My main issue is with coastal elites that can't tolerate the idea that life is actually very hard for the nowhere-town "deplorables" they've never met, so they vascillate between proposing "let them eat cake" policies & viciously attacking them for a lack of gratitude & "values"
Outside of the private feeder school and "modest" trust fund bubbles are a lot of people willing to work very hard for a very long time as long as they can expect to not be interfered with, and that their gains won't be taken from them arbitrarily.
There are also a lot of people — if you live in these towns, you WILL meet them — who take advantage wherever they can and actively claw the precocious crabs right back down into the bucket. Their own children included. Their lives are miserable, for sure, but not for no reason.
These are not the same sorts of people. Lives lived in poverty are as diverse as any other sweeping slice of the demography. The people looking down from more privileged perches fail to see these distinctions more often than not, and rail against the idea that they *should.*
I get the horror at the initial realization that life is this hard for *anybody,* but elites need to understand that their role is helping create viable, sustainable and irrevocable paths *out,* not pumping out gameable patches that rarely help anybody achieve escape velocity
This means helping people:
- build real marketable skills
- own specific assets that are prerequisites for participating in the skilled economy
- move around so that they can capture the best opportunities for someone with the skills that they have
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