Are you the 9.9%?

It’s no longer the 1% vs the 99%. Now we have 3 classes: the 0.1, the 9.9, and the rest :scream:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/

What’s the author’s point?

To solidify the class difference between the 0.1, 9.9, and 99?

It was way too long, and he wasn’t making any meaningful conclusions. Unless his point is everyone should be crappy parents, because being a good parent is unfair to kids without good parents.

He is fomenting class warfare…The worst of liberals motivations…Instead of celebrating the growing wealth of America these idiots bemoan the fate of the middle class. With his point about boxed pizza he admits we are doing better. Some hard working and lucky folks are just doing a little more better…Why create class envy and hatred? What is the agenda?

It is clear that the author was a spoiled rich kid whose family squandered their wealth…A spoiled brat who never accomplished anything except a degree in political philosophy…aka horseshit…

His agenda is socialism…even though it will never work in a large country like the US…

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Socialism seeks to remove the upper class in order to achieve equality. Is this guy saying that? He seems to be celebrating the achievements of the 9.9 rather than trying to undermine them.

He focuses a lot on lack of upward mobility and how much more difficult it is to move up vs. prior generations and other countries. I wonder how much is it’s more difficult vs. people make different choices now. I know far more smart people who choose less demanding careers for family reasons than I know hard working people that can’t move up.

He mentioned that the definition is liquid because there’s always a door open for people who want to move up. They just need to do the right kind of things.

This means he believes America is a meritocracy where people will be able to move up the ladder. There’s no glass ceiling for minorities either.

The smart people you mentioned failed to achieve wealth status due to their own choices, not because of the fault of the system.

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He is an academic and a whiner…His views have no validity

Wait… didn’t you mention that your father was an academic who despised your grandpa?

Yep and I despise academia…It is isolated ivory tower liberal philosophy that is destroying free speech nationwide…Quite ironic since the current PC hysteria was started at Sproul Plaza by Mario Salvio in 1964…In 1968 when my Dad became a vice chancellor he became a lot less liberal…The radical left threatened to kill him…He then realized the danger of leftist politics…He was a Roosevelt Democrat.

Not all academics are liberal though. My dream job is actually to become a professor of philosophy in a prestigious university. But I would also need my family background to be “aristocratic” so that I would be born with a silver spoon with millions in the family endowment bank ready for me to use… :rofl:

Article too damn long. Care for a (unbiased) summary?

I also couldn’t finish. But you can get a pretty good sense based on my posts.

My summary is unbiased…The author is biased …Went to Princeton just like my dad…I actually lived there for 6 months…I had to fight those Jersey punks the whole time…I was 8 and learned all about discrimination…It is amazing how much the rest of the country hates Californians, even as for back as 1961

I am a little weary taking anything from you three as “unbiased”… :smile:

:scream: Me? biased? Read the article and judge for yourself!

You guys know there’s a Chinese term for people like him? They call them Baizuo, which literally means “white leftists”. There’s even a Wikipedia entry for it:

Zhang Chenchen further defined the word “baizuo” with the definition “People who only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT and the environment” and “have no sense of real problems in the real world”; they are hypocritical humanitarians who advocate for peace and equality only to “satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority”; they are “obsessed with political correctness” to the extent that they “tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism”; they believe in the welfare state that “benefits only the idle and the free riders”; they are the “ignorant and arrogant westerners” who “pity the rest of the world and think they are saviours”.[11]

I feel like Zhang will feel right at home on this forum… :cold_sweat:

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Chinese people should mind their own business and take care of there own problems first before acting like Americans who like to teach people their “lessons”.

Stewart is dripping in liberal guilt… He should just give away his money and live in a monastery. What I love about my Russian wife is she has no American guilt about being wealthy. And no puritanical guilt about earthly pleasures either.
Americans are obsessed with guilt and don’t know how to enjoy life… what good is having money if you can’t enjoy it ??

Think about it . The only country with the constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness and yet happiness alludes most Americans

Stewart’s drivel
“The meritocratic class has mastered the old trick of consolidating wealth and passing privilege along at the expense of other people’s children. We are not innocent bystanders to the growing concentration of wealth in our time. We are the principal accomplices in a process that is slowly strangling the economy, destabilizing American politics, and eroding democracy. Our delusions of merit now prevent us from recognizing the nature of the problem that our emergence as a class represents. We tend to think that the victims of our success are just the people excluded from the club. But history shows quite clearly that, in the kind of game we’re playing, everybody loses badly in the end.”

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