4 ms·
The Scary New Rich
- nazgulnarsil 17y agopeople who have to work pretty hard for everything they have tend to be conservative in the literal sense of the term. middle class in china have a 50% of income savings rate or so I've heard.
- CoreDumpling 17y agoI wouldn't put it that way. Think of the subsistence farmer struggling to make ends meet after the social safety net got taken away. Or the factory worker whose newborn child has birth defects likely induced by hazardous pollution in the work environment. These people fall well within the category of "work pretty hard" but they are also the most likely advocates of reform. I think the article got it right -- the "conservatives" simply feel they have more to lose. China's urban baby-boomer generation grew up during the Cultural Revolution in the '60s and '70s, where it was effectively mob rule by the Red Guards at a local level and many were sent to the countryside for re-education. They've seen what misguided "reform" can do and are not clamoring for it to happen again.
- patio11 17y agoThe emerging bourgeoisie is a patchwork of contradictions: clamorous but rarely confrontational politically, supporters of globalization yet highly nationalistic, proud of their nations' upward mobility yet insecure and fearful they will fall back, fiercely individualistic but reliant on government subsidies, and often socially conservative. This is pretty much verbatim what folks said about the rise of the United States. And, for that matter, the British before us. And, for that matter, Japan. (Though foreign observers haven't frequently described Japanese as fiercely individualistic since, oh, the 1920s or so. Fun fact about changing perceptions of culture: Japanese people also used to be well-known as poorly educated slackers.)
- fburnaby 17y agoI was thinking the same thing. That quote describes our society pretty well.
- sp332 17y agoI read your quote before reading the article, and I was dead sure the quote was about the US :-)
- patio11 17y agoI was seriously waiting for the reveal. (P.S. I have used the "Blah blah blah, blah blah blah, HAH, I was talking about X the whole time" shtick more times than I want to think about. It is practically "Hit this button to get your writing ability praised" in cultural studies. I got my degree before anyone caught on that I worked it into almost every other paper.)
- sp332 17y agoHey, at least you had a method. That's more strategy than I put into most of my college papers:-)
- ellyagg 17y agoWhat the author of this article doesn't seem to realize is that populations only become politically liberal as they can afford to be. Child labor laws didn't happen in the US, e.g., until families could afford to survive without child labor. These emerging middle classes still have a long way to go before they can afford to be as politically liberal as the US is today.
- xiaoma 17y agoLike the OP, I'm also interested in building up a modest income with a side project. I have a question about it that you seem particularly likely to be able to answer: How do you go about setting up an LLC from abroad (like you in Japan), and was it the sort of thing that could be done on a shoestring budget? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1161997 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1161997
- xiaoma 17y agosorry, I posted this on the wrong thread
- pw0ncakes 17y agoThe Cold War definitions of First, Second, and Third "worlds" are obsolete. Updated for 2010: First World: politically liberal, transparent government, rich countries with universal healthcare and mandated vacation floors. Moderate to high economic growth. Poverty is virtually nonexistent; it's not tolerant. The major flaw of these countries comes from their strength-- although completely nonmilitant, they can be a bit insular and closed to outsiders. Second World: politically conservative, high degree of corruption, overt elitism and stark class (and often race) discrepancies. Low degree of political freedom. Lots of poverty and economically-motivated crime. Usually, high economic growth. These are countries that are sacrificing freedom and quality of life in order to increase or maintain relative status. Third World: persistently underdeveloped and poor countries-- often too corrupt and wartorn even to get off the ground-- that, absent substantial change, have grim economic futures. This article is about the Second World mentality. First World includes most of the EU countries and Canada. Second World includes the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries as well as the Arab oil states, most of Latin America, Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai, and (to a large degree) the United States post-Reagan. In fact, I'd argue that the main political tension in the US is between a First World (Blue States) and Second World (Red States) subnation that are emerging, and diverging, within one country. The post-2001 militancy is our Second World component expressing a willingness to sacrifice prosperity, lives, and political freedom for national dominance.
- starkfist 17y agoWhere's Japan in your categorization?
- d4nt 17y agoI don't buy it. France's middle class already think and behave very differently from America's. The fact is though that in any society, people don't like corruption or being told what to think and the ones with a bit of money will vote with their wallets. That might not look the same as western democracy but I'm confident it will trend towards the rule of law and individual freedoms.
- swwu 17y agothe ones with a bit of money will vote with their wallets The problem with this (regarding China in particular) is that the "ones with a bit money" and the "people" sometimes intersect at very few points.
- d4nt 17y agoI would have to conceed that point. But if the ruling elite use the promise of expanding prosperity to stay in power then sooner or later they either won't be in power any more or there will be greater prosperity.
- nalbyuites 17y agoI try to steer clear of articles such as these but got fooled by the submission title. These attempts to paint the world in such broad strokes may seem to provide information in easily digestible forms but are useless, being just one step higher than black and white or good and evil. No matter how appealing it may be to simplistically classify millions of people like that, the devil is in the details always. We can just begin to form some crude models with an in-depth study of the economies and sub-economies (and sub-sub) of the world (a humble attempt here: http://www.gapminder.org/ http://www.gapminder.org/ ), let alone their equally complex social and political data. And despite the authors' beliefs, we are still evolving in all spheres - political, social and economic. Today's liberal views can yet be viewed as conservative in the future when better *cracies will form, very many of them from the so-called second and third worlds.
- olh 17y agoWelcome to the real world. Your country is nothing more than a really big corporation. If your big corporation can not control and predict the money flow, your big corporation will be susceptible to bankruptcy. This article is just an erroneous generalization. The "middle class" culture and politics aren't the same in these countries.