Pictures, Videos, Articles showing just how boring it is to live in a dystopic society, or with signs of a dystopic society.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
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.
Not only that, but think of all the intelligent people that could have done something to revolutionize a field but instead work in finance.
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.
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!"
Not everyone can be doctors or engineers or lawyers. We need operational personnel that work in retail, in construction, plumbers, electricians, etc. But this is not bad at all, we all need better work conditions. Since the beginning of humanity wealth has been inherited.
Same deal as sexism. Even if you get in, your work will probably be stolen or you will be pushed out.
That's an America problem, not a capitalism problem. Free, or at least highly subsidised, higher education isn't exactly limited to communist countries.
To be fair, it's not just an America problem.
I thought capitalism had something to do with capitalists owning the means of production and alienating labor from their work. Where I live most universities are public entities.
You probably live in a social democracy, universities being public means there's some flavor of socialism (as in social democracy, not communism) in your country, with a regulated free market and capitalism.
Capitalism is a method for the control of information. If information were given freely, like as in an actually civilized society not full of fucking barbarians, the world would be a much better place.
They don’t want experts, they want drones and demagogues.
It's ironic that capitalism is missing out on more efficient workers who could maximize production and profit because of this. Who knows where we would be if we actually helped people pursue their goals regardless of current income?
This isnt a unique capitalist problem.
This is power dynamics 101.
The capitalism version of this problem is not even the worst version
There's a few problems with this. Two I can identify right off the bat:
Just because you're passionate about something doesn't mean you're good at it. I don't want the William Hung of medicine doing my surgery.
By artificially limiting the supply of doctors you are increasing demand and salaries (I agree this seems morally wrong a priori/prima facie, especially for something like health care that is a public good). However when the salaries drop then you reduce incentive for smart people going into the field, which has already been happening in medicine for decades. The top of the class that would've become the brilliant physician in the 20th century is your 21st century finance bro. AKA brain drain. (See also point 1.)
I do agree that it is wrong for people to be unable to pursue careers due to the misfortune of their station of birth. I don't know how to fix it other than funding public education.
That one is actually weird.
People with more education draw higher salaries. That only works because employers make a higher profit with better educated people. Which means that for profit-maximization, you want to have a pool of potential employees that is maximally well-educated on the expense of someone else. Note the push for more STEM graduates.
You'd think businesses would be all for tax-funded education for everyone.
One can argue that we have two kinds of capitalism. And that would be true for the classic, theoretical capitalism.
However, the modern one favors short term profit and stock prices. Which do not care if economies collapse in 20 years due to global warming, as long as the profit is good now.
Then again, capitalism gave many societies a lot of wealth that they then used to educate everyone.
Development is what increases education abilities, not necessarily wealth or Capitalism. It's correct that a side-effect of Capitalism is development, but it's also true that a side-effect of Capitalism is increased wealth concentration and disparity, rather than equitable distribution of resources.
The fact that education increases in spite of Capitalism, rather than because of it, shouldn't be a point in Capitalism's favor.