The United States, with its enormous highways, sprawling suburbs and neglected public transport systems, is one of the most car-dependent countries in the world. But this arrangement of obligatory driving is making many Americans actively unhappy, new research has found
Not everything; some things are about racism. Suburban sprawl and car dependency owe a lot to white flight to suburbs with racial covenants and racist urban-planning decisions like Robert Moses making overpasses on roads to suburbs too low for buses to keep the minorities contained in the ghettos. The idea of retreating to defensible space (in a suburban cul-de-sac or a personal car) also raises the question of who one is expecting to defend against.
The stratification of society is also about money. You need to have an underclass to scare and motivate the workforce.
Some of it is subject to human frailty. Even the rich are too busy being racist to make the most money they possibly could. Human biases affect and infect even the systems we produce in ways that are difficult to untangle or even perceive at first glance.
The fictional, optimal economist version of people doesn’t exist in boardrooms or secret societies either. It exists nowhere.
It’s important to understand that because otherwise you lend credence to the mystifying, unempowering idea that they are all part of an unstoppable plot full of perfect agents and not just a cohort of self-centered, biased, and routinely misguided mortals just like the rest of us.
Yes, it is not a statistical oddity the wealthy are shit humans. This system is guaranteed to produce these oligarchs.
“see, if you don’t slave your ass day and night, there are those who are desperate to work double your work for half the wage”. Again, fuck this country and on top of that, fuck capitalism.
And if there aren’t, we’ll get some people like that. See the recent H1B debate.