320 Years of History
Gold Member
- Nov 1, 2015
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All one has to do is look at our distribution of wealth to realize that it isOur society works differentlyFine, but if the man cannot afford to take your fishing class, regardless of why he cannot, then what? Give him a fish? Let him starve because you've neither given him a fish nor taught him how to fish? Rely on someone else to give him a fish or teach him for free? And what happens when nobody (other than the government) is willing to give him a fish?
While there are myriad answers and approaches to resolving the dilemma of the questions above, when it comes to other human beings, and assuming as a nation we concur that no man should be left to starve or be homeless because, as a nation, we are more than adequately wealthy to make sure that never happens, the ones we (the nation) implement must, if one is to be humane to one's countrymen, be the ones (or one) that has the greatest likelihood of working. That is, the one that at the very least is capable of making sure no man starves or goes homeless. Might some approaches have the potential to achieve more than feeding and housing a man? Sure, but if they potentially less adept at achieving the bare minimum for the the greatest number of folks who need it, they are worse choices because they result in more people starving and being homeless.
There's nothing wrong with the human capital development goal you identified above -- teach a man to fish -- indeed it's an excellent and worthy one for which to strive. In setting that as the desired outcome of one's beneficence, one must also consider whether so doing folks are "left behind," so to speak. If one is okay with leaving some behind, fine, but if that's so, own it and tell the citizenry that's the case, that of those who are "left behind," the government's take on that is "Tough. You had your chance and you blew it, or perhaps you didn't, but either way, starve and/or freeze. Best of luck finding individuals who'll take kindly on you and help you out."
The other thing to consider carefully is that when addressing what amount to handouts, one must view the approach differently than were one providing goods and services for a fee. With the handouts, a program strives to achieve its end(s) -- leave nobody hungry, leave nobody homeless, leave nobody uneducated, whatever... -- as inexpensively as possible. To do so, the focus is on what approaches have the greatest potential to achieve those ends, not which approaches have the greatest potential to achieve something over and above them. Again, however, if one wants to define the ends in accordance with human capital development objectives rather than subsistence objectives, fine. There again, one must own it. All that's different is the message: "If you are poor or destitute, the government will give you an education, food, shelter, etc. and those who are not poor/destitute will not receive those things from the government, but instead will pay for them."
Do both sets of ends result in "ticked off" citizens? Yes. In the former, irked folks will come from all levels of society...the poor as well as the "not poor" who feel for them. In the latter, it's going to largely be folks of some means being irked because their taxes are being used to help their fellow citizens rather than their being allowed to "pick and choose" whom to help when they want to.
In light of the preceding, I ask this.
- What should be/is the United States' stance regarding its citizens who, again for whatever reason, need food, clothing, shelter and education and who cannot pay for it one their own?
- Are you okay with allowing any of your fellow citizens to starve and/or go homeless and unclothed? If so, to what extent, that is, at what point does it not become "okay" to let that happen?
- If you don't find it acceptable to allow folks to go hungry and homeless, of the various solutions that exist or that you can design anew, which of them has the greatest potential to ensure the fewest number of people at any given point in time are hungry and homeless?
You fish all day and turn all your catch over to the wealthy. The wealthy takes what they want and allow you to share a fish with your fellow fishermen
Whatever its ills, our society is not feudal.
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Your earlier remarks all but characterize at a high level a feudal system. While the distribution of wealth may or may not be similar between our society and feudal ones, that similarly (or lack thereof) is incidental, not unavoidably characteristic or causal. Feudal economies and polities may have the depicted wealth distribution, but they are hardly the only ones that can and do; therefore, the distribution of wealth measure isn't germane to establishing whether ours (or another) is or is not a feudal society.
Quite simply, that which looks like a duck is not necessarily a duck.
When you look at the distribution of wealth, you can see that 80% of the population controls 15% of the wealth. As a worker, you may be able to move about within that 15% slice of the pie through initiative, but your ability to eat from the 85% remaining is limited
It is a feudal system that allows the workers to think they have some control over their well being
Red:
The concept you've described is economic mobility. There are two measures of economic mobility:
- Absolute mobility: how likely a person is to exceed their parents’ family income at the same age. In the U.S., 84% of the population exceed their parents' income at the same age.
- Relative mobility: how one's rank on the income ladder compares to their parents, their peers, or even themselves over time. Thirty percent of Americans moved up two quintiles or more in one generation according to a recent Pew Study.
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Having observed that U.S. citizens' mobility is better than some and worse than other nations, the question one must ask is whether there is a way to do something about it. A group of Stanford University researchers in 2015 examine that and found, among other things:
- There is less intergenerational mobility in the United States than is sometimes appreciated by the public, but intergenerational mobility is not declining. When poor children born in 1971 and 1986 are compared, one finds a slight increase (from 8.4 to 9.0 percent) in the chances of reaching the top fifth of the income distribution by age 28.
- There is substantial variation within the United States in the prospects for escaping poverty. In the highest-mobility areas of the United States, mobility rates are higher than rates in most other developed countries, and more than 1 in 10 children with parents in the bottom quintile of the income distribution reach the top quintile by adulthood. Poor children in western states have the best chances of making it to the top.
- In the lowest-mobility areas of the United States, which tend to be in the South, fewer than 1 in 20 poor children reach the top quintile, a rate that is lower than in any developed country for which data have been analyzed to date.
- Mobility rates are relatively low in areas with high income and racial segregation. Mobility rates are relatively high in areas with high school quality, local tax rates, social capital, and marriage rates.
- Five factors are strongly correlated with upward mobility:
- Segregation: Upward income mobility is significantly lower in areas with larger African-American populations. However, white individuals in areas with large African-American populations also have lower rates of upward mobility, implying that racial shares matter at the community (rather than individual) level. One mechanism for such a community-level effect of race is segregation. Areas with larger black populations tend to be more segregated by income and race, which could affect both white and black low-income individuals adversely. Indeed, we find a strong negative correlation between standard measures of racial and income segregation and upward mobility. Moreover, we also find that upward mobility is higher in cities with less sprawl, as measured by commute times to work.
- Income inequality: CZs with larger Gini coefficients have less upward mobility, consistent with the “Great Gatsby curve” documented across countries. In contrast, top 1 percent income shares are not highly correlated with intergenerational mobility both across CZs within the United States and across countries. Although one cannot draw definitive conclusions from such correlations, they suggest that the factors that erode the middle class hamper intergenerational mobility more than the factors that lead to income growth in the upper tail.
- Proxies for the quality of K-12 education: Areas with higher test scores (controlling for income levels), lower dropout rates, and smaller class sizes have higher rates of upward mobility. In addition, areas with higher local tax rates, which are predominantly used to finance public schools, have higher rates of mobility.
- Social capital indices (proxies for the strength of social networks and community involvement in an area): Areas of high upward mobility tend to have higher fractions of religious individuals and greater participation in local civic organizations.
- Family Structure: The strongest predictors of upward mobility are measures of family structure, such as the fraction of single parents in the area. As with race, parents’ marital status does not matter through its effects at the individual level. Children of married parents also have higher rates of upward mobility if they live in communities with fewer single parents.
- We find modest correlations between upward mobility and local tax and government expenditure policies, and no systematic correlation between mobility and local labor market conditions, rates of migration, or access to higher education.
Blue:
??? Say what? A feudal system by it's very nature all but guarantees that workers are absolutely certain they have little to no chance of advancement. It was really quite simple: if one was not "to the manor born," one knew that absent exceptional circumstances, one would never own the land. In a society governed by and for landowners' benefit, nobody with half the sense God gave a goose thought they had any degree of political or economic control or influence.
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The hierarchy of feudalism and its accompanying "right by birth" principle ensured that economic mobility was largely nonexistent and not going to happen, and everyone knew it.