I think historically it was with the rise of agriculture that we
began to have distinctions between rich and poor. I think tools were generally
shared among the tribe, not sure where I heard that. Heard last night on tv
that the bronze age looked pretty good as far as poverty, but that was in
Britain, it wouldn’t have held for Egypt or Mesopotamia.
I always think of that old time emperor thing when I am flying in a
plane. Even Napoleon or the tsars never got to do that, look down from that
high. And yet as I look around me on the plane hardly anybody is looking out
the window, they are more obsessed with trying to open that little bag of
peanuts, which are suddenly so important, but if someone had offered that to
them while they were sitting in the airport, they probably would have refused
it.
For a brief time there when I first started working in that office
in Chicago, I thought maybe I should try to get ahead, because what else was
there to do? I was no longer a hippie, all my friends were back in Champaign,
might as well become a bigger bureaucrat, but everybody I worked with had been
bureaucrats for years and knew the game and kicked me to the curb, which in
retrospect was just fine.
When they first started putting in public housing the plan was that
they would spread the poor around the city, but inasmuch as the poor were mostly
black, the white people didn’t want them in their neighborhoods, so they just
tore down the black neighborhoods and put up those awful high rises in the old
black neighborhoods.
One thing you hear from time to time is that in the bad old days
all the black people were confined to a little patch on the south side, but
because of that, all the blacks that did get ahead, the doctors, the funeral
directors, the preachers, etc, all lived cheek to jowl with the really poor, and
that gave the kids something to look up to. But as soon as segregation weakened
a little, all the rich black people moved out of the patch and then all the
black kids had to see was other poor black people.
When they tore down Cabrini Green the progressive thought was that
there would be mixed income communities. Rich and poor would live together in
harmony in the same building, but that hasn’t worked out to well. The poor
people tended to hang out in the common areas all day long, and leave their
stuff around and stay up late and drink, and the rich people didn’t like
that.
You know one of the problems is that the blacks tend to be poor and
the whites rich. I think white people would be more likely to want to share
with other white people, but not so much with black people.
That is one of the reasons Europe does better than the United
States in things like infant mortality, and surprisingly enough, height, we used
to be the tallest in the world, and many of us are, but there are those
unhealthy poor bringing us down. Because France is full of Frenchmen, they are
likely to help each other out, so their income is more even, they don’t have a
huge class in poverty to bring them down. They do have some poor muslims who I
think they treat shabbily, but not that many of them.
Poor people probably wouldn’t mind living with rich people, but it
doesn’t work the other way around.
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