The Divide between the Poor and the Rich

[Democratic Koyro]

If the poor got richer and their living standard increased, even if the rich got richer, would that be okay with you?

Absolutely, even if the rich got richer at a greater rate.

Would you rather the difference between the poor and the rich was less, even if the living standard of the poor didn't increase?

No, this would be retarded.

You sir, i'm sorry to say, are an incompetent half-wit.

[Avenio]

Because many poor people manage to pull themselves up out of poverty, some even into wealth, thus proving it correct?

All or most (and for SD to be correct, it has to be most or all) of those mobile poor people demonstrably 'better' than the rest of the poor population, and not just catching lucky breaks or being in the right place and time? And similarly, do all or most stupid and/or incompetent rich necessarily fall out of wealth due to their merit?

That's the most important tenet of SD; that social mobility is meritocratic and works regardless of individual circumstance universally across society. So does it, when applied, work in the real world?

[The Grand Duchy of Marinia]

Because many poor people manage to pull themselves up out of poverty, some even into wealth, thus proving it correct?

All or most (and for SD to be correct, it has to be most or all) of those mobile poor people demonstrably 'better' than the rest of the poor population, and not just catching lucky breaks or being in the right place and time? And similarly, do all or most stupid and/or incompetent rich necessarily fall out of wealth due to their merit?

That's the most important tenet of SD; that social mobility is meritocratic and works regardless of individual circumstance universally across society. So does it, when applied, work in the real world?

For the most part, yes. But even in the times when merit and exceptionalism aren't enough to push someone to the top, or if they are held back by those at the top, it still proves the point that the strongest always win. And it's a universal truth that the incompetent wealthy will lose their stuff. Look at the European Monarchs. Without exception, the truly incompetent rulers lost everything, ran their countries into the ground, and were removed. Look at the Medici family history. Look at the old blueblood wealth on the east coast like the Rockefellers, the Roosivelts, the Vanderbilts; all of them are coasting on wealth created by their great, great grandfathers, not gathering more of it. On the other side, there are examples like Andrew Carnegie, who came here from Scotland with 10 cents in his pocket and became the owner of the largest steel company in the United States. Then there's Abe Lincoln, George Westinghouse, J.P Morgan, Henry Ford...more recent examples include Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Ben Carson, Colin Powell, Bill Gates, Shahid Khan...Mark Zuckerberg. The list goes on. All are people that came from either the desperately poor, or the middle class. All are or were exceptionally intelligent, innovators, leaders. And yes, as heartless as it sounds, the poor that stay poor, at least in America, aren't good enough, smart enough, fast enough, motivated enough, sober enough to be wealthy. Wealth is a reward for being the best, not for being average. Wealth is the Gold medal of life.

[Grenartia]

All or most (and for SD to be correct, it has to be most or all) of those mobile poor people demonstrably 'better' than the rest of the poor population, and not just catching lucky breaks or being in the right place and time? And similarly, do all or most stupid and/or incompetent rich necessarily fall out of wealth due to their merit?

That's the most important tenet of SD; that social mobility is meritocratic and works regardless of individual circumstance universally across society. So does it, when applied, work in the real world?

For the most part, yes.

I didn't read the rest of your post, because this is all I needed to read to know that you have no clue what you're talking about. Because its clearly bullshit.

EDIT: However, for the sake of debate, I'll address specifically where your post is bullshit.

But even in the times when merit and exceptionalism aren't enough to push someone to the top, or if they are held back by those at the top, it still proves the point that the strongest always win. And it's a universal truth that the incompetent wealthy will lose their stuff. Look at the European Monarchs. Without exception, the truly incompetent rulers lost everything, ran their countries into the ground, and were removed. Look at the Medici family history. Look at the old blueblood wealth on the east coast like the Rockefellers, the Roosivelts, the Vanderbilts; all of them are coasting on wealth created by their great, great grandfathers, not gathering more of it. On the other side, there are examples like Andrew Carnegie, who came here from Scotland with 10 cents in his pocket and became the owner of the largest steel company in the United States. Then there's Abe Lincoln, George Westinghouse, J.P Morgan, Henry Ford...more recent examples include Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Ben Carson, Colin Powell, Bill Gates, Shahid Khan...Mark Zuckerberg. The list goes on. 1. All are people that came from either the desperately poor, or the middle class. All are or were exceptionally intelligent, innovators, leaders. 2. And yes, as heartless as it sounds, the poor that stay poor, at least in America, aren't good enough, smart enough, fast enough, motivated enough, sober enough to be wealthy. Wealth is a reward for being the best, not for being average. Wealth is the Gold medal of life.

1. And most of them got to where they are by exploiting others.

2. As one of the poor you are referring to, allow me to simply say that I'm sorry that I'm not apparently good/fast/strong/motivated/sober (despite never having been drunk in my life) enough to be a winnar. I'm also sorry for being a waste of space for not having any of those attributes. I mean, after all, that is the logical conclusion of the logic of SD, is it not?

[Avenio]

For the most part, yes. But even in the times when merit and exceptionalism aren't enough to push someone to the top, or if they are held back by those at the top, it still proves the point that the strongest always win. And it's a universal truth that the incompetent wealthy will lose their stuff.

By prefacing your statement with 'for the most part', you admit that social Darwinism doesn't work; for the principles behind it to be true, it has to work in all cases. The fact that the incompetent wealthy both exist and continue to exist proves that.

Look at the European Monarchs. Without exception, the truly incompetent rulers lost everything, ran their countries into the ground, and were removed. Look at the Medici family history.

George III went insane in the later parts of his life and the British Empire still went through a period of growth and stability. The Ptolemies of Hellenistic Egypt went through centuries of inbred, incompetent and decadent rulers and still survived. Marcus Lepidus was a mediocre politician who went on to become a triumvir alongside Antony and Octavian in the Second Triumvirate. etc.

Look at the old blueblood wealth on the east coast like the Rockefellers, the Roosivelts, the Vanderbilts; all of them are coasting on wealth created by their great, great grandfathers, not gathering more of it.

...This is supposed to be an argument for social Darwinism how, exactly? If they've simply been coasting for hundreds of years, that means the principle of meritocratic social movement that SD builds itself upon isn't working.

On the other side, there are examples like Andrew Carnegie, who came here from Scotland with 10 cents in his pocket and became the owner of the largest steel company in the United States. Then there's Abe Lincoln, George Westinghouse, J.P Morgan, Henry Ford...more recent examples include Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Ben Carson, Colin Powell, Bill Gates, Shahid Khan...Mark Zuckerberg. The list goes on. All are people that came from either the desperately poor, or the middle class.

Wrong. Bill Gates was born to a wealthy lawyer and a bank director. Zuckerberg went to a rich private school and his father paid a famous programmer to tutor him. Michael Dell was born to a stock broker and an orthodontist. Khan was born to a professor at a university in Pakistan. J. P. Morgan was born to a powerful banker. The list goes on.

If you can only name a handful of people in the last 200 years who rose out of genuine poverty to the upper echelons of society, that means that the principles upon which social Darwinism operates do not work, because for every Colin Powell and Henry Ford there are a half-dozen unnamed innovators and great people who are born, live and die in the dustbin of history because they never got the breaks and advantages the Zuckerbergs and Gateses of our world got by the happy accident of whose vagina they fell out of.

All are or were exceptionally intelligent, innovators, leaders. And yes, as heartless as it sounds, the poor that stay poor, at least in America, aren't good enough, smart enough, fast enough, motivated enough, sober enough to be wealthy. Wealth is a reward for being the best, not for being average. Wealth is the Gold medal of life.

Naive nonsense. Especially considering the cast of drunkards, buffoons and miscreants that dominate our history.

[The Black Forrest]

If the poor got richer and their living standard increased, even if the rich got richer, would that be okay with you?

OR

Would you rather the difference between the poor and the rich was less, even if the living standard of the poor didn't increase?

One group doesn't need the other to improve.

[Kilobugya]

Why do people still believe in Social Darwinism?

I don't know, but please, please, don't call it that way. Charles Darwin opposed it all his life, and it's not at all a natural conclusion of the theory of evlution.

[Kilobugya]

Greed and envy are the only means by which humans advance themselves.

That non-sense has been proven wrong since decades by game theory. Greed and envy are negative-sum games which keep us backwards. What drives us forward is participating to positive-sum games, like reciprocal altruism and cooperation.

[Risottia]

One group doesn't need the other to improve.

Is that a sort of an argument for extreme class war?

Anyway, no, I think that the upper class need the mehrwert produced by the lower class - so if they want to improve (their living standards I guess) they need to keep the lower class producing for them to accumulate.

You sir, i'm sorry to say, are an incompetent half-wit.

You're flaming and you shouldn't be.

/notamod

[The Merchant Republics]

There was a time when the former was true, much of the 19th century saw massive gains for both rich and poor and the poor by far got the most of it (in terms of stard of living increase), if we could capture that essence especially in the few years where the poor grew disproportionately richer faster than we'd be very well off.

The current problem is the poor haven't been getting much richer since the 80's in pure income due to inflation. Meanwhile the rich have, and significantly so.


I of course would prefer a society where everyone's income grew equally fast, as well as where there was only a moderate wealth gap. Not out of social "fairness" but mere compassion for the poor. Yet, I don't think the gap should be narrowed by force, especially when the net result is everyone being slightly poorer.

[Kilobugya]

That's the most important tenet of SD; that social mobility is meritocratic and works regardless of individual circumstance universally across society. So does it, when applied, work in the real world?

For the most part, yes.[/quote]

It has never been the case, and will never be. At birth, people are in unequal conditions. Between the underfed child whose uneducated parents will never be able to help him and who has to share a room with his siblings, and the well-fed child of a rich family that goes to the best school, receive help from parents or tutors when he struggles on a topic, and has a quiet and clean place to study, how can you imagine for one second they have even similar chances ? And that's just the beginning. The self-made man is a myth. Take the richest man of Earth, Bill Gates. Where does his fortune comes from ? The fact his father was a lawyer and helped him write a contract with IBM that was amazingly good for him. Every success story is full of that kind of external help. And every failure story is full of the opposite, betrayal, being sick at the wrong time, ...

The jungle isn't fair. It doesn't reward hard work or smartness or being ethical, at the individual level. It rewards luck. Sure, a smart, hard-working person will have a slightly higher chance to advance. But that will be a very minor factor.

That's terrible, but that's not even the main problem of your "each for himself" vision of life. The main problem is that it just doesn't work. Game theory proved it.

[Great Nepal]

Rich's disposable income increasing by $1000 and Poor's disposable income increasing by $700.
VS
Rich's disposable income decreasing by $10000 and Poor's disposable income increasing by $0.00.

Tough choice... We could either have high tide that lifts everyone up or tsunami that reduces standard of living.
Yea, I take the first one.

[Democratic Koyro]

One group doesn't need the other to improve.

Is that a sort of an argument for extreme class war?

Anyway, no, I think that the upper class need the mehrwert produced by the lower class - so if they want to improve (their living standards I guess) they need to keep the lower class producing for them to accumulate.

You sir, i'm sorry to say, are an incompetent half-wit.

You're flaming and you shouldn't be.

/notamod

It appears the definitions of "flaming" and "friendly poke" are fused, good sir. I was not aware that "half-wit" is considered a most slanderous term in this day and age. I shall refrain from using the word further in conversation.

/removes tophat.

[Dyakovo]

Why do people still believe in Social Darwinism?

Because many poor people manage to pull themselves up out of poverty, some even into wealth, thus proving it correct?

People having the good fortune of improving their situation does not prove that social darwinism is correct.

[Dalodon]

Depends on what way with the living standards. Living standards isn't a benchmark, it is a perceived level of contentness with current life, some people mandate it to be at a specific level, but that is really just politics, I'd say a minimum in my opinion is a roof to sleep under in a house that is mostly waterproof at at least temperature 15 degrees inside where the people where garments of a jumper thickness and that the people don't get starved to a BMI of less that 16.

EDIT: if the family is happy to settle for less that what I stated, they ARE at the living standards since they are ok living like that.

Uruguayan president still lives in a shack, but he willed it to stay that way.

[Dread Lady Nathicana]

Absolutely, even if the rich got richer at a greater rate.



No, this would be retarded.

You sir, i'm sorry to say, are an incompetent half-wit.

And you sir, have earned a *** Warning *** for flaming. Kindly go reference the One Stop Rules Shop and other helpful links found in my sig for a refresher on what is and is not acceptable behavior here. Thank you.

[SaintB]

Obviously the standard of living for everyone increasing is preferable. The issue is that at the current rate it is not sustainable any longer, the wealthy have a standard so far removed from the poor, or for that fact even the average, that for them to maintain it they are negatively affecting the standard for the people below them. The real spending power of the poor and average person is lower than it has been in decades but the wealthiest people have enough assets stored away that they are unaffected by that. Its the same way things were in pre-revolutionary France

[The Grand Duchy of Marinia]

Look, nothing works all the time. There isn't a single thing on this planet that can't be corrupted by human stupidity, which is why Social Darwinism doesn't always work. Hell, Natural Selection doesn't work when you start throwing asteroids at the dinosaurs. But the basic theory stands. Yes, rich people get rich by exploiting other people. In order to be able to exploit people, you have to have intelligence, the ability to manipulate, and you have to fight -a lot. As I said, the strongest wins. What I don't get is why people assume that those in power are always going to be in power. For every Ptolomy, for every George the III, there is a King Louis the VI. But on the other hand, for every insane or "mediocre" ruler there is also a William the Conqueror, Alfred the Great, Charlemagne, Emperor Chin, Han Dynasty, George Washington...
As for some of the guys on my list you don't like, yeah, some of them had advantages others don't. But had Mark Zuckerberg been a drunken frat boy instead of improving his programming skills and working on his one good idea, we would never have heard of him. Bill Gates was upper middle-class, to be sure, but if he hadn't had a crazy idea and put his effort into making his idea a reality, we never would have heard of him either. Sahid Khan was given an amazing education, and he turned around and invented the single piece car bumper design that every car manufacturer on the planet uses. You are proving my point!
And you seem to be forgetting that all of the guys on the list, high and low, were insanely smart. Do you really want to argue that Abe Lincoln wasn't better than everyone around him in order to rise as far as he did? How about Ben Carson? Colin Powell? Andrew Carnegie?
Also, don't be offended because you are poor. Hell, I'm poor. I've been homeless. But I'm not sitting around, waiting for a handout and writing manifestos about how put upon the poor are. I've got student loans, I'm going to college, I study and work my ass off to get the 3.4 gpa I have. Is it tough? Yes. Getting out of poverty is hard, but not impossible. If it were easy, we would never improve. The system doesn't promise wealth, success, or happiness to anyone. The promise was that you would have a chance, and you do. Don't take it personally that I included the "sober enough" bit. If it doesn't apply to you, then it doesn't apply to you. But something on that list does. It could be intelligence, it could be motivation, it could be many things, but the onus isn't on anyone other than yourself to figure out what it is and to fix it.
No, the socialist victimizes himself in order to get out of being responsible for improving his own life. As I posted before, if you think you have what it takes to be a wealthy person then you have to prove it. Athletes don't get gold medals for thinking they deserve one, they get gold medals for beating every other challenger out there.

[The UK in Exile]

Athletes don't get gold medals for thinking they deserve one, they get gold medals for beating every other challenger out there.

within a set of carefully designed and highly arbitrary rules exclusively designed to conform with spectators views of the sports values.

[The Grand Duchy of Marinia]

Athletes don't get gold medals for thinking they deserve one, they get gold medals for beating every other challenger out there.

within a set of carefully designed and highly arbitrary rules exclusively designed to conform with spectators views of the sports values.

You're making my point for me. The people that can beat the rules of the system by being the best, win. It's all part of SD. Even lying, cheating, manipulating, and exploiting...it's all part of the dog-eat-dog system that is the human experience. The rules are arbitrary because there has to be a set of rules somewhere. And if there isn't, then you have Mad Max fighting the Warlord of the Wasteland, which is an even purer form of SD by virtue of it's kill-or-be-killed value system.

[The Grand Duchy of Marinia]

Oh, and Avenio, you are right about J.P Morgan, He shouldn't have been on the list. My apologies. For some reason I thought I remembered a story about him being very poor in his young life. Anyways, next time I'll do better research.

[The UK in Exile]

within a set of carefully designed and highly arbitrary rules exclusively designed to conform with spectators views of the sports values.

You're making my point for me. The people that can beat the rules of the system by being the best, win. It's all part of SD. Even lying, cheating, manipulating, and exploiting...it's all part of the dog-eat-dog system that is the human experience. The rules are arbitrary because there has to be a set of rules somewhere. And if there isn't, then you have Mad Max fighting the Warlord of the Wasteland, which is an even purer form of SD by virtue of it's kill-or-be-killed value system.

no, you're undermining your point. athletes don't get medals for beating every challenger. they get medals for being the best within a set of rules designed to give everyone an equal chance of competing. those that do cheat, using steroids (lance amstrong) using technology, (Boris Onishchenko) or bribing the Judges, are stripped of their awards. your model for natural human behaviour is A) completely artifical and B) disagrees with your conclusion.

[Galborg]

If SD were true, why haven't Peasants gone extinct?
For the same reason that cows and sheep ain't extinct. For the same reason that Slaves didn't go extinct in Dixie. Rich are rich because we are poor.

If the poor got richer and their living standard increased, even if the rich got richer, would that be okay with you?

OR

Would you rather the difference between the poor and the rich was less, even if the living standard of the poor didn't increase?

#1 is impossible, why would the Rich let Peasants have any money?

Roman Aristos were incompetent already by 100 BC, Rome lasted till 450 AD and the Roman Empire lasted until 1454 AD. French Aristos were incompetent from 1650 tp 1789. Rockefellers etc are still here.

[Great Nepal]

#1 is impossible, why would the Rich let Peasants have any money?

Dunno...
Prolly because, they need someone to buy stuff they make cos they wont make much money if they bought things they made themselves?

[The Black Forrest]

Rich's disposable income increasing by $1000 and Poor's disposable income increasing by $700.
VS
Rich's disposable income decreasing by $10000 and Poor's disposable income increasing by $0.00.

Tough choice... We could either have high tide that lifts everyone up or tsunami that reduces standard of living.
Yea, I take the first one.

Ok. How about:

Rich's disposable income decreasing by $1 and Poor's disposable income increasing by $700.00.