[arjie]

I don't buy it. The last election saw relatively wealthy cities voting to increase taxes, increase equity, and make life better for the poor. And rural areas voting the opposite way with national identity, lower taxes, and lower community spending being their important things.

This is very different from third world nations where the middle class wants lower taxes and the poor vote for more spending but don't succeed.

[bigeasy]

Rather than setting up your own straw man, why not respond to some of the arguments made in the article?

> In the developing countries Lewis studied, people try to move from the low-wage sector to the affluent sector by transplanting from rural areas to the city to get a job. Occasionally it works; often it doesn’t. Temin says that today in the U.S., the ticket out is education, which is difficult for two reasons: you have to spend money over a long period of time, and the FTE sector is making those expenditures more and more costly by defunding public schools and making policies that increase student debt burdens.

The article focuses on education is a class divider that is becoming increasingly unobtainable or when obtained, burdened with debt. This is strike against social mobility. Do you buy that?

[arjie]

A bit harsh, that accusation, especially when I can't find any of your quoted sentences in the linked article.

For what it's worth, I was talking about this following excerpt:

> In the Lewis model of a dual economy, much of the low-wage sector has little influence over public policy. Check. The high-income sector will keep wages down in the other sector to provide cheap labor for its businesses. Check. Social control is used to keep the low-wage sector from challenging the policies favored by the high-income sector.

[BoiledCabbage]

> Social issues are used to keep the low-wage sector from challenging the policies favored by the high-income sector.

Yet change two words and suddenly things align again. Particularly if you take high-wage sector to be that demographic of the republican party. (Obviously this isn't exclusive to the republican party, but what's present in the party matches the form in developing countries).

Another way to look at the thesis is this: The republican party's politics and functioning/platform execution matches that of a developing country. While they aren't they only party, their views/framework have been taking over American politics since Clinton's triangulation of the 90s (and arguably since Reagan's arrival in the 80s).