Most liked posts in thread: Todays society

Well, they've moved it since I lived there then..

 

Why can't students be working class? My dad was a postman and my mum worked her way up from a secretary to a solicitor and yet students are continually classed as some kind of offspring of rich people situation. Since uni was opened up as much as it is now, a significant part of the student population are from working class backgrounds.

 

100% and part of the issue at the moment is that we can all spot and to some extents vilify those who are on the far right.

The ones who lean to the more extreme end of the left are treated in a much different way. Its almost like its possible and accepted to be too far right but impossible to be too far left, it gives some people a skewed idea of where the centre actually sits.

 

Apart from there's two sides to that. Part of the reason what you say is true is that the previous generation was the most prosperous ever.

It's only if you judge todays young to their parents that it works. If you judged them against their grandparents it would be laughable.

Similarly though who actually benefites in the long run? The wealth generated by your patents and grandparents eventually comes to you (in general terms, not you specifically). The benefits of the prosperous system doesn't stay with the boomers.

Nobody is shut out of the system, you're just getting different challenges and benefits to the previous generations.....but the choice is to focus on the negatives.

 

Of course housing costs have gone up.......housing quality has gone up!!!

You can buy a house in Bradford for £40k but nobody wants them. It's not just about price is it?

Comparing Wealth inequality to the Victorian Age is laughable. It might be mathematically correct but the implications of it are completely different, the poor now are clearly not Victorian Poor!

I didn't have rich parents, got brought up on a council estate by a single mother, had 2 kids before I was 20, didn't have a super duper job when I was young......but not..... I'm doing okay. The mentality that the situation is "locked in" and determined by something stmystemic is exactly the sort of negative mentality I'm talking about.

I'll say it again, there has never ever been a generation with more opportunity.

 

You don't think houses are of better quality than they were in the 80s? Wow!

And lack of regulation or cutting corners will have been worse back then, those things aren't new.

No, the pure maths isn't the important point. If your wage doubles compared to your peers then you are better off.......it doesn't matter if the richest person's wage has gone up by 10. Their wage has no impact on you. The richest people's income has gone up because technology allows purchasing to be centralised, but people are way too bothered about Jeff Bezos earnings when it has no impact on their lives at all.

If people can't get on, they can't get on. It's not a new or systemic thing.

And everything you've mentioned there is the best it's ever been. No generation has more help with those.

 

I don;t give a shit about Jeff Bezos' wage, you brought that up not me. Most of his wealth is tied up in assets anyway. What does concern me is that a CEO's median wage is now literally in some cases thousands of times what an average employee earns, when prior it would be something like a hundred times. that isn't right, because we aren't in a golden age of super effective CEO's, they aren't adding anymore value to the business than anyone in a CEO role was prior. Thats what happens when you smash people's ability to collectively organise for better pay and working conditions. Money that would have gone into wage rises now goes into CEO's back pockets. Nothing to do with Baldy Bezos and everything to do with unrestrained greed. Yes, their wage does impact ordinary people because companies don't have infinite pots of money with which to pay people, so if they started shifting more money to pay the top guys, that's less money to pay everyone else, which is fairly obvious to me. If they all had bottomless cash reserves you would be right but sadly that isn't reality.


So the last 12 years of cuts didn't happen? wait times for everything are up from when the conservatives got in to now. Overall employment is down, but youth unemployment is hitting pretty much the level it was in the 80s. It wasn't down to lazy young people then and it isn't now. Older people sneering that the young are lazy is not a new phenomena either.

 

do you honestly think I care in the slightest what you or anyone else thinks of my opinions? I don't believe what I believe to be popular. And its only because of people like me that this place isn't a right wing echo chamber

 

That's exactly what I said. You're judging it against a tiny proportion that have no bearing on your life. Its not even all FTSE 100 companies, it's a tiny minority of those where the top wages 'a 1000 tines times the average'. Your comparison that it was 'previously 100 times' is still true for many of the FTSE companies.

They're the top 100 CEOs in the country who are responsible for about £2Trillion of revenue and £300billion of profit. Of course they're paid a lot when they're directly responsible for companies with those sorts of figures.

It's pointless though you might as well compare our wages to the top 100 footballers in the country. It would make just as much sense.

If you're the top 100 of anything in an income generating field you will be paid astronomically.

The mistake people make is thinking that if those 100 people got paid less the companies would boost up the other employee's wages - they wouldn't. They're not paying people £25k because they can't AFFORD to pay them £35k (the profits prove this, there's an enormous amount of leeway) its because that's the going rate in the job market and what people will accept to perform the role they are required to do. The company saving £2m on CEOs wages won't alter what people will accept.

And to say the explosion in revenue hasn't directly affected CEOs wages is clearly nonsense.

As for unemployment, I didn't say it wasn't an issue now. I was saying that the perception that "this generation has it the most difficult of any generation ever" clearly falls down when you compare it to previous ones. Employments statistics (and the quality of those jobs) are another example that it is a similar struggle that the current generation are going through as most in history......with massive additional benefits alongside it.

 

First time we've interacted in a while and you still talk rubbish, glad to see some things never change

 

I appreciate that a lot bud, as I said to Aaron the main thing I want is people to actually just even recognise these as valid issues rather than assuming I'm playing tragedy top trumps with people.

 

Totally agree trevor, successive governments have failed to tackle this issue for various reasons which has left us in the situation we are in. Also agree that whilst Thatcher wanted a home owning nation, we are now dealing with the unintended consequences of her housing policies.

 

I probably don't agree with a lot of @YungNath posts but being 27 he is absolutely right on housing, I'm forced into expensive private renting which leaves it almost impossible to put any savings away. I'm hoping that the government backed 5% deposit mortgages might help a little but even then I need to probably look at 8k minimum for something I'd want to live in.

 

This and some were/are lucky enough to live at home with the parents until they have the money behind them to move out.

 

Yes when that was the alternative option we found their deposits quickly .

 

I think it would be worth seeing if there's any figures on who's buying them, if its people getting their first property in record numbers then great but I don't think that will be the case.

 

Ah yeah, forgot you were tax dodging

 

Only council tax mate, no discounts on water and power sadly!