> Usually the ruling class wants the masses to be content with whatever their predicament is. That conspiracy theory is immaterial to the discussion. The point

> Usually the ruling class wants the masses to be content with whatever their predicament is. That conspiracy theory is immaterial to the discussion. The point is that social mobility and poverty are orthogonal concepts. You can have zero poverty but no social mobility, or high poverty and high social mobility. To put it differently, the reason why being born in a middle class family is a strong indicator that an individual will live a middle class life, with a low probability of becoming either upper class or lowe class, is not poverty. > I'm just saying that most people who have made it are not interested in everyone else making it to their level (that would be impossible, economics aren't zero sum but we can't all be Bill Gates). They're interested in making everyone else content. The assertion about "not being interested" is meaningless. I'm not interested in anyone winning the lottery, but that does not mean I don't want anyone to win or even that I intend to take any sort of action to stop anyone from ever having a chance of winning a prize. It just mean that I don't spend any time thinking about others winning lotteries because I have far more interesting and engaging things to do. That's what we all do. How much time do we collectively spend doing anything to actually tackle a hard problem such as hunger and war? Is that an indicator we want everyone to die from a combination of starvation and violence? Of course not. So, why is this vague notion of caring about somethong being conflated with being actively engaged in causing a problem?