Meritocracy is a massive lie: Race, inheritance and the the truth about the rigged American dream
Once a process of economic polarization begins, it is very hard to turn it around. Attitudes harden, fear grows on fear; as people polarize geographically, they begin to know less and less of each other, and become more fearful and more distrusting of each other. Free market rhetoric stops being ridiculed as it was in the 1950s, when economists described events in the late 1920s as free market madness. It is only under rising prejudice that it becomes acceptable again to have many people looking for work all the time, and changing jobs frequently, as the workless become seen as part of the ‘oil’ that makes the whole machine work smoothly. It takes a long time again for people to realize that jobs being lost and gained around the world, or relocated, results in huge gross turnover of human lives for small net increases in apparent productivity.
