From an economics and intelligence standpoint it's basically inevitable due to globalization and automation.
The US has shifted to high skill tertiary economy. This leaves less opportunities for lower skilled individuals. These lower skilled individuals don't have nearly the same earning power and thus have fewer choices (location, housing, schools, etc) and will naturally end up as a higher percentage in the lower cost choices. In some ways it's also how the work has moved vs the people. Entire regions like Appalachia have seen industries die and have left almost nothing to properly replace them.
> The US has shifted to high skill tertiary economy.
I don't think this has anything to do with it. The physical class divides have been around since the beginning of the United States. If anything, it's a symptom of capitalism where those with greater wealth use it to segregate themselves from poorer folks.
In effect, capitalism takes advantage of human nature and as a side effect that same human nature self-segregates based on how "nice" any given area is. You want rich folks to mingle with middle class folks? Make the middle class area the nicest place and don't let the rich completely "take it over" (aka gentrification).
The way the modern world is becoming though we're self-segregating more and more though so I don't think it's realistic to expect any sort of top-down planning or policies to force mingling. Upper middle class people don't even go to the grocery store anymore and thus, don't end up mingling with lower middle class people.
Maybe we should promote more "mixing hobbies" where people physically need to show up and interact with each other? Subsidize board game shops, paintball, indoor rock climbing, and similar? Might help humanity a little bit.
I segregated myself from crime. I segregated my family to keep them safe.
I don’t care if someone is poor, I care that at 2am my neighbor is beating his girlfriend and she’s screaming and I have to go out there to stop it. I care that the neighbor kid is shooting a gun into the air yelling “MOTHER FUCKER” as a car screeches away, when my daughter is playing in the front yard, and the cops say “it was just a .22” and nothing is done. Whelp, I guess a .22 won’t kill my kid, nothing to worry about!
So I moved to the most expensive house I could afford (and honestly couldn’t afford it then, can now after some raises).
To be fair, my current neighbor beats his wife too, but at least he keeps quiet about it and didn’t make a whole scene when he got arrested. The lady down the way sells weed but like, she’s not getting into fist fights with the people she’s dealing to. People know how to behave in a nicer neighborhood, or at least keep their business their business.
It also has nothing to do with race as this neighborhood is more diverse than where I moved from (old neighborhood was basically only black people and white people vs professional immigrants of every stripe from every continent in the new neighborhood).
Yes, but consider that people of higher SES do not want to mix with people of middle and low SES.
And part of that is because they are not fun to be around! People of low SES tend to be meaner, more anti-social in their behaviors like littering, not maintaining their environment, more likely to commit crime, less family formation, etc.
Access to well behaved people is not a human right.
>people of higher SES do not want to mix with people of middle and low SES.
To some extent the opposite is also true, because spending time with people with higher SES might cause a discomfort/decreased self-esteem or simply expose the asshole-side of elites which quite often appears in face of "paupers".
All social classes benefit when social differences are minimised, like in 70s Sweden.
For the high SES people, this means that they can move freely without worrying about their safety.
Walking home late from a party, biking to work or working from a coffee shop on a busy plaza are pleasures in life that rich people like, too!
The opposite is something like Mexico, where, as a rich person, you are basically forced to stay inside a bunch of confined areas and only move in public inside an armoured car. (Slightly exaggerating, but you get the point)
All social classes have an interest to provide the universal high quality education system that is necessary to achieve this. Some rich people might think that they are better off if the rest of the country is poor. But they are mistaken.
I was invited to a Parisian party for 'high SES' people (200€ the entry ticket, it was two month of food at the time for me, but you get champagne with it!). I don't think i've ever seen as much antisocial behavior, even when I worked in a youth camp for abandoned/placed teenagers. I don't understand how prison aren't filled with those people. So much coke, sexual slavery in plain sight, drunk driving... One police descent and you have half the club in prison for a few years. And the person who invited us told us it was quite tame, and not the most expensive place (it was after a student hackathon with different schools participating, he was the MBA grad, we were devs/design type).
Wow you went to a party in paris with sexual slavery and drunk driving in plain sight? Did someone drunk-drive a bus full of sex slaves up to the party and drop them off? What the hell are you talking about?
I meant very young eastern European women who did not speak French and clearly did not have any business there (also not sure if some weren't minors, there was a scandal with that and football players around the same time), and people being clearly drunk who snorted coke to 'get right' and be able to drive home.
Quite likely true, which means we now have an excellent argument against the libertarian ideal of private property.
In practice, we can put constraints on, for example, the kind of business one can do with one's private property, and the constraints one is under while doing that business (equal service laws, ADA compliance, and you can even cap rents to leave room open for low-revenue business to keep operating).
It's a little irrelevant what evolution "prefers." We have multiple examples of what has been called "dangerous evolutionary baggage": behaviors that were sensible in the past but in the present, rapidly-changing world actually hinder optimal outcomes for people. Two examples are ingroup-outgroup bias in a densely-connected world where the decisions of someone halfway around the planet can impact your day and scarcity / hoarding behaviors in a world with more than enough stuff in several categories to satisfy every human being more than they could possibly ever consume.
I have no idea. My point is it's irrelevant for modern humans.
As a social construct: caste could be useful for specialization. But I sort of fail to see the point of making the specialization birth-based (observation seems to indicate that people's interests and skills, particularly in technology spaces which dominate the human condition now, are randomized / environment based more than bred. Give me an interested kid who wants to be a programmer, and I can teach them how to program regardless of who their parents were).
Whether there's some natural selective pressure to encourage caste is irrelevant in the modern human condition. Probably better to optimize for letting people have experiences and finding what fits them best under the theory that people do the best work / live the best lives if they're doing what they're into.
Can it truly be irrelevant? Our so called society may be modern based on some subjective chronocentric premise, but our biology and the sociological patterns
from which they are derived are largely just as they've been for millennia.
My point is that we can attempt adjudicate out our biological programming through social conditioning, but it's still there lurking under the surface. It's built into us and we can never truly hope to escape it as long as we shall live.
Some of us are conditioned to want to murder. Those people, if they act on that impulse, are murderers and we jail or slay them. There were probably good evolutionary reasons to kill those like oneself in the past, but context has changed and what was once perhaps evolutionarily advantageous (elimination of resource competition) is now counter-advantageous (elimination of members of society and allies, not to mention the vast resources spent on defense if "You can just kill who you want" were to become part of the social code; those resources can be spent otherwise if people check their urges).
Yes, we're riddled with dangerous evolutionary baggage. Yes, perhaps it never goes away. We learn to regulate it so that we can live in a society, because none of us are as strong as all of us.
If anything, one of the greatest risks to modern humanity is the risk that we will fail to regulate such urges. Because the urge to murder, the urge to divide, the urge to have ingroups and outgroups... Those urges are an existential threat in a world of nukes and gene-engineered virii, where someone acting on such an urge could slaughter a whole city or a whole species.
Are we talking about the physical cost to produce eggs and sperm? I don't think that's that high. Also, a woman already has all her eggs at the time she's born.
Are we talking about the physical cost to maintain eggs and sperm? I don't think that's that high.
Are we talking bout the physical cost of pregnancy? If so, it doesn't make sense to say eggs and sperm. colonelpopcorn should have said pregnancy.
Yes, it takes 9 months to grow a baby and it’s a health toll and a health risk. Fair.
But unless you’re planning to abandon your kids, most of the investment comes in the years after and this responsibility is equally on both father and mother.
But unless you’re planning to abandon your kids, most of the investment comes in the years after and this responsibility is equally on both father and mother.
One of the players in this game can freely walk away with no negative consequences. The other player is biologically attuned to lose their mind until they reunite with their child. Also, one player can have children up until 30-50, depending on how well they roll. The other player can have children until the moment they die. One player will have 3-5 years of extremely negative health effects starting with conception. The other player can fulfill their obligation in their sleep and never think about it again.
You seem to suggest that a father’s love and responsibility for their child is just an unnatural delusion. Even that it’s a bad thing somehow.
My narrow response to that is what I hinted at above:
Fathers love their children no less than mothers love their children.
My broader response is: Trying to be moral, and sometimes failing at it, is better than never trying and thus always failing.
Some people decided that they will just always do what’s best for themselves.
Such people like to claim that anyone who tries to be moral is always a lying hypocrite and thus worse than the absolute asshole. Because there is one sin that the absolute asshole can never be accused of: hypocrisy.
These people are hard to counter, because anything that is said will be labelled as hypocrisy.
The truth is that many, many people in this world sometimes do things because they are right, not because they benefit themselves.
The US has shifted to high skill tertiary economy. This leaves less opportunities for lower skilled individuals. These lower skilled individuals don't have nearly the same earning power and thus have fewer choices (location, housing, schools, etc) and will naturally end up as a higher percentage in the lower cost choices. In some ways it's also how the work has moved vs the people. Entire regions like Appalachia have seen industries die and have left almost nothing to properly replace them.