How can US social mobility stay vibrant past the 1970's?

[John Fredrick Parker]

Originally Posted by RousseauX

That's actually pretty good POD, the war on drugs have a massive effect on perpetuating the cycle of poverty for poor of the wrong skin color at the same time when their labor is needed less and less and society can therefore marginalize/ignore easier.

Well, except that PoD is far from simple to tie down...

[Plumber]

Originally Posted by John Fredrick Parker

Well, except that PoD is far from simple to tie down...

No, it's not.

[John Fredrick Parker]

Originally Posted by Plumber

No, it's not.

By "PoD is hard to tie down" I meant "hard to see what needed to happen so that what happened might plausibly have been averted" -- I am about the last person who would try to say it didn't happen.

[TxCoatl1970]

@ Mad Missouri
I'm sorry if I didn't go more into St. Louis city politics and mismanagement vis-a-vis Pruitt-Igo and many other issues. There's always more to the story. I'm just gleaning the highlights of a film I watched a couple of months ago and fitting it into my theme of failed attempts to include more people into the American mainstream and what might have worked better.
Hey, if NYC could turn itself around from the Rotten Apple 1970's to the present, St. Louis can.

@Sam R--
Maybe I'm completely wrong, but post-WWII, far more Americans got college-educated and were able to move from proletarian occupations to professional managerial occupations.
That's the social mobility I'm talking about where people make more money and do different work and improve their social status vs the generation before. You proved my point that once the WWII vets had made their bones in the 1960's, social mobility slowed down to a crawl. There's a ton of reasons why I'd like to explore and how we could improve upon OTL results.

So, let's see if we sort the spaghetti. As a leftish Democrat, my critique of modern America is pretty basic:

• The current crop of politicos bitterly fight covering everyone with health care, effective education, and so forth because it removes special advantages granted by superior resources. This is social overhead and we're able to do so much better cheaper providing for all than trying to buy individually a la carte.
• Poor people are stuck in a vicious cycle- they need tor run a gauntlet of low expectations, less social support, and harshly-tilted table against them to succeed. They have to put themselves in ridiculous amounts of debt to go to college. They're far more at risk of getting incarcerated, having untreated chronic diseases and so forth that burden themselves and society at large.
• Middle-class people are in a vicious cycle themselves. Jobs are less secure, pay less, and both spouses are having to work to maintain lifestyle. Their kids need to go into debt to get the wualifications to compete in the job market, face a much tougher job market and need a lot more social support to get launched to say age 25 vs previous generations.
• Saving for retirement is tough b/c real incomes have been flat for nearly forty years adjusted for inflation, so working class and middle-class folks have to gamble with 401k plans vs pension plans. Pension plans had their share of shenanigans, transparency issues, unfunded obligations, fraud, etc. but the current mess seniors face is a needlessly complicated mess.

[Sam R.]

Originally Posted by TxCoatl1970

@Sam R--
Maybe I'm completely wrong, but post-WWII, far more Americans got college-educated and were able to move from proletarian occupations to professional managerial occupations.
That's the social mobility I'm talking about where people make more money and do different work and improve their social status vs the generation before. You proved my point that once the WWII vets had made their bones in the 1960's, social mobility slowed down to a crawl. There's a ton of reasons why I'd like to explore and how we could improve upon OTL results.

I'm pointing out you're talking about "Socio-Economic Status" rather than class; That SES is meaningless as 20 years of plenty were wound back by 20 years of Reagan; That the "Professional-Managerial class" have been largely proletarianised.

If you want to talk about use values consumed as a marker of social difference then you need to go thoroughly relativist and you can't talk meaningfully about "improvement," just difference. As far as improvement goes, the return to labour as a percentage of GDP has shrunk, it is called emiseration.

I'm happy for you to explore the american lumpenproletariat with more refrigerators, but this isn't social mobility. In fact, I'm going to be blunt, and suggest that your version of "social mobility," merely is "respectability" or adaption to the dominant ideology by the proletariat.

yours,
Sam R.