US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8276

On August 02 2017 07:02 mozoku wrote:

The three highest income ethnic groups in the US are East Asians (broadly grouped), Hindus, and Jews iirc.

I'm not sure if that fits into your implied narrative about the WASP conspiracy that's purposely oppressing all the other races.

Racism exists and it's unfair and should be fixed where possible. But in socioeconomic terms, it certainly appears that the market cares more about skills and education more than it does oppressing non-WASPs.

Also, let's dust off this chart:

A paper suggested by a liberal poster here claimed rank-rank correlation of US income mobility was 0.6 (the number was corroborated by other authors). This is what that looks like. This is within-generation mobility by the way (correlation between you now and you in 15 years). Which is already heavily biased downward because the most common method of family income mobility is between-generation (i.e. through getting a better education than your parents).

Yes, the system isn't fair because not everyone gets a level playing field to start.

While there's steps that can and should be taken to try to ameliorate that, it's more or less impossible to completely fix as parents who are successful in their career are always going to impart genes and parenting lessons/practices that generally lead to their kids' career success. Conversely, parents who haven't had successful careers tend to lack the knowledge of what it takes to have a successful career, making it hard to pass it down to their kids. Additionally, families tend to move near other families with similar socioeconomic status, which reinforces this effect both directions. This is also hard to fix, short of government mandating where people live.

No, the system isn't what's stopping you from living at least a comfortable upper-middle class life though (in the vast majority of cases). That's fully achievable by working hard and following common sense advise that's told to everyone (i.e. "try hard in school", "play nice with others", "try to excel at your career", etc.).

Democrats love to tell their voters that the system is at fault for their problems because it's human nature to blame things other than yourself for your mistakes (ever play a MOBA?). Especially when it's socially acceptable to do so because half of the country is telling you that it's the case. It's a brilliant political strategy. And, as an added bonus, Democrats can then morally justifiably push for redistribution (i.e. taxing to give money disproportionately to their voters), and create an enemy (Wall Street and/or "the 1%"). to energize their base. The whole narrative is like a politician's wet dream, and consequently it's perpetuated; but that doesn't mean it's accurate, nor unfortunately that their solutions fix the portion of the alleged problem that does exist.