Comment by snovymgodym
1 day ago
The figure might be misleading. It might not be.
Either way, the idea that the natural and normal state of affairs is that every person can go out into the world and be a perfectly self sufficient but comfortable atomized economic unit without support from their family or society is deeply flawed.
This wasn't the norm for most of human history, and it isn't the norm globally today.
It might, however, be a nice thing to aspire to, no? Economic self-sufficiency doesn't have to imply atomization, I think.
It's an interesting question.
We have a group that promotes a "living wage" construct in Tompkins County that pushes the unquestioned assumption that people who are working in the lowest paying jobs can live 100% alone. It's not something I want to challenge directly, but... It reminds me of discussions about the minimum wage in the late 1980s when it was common for teenagers to work at supermarkets and fast food markets. I think the public never really understood how the
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit
was specifically intended to help out people who were raising a family with low incomes that was economically efficient and how there is some logic to people who are working in low income jobs qualifying for food stamps, it is not just a way "Wal-Mart is stealing for us."
e.g. part of "affordability" is keeping costs low and as much leftie folks want to sweep it under the rug there is a lot of internal class conflict in groups such as women: like the Sheryl Sandberg type definitely benefits from exploiting less wealthy women to do child care work for them and child care is basically problematic because the child care worker is not productive enough to put their own children in child care without subsidy and you don't get the Fordist scenario where the auto line worker can easily afford to own one of the cars they make.
I can't think of any serious leftist who would advocate for high costs, unless there was some fundamental resource constraint like with fossil fuels.
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I am not sure - in my experience, I've observed that the more money you have the less people care about relations (their social circle becomes smaller) and healthy co-dependency reduces. This is more true of the young. Human nature tends to be selfish, which is not conducive for a healthy society. Young people becoming financially-independent at an early age may negate opportunities for self-introspection on that - without the struggle to earn a good living, many fail to understand the value of money and good relationships, which often lead to costly and immature decisions.
I don't agree with your characterization of "human nature". I mostly disagree that there is any such thing, and to the extent that there is, it seems to me that it is more like: cooperative, altruistic, empathic within the in-group, aggressive, selfish and uncooperative with the out-group.
The great work of human civilization is to expand the size of the in-group.
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Look at the comment above, the sample is from really wealthy parents, not the median income in the US, so I'm sure that skews the data.
No, it mentioned 816 out of more than 4500 respondents had net worth over $1M.
That's quite different to your claim.
That's also incorrect, it's not net worth > $1mm, it's "those with total household investable assets, excluding pensions, retirement plans and property" over $1mm, which is a much smaller number. The sources I saw said about 4% of US households meet this criteria, but 18% of survey respondents did.
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Slavery and massive wealth disparity was also the norm for most of human history, but just like generational wealth transfer, that doesn't mean it's equitable (or sustainable). Personally, I'm concerned that this will lead to greater wealth transfer from poor to rich and the subsequent dissolution of social norms that hold countries and cultures together. But I don't really care, I have nothing to lose here.
It is something to aim for though. The kid feels good about themselves and the parents can enjoy their hard earned money to have a banging retirement. My parents won’t stop traveling. They’ve been to something like 50 countries over the last 5-7 years.