Is America the new South Africa?

[Patroklos]

*the US has little social flexiblity and is far closer to a class society than most European countries, their elite is almost hereditary.

Do you have any intention whatsoever of backing this up?

[KrazyHorse]

Re: Re: Is America the new South Africa?

Originally posted by Felch
The thing you don't understand is that people can still move up.

And the thing that most Americans don't know is that this happens significantly less often in the US than elsewhere.

[Heraclitus]

Re: Re: Is America the new South Africa?

Originally posted by Felch


I really think you misunderstand America. Yes, people born on the top will stay there. Yes, "white" people are a diminishing portion of the population.

The thing you don't understand is that people can still move up. Like say, a child of a single mother becoming President. That's been known to happen.

Also the definition of white is flexible. A hundred years ago, Irish and Italians were not exactly white people. Now they are. It's an ever increasing concept.

I think you misunderstand me.


I'm not mixing up the concepts of cast and class societies, I think you should read up on it on the wikipedia.


A classe-less society is basically what communism aspired to you, we all live in "weak" class societies, some are closer others are farther from the theoretical defintion.


Also: I live in Slovenia not on the Moon. Our societies are not that different.

[Heraclitus]

Re: Re: Re: Is America the new South Africa?

Originally posted by KrazyHorse


And the thing that most Americans don't know is that this happens significantly less often in the US than elsewhere.

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Patroklos


Do you have any intention whatsoever of backing this up?

Do you want me to back my statement of a relative lack of economic mobility in the US?

The two measures I'm thinking of are the "movement between quintiles" (or quartiles, or whatever) measure and the intergenerational elasticity of income measure.

[Kidlicious]

The lower classes are more sheepish in the US though.

[Patroklos]

Do you want me to back my statement of a relative lack of economic mobility in the US?

No, I want him to do it and then show how that qualifies as "little social flexibility" and a hereditary society.

Then I want him to show wether or not the opportunity is not there, or whether people are simply not making the best of it (which is where I put most Americans, including me at times).

When people compare Europe to America they sometimes imagine huge disparities, when in reality we are talking about degrees of awesome.

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Heraclitus


I consider Europe a "weak" class socitey, and I said that America was close to a "true" class society.

You are taking one measure (economic mobility) and translating it into a broad based measure (class society).

To most people a class society is one where social status is determined almost entirely by parental status. While there is a significant effect on income due to parental status, if the US were a classic "class society" you would expect to see additional, strong non-economic determinants of status due to parental status. It is in these less well-defined markers that the US tends to be (in my experience) less "classist" than Europe.

[Dinner]

A lot of that "social mobility" in Europe is the children of rich people not being rich themselves. In other words downward mobility. The rich do stay rich in America but the upward path of social mobility is also more fluid in America then in Europe.

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Patroklos


No, I want him to do it and then show how that qualifies as "little flexibility" and a hereditary society.

Then I want him to show wether or not the opportunity is not there, or whether people are simply not making the best of it (which is where I put most Americans).

Stop trying to turn this into an either/or discussion.

Parental income determines about half of the variance in a child's income in the US. It's significantly lower in most of Europe (ranging from 20% to 40% in most countries IIRC). Much of this difference comes from the existence of high-status/high-cost private education in the US and its relative lack elsewhere. Another major component is racial.

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by Oerdin
A lot of that "social mobility" in Europe is the children of rich people not being rich themselves. In other words downward mobility. The rich do stay rich in America but the upward path of social mobility is also more fluid in America then in Europe.

This is utter nonsense, and would imply that Europeans' incomes are growing significantly less rapidly than Americans' incomes. In truth the relative level of per capita incomes has remained fairly stable since WWII reconstruction ended (in Western Europe, at least).

[Dinner]

There are a lot more Americans who own their own businesses then Europeans. Plus there are a lot of tax loop holes designed to help businesses not pay taxes. That's why even though or nominal business tax rate is something like 32% 50% of businesses pay absolutely not taxes each year including some of our biggest and most profitable companies.

[Heraclitus]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse


You are taking one measure (economic mobility) and translating it into a broad based measure (class society).

To most people a class society is one where social status is determined almost entirely by parental status. While there is a significant effect on income due to parental status, if the US were a classic "class society" you would expect to see additional, strong non-economic determinants of status due to parental status. It is in these less well-defined markers that the US tends to be (in my experience) less "classist" than Europe.

I'm speaking of class society in pseudo-Marxist terms here, the US is a class society by that definition.

What you are describing seems more like the what European society looked like before the 19th century.

[Heraclitus]

Originally posted by Oerdin
There are a lot more Americans who own their own businesses then Europeans. Plus there are a lot of tax loop holes designed to help businesses not pay taxes. That's why even though or nominal business tax rate is something like 32% 50% of businesses pay absolutely not taxes each year including some of our biggest and most profitable companies.

:facepalm:

How did we get to the issue of taxation here? Taxes don't make you poor unless you are living in prerevolutionary France.

Taxes:

-Redistribute wealth
-fund goverment

Social security, universal healthcare and free university are all goverment expenditures that help bring people out of poverty.

[KrazyHorse]

A caste society has legal or quasi-legal barriers to movement. It is not the same as one where class determinants strongly affect social mobility. In the US most of the class determinants which strongly affect social mobility are economic in nature (translated through education and race, for instance) while those which affect social mobility in Europe are often (and this is from personal experience, since measurements of these is more difficult) non-economic (for instance, speaking with the right accent).