It is an excellent summary of the upper-middle-class in the US today, and explains how they use their political power to maintain their status....and how this eventually led to enough resentment to elect Donald Trump.
Read it!
I think that all started around 1861. Ever hear of the "Robber Barons"? "Barons". Get it?
This smug bastard would read far better from the end of a rope.
And he was dubbed a racist for doing so.
I started college with a friend from high school. His lower class father worked hard to offer his son a full ride college education at a state school. As did mine. Neither of our parents had ever attended college. My friend spent his opportunity tuning in, turning on and dropping out. He’s worked the same dead end job for the last 45 years. I chose a different path, which led me to the top 1%. Choices are what it’s all about. No guilt here. Not for a second.
And while the achievement gap between the poor and the middle class has been narrowing, the gap between the middle class and the rich has been widening.
That is very different from how things were not so far back. In those days, the playing field between the middle class and rich was more level and the poor weren't so academically demoralized as they are today.
Fifty or sixty years ago, colleges like Harvard and Yale ceased to be preserves of the rich and idle and opened up to the ambitious of other classes, but over the last twenty or thirty years, the new rich (and what remains of the old rich) have retaken the elite institutions and become a self-perpetuating class.
Of course, it's not wholly unearned. The elite work. They prepare. But they have more opportunities and take advantage of them. It seems like others lower down are too stressed and burnt out to compete with the privileged.
This misguided and specious spew, is just PC "virtue signalling" garbage !
Writers write and talkers talk. It is all about money.
I got real tired of reading this real fast.
No sale.
Aaaahhhhhh.....
The Atlantic.
The Atlantic is filled with garbage and sewage and old crabs.
It’s also the name of an ocean.
What is this guys point? That it is a bad thing that parents love their kids and want them to do well? What is hell is he going to do about that?
I think it is pretty clear that our problem is the breakdown of the traditional family. If EVERY kid had a mother and a father that gave a sh!t i.e. parents that want them to do well, we would be so much happier and so far ahead of the rest of the world that it would not be funny. As our President would say, we would be sick of winning. There are certainly other issues (the disproportional influence of the Ivy League being one), but if that one problem could be fixed, solutions would be found for the rest. I really believe that.
Complete B.S.
It talks all about percentages, without considering absolutes.
If everyone is better off, who cares if the top is much higher?
I strongly suspect that a significant amount of gap from lower to higher economic wealth is necessary for innovation and increases in efficency.
You cannot have the great innovations and efficiencies in an age such as ours without allowing people to gain significantly.
The article is thinly disguised socialist zero sum game B.S.
Here is my essay on how to become a member of the new nobility, written in 2013.
I think it offers more helpful advice:
https://www.ammoland.com/2013/10/how-to-become-a-member-of-the-new-nobility/
Let's look at family structure. The 9.9% usually have healthy nuclear families (per this guy's own numbers)--not "alternative" families. And we have taken away the moral shame with single motherhood. So, as another article that I read years ago put it, "why isn't the upper middle class preaching what it practices?"
Frankly, the trades are a good spot in my view right now. Lots of people are going deep into debt for diplomas in bogus disciplines. But go become a plumber or electrician and you can make decent money without the debt.
By the way, how many of these Ivy League attorneys and brokers and doctors majored Womyn's Studies or Racial Pandering?
At least the writer had the wits to understand that the Average Joes out there are tired of being the losers in The New Economy. What he missed is how they also despise how their "betters" lecture them.
I don’t read anything the lefty rag has to offer
He wants to do away with the $500k married couple capital gains exemption on primary residence but in typical liberal pea brain fashion does not understand this would exacerbate the housing unaffordability he laments.
Major flaws:
1. It assigns motives - about getting ahead of others - to groups, persisting in the myth that the motives are and must have been there because X did in fact get “ahead” of y. Any attribution of outcomes to motives is a lie.
2. It suggests what one lost was “taken” by another. Again, the reality is just changes over time, and using statistics of one time to compare it with a statistic at another time, suggesting that years ago X had 22% of something and at the later time had only 12%, while Y had 12% at the earlier time and 22% at the later time ERRORS massively in suggesting Y “took” from X, when the whole that is being measured has grown, and 12% of something larger is still less more than 12% of something smaller. All that really happened was X grew less than Y grew, but it is a lie that that was achieved by Y “taking” anything from X. All that you need to believe to believe any of it is Marxian class envy. With that it is not enough to be “better off”, you must be “as better off” as everyone else.
I made my way through the whole thing. It’s a worthwhile read in that he’s identifying the blue state aristocracy that has emerged over the past half century or so. Unfortunately his political operating assumptions are entirely within the liberal bubble so there’s a lot of gratuitous crap there as well.
Yep. Because they are mostly leftists, contrary to the lies the Enemedia tell.
The pseudo-aristocracy all attend Marxist Ivy League schools.