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> Some of us immigrants do not come to this country with an existing stock of wealth either back home or here. We are also not in the favored group of immigrant
by throw0101a 5y ago
> Some of us immigrants do not come to this country with an existing stock of wealth either back home or here. We are also not in the favored group of immigrants. We have human capital which we are trying to convert to financial capital for the next generation.
And this is where the idea (now myth?) of the American Dream came from.
When America was young, no one really had much capital. Also true for periods of large scale immigration: most folks were 'equal' in the sense of not having much of anything.
Over time wealth got concentrated, but with the Great Depression and the WW2 war economy, capital was generally became more equalized in the early- and mid-20th century.
Of course in the last 50+ years there have been no 'equalization events', and so the concentration of wealth has managed to run for a while without interruption with the obvious results.
Piketty has a lot of historical data that shows this process for number of countries:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...
- zpeti 5y agoSee my comment above, but there could have been equalization events. The governments had three financial crises, in 99, 2008, and 2020 where it could have chosen not to intervene and save the rich. Yes it would have been hard on everyone, but it would have equalized wealth. A lot of companies would have gone bankrupt, but they could have been bought by new manaments, or employees, or could have been replaced by new startups. But the government, and society really, chose to keep the status quo and not create a true crises. The result of this is the world we live in now, where basically it’s normal to rescue any large business and not let it go bankrupt.