It feels like I'm seeing an increase in people with a fatalistic mindset, both online and amongst people I grew up with, that things are getting gradually worse and if you don't have a wealthy family behind you then you've got pretty much no chance. Now I largely agree with this sentiment but it is noticeable that the ones who complain about this the most seem to have decided that this means the system is rigged completely against them so there's no point in even trying, so they're in a worse financial position than most of their peers.
If we take home ownership, for example, I grew up in East Yorkshire and there is a noticeable split amongst people I went to school with; I'm 33 for reference. Those who saved up for a house have, by this point, been able to buy one. Those who bought into the mindset that they'd never be able to afford a house decided not to bother trying to save up for a deposit so they're still some way off, which they blame on privilege and capitalism rather than taking any responsibility for it. I appreciate home ownership is a pipe dream in certain parts of the country, particularly That London, but not whatsoever in a relatively cheap part of Yorkshire.
I think what I'm saying is we all know that things are shit, particularly if you're from a poorer background, but is the biggest factor in how successful you are your own mindset and how you adapt to this?
>>442625 One wonders what part of human psychology makes us so interested in getting failures to admit that they've got some tiny level of responsibility for their own suffering, but feels it's poor sport and bitterness to want successful people to admit that the single biggest reason for their success is luck of the draw.
>>442626 >but feels it's poor sport and bitterness to want successful people to admit that the single biggest reason for their success is luck of the draw.
It is really quite simple . It isn't just the rhetoric of someone who has tried and failed before, it is the rhetoric of someone who refuses to try and help themself ever again, and that is a quite terrible thing, because no one can ever help anyone who doesn't want to help themselves. Only at the point when you will never try again do you really become a failure.
I'll freely admit that all my success in life is just pot luck - I'm a complete mentaloid, but I happen to be quite good at some particular sorts of maths that are highly relevant to some very lucrative businesses. Save for that very specific aptitude, I'm completely unemployable.
Even in a completely equal society some people will lose the lottery of birth, but we live in a society that compounds unfairness upon unfairness. A small but vocal minority are over-eager to blame their own shortcomings on some kind of systemic bias despite the fact that they're actually getting a pretty good deal, but they're really just a distraction; anyone who is articulate enough to be taken seriously can't legitimately claim to be part of a disadvantaged underclass.
The real issues are social class and assortative mating. We live in a society that gives out opportunities based mainly on social class and having certain kinds of intelligence. People who have that kind of intelligence usually have kids with similar people they meet through university or work, so both genetic and economic advantages compound across generations. To top it off, our society piles tons of development-stunting stresses onto less advantaged children.
Fifty years ago you could have a decent standard of living with nothing more than a good work ethic and a strong back, but the barrier to entry to the middle class is getting higher and higher with the march of technology. Jobs that used to require no particular qualifications now require degrees, because there just isn't enough decent work to go around and employers can afford to be arbitrarily picky. The first step to any kind of fair society is acknowledging that a) thick people get a really shitty deal, b) nobody chooses to be thick and c) there's only so much that education can do to make people more intelligent.
If you're reading this, I'm not talking about you, you're probably just bone idle; I'm talking about the people on your Facebook feed who aren't sure how to use apostrophes, still post Minions memes and get suckered into some kind of multi-level marketing scam on a regular basis.
>>442633 >I'll freely admit that all my success in life is just pot luck... I happen to be quite good at some particular sorts of maths that are highly relevant to some very lucrative businesses.
That isn't luck, it's being talented at a rare specialism. What do you do, incidentally? Fintech?
Keep in mind that in the same way your maths skills are arbitrarily valued in one form of work, other legitimate and innate skills are not valued (even looked down upon) depending on the nature of the economic system we live in.
I would argue that only a few career paths really require many years of specialist training, and it seems to be completely unrelated to your salary; managers can get paid as much as surgeons. There also seems to be no relationship between innate talent and pay; I'm sure there are people (perhaps few in number overall, but they do exist) with your gift for maths that never had the chance to put it into practice. Again, it's survivorship bias -- you made it, but perhaps a similar version of you would not have made it if placed in even a slightly different context.
Indeed, it really doesn't matter how socially valuable, education-dependent, or difficult your work is in our current economic system. Your pay is mainly down to negotiating power.
As an entirely separate point, I also think we're ignoring the incremental stages of a person's development. What you write about apostrophes and memes is elitist nonsense, and largely down to socialisation. The Facebook posters you're poking fun of are a stone's throw away from your average .gs poster, if you go by critical thinking skills, only here we express our bile with proper grammar.
I'm a big wet lefty socialist, but I can't stand fatalism and defeatism. I just find it revolting, pathetic, undesirable. But it's not as simple of a dichotomy as you make it sound, crab bucket lad.
>is the biggest factor in how successful you are your own mindset and how you adapt to this
No.
Often a person can be emphatically correct that they're shit out of luck and there's fuck all they can do about it. But that's no excuse to go blaming everything in your life on somebody or something else- I have seen many cases where I can only assume that these people enjoy the situation they are in, because it gives them the excuse not to bother with anything. Sure, they might not have much chance of turning it around and becoming the next Geoffrey Benzos, but that doesn't grant you the freedom to basically regress into childhood and abdicate responsibility for every single problem in your life.
This is the primary driving motivation behind most of that Rudgewick-esque, Acrobatic victim culture if you ask me. Everything is somebody else's fault, because that's a get out of jail free card for ever having to shoulder an ounce of control over your own fucking existence. For instance, I've dealt with some deep, deep depression in my lifetime, and ultimately at the end of the day, the most important thing I learned about that particular affliction is that the only person who can dig you out of it is yourself. Someone who refuses to help themselves will never be free of it. It goes beyond the economy and politics and just into the basic will to live.
I could go very deep into my philosophical ruminations on this, but I won't bother. It's just that when the worker's glorious revolution comes, it certainly fucking won't be carried out by people who can't be arsed to get dressed because they've run out of fucking spoons.
>>442637 >when the worker's glorious revolution comes
Has the glorious revolution being mythologised? I guess it's because I've been watching too much Lucy Worsley recently, but the French Revolution was largely driven by the upper middle class, now canonised as workers, revolting against royalty and the aristocracy, with it ultimately being followed up by Napoleon becoming King in all but name.
>>442638 Well the French Revolution, as basically any historian will tell you, was not a "worker's revolution", several tonnes of nuance aside. Not to mention by the time Napoleon became Consul, let alone Emperor, the revolution was over. Given that the French Revolution was basically the event that kick started how we now view politics, many of the philosphies that we shape how we do that and ushured in the beginning of the end of European feudalism, one can hardly blame it for not implementing full Communism then and there, and people who think it could have probably got very confused about Les Misérables*.
*If this sounded like a dig it wasn't I was just speaking generally DO NOT SHOUT AT ME.
>but the French Revolution was largely driven by the upper middle class, now canonised as workers, revolting against royalty and the aristocracy
The emerging (upper) middle class from about the 19th century was a threat to traditional aristocracy throughout Europe. In the old feudal system of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires in particular but also in royal pre-revolution France, you were really either a peasant, probably a serf, or you were part of nobility or the clergy. There was some stratification within nobility, as there is in Britain today, but there was really no room in that system for a class of emerging, increasingly prosperous commoners who had acquired their wealth not by high birth but through their own work. While on paper, they still had very few rights as citizens. To a limited extent, you could just buy yourself into nobility, which happened sometimes in Austro-Hungary and Germany, where from the Middle Ages onward there are accounts of wealthy merchant families being nobilitated. But this was no remedy to placate an entire emerging social class who demanded political influence to match their growing economic power.
France's short-lived restoration period was testament to the fact that you couldn't turn back the clock, and you could say that to some extent, the struggles between bourgeoisie and nobility in Central Europe culminated in the dissolution of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires in 1919, which, besides the fact that Austria and Germany had lost the war, was really a swapping out of the old elites and replacing them with a new elite of prosperous commoners (and left-wing intelligentsia).
That woman may have the name of a poor quality sauce and the face of a half-gremlin, but she knows her facts.
The French Revolution can largely be summarised as a civil war between the French Nobility and the Bourgeoisie.
Britstan did its usual thing and tried to aggravate the crisis by buying as much grain as possible in years 1787-8-9 to ensure that the powder keg was as filled as possible, and it had been trying to garner support from the french Bourgeois since several decades then. But it was a rather ineffectual tactic that only managed to convince a minority that the British way was the better way (see Voltaire's comments on his trip to your land of Tea and opium).
When the powder keg was ready to explode, the Bourgeois, supported by the population, launched a coup against the state. There are other elements to it, many, many people ignore the terrible crime of the Courts(Parlements) at the time, who could roughly be blamed for the very start of the Revolution.
But the people themselves, Bourgeois, Nobles, or anything, they'd follow anyone for bread. Their role in the Revolution is to kill to eat and die for the Bourgeois mainly.
In the end the Bourgeoisie won the war with a famous hawk leading them, but since he was a man of integrity and deep-seated beliefs, they had him executed (Robespierre).
The regime bogged down into the typical Bourgeois spirit of circlejerking while complimenting each other's dicks and eventually Napoleon shook those assholes down.
I'm glossing over much but that's an honest summary of the actual camps. Bourgeois on the rise, Nobles in absolute selfish immobility and keeping their privileges, and some sharp-toothed genius that would eventually bring the hammer on this monstrosity that was the 1st Republic.
>>448836 It's the same problem as always. "Just work harder!" Okay, but how? In what direction? You could be the best binman in the world and you won't get rich doing it. There will never be a way to make millions wiping bums in a care home, no matter how "hardworking" you might be at it. If you're a gypsy living in a caravan on a tip, then in addition to all the horrors that come with that, you could follow this woman's advice to the absolute letter, walk the streets ten hours a day handing in your CV at every bank and office building you see, and not one of them will hire you because you're working hard in the wrong way. If you don't know how to work hard, you'll never get anywhere.
This woman's advice is so useless that I expect Tyson Fury's brother to be ashamed of ever shagging her.
>>448838 Yeah, agreed. I sort of wish I was successful/attractive/rich enough to make videos advising people to almost do the opposite of what the daft bint is saying - just fucking wing it; thats what the rest of us are doing; take the piss, do the minimum amount you absolutely need to get by, because that is pretty much what the rest of the world does and how everyone else copes.
>>448836 Are all influencers retards? The same week Molly-Mae is being a Thatcherite cunt, an influencer couple have been cancelled for tweeting the n-word 10 years ago. You'd think if you're making your living on social media, you'd scrub your racist tweets before they get used against you.
She's completely wrong, but what she's saying there is a pretty bland platitude, hardly a "Thatcherite rant". People with actual decision-making power say things far worse than this on a regular basis.
It would certainly appear so, wouldn't it; but then again, to end up in their position you have to imagine they did something right. They must at least have that kind of soft social intelligence, that allows them to "network" in ways autistic nerds like us can't possibly fathom.
Then again it is probably largely a right place, right time thing- Every kid and their mum nowadays is doing the same thing, every zoomer has a TikTok and YouTube channel about some inane shite. Influencers are just the people for whom it blew up somehow.
At the risk of being cynical for the sake of cynicism and attributing agency to random noise: Sometimes I wonder if the whole "just work harder" thing is partially there to deflect from or undermine the easier way for people at the bottom to improve their lot in life - collectively agree to stop working entirely until a set of demands are met, i.e. go on strike.
First because you just deflect away from the idea entirely. A strike is a collective thing, while an apparent relationship between hard work and success can be drawn for any successful individual in a way that makes for a snappier narrative, so people are less likely to organise a strike in the first place, but secondly because if you do go on strike and people are inconvenienced they can be drawn to not support your demands by appealing to a "I've never done such a thing, I've always just put my head down and got on with it (and got nowhere yet, but one day...)" sort of sentiment.
>>448849 If you go on strike, and everything works perfectly, then everybody gets richer and you continue to only be as rich as the people you know. You don't get to swan around being happy that you're richer than everyone else, because they are all as rich as you. It is not enough that I should succeed; others must fail.
It needn't be random noise or fully intentional, more like a hyperstition; if people with power believe it they justify keeping power to themselves and that reinforces the idea because the people who believe it have power. The idea creates a feedback loop.
>>448849 >Sometimes I wonder if the whole "just work harder" thing is partially there to deflect from or undermine the easier way for people at the bottom to improve their lot in life
The thing is that it goes both ways. I'm doing better than average, better than a lot of my friends, but not well off by a long shot and I've noticed they've got a sour grapes coping mechanism going on.
If I've done well it's down to sheer luck. If they do well it's because they worked hard for it. If something goes bad for me it's because I deserve it for making poor life choices. If something goes badly for them it's entirely bad luck out of their control.
What I'm saying is that it's very easy to get into whether the other deserves what they do or do not have if you use the right mental gymnastics.
>If you go on strike, and everything works perfectly, then everybody gets richer and you continue to only be as rich as the people you know.
It's worse than that. If everyone's wages go up, then everyone's costs go up, prices rise to match and nobody is any better off. People lament the decline of trade unionism, but they forget that inflation hit 24% in 1975.
Some people might think of hard work as a virtue, but the economy only cares about productivity. It doesn't matter how hard you work if you can't do anything useful. Britain has exceptionally low per-worker productivity for a developed nation, partly because we are are skivers but mostly because of poor skills and a lack of investment.
>>448858 It's how much you get out for what you put in. Someone making four lots of something in an hour is more productive than someone making three lots of the same thing in the same timeframe.
France has double the rate of unemployment than we do but the average French worker is more productive. They're happy to keep dross out of the workplace rather than shifting them into pointless non-jobs.
It's a filthy capitalist term that people throw about to distract from poor management.
I work in a factory and my productivity would significantly increase if the facilities weren't a pain in the ass to work around, and I assume this is the main case in most of the UK.
There's surely a huge amount of jobs in which productivity is impossible to define, though? At my job, if I do it right, I'm not really contributing any sort of measurable profit, but not doing my job would cost the company significant amounts of money. So I can only really be at zero, or below.
>>448861 That's what I was thinking. I do IT support, which really puts me in the service economy. All I produce is customer service. Maybe I help other people create wealth by making sure their websites stay online, but is that them being productive or me? Is it counted twice, for each of us?
If you weren't doing your job, your company's profits would be lower. Productivity is difficult to measure on an individual level, but on a corporate or level it's a simple equation, as >>448863 says - just divide the total economic output by the number of hours worked.
IMO the key to understanding productivity is recognising that it's about making more stuff, but also about making stuff that people want more. Innovation and quality matter at least as much as raw efficiency. Making an iPhone costs more than making an equivalent Android phone, but iPhones are so much more desirable that they sell at much higher prices and are vastly more profitable. Apple only have about a 15% share of the global smartphone market by the number of units shipped, but they make more profit than all other phone manufacturers combined.
The Johnson government's "levelling up" agenda is mostly hot air, but at least the rhetoric is in the right direction. If we want to get out of our post-2008 rut, we need a serious long-term industrial strategy (backed by eye-watering levels of investment) to produce highly skilled workers and create innovative companies that can compete internationally.
IMO our class system should bear a lot of the blame. There's a middle-class taboo about just doing things for the money that acts as a massive drag on the economy. Someone with a degree in Art History and strong opinions about gender theory qualifies as middle class, even if they work in a coffee shop for minimum wage; someone with a BTEC in mechanical engineering is inescapably working class, even if they're making bits for the aerospace industry and earn £40k. I think we need to get over our snobbery and celebrate people who actually get stuff done.
>>448856 >People lament the decline of trade unionism, but they forget that inflation hit 24% in 1975.
People remember to blame the unions, but oh how quickly they forget the dash for growth, the oil crisis, and good old competition and credit control...
Aye. The usual class-obsessed lad seems to be some kind of Marxist, but I think it's fairly obvious that I'm closer to Thatcher.
Speaking of which, I think it's very telling that when working-class people started getting highly-paid jobs in the City, the established middle class mocked them as "yuppies" rather than celebrating their social mobility. The sorts of people who run academia and the media might purport to be egalitarian, but they hate it when meritocracy actually works and talented working class people improve their lives through their own efforts.
>>448882 Admittedly I'm too young to have known any at the time but no part of my mental image of a "yuppie" has anything to do with the working class.
>>448882 I'd want to see some evidence before accepting that the average Yuppie wasn't a middle class twat before becoming a Yuppie.
It's also worth questioning the "through their own efforts" thing a little bit - their efforts would've been for nothing without the Big Bang or the general financial environment of the 1980s, so there's still an element of politics and luck there.
Which is probably why my first response to the idea of celebrating someone getting rich in the City is "why celebrate cuntery?", probably because I've spent too long with economic historians who go on about us repeatedly prioritising the interests of the City over the interests of Industry. It all feels a bit "congratulations mate, it's wonderful that you got rich. Of course, it's a shame you did it in the misery factory that makes everyone else sad..."
Are wideboys the same as yuppies? I would argue that they are except for the class element. Both have succeeded in the professional sphere, and are twats that all right-thinking people despise, but wideboys are normally bragging about the watch they bought with the proceeds from their roofing business or car dealership, while yuppies are braying into their mobile phones about share prices and audits.
After deregulation, the city was exposed to the full force of global competition and dim poshos with the right school tie weren't going to cut it. They needed rough types with a killer instinct - the same kind of wideboys that >>448887 talks about. It turned out that people who grew up around their dad's stall on Deptford market fared a lot better on the trading floor than people who were forged on the playing fields of Eton.
I don't necessarily disagree with most of your points, but the Big Bang showed what could be possible in the rest of the economy. There's huge amounts of untapped potential in this country, but we're actively hindering opportunity at every turn.
Isn't the elephant in the room here the fact that deregulation and them yuppies in "The City" are a large part of what got us into our current mess?
The issue has long been that there's no direction, it's just the blind will of the profit motive. There are many things I, Classwarriorlad, will actually find myself agreeing with Thatcherlad on; the main principle I feel has been debunked by history is that rational self-interest alone is enough to guide an economy, nor a society, into prosperity. That's not how it works in practice, instead rational actors follow the path of least resistance, and we end up with a ludicrous property-based ponzi scheme pretending to be an economy, instead of an actual economy.
To his credit though, my arch-nemesis has come along way since his days of banging on about crab buckets, I'll give him that.
All of the brokers being interviewed by Joan Bakewell had working-class accents. At that time, losing your regional accent was almost a prerequisite for social mobility - Joan Bakewell grew up in Stockport, but you wouldn't know it from her perfect RP. Even the young lady in the yellow blazer spoke in an accent that would be considered "common" by the standards of the day, the sort of accent you might hear on Eastenders but certainly wouldn't hear coming from a newsreader.
I (Thatcherlad) think that the situation is much worse than the blind profit motive. Britain is horrendously corrupt, we've just been conditioned to think of it as "sleaze". Somehow a foreign person taking an envelope full of cash is seen as worse than a British person giving their nephew a £150k job or their mate a £150m government contract. We use phrases like "it's not what you know, it's who you know" without for a moment reflecting on the awfulness of that reality. Our institutions aren't laissez-faire, they're structured to aid and abet corruption.
I think we should let capitalism go mental and use the resulting tax revenues to patch up the damage, you probably think the government should play an active role in managing the economy, but neither of us are served by the current state of affairs.
The "t" in "better" is progressively overcorrected as he repeats it, betraying the fact that he'd naturally drop it. His vowels are far too close and fronted to be even remotely RP - the "a" in "Labour" is a dead giveaway.
