff overseas. An incredible achievement, only possible from free markets and the wealth produced by them. The US nationalized many industries during WWII. From 'U.S. not always averse to nationalization, despite its free-market image'[1] "In times of war and national emergency, Washington has not hesitated. In…

The book you cite doesn't seem to support your argument. Firstly, you say they nationalized many industries but the book talks about individual companies. Nationalizing an industry means nationalizing every company within that industry. Secondly, this does not appear to have been motivated by the failure of capitalism but rather the opposite. It was done in response to union strikes. Unions are usually understood as…

To be fair, Roosevelt in his 1945 State of the Union Address advocated for imposing forced labor on American civilians. Fortunately, that went nowhere.

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#209

Post by MaxBarraclough »

raynr wrote: post #128
deanCommie wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's always going to be unfair. Can I ask you a question without I swear any implicit judgement. Do you gravitate towards conservative politicians? Because I'm finding that this is the main distinction between Progressive and Conservative-minded people in today's western society. You can account for religion (there are religious leftists and atheist rightists). You can account for racism (there are plenty of racist…

Not the poster you were asking, but I did appreciate the stress you put on trying to ask a non judgmental question and I thought I'd add a personal observation, which is: disillusioned progressives also think that way. You try and you try to make society a fairer place to live in, but realise the system is so far gone that nothing you ever do will ever make a difference. So the morally correct and efficient thing to…

> Not only is it silly to try to create a fairer society, life has extensively proved that it is silly.

Seems rather defeatist. Wouldn't you agree that different societies across the world vary in their levels of fairness? For that matter, how about different societies across time?

Re: What Oxford taught me about posh people

#210

Post by WalterBright »

jfk13 wrote: post #186
teachingassist wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US raised scores of millions of immigrants from poverty to the middle class. Emphasis here is on the past tense. There are several reasons to challenge this: 1. The USA had (and still has) unprecedented resources per population. Why is your claim not still the case? 2. Immigrants tend to be people with the means to immigrate. That's rarely people in relative poverty, unless you intended to mean slaves.

In the past, a lot of (non-slave) people immigrated to the USA precisely because they were impoverished -- for example, Irish fleeing the Great Famine, among many others. > "Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore." Whether those words are as appropriate today may be another matter, of course.

Something like 100,000 people per month are flooding into America via the southern border. What are they fleeing from?
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