Keeping them in their place

[supergee]

One of the great unannounced projects of the 20th century was the abolition of class. The United States ignored it in the hope that it would go away; that worked every bit as well with class as it did with the People's Republic of China. The USSR tried to smash it; that was just as successful, plus millions of deaths.

So it seems we are stuck with class, and we should think about making it work better. One answer is to cut the ends of the curve: make the uppers less powerful and the lowers less miserable. The other is class mobility, enabling lowers to reach the higher level they belong at. It's easy to pick on the ways in which lower-class people with the ability to rise are pulled down, by a culture of poverty that says, "Don't get ahead of yourself" (meaning "Don't get ahead of us") and the collectivists (many of them not poor) who turn it into an ideology.

But of course the real problem is the way they are pushed down, for irrelevant reasons like race or sex, by the classist assumption that all those born into the lower classes belong there, and by plain stupidity. fjm reports a particularly gross fail from the UK.

Comments

[brewsternorth]

One answer is to cut the ends of the curve: make the uppers less powerful and the lowers less miserable. The other is class mobility, enabling lowers to reach the higher level they belong at.

To give it its due, I think the UK government at different times did try to achieve both ends using the rather blunt and slow instrument of legislation of varying kinds; now the Tories seem to be undoing all that good work. I recall seeing a New York Times headline that concerned the "culture of poverty" and thinking of just your second paragraph: to what extent is the culture that of the poor pulling the aspirant down, and to what extent that of the rich kicking the aspirants off the ladder?

[supergee]

I was trying to suggest that the rich are a bigger problem.

[necturus]

Social mobility is easier in a world with an open frontier than in one of finite resources. The only frontier left is space, and the only way to grow now is up and out.