There Is No Level Playing Field....Social Mobility Is A Myth...?!

[Soph0571]

Can social mobility really exist if only one in a hundred has the brains and skills to take advantage of our capitalist systems?
Working class born, working class bred, working class dead.

As Karl Marx once said: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past”

Whatever you think of Karl Marx philosophy he was not wrong in this regard. After all we may all have the potential scope to buy a 1-million-pound house, but that scope is abstract unless we have the money to purchase the home. Many people are born into situations where they grow up in poverty. They have poor housing and diet which has a huge impact on people’s on-going health and well-being. Some people are born into situations where they are not exposed to a broad range of role models from an early age. They are not taught how to aspire. Aspiration is for other people. Those children who are born to people of wealth and who can provide for their children in a myriad of ways that those who live in poverty cannot.

Today, in the United Kingdom we have a grotesquely unequal and unfair society. A society where in the last 5 years the richest 1000 people in the Kingdom have doubled their wealth while a million people have had to rely on food banks. Here I sit, in the 6th richest country on the planet, where we feel we can justify real and deepening inequalities by saying that anyone can make it, just pull yourself up by your bootstraps even if, to paraphrase President Obama, you don’t have any boots.

Here is the West we are masters at justifying inequality. However, the fact remains, not anyone can make it regardless of where they come from. Some people have odds stacked so high against them that they are never going to be able to climb over the odds to get on even the first rung of social mobility.

[stopbush]

1. Spot on.

[Ohiogal]

2. We desperately need

the next President to address the egregious income inequality problem which keeps on getting worse with current policies.

I have a family member who says she hates hearing that phrase “for the common good”. We’ll need a candidate who can spell it out in terms everyone can get behind.

[Wounded Bear]

3. Most rich people get their wealth the old fashioned way...

they inherit it.

[harumph]

4. It's even worse than your first sentence.

MANY people who have risen through the ranks (from modest wealth to incredible wealth) lack the natural abilities to perform their
jobs with facility and integrity. It seems a pretty face and willingness to be an unapologetic flack for the status quo
is all that is required to gain a spotlight. My only question is whether these people are genuinely stupid - or deliberately obtuse.

[HopeAgain]

5. The US College scandal

pulls back the curtain on capitalism and privilege. Privilege and wealth buys more privilege and wealth. And capitalism is proving to work as well, if not better, with authoritarian systems as with Democracy.

I am not afraid of the words Democratic Socialism and no one else on here should be either.

[Wellstone ruled]

6. Long gone are the days

when one would apply for and receive a employment opportunity where your moving and temporary housing needs as well as a short term monetary stipend was included in the Hiring package.

So agree with your post. Have Childhood acquaintances who are still stuck in a poverty situation simply due to Social Economics of their area. Religious and Family ties can play a major role in the negative,which is in play for these acquaintances.

[MineralMan]

7. No, there is no level playing field. There probably never has been one.

In every generation since I was born, in 1945, though, some people have managed to break free from their wage-earning working class heritage. I was the one in my family who finished college and did something other than manual labor. My sister became a nurse. My brother continued in his father's auto repair business. Even today, people are doing the same thing, being the first in their family to get an education or move away from living the same life their parents did.

Not enough, but some. Some even become leaders, entrepreneurs and high achievers. There's the rub, though. Going beyond the mid-level of white collar positions remains a very difficult challenge. There are only so many positions available, and most people cannot rise to fit into those when they become open. Not all people have the same abilities, capabilities, and temperament. Only those who are capable will rise to achieve leadership positions.

That problem will never be solved, really. What can be solved, though, is to even out the paying field, not the playing field. The unconscionable difference between the earnings of the top 5%, say, and the rest of us is the real problem. The unreasonable profits of mid-sized to larger corporations are not distributed fairly within those organizations. The top ranks receive far more than their output warrants. So much more that those nearer the bottom of the employment chain do not earn enough money to live comfortably and dream of even better situations.

At the top of any organizational chart will always be people of high intelligence, excellent education, strong ambition, and even a thirst for power. Why? Because those are the requirements for such positions. However, there is no reason they should earn obscenely vastly more money than the person working 8 hours a day at the lowest level of that organizational chart. There is no justification for that that makes any sense from a humanitarian perspective.

Instead of prioritizing the maximum pay of the leadership of an organization, a better goal would be to set a good livable standard of income for the lowest level of the organizational chart. And by that, I do not mean minimum wage, but a wage high enough to give families a decent living with some left over to plan for the future. Then, scale incomes up on the organization chart, based on that good living wage at the bottom. There's nothing wrong with rewarding achievement and advancement with higher pay, but not so much higher that the very top of the organizational chart has an obscene marginal increase. The CEO's salary should be relatable to the entry-level mail clerk's salary or the salary of the person loading trucks. It all should should make sense. Today, it does not make any sense at all. Top management salaries are so incredibly much higher than line employee's salaries that there is no recognizable connection whatsoever between the two.

We need a huge adjustment in salary differences. The CEO should earn more than the mail clerk, but not 1000 times more. Maybe 10 or 20 times more, with all salaries in between scaled accordingly. I don't know what the numbers should be, but the mail clerk ought to be able to raise a family on his salary without food stamps or other assistance. It is obscene to do otherwise.

How to do that? I don't know. I tend to like the idea of confiscatory taxes on wealth that enforce some limits on the discrepancies between the lowest-paid and highest-paid person. If there is no point to earning obscene amounts of money, then the pressure would be lessened in paying a living wage to everyone. But, I don't know how to make any of that happen. I just know that the current situation is no longer tenable.

[rickford66]

8. The "levelest" time was after WWII to the late 70's. The GI Bill made some difference.

I used it twice with no problems (1971 & 77-78). It's a lot harder to use it now and doesn't go as far with the present benefits. If any vets out there have used it recently, I'm open for corrections.