Member-only story
I’m not any type of vetted social scientist, so I’ll tackle this quickly up top before belaboring any points.
35,000-foot view: Yes, for sure. It’s much less about “everyone gets theirs,” though, and more about “a certain few get theirs and everyone else has to kind of hustle and struggle, but the end result of that struggle is still largely better than it would be if you were living in, say, Mongolia.”
View many people feel every day: Yes, it’s dead and I can’t get ahead.
How did that all happen?
Again, won’t go into a ton of nuance, but … maybe it never was “The American Dream” at all, and instead “a fantasy of self-congratulation, inextricable from the slave society upon which it was built.” That’s certainly one valid take.
Just to cut to the quick here: the reality is that most people have no chance at a “liquidity event,” i.e. big money from Google or Amazon into something you built. Most people have their house/condo and maybe some property and investments, and the lower classes have less than that. So when you see stats about 0.1% owning as much as 90%, that’s very logical. The 0.1%, which is so rare the numbers are hard to comprehend, has many liquidity events. That gets them paid (and laid!), and that doesn’t happen to most of us. We have salaries and maybe…
