On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have viable career paths that are NOT being selected because the income simply won’t be enough. We miss out on a lot of talented and motivated individuals that would love to get into a particular field, but it just doesn’t pay as well. Teachers and corrections officers come to mind. The career I’m in was not my first choice, but it pays better than what I wanted to do.
To be fair the correctional system in its current form in North America is primarily constructed and controlled by capitalist interests.
Idk, I’ve never made enough money to live on and at this point never expect to. I’d rather do something I’m passionate about while I die under capitalism, than sit here feeling useless while I die under capitalism. Shit is depressing and unsustainable.
Fully agree with this. Anything in the arts immediately comes to mind. Not just performing arts either - history, literature, and philosophy fields have a lot more uncertainty with income than others.
This is one of the reasons why I favor UBI and universal health care. I think there’s a growing deficit in overall creativity, leisure, and social engagement that the arts and other so-called lower-income jobs provide to society. And its not that people care more about money. You just dont have the option to pursue these jobs when your income level affects life or death decisions for you and your loves ones.
Yeah, try being a nurse these days if you want to play life in hard mode
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
I had a friend as a kid who made straight A’s the first semester in school every year, then straight F’s to the last semester where he’d pick it up just enough to pass. I remember a teacher laughing at him because his cousin blacked his eye while he was fighting his mother, “Oh, you mean a girl did that?”
Once he got to high school he couldn’t pass the 9th grade because the strategy of passing the first and last semester didn’t work anymore. He dropped out and got his GED. He took the test one time, scored 90% higher than average.
He slept in class every day because he spent his nights prepared to fight his dad when his dad attacked his mom.
I remember in middle school when the regular teacher was out long term for surgery, he handed a test to the substitute and she cried and apologized for not paying closer attention to him. She worked with him after that and he passed her class.
The last time I seen him, he was strung out on heroin and doing nothing. We went to school together from the 3rd grade until he dropped out and I only ever seen two teachers really try to help him. Police came to the school one time to photograph his bruise covered body and nothing ever came of it.
He used to write stories and give them to me on the bus. I asked him if he kept writing. He told me he hadn’t since his early 20s.
I can’t stand to think about how many kids out there have so much potential, only they’re stranded on an island with nowhere to put it.
Fuck man, that’s so sad. You tell it really well, too. I can’t imagine hanging on if the adults in your life kept letting you down that consistently. Poor guy… And like you said, he’s just one person. 0 doubt there are others out there there who’ve got it way worse (not that it’s a contest).
Reminds us to try and be kind when we come across someone who’s struggling. We don’t know their story but guaranteed they have one.
Damn, this was so hard to read and felt so close to me…
I used to be the kid that got the best grades and didn’t care to study in the last semester too. I had severe family problems, and my father also tried to attack my mom.
I grew up left behind and with no one to ever support or guide me. I ended up isolating myself from society to such a degree that my life went downhill and I messed up everything to become a disfunctional adult who can’t evem get a job. I didn’t get into drugs, but isolation and depression did a similar thing to me… I ended up losing all my dreams, stopping doing all tbe things i was good at, and kinda losing even my cognition with time.
I can’t express in words how painful reading about your friend’s story was to me. I feel so sorry for him.
Trust me, it feels very close to me too. I get it. I really do.
I hope things improve for you. We only live once, so make the most of whatever you have. That’s what I do. That’s all we can do.
I try not to resent the world myself. None of us asked to be here, so we’re all kind of winging it.
I believe that beauty is everywhere. I believe that if we spend as much of our time as we can focusing on that beauty and not our own situation, we can be happy. Sure, we have to pretend a bit to cover up the things that aren’t beautiful, but we can find beauty and we can make beauty.
I was a “gifted program” kid with problems at home and undiagnosed adhd. I went from A’s to failing and dropping out and nobody cared. Nobody wanted to know what was wrong. All they wanted to do was punish me.
My daughter just started high school this year. It has became very clear to me that she’s dealing with that. I’m standing outside at her first mental health appointment now.
I’m hoping she gets what she needs here. I’m sorry you got missed. I did too, big time. So did my mother though, and her mother.
Maybe today breaks the chain.
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Honestly, it’s not just capitalism. Education is anywhere from free to really cheap in Germany, and we still don’t get many people from poorer families into uni.
I see the main problem here as a sort of class divide between people with university degrees and people without. For example: if you work in a public library and don’t have a uni degree you will never get more money than salary level 9 (4k/mo) just having a degree and not doing any more/different work more or less instantly puts you on 12 or higher (6k+)
This I think understandably makes people without uni degrees kind of resentful of those who do have them. And if you grow up resenting a certain group of people you are much less likely to join them.
So, no. “Just” getting rid of the cost won’t magically get these people into higher education.
Usually when people are in favour of getting rid of capitalism, they’re also in favour of getting rid of hierarchies such as class divide.
Sure, but one does not inherently include the other.
Capitalism does inherently include a class divide.
How so? In particular how would you compare it to apartheid or India’s old caste system?
Making big jumps in income is mostly luck based (building a company and getting funding for it), but is not inherently bound to some external property, like where you live or who your parents are.
The capitalist class vs the working class
Education is anywhere from free to really cheap in Germany, and we still don’t get many people from poorer families into uni.
I am not German myself, but I am familiar with the system. Please correct me if things have evolved, but…
I thought the post-elementary education system in Germany was a tiered system. University admission requires completing the Abitur exams, but one can only feasibly do this if they’ve attended Gymnasium, or the “highest” tier of high school. It may be possible to do if one gets very high marks in Realschule (mid tier), along with Abitur preparation courses, but it’s virtually impossible if one attends Hauptschule (lowest tier). These schools are not intended to provide university preparation, but instead provide a general education to prepare students for trades/vocational careers.
Whether a child attends Hauptschule, Realschule, or Gymnasium is decided at 9 or 10 years old, and is dependent on performance in elementary classes and teacher recommendations.
And when one considers that a child’s educational performance is directly related to both familial socioeconomic status and parental educational attainment, it’s not surprising that poorer people are less likely to attend or complete university.
Capitalists’ dominant position within the class hierarchy necessitates exploitation of the working class, and this is maintained by fomenting division. This tiered system is just one manifestation of how society can be stratefied and divided.
It is absolutely possible to get to university after only finishing Hauptschule. You just need to go to BOS after finishing your apprenticeship and then you can achieve a fachgebundene Hochschulreife (maybe even allgemeine, im not sure) and attend University. Few people do it, because the desire is not there, or maybe not the tenacity to study further after already having trained for a job. Also you get Kindergeld and Bafög while studying.
And when one considers that a child’s educational performance is directly related to both familial socioeconomic status and parental educational attainment,
This is true and criticized by PISA every time.
I think it has a lot to do with how much the parents value education. east asian immigrants are famous for how much emphasis they place on education and as a result get into university. The only thing that would help immediately (i.e. does not require behavioral change for a large portion of the population) would be to separate kids more from their families via Ganztagsschulen, to weaken this influence.
Disagree about librerians because it is skilled profession and good librerian needs to be very educated, but yes,
“Just” getting rid of the cost won’t magically get these people into higher education.
Sure very skilled and such. But I’m not talking about librarians. Just library workers with and without a degree
Well, I don’t know why not librarians library workers would need a degree and it doesn’t make sense tu require them to have any.
My point exactly. They don’t do anything more than normal library workers, but get significantly more money
Do you know Aladin El-Mafaalani? I think this Interview (in german) with Jung&Naiv is totally worth to watch for everyone that is just slightly interested in that topic of the german educational system, its flaws and how to improve it.
Not being able to afford education isn’t limited to the cost of the education either. If I have to take time to study it means I have to spend every hour of every day either working, in class, studying or working on school projects to also afford to eat and have shelter, and even then I think I’d have to choose between the two.
Not that I think capitalism is good, but how exactly does any other system solve it? And I’m talking about real-world systems, not the idealized ones. Because the made-up unrealistic fable of capitalism has no problem with this either.
Yeah no system is perfect.
Centrally controlled education. We need 500 doctors this year, assign the seats, nobody else can get it. Also, doctors have the same lifestyle as any other professional.
Anyone can study anything for free, sure, great. How long so you let people study to become doctors for? How do you ration enrollment? (We don’t have infinite teachers), how do you decide who gets to practice? Lots of filter classes? If the country has 1000 doctor vacancies a year, do you produce 3000 doctors? For the 2000 who don’t get to practice, do they maintain their license? Etc… this will increase supply, good thing, which will reduce pay, and reduce student demand. How long do you take to find the equilibrium?
Uh, grades.
You take Doctor 101 and get a C-, well the number of students who graded A-B filled the Doctor 102 class. Study up, and either retake the class or take a test to prove you know the information. You scored high enough on your test? Rad, welcome to the class. This is actually what we do anyway so, you’re overthinking things there.
Number of jobs is a weird limitation for gatekeeping professionals. If we only need X amount of doctors, then we’re an entirely healthy world with zero illness and no room for new minds to create entirely new methods and further our understanding of medicine? I want anyone driven enough to practice medicine to do so, it’s the only way we’ll have enough doctors to fix the massive healthcare deficit we’re experiencing. Especially through the above grading methods I suggested.
As for the pay decreases, hard to say really without doing it. If an employer believes your education is less valuable because more people can achieve the same, they’re a shitty place to work and they’ll get what they pay for. There’s also the possibility of those doctors being more affordable actually expanding the availability of healthcare overall.
I get why it’s worth questioning, but it’s broken now so why can’t we try to fix it? What if the fix works? Awesome right? What if the fix doesn’t work? Good thing the current broken system could act as a fallback, right?
Yeah absolutely. We should always be thinking about how to improve systems. I’m not saying we shouldn’t look at it. But we shouldn’t say this system is totally broken. Which seems to have been the overall thesis of the original post
Oh, no the system is absolutely broken. I’m just trying to give you a rational explanation to the concerns you raised. I’ve worked hard my entire life and been screwed over every step of the way. I’m unemployed, living with family, and can’t afford to see a doctor. I apply for jobs but never hear back. I learned Python and Linux just because I felt like it, so I’m not unskilled. Ruined my spine unloading trucks in my early 20’s, so I can’t really do anything manual labor. But like, shit I feel worthless, and I don’t think a functional system would put anyone through that. I can’t even get assistance because I’m “too young and healthy” so like, fuck me for existing I guess.
“No system is perfect” motherfucker we can see how free/cheap higher education works in several european countries and yeah, they use grades to select students, same way U.S. schools do.
Also, how is the free market any better than your first
strawmanconcept? Only instead of the gubmint telling you you can’t go, it’s exceeding expensive educational facilities and the circumstances of your birth.No need for personal insults.
The need for doctors is usually a supply/demand situation, but even then it can be predicted ahead of time, so the universities can open for more students in advance.
There’s never a perfect balance, so certain jobs can also advertised in other countries, creating a sort of job import and export.
“There are no completely healthy people, only underdiagnosed”
I don’t disagree, I just don’t follow how this is relevant in this context?
Oops, I think I responded to wrong comment. It means there is never oversupply of doctors. I can’t find comment that mentioned perfectly healthy nation.
Ah. No problem. Yes you’re right. There’s never an oversupply of doctors.
However, in a fully state controlled healthcare system, there’s still a limit to what patients can request for free. Like, boob jobs or other cosmetical surgery. Unless it’s for a health care reason, it’s for the patients to pay for that operation, so the demand for those kind of doctors are limited to demand, while demand for doctors treating actual illnesses are limited by supply.
Because the made-up unrealistic fable of capitalism has no problem with this either.
Also, this isn’t true - capitalism has inequality and unrealised potential built into it.
What do you mean by “real, not idealised”? All such things are ideals until put into practice.
I mean that if your argument is communism, let’s talk about the real world one, not the ideal one that doesn’t exist and will never actually be put into practice. Because comparing a real, existing system against an idea is unfair. So either let’s compare real communism with real capitalism, or let’s compare the idea of capitalism with the idea of communism.
As I said, capitalism sucks, but I’m tired of people making comparisons between the real, actually used capitalism and some made up version of communism.
Real existing forms of socialism kind of solve the problem by offering free education and programs to support poorer individuals so they can participate in society and enjoy their lives. There isn’t a fully democratic socialist country yet but having parts of socialism already kind of solves these issues.
IIRC, in former east Germany you couldn’t just study whatever you want (topic of this entire post). If your parents went to uni, you can’t. Oversimplified, because of course there were options if you were part of the party, but I’m not sure that strengthens the point.
I don’t know how that worked in Russia.
The GDR was way too authoritative and I don’t really know about russia either. I was tlaking about modern day germany
Again, all things are only “made up” until put into practice. You can’t ask for a better idea, then balk at it, saying “it’s just an idea”. Is your position really to never try anything new?
Is your position really to put words in my mouth? If you rephrase it, I’ll answer.
Do you object to trying ideas simply because they are ideas? Understand that this thinking is anti-progress. We can’t reject everything that’s “made up”, otherwise nothing will ever become real. Planes were “made up” until someone actually made planes that worked. Imagine if someone just said, “you can’t make a flying machine. Flying machines don’t exist!”
No, I don’t, I’m just saying that it’s unfair to compare the actual capitalism with (for example) the textbook communism.
I’m comparing textbook capitalism with textboox communism. It is built into the very system of capitalism.
I think about this all the time with everything from professions to entertainment. I watch a lot of F1 and those guys are always called the best/most talented drivers in the world, and all I can think of is how the most talented driver in the world is probably a poor kid in India or China who’s starving to death that will never have the chance to develop that talent let alone drive a car.
We are missing out on so many brilliant minds because capitalism requires them to be at the bottom. Meritocracy isn’t real and never will be.
Just watched a Bad Sports episode where a champion race driver couldn’t break into the sport without become a drug trafficker to pay for it. So yeah that’s already happened, just in Florida.
Justice in general doesn’t exist in nature. That is a human construct. You will have more inner peace the fast you accept this reality. What we can do is do our best with the resources we have, and be grateful if we were lucky. Our call for justice is because we are in a privilege position.
I do t care about justice existing in nature. Humanity has always aimed to dominate nature. Let’s do that but in a way that lifts all boats, yea?
How is this good for certain things and not for others? What is the line?
Even the people that can afford it no longer want to work in the industry because capitalism has made them entirely profit oriented and very unrewarding to be a part of, both financially and spiritually.
there are lots of capitalst countries in europe where education is pretty much free. what you are talking about is neo-liberalism
yep
Nah, it’s Capitalism as well. Capitalism depends on the global orphan crushing machine, not just insular countries. There are many, many Einstein level talents that have died without access to necessary education to fully take advantage of their talents simply to keep the orphan crushing machine going.
Yes, in South America too, as long as you pass entrance exams which are difficult af.
Someone once said how many Einsteins have we missed out on because they were born in Ethiopia?
This is way more the problem than people missing out on going to medical school when they really wanted to.
Most people who are in the United States and want to go to a high paying career, can take out student loans and achieve something close, assuming good grades. Not that there aren’t problems with that scenario, but everyone wants kids to get high paying jobs, society is organized around helping those kids.
Meanwhile, some people would be great authors or philosophers or artists if they didn’t have to spend time making the money to survive. Those are valid goals that are being oppressed by the system.
And in the same way the global system is oppressing billions of people who are born as the rural poor and just not able to do much beyond subsistence farming.
How many Einsteins have we missed out on because they were born in America to a working class or poor family or as a person in a marginalized group?
Less than in Ethiopia
Probably, I didn’t mean to make it a competition. In both cases it’s a nonzero number and every one is a tragedy.
I don’t think the comment was necessarily to dunk on Ethiopia per se as much as to make a point.
E.g. The person who worked out at least a theoretical model for faster than light travel was Mexican. So we are obviously not dealing with this situation in which the most intellectual necessarily are born into western society.
Not only that, but think of all the intelligent people that could have done something to revolutionize a field but instead work in finance.
Or real estate, advertising, etc.
Capitalism wastes talent.
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So is in Czechia, public universities are free unless you repeat a year (and even then it is not very expensive and IIRC you pay a single fee, 2500$ Bachelor’s, 3200$ Master’s, and 20$ (yes 20) Doctor’s, all per year - taken from my university). Textbooks are freely available in 99% of cases, the rest costs about 20$ printed but can be obtained for free in electronicformat, IIRC legally.
The quality is not perfect all the time, some curriculums are outdated or taught in strange ways, but it’s ever-changing.
Of course, dorms and food are not free. But there are programs to at least partially accommodate that.
Norway is actually a good example of this – where pro-social regulatory policies (i.e. beneficial not from the perspective of capital, but from the perspective of actual societal conditions) are used to help mitigate some of the BS that capitalism produces.
Regardless… Yeah, it’s a problem with capitalism. It’s a problem that stems from the literal core of the ‘system’: utilizing ‘capital’ to find opportunities for the creation and extraction of ‘surplus’ from labor and its products.
It’s great that regulation is able to reign in, in some cases, the deeply criminal BS that such a system naturally produces… But it seems like a huge overreach to assume this is possible “globally” (as it would need to be for a blanket statement like that to be true).
Not just education, but profitability as well. Doctors and Engineers are incentivized more than educators.
’ Deregulated capitalism’ is capitalism so it’s 100% a problem with capitalism. And running things for profit with private ownership is the basic definition of capitalism… so it sure doesn’t sound like Norway’s free education is ‘for profit’ unless I’m grossly misunderstanding.
don’t be obtuse of the sake of it
Not real capitalism is just as much capitalism as not real socialism is socialism…
just deregulated capitalism
The line between “well-regulated capitalism” and “socialism” is entirely subjective. One man’s big government job killing mandate is another’s sensible growth-oriented reform.
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The cliche is Asian parents bullying their kids into it “because money”
Sad.
A fancy car does not equal any respect from me.
Generally reduces respect from me.
It really is ridiculous - I’m in the higher income bracket in my country but drive an almost 15 year old tiny car that uses less gas than most modern cars and people keep asking me if I only got my girlfriend’s car today if I show up with that…
In my limited observation, everything in capitalist societies revolve around money (power) and appearances (illusion).
I hope you are not talking about medicine as the example lists. In a capitalist society these roles remain undervalued and most people struggle for much of their career to pay debts. If you are going into medicine to get rich you are ill advised and foolish.
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Sorry someone hurt you, but this is just a very skewed view. Medicine is one of only a few fields requiring high degrees of training and investment that isn’t keeping up with inflammation year after year. If you just against an upper middle class in general that’s a bigger issue that you aren’t going to solve anytime soon. If you think people aren’t entering the field for it’s payoff, don’t take my word for it look at all the alternatives with better pay and less debt. Sure there are some bad seeds out there, but they are also fools and a minority. I hope you find better healthcare in the future, and I’m all for healthcare reform and you guessed wrong (for Christs sake, I’m on Lemmy - why are you betting against obvious statistics).
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Capitalism is interested in your ability to enhance the bottom line of the company you work for.
That’s a very broad reading of Capitalism as a system of incentives. But when you break it down, you find that it isn’t holistically profit-maximizing. It is locally rent-seeking. Which is to say, if we all work for a freeway that moves $10M/day in commerce and I - personally - have the opportunity to erect a toll gate that earns me $100k/day but inhibits $1M/day in commerce as a result, I will build that toll gate.
We saw this problem play out with the collapse of the Sears Roebuck Company under CEO Edward Lampert. Lampert took the capitalist ideology to its logical conclusion and began pitting individual departments within the greater corporate behemoth against one another. Consequentially, he dissolved all the economies of scale Sears had aggregated. Far from enhancing the bottom line, his business strategy dissolved all the economies of integration and scale that the firm had built up over its 120 year history.
Wherever the tenants of rent-seeking are applied, individuals with power will attempt to extract surplus wealth from weaker agents beneath them, even when that would destabilize the system as a whole. This can be disastrous for the “bottom line”. We used to even classify it as such, labeling these behaviors as “price gouging” and “embezzlement”. Now we see these initiatives as “creative destruction” and applaud their implementation.
Wow I’ve never thought of it that way. That makes so much sense. This kind of implies all subscription based services will inevitably devolve into paying more for less in a race to the bottom until the whole thing collapses. Which is interesting because I remember hearing about an economics paper that showed that the most profitable business model is bundled subscriptions. It’s kind of amazing someone can say that with a straight face looking at what has happened to cable TV.
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lol.
lmao.
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Rent seeking is just the latest in a long line of buzz words invented by MBAs
Its definitely a term that’s been co-opted by MBAs, but the process of enclosure is centuries old and foundational to the process of capitalist profit-taking.
You seem to not like this.
I’m not a huge fan of negative externalities in business. And profiteering generates enormous externalities.
I would recommend putting down the phone that are using to browse this website, since it exists due to the aforementioned capitalistic system.
Oh no, buddy. I’ve got some terrible news for you. Cellular mobile telephones are a soviet technology. And the entire backbone of the modern domestic telecommunications service was created with public lands, materials, and labor.
The modern cell carriers are simply gatekeepers, charging exorbitant fees to access public works. When the western states copied the USSR’s homework back in the 70s and 80s, no single private business could afford to front the enormous costs associated with the infrastructure. So the Federal Government issued block grants and unleashed (literal) armies of engineers, surveyors, and construction teams to lay the original main arteries. They then tasked a handful of private companies to operate as retail brokers for consumer access and use.
every human on this Earth is already partaking in it to some degree.
The bulk of international digital infrastructure is public works. Always has been. And the cost of accessing these public works varies enormously by state, entirely due to who is tasked with gatekeeping access to the service. US telecomm costs are astronomical, compared to Mexico or Germany or India or South Africa, entirely because the American domestic retailers charge a higher toll.
Incidentally, that’s also why we have some of the slowest and least reliable networks in the post-industrial world. Once we gave up investing in public broadband, public wifi, and public satellite services, the gatekeeping private telecom firms failed to maintain pace with peer nations like Japan and Germany and China and India. Now you can buy a cell phone off the street in New Delhi with a plan that charges pennies and get higher speeds and better coverage than anything T-mobile or AT&T can provide stateside for $100/mo.
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the hilariously fake Soviet propaganda
the first handset was born in 1973 weighing in at two kilos.
You’re citing the first retail model sold in a western market, built on technology from 20 years prior.
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Technically the transistor was invented at Bell labs in 1947
We’ve understood electric diodes since 1874.
Bell labs secured the first US patent for a silicon point-contact transistor in 1948 two years after Soviet scientists proved out bipolar diffusion in silicon. Two ahem German scientists, Herbert Mataré and Heinrich Welker, developed crystal rectifiers from silicon and germanium during WW2. They extended their discovery into a modern working transistor in 1947, at the Compagnie des Freins et Signaux, a Westinghouse subsidiary in Paris. Tadashi Sasaki pioneered the first Japanese transistor at Kobe Kogyo that same year.
American history loves to casually ignore the global race towards modern machinery, assuming anything that wasn’t filed at the US Patent Office simply didn’t exist.
This is one reason why I advocate for free and open source software, this same exact reason. So many poor people/kids can’t afford to pay for software they need that could help them achieve something.
The last barrier we have to destroy is the formal certification institutions such as colleges and universities. Their careers are not equivalent to knowledge a lot of occasions, even Musk said that in the past. Its more like a social club to meet people…
I feel like its almost a lottery in canada, I know a few people on their 4th-5th round of applications years after getting a university degree. These are good candidates too, 90-something average, volunteer… and then we wonder why theres a huge shortage of family doctors and wait times.
Yeah we need to increase the size of our medical schools, but investing in education isn’t a political priority. The “Why should I pay for sometimes education?” group is loud. “Who cares if it improves the country, I want lower taxes!”
In some other countries-turned-shitholes the reason is shit working conditions and shit salary. By salary I mean 500€/mo
Serbia Moment x(
Huh. Russian regions. AKA not Moscow.
