"Rigid Class System in Europe" Bob Roll Comments

Curtis L. Russell wrote:
On Thu, 17 Aug 2006 16:24:17 GMT, Bob Martin
wrote:

Incidentally, I lived in the USA for a year and I saw poverty the like
of which I have never seen in Europe.

Very possibly true, but people often don't see what is in front of
them. When international news reported the fire in the Paris tenement
last year or the year before, we had people deny that the tenement
existed or that any minority was living in the manner described. Their
proof was that they lived in Paris and knew it wasn't true.

I don't remember the discussion that way at all. What I remember is that
you, who had never seen the building in question, asserted that you knew
that the residents were miserable and could even compare their quality of
life to those in Southeast DC. I don't remember anyone in that thread
denying that the tenement existed.

Bob Martin wrote:
in 523553 20060817 151817 "Tom Kunich" cyclintom@yahoo. com wrote:
"Scott Johnson" wrote in message
t...
wrote
And you don't have to win lotto to become rich. Running a good pizza
restaurant or plumbing company can do the trick.

Something the people with a masters in 14th Century Eastern European
Library Systems who work at THAT person's pizza place will never grasp.

My great grandmother starved to death in Europe and today I live in a nice
house that I own in a nice neighborhood and have everything I want. I own my
own car, have no bills outside of the utilities and such and a good deal of
money in the bank.

Let's compare that to a woman I met in Paris - she works in an office, every
single cent she makes is earmarked. Her rent, her food (bought out because
her apartment doesn't have a kitchen nor any such facilities) her
transportation (good thing that the Paris subway system is one of the best
anywhere). Her total savings didn't amount of a single year's income.

Virtually every shop keeper in Paris I talked to had the same story. On the
other hand a bicycle shop owner in the USA in town nearby owns a house on
the hill with a view of San Francisco bay and the surrounding cities. His
house alone is worth more than a million dollars. He has an older car - a
collectors item really - that is in perfect condition. Several other
vehicles as well.

To compare a wealthy man in one country with a struggling person in another
country is completely pointless. Should we now compare you with Alan Sugar
or a hundred other self-made men in Europe who pulled themselves up from
nothing?
Incidentally, I lived in the USA for a year and I saw poverty the like of which I have
never seen in Europe.

I agree comparing an office worer in Paris to a business owner in
California is apples and oranges.

As for poverty in th eUS, squalor does not equal poverty. Some poor
run-down neigborhoods you may have seen house people with a level of
comfort and income that would surprise you. Cars, DVD players,
computers, microwave ovens, all the modern conveniences you can buy.
The fact is there is very little poverty in the US and in Europe. (But
I have never seen child beggars in the US as I have seen innumerable
times in Europe). The question is how much do the poor people in both
places suffer, and how much oppurtunity do they have to change their
situation if they choose to do so.

Joseph

Apropos of the topic, here's an article from the August 12th issue of
The Economist.

This column, concerned with Britain's class strictures, doesn't focus
on the topic; but I seem to recall reading somewhere that American
class mobility has declined over the last several generations with
access to affordable education being among the chief reasons.

Luke



begin article______________________

But did they buy their own furniture?
Aug 10th 2006
From The Economist print edition
Class is no longer a reliable guide to anything in Britain. But it
still matters

WHEN George Orwell wrote in 1941 that England was ³the most
class-ridden country under the sun², he was only partly right.
Societies have always had their hierarchies, with some group‹Boston's
Brahmins, France's énarques, the Communist Party of China‹perched at
the top. In the Indian state of Bihar the Ranveer Sena, an upper-caste
private army, even killed to stay there.
By that measure class in Britain hardly seems entrenched. But in
another way Orwell was right, and continues to be. As a new YouGov poll
for The Economist shows, Britons are surprisingly alert to class‹both
their own and that of others. And they still think class is sticky.
According to the poll, 48% of people aged 30 or over say they expect to
end up better off than their parents. But only 28% expect to end up in
a different class. More than two-thirds think neither they nor their
children will leave the class they were born into.
What does this thing that people cannot escape consist of these days?
And what do people look at when decoding which class someone belongs
to? The most useful identifying markers, according to the poll, are
occupation, address, accent and income, in that order. The fact that
income comes fourth is revealing: though some of the habits and
attitudes that class used to define are more widely spread than they
were, class still indicates something less blunt than mere wealth.
Being the sort of person who ³buys his own furniture², a remark that
Alan Clark, a former minister and diarist once reported as directed at
Michael Heseltine, a self-made Tory colleague, is still worthy of note
in circles where most inherit it.

Occupation is the most trusted guide to class, but changes in the
labour market have made that harder to read than when Orwell was
writing. Manual workers (C2s and Ds in sociology-speak) have shrunk
along with farming and heavy industry as a proportion of the workforce,
while the number of people in white-collar jobs (ABC1s) has surged (see
chart). Despite this striking change, when they are asked to place
themselves in a class, Brits in 2006 huddle in much the same categories
as they did when they were asked in 1949. There has been a slight fall
in the number who reckon they are at either the very top or the very
bottom of the pile, consistent with the move to working behind desks
and in air-conditioned places. But jobs, which were once a fairly
reliable guide to class, have become misleading.
A survey conducted earlier this year by Experian for Liverpool
Victoria, a financial-services firm, shows how this convergence on
similar types of work has blurred class boundaries. Experian asked
people in a number of different jobs to place themselves in the working
class or the middle class. Secretaries, waiters and journalists were
significantly more likely to think themselves middle-class than
accountants, computer programmers or civil servants. Many new
white-collar jobs‹in vast call centres, for example‹offer no more
autonomy or better prospects than old blue-collar ones. Yet despite the
muddle over what the markers of class are these days, 71% of those
polled by YouGov still said they found it very or fairly easy to figure
out which class others belong to.

In addition to changes in the labour market, two other things have
smudged the borders on the class map. First, since 1945 Britain has
received large numbers of immigrants who do not fit easily into
existing notions of class and may have their own pyramids to scramble
up. The flow of new arrivals has increased since the late 1990s,
multiplying this effect.

Second, barriers to fame have been lowered. Britain's fast-growing
ranks of celebrities‹like David Beckham and his wife Victoria
(³Posh²)‹form a kind of parallel aristocracy open to talent, or at
least to those who are uninhibited enough to meet the increasingly
baroque requests of television producers. This too has made definitions
more complicated.
Yet class categories remain surprisingly resilient, which seems to fly
in the face of recent economic reality. Does it correspond to a new
treacliness in social mobility? The best-known findings about the
fluidity of British society comes from a study of two cohorts: one made
up of people born in 1958, the other of people born in 1970. The
earlier group enjoyed a high degree of mobility but the later one was
less fortunate, suggesting that movement between income groups is
slowing down. Recent international studies indicate that British social
strata are a bit more flexible than America's but more rigid than in
many European countries.
In fact, it seems that many Brits, given the choice, prefer to identify
with the class they were born into rather than that which their jobs or
income would suggest. This often entails pretending to be more humble
than is actually the case: 22% of ABC1s told YouGov that they consider
themselves working class. Likewise, the Experian survey found that one
in ten adults who call themselves working class are in the richest
quintile of asset-owners, and that over half a million households which
earn more than £100,000 ($191,000) a year say they are working class.
Dissimulation in the other direction‹pretending to be grander than
income and occupation suggest‹is rarer, though it happens too.
If class no longer describes a clear social, economic or even political
status, is it worth paying any attention to? Possibly, yes. It is still
in most cases closely correlated with educational attainment and career
expectations. And what societies believe about how fluid they are
matters almost as much as the reality: if America's poor ever start to
believe they will never get rich, the place will be heading for
trouble. In Britain the perception that class is fairly fixed could
become more damaging if income inequality continues to rise and social
mobility to slow.

wrote:

I have never seen child beggars in the US as I have seen innumerable
times in Europe

Beggars are often more an indication of income disparity than low income
levels. For example, you see very few beggars in rural third world areas
not because there isn't poverty but because there aren't many people with
enough assets to beg from.

The question is [...] how much oppurtunity do they have to change their
situation if they choose to do so.

If that's your question, then you're talking about individual income
mobility. For that particular measure, the US tends to rank behind most
European countries.

Robert Chung wrote:

snip
If that's your question, then you're talking about individual income
mobility. For that particular measure, the US tends to rank behind
most European countries.

Yeah, but the difference is that in the USA, all those poor people are poor
because they are lazy and don't want to earn money. In contrast, the
European poor are held down by the jackboot of Europeanism and can't earn
money because of rampant socialism. My guess is if Europe had more
firearms and less socialism, they would get more economic growth, less
crime, public transportation that didn't impede important bicycle races,
analytical laboratories that weren't an international joke, and an
appreciation for bathing. It would sort of be like Canada, only I still
wouldn't understand a word the train conducter was saying.

--
Bill Asher

steve wrote:

On 16-Aug-2006, smacked up and reeling, Gabe Brovedani

Which oddly enough was true (smacked up and reeling).

Dont be insulted. I have my browser set up to generate that message for
everyone. Think of it as a longer, more creative way of saying "dumbass".


Point taken, but I didn't say I was insulted - this is the usenet, after
all.

Gabe Brovedani

William Asher wrote:

It would sort of be like Canada, only I still wouldn't understand
a word the train conducter was saying.

It's sort of like pig latin but instead of adding "ay" to the end of each
word they add it to the end of each sentence.

Robert Chung wrote:
wrote:

I have never seen child beggars in the US as I have seen innumerable
times in Europe

Beggars are often more an indication of income disparity than low income
levels. For example, you see very few beggars in rural third world areas
not because there isn't poverty but because there aren't many people with
enough assets to beg from.

This is true to be sure. But my observation about child beggars is more
to remind folks that Europe is not some Utopia free of all the ills
seen in the US. Child beggars is a sign that there are serious holes in
the safety-net that is supposed to ensure the well being of everyone. A
safety net that in it's good intentions, and often good results, has
some serious unintended consequences.

The question is [...] how much oppurtunity do they have to change their
situation if they choose to do so.

If that's your question, then you're talking about individual income
mobility. For that particular measure, the US tends to rank behind most
European countries.

I am not aware of these studies, nor am I a statistician able to make
sense of any results. I think my observations may be usefull for people
to think about what sorts of information is useful to compare, and what
sort of questions can be raised given what we do know. Any statistics
that show what actually happens does not necessarily give a picture of
what is possible. Income mobility in the upper 3/4 of income is not
very interesting, It is what "keeps the poor down" that is interesting.
This is obviously an unanswerable question, but consider this: A poor
2nd generation kid from Guatemala who lives in LA in a crap neigborhood
with crap schools, and a 2nd generation Algerian kid who lives in a
crap suburb of Paris. If they both stay out of trouble and g oto
school, which one is going to have more obstables to attaining a
"normal" life? The kid in LA has to "act white" and wear a shirt and
tie at some call-center job and work his way up to manager after a few
years and then he is there. I contend that the Algerian kid will have
more obstacles with "acting French", getting a job, getting promoted,
etc. There are obvioulsy racial/ethnic issues that compound this, but
they are part of the picture.

Joseph

wrote:
steve wrote:

Im hoping some of our European friends will comment here. I know the US is
famous for class mobility, but I was under the impression that class
immobility was a thing of the past even in Europe... especially after the
two world wars shook up the social structure. Bob obviously disagrees..and
he's been there, which gives him a big advantage over me (a "dumbass", no
doubt).

What do our European friends think? Rigid class structure and social
pressure to stay put? Or is social mobility now the norm?


Actually, the US is not as class-mobile as it is famous for, depending
on how you define class. The US is (or should be) famous for the
_appearance_ of mobility because class is more linked to income
than strict heredity, but actual measures of income mobility from
generation to generation often show that the US is _less_ income-mobile
than a number of European countries. This is all speaking about
the postwar era.

Here's a recent article that suggests Brits define class more by birth
than by income:
http://www.economist.com/world/brita...ory_id=7289005

(FWIW, as an American, the class jape in the headline about
"did they buy their own furniture" was quite inexplicable. I had to
read the article to find out that the opposite is inheriting one's
furniture, from the previous Lord of Woolshirt-Dundersnipe, presumably.
My American co-worker who has lived in Britain figured it out
immediately, though.)

A bunch of Times poll results for the US (which shows that most
Amis think it's easier to move up in the US than Europe):
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html.../index_04.html

And a comparison of income-mobility among countries, which
suggests the opposite:
http://www.americanprogress.org/site...8OVF&b=1579981

Unfortunately, none of these really studied whether bike racers
are definitively working-class no matter how much they make,
which is sort of the substance of your question, I guess.

Ben

in the US the big fixation in on race... in europe, class is just
different. Of course there's racism everywhere but they have different
attitudes about race. Interracial marriage isn't as much of a big deal.
But here, we like to pretend we live in this classless society where
everyone is the same.

I am not sure anybody pointed to the followng recent series by the NYTimes.

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/nationa...x7IaIFloIvtYYg


"Marlene Blanshay" schrieb im Newsbeitrag
...
wrote:
steve wrote:

Im hoping some of our European friends will comment here. I know the US
is
famous for class mobility, but I was under the impression that class
immobility was a thing of the past even in Europe... especially after the
two world wars shook up the social structure. Bob obviously
disagrees..and
he's been there, which gives him a big advantage over me (a "dumbass", no
doubt).

What do our European friends think? Rigid class structure and social
pressure to stay put? Or is social mobility now the norm?


Actually, the US is not as class-mobile as it is famous for, depending
on how you define class. The US is (or should be) famous for the
_appearance_ of mobility because class is more linked to income
than strict heredity, but actual measures of income mobility from
generation to generation often show that the US is _less_ income-mobile
than a number of European countries. This is all speaking about
the postwar era.

Here's a recent article that suggests Brits define class more by birth
than by income:
http://www.economist.com/world/brita...ory_id=7289005

(FWIW, as an American, the class jape in the headline about
"did they buy their own furniture" was quite inexplicable. I had to
read the article to find out that the opposite is inheriting one's
furniture, from the previous Lord of Woolshirt-Dundersnipe, presumably.
My American co-worker who has lived in Britain figured it out
immediately, though.)

A bunch of Times poll results for the US (which shows that most
Amis think it's easier to move up in the US than Europe):
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/html.../index_04.html

And a comparison of income-mobility among countries, which
suggests the opposite:
http://www.americanprogress.org/site...8OVF&b=1579981

Unfortunately, none of these really studied whether bike racers
are definitively working-class no matter how much they make,
which is sort of the substance of your question, I guess.

Ben

in the US the big fixation in on race... in europe, class is just
different. Of course there's racism everywhere but they have different
attitudes about race. Interracial marriage isn't as much of a big deal.
But here, we like to pretend we live in this classless society where
everyone is the same.