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Corona / Covid-19 Virus - General Discussion (politics go to the Off Topic / Politics thread)

Silvaire wrote:

What is important for quality of life is money and resources, not where you for for into their imagined social hierarchy.

In my opinion this is a very much oversimplified view: The amount of money and resources you need for a specific standard of living is actually quite closely connected to your social environment (I don’t like “social hierarchy” either because it implies a mono dimensional ranking that is not the case).

Example: If you live in a neighborhood of comparatively good social status, odds are quite high that the quality of the next public school is much better than the quality of a public school in a “poor neighborhood”. Therefore if you live in a poor social environment your cost to get the same quality schooling for your children is much higher.

Obviously with enough money and resources you can “buy yourself out of your social status” and move to a better neighborhood – but again there are step cost for that which are not negligible.

Germany

Peter wrote:

Norway is a hugely rich country. A small and socially cohesive population, relatively negligible ethnic issues, relatively negligible immigration issues, and looooads of oil money
  • Norway is hugely rich: correct
  • A small and socially cohesive population: Small – yes, cohesive – wrong. Lots of different cultures here. 15% of the population is immigrants, first generation and their children. We have a total of 5 official languages for instance, 2 Norwegian and 3 Sami (in addition to English and Swedish, which most of the hotel/restaurant personnel talk. They are not immigrants, but seasonal/part time workers, loads of them). On the other hand, in contrast to many other places we don’t tolerate “ghetto building”. If you want to live here, you have to behave like a “Norwegian” and uphold the “Norwegian values”. Brain washing is another word maybe
  • relatively negligible ethnic issues: wrong/right. As above, different cultures are good, but cultural aspects that oppose the “Norwegian values” aren’t tolerated. It’s not like ethnic issues don’t exist, it’s more that they are dealt with before they become problematic, for most of it at least.
  • relatively negligible immigration issues: same as above. If we would have allowed “ghettoing”, all hell would be lose here as other places.
  • looooads of oil money: correct of course, but that surplus is not simply used (see below).

I think the issue here is that since the dawn of time, we have had unwritten laws that every person has the right to pursuit his potential and dreams. When they started writing laws over 1000 years ago, this was incorporated into it. The law stated for instance that every free citizen had the right and duty to kill a tyrannical king, which happened all too often in fact There were also slaves at that time, but that’s was just “destiny”

I think one of the results of this is that the respect of people who have inherited power and wealth is as good as non existent. However, at the same time we love people who “makes it”, as long as they remember where they are coming from. I think those two aspects together are very difficult for many from foreign cultures to grasp, but is an intrinsic part of “Norwegian values”. There simply is no such thing as “inherited respect”. If you want respect, other than the basics, you better earn it. But I mean, it’s the same in all the Nordic countries, but most pronounced in Norway and Island perhaps, and least pronounced among the snobs in the capitol cities (Denmark and Sweden in particular). The quint essential Norwegian hero, is the one who starts out with two empty hands, and through his wits, kindness/helpfulness, industriousness and courage ends up with half the kingdom and the princess. Deep down it’s IMO these factors decided why Island and Norway are not part of EU, and why Sweden and Denmark are (although the practical difference today is as good as zero).

100-200 years ago Norway was one of the poorest countries in the entire world. This caused 1/3 of the population to emigrate to North America. Later, in most of the 1900s, shipping were the “alternative”. Of the entire worlds total merchant fleet, 1/4 of the tonnage were Norwegian. Not bad when the population was 3-4 million at the time. It wasn’t before the end of 1980s that oil money started pouring in. They are used for the oil fund, which today is the worlds largest pension fund. In total it owns 1.5% of all the worlds listed companies, again not bad for 5.4 million people My pension (and all other Norwegians).

The elephant is the circulation
ENVA ENOP ENMO, Norway

Malibuflyer wrote:

If you live in a neighborhood of comparatively good social status, odds are quite high that the quality of the next public school is much better than the quality of a public school in a “poor neighborhood”. Therefore if you live in a poor social environment your cost to get the same quality schooling for your children is much higher.

Education is certainly important. One of the best things that’s happened for students locally is that they can opt to go to private Charter schools, based not on geography but their interests and talent, using money taken from the geographically based public schools. This also had the effect of giving the Teachers Union some competition, the lack of which which had been causing problems for decades.

Last Edited by Silvaire at 14 Jan 15:04

Peter wrote:

Wales is a region which is extra poor nowadays because there used to be a lot of industry there which has died out and while billions were spent on regeneration of all the old Industrial Revolution regions, this only goes so far.

That happened in every western country, more or less. While some adapted well and managed to find replacement industries others did not do so well. It would be interesting to know the reasons why, but I expect there has already been tons of research on this.

Last Edited by Airborne_Again at 14 Jan 15:07
ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

A big factor is people’s willingness to physically move where the work and jobs are. This is now declining in the US, notwithstanding what seems to be an accelerating trend for people to relocate for other reasons. Perhaps the ability in some industries to work remotely will mitigate what I see as a slowly increasing and unjustified sense of entitlement to live in one place with or without means of support.

Last Edited by Silvaire at 14 Jan 15:32

Education is very important, but so are parental attitudes/expectations with regard to it – and a lot of this (in the UK at least) does derive from social class. The correlation with wealth is there in a general sense, but it is not absolute.

I grew up in South Wales and went to what might be regarded as a fairly good state-funded school. Compared to some of the stories one hears the class sizes were reasonable and the teachers mostly pretty good. Some very good and one or two rather poor, but mostly good enough to give every child who attended a good education. At age 16 probably half of our year group stayed on to do A-levels with the intention of going to university. I did not think about it at the time, but it basically correlated to the half with middle-class parents in professional occupations. Those who did not go to university are, for the most part, still living in that town or reasonably close by. Wealth was not a barrier really – the post-16 education was free and the university education (in 2000) still almost free, and in any case these were not ‘poor’ families – just average. Intelligence was not necessarily a barrier – some smart kids dropped out. What it seemed to come down to was history of education in the family – looking back it is obvious now who’s parents had degrees and who was expected to go to university, and who wasn’t.

Of course it can be done, but it is quite hard for a child from a family which does not value education to take the same (relatively easy for me) path that I took: do some A-levels in science subjects, get a degree in a science subject from a middle-ranking university, pursue a career in a scientific business working for large companies with good pay and benefits.

EGLM & EGTN

skydriller wrote:

I dont know where you get the idea that French medical care is some kind of panacea…I live in france and I can assure you it isnt, I find it extreamly disjointed and inefficient.

+1 proper third world stuff sometimes…

LFHN - Bellegarde - Vouvray France

Graham wrote:

What it seemed to come down to was history of education in the family – looking back it is obvious now who’s parents had degrees and who was expected to go to university, and who wasn’t.

That is the biggest problem with the advancement of the Hispanic immigrant population here, which is not coincidentally disproportionately infected with CV19. They have no tradition of advancement and parents don’t push their kids hard enough. In contrast the Vietnamese and other Asians more often push like hell, and typically the second generation is affluent and fully integrated into the economy. The only difference is attitude.

I’m the first and only person in my extended family to have ever attended university. I came to US relatively young, not wealthy, and very much like the Hispanics in that the parental expectation for me was not that high – I recall my father telling me that maybe I could be a handyman with a little truck, the kind that make $20/hr. However while my parents had and have a very limited and repressed view of the economic potential in this area, they’re otherwise smart people – my father has a genius IQ in spite of being profoundly dumb in some ways. You do learn to think with parents who think. In the end I figured it out myself and left them behind in terms of understanding what is possible, and how to do it. That process was helped by having been moved to a very diverse place with lots going on, not an isolated, poor mono-culture.

Moving plus thinking works to shake things up. What young, poor people in Wales need to do is find a way to leave for greener pastures, and apply themselves to the problem of accumulating resources once they get there. What they don’t need is to be told they are “deprived” victims by paternalistic twits.

Last Edited by Silvaire at 14 Jan 17:00

Graham wrote:

Of course it can be done, but it is quite hard for a child from a family which does not value education to take the same (relatively easy for me) path that I took

I totally agree with this.

In my first job, I worked with a lady who was from a poor part of the city. One day it came up in conversation that of the approx 50 houses on her road, she was the only one who had a job. I’ve often thought about how hard it must be for a child growing up there to even think that getting a job and a career was a possibility. Their parents have never had a job, they know nobody with a job/career.

These people aren’t stupid. They understand the social welfare system and are experts at working it, as it if was a job. They could act as excellent consultants on it!

But to them the idea of getting a job or career is as unobtainable as the idea of buying a brand new business jet is to me. It’s not that they wouldn’t like the lifestyle that a good job can bring, but it’s not something they see as a possibility.

And if they have their eyes opened, they face all sorts of additional difficulties. Teachers who are over worked just trying to keep discipline in the class room, never mind give attention to a student who is trying. Parents who don’t have enough education to help them when they are struggling. Parents who haven’t been though the process of getting to collage or getting a job themselves can’t offer any advice. And if they make it that far, potential employers are suspicious when they see they are from a “bad area” and speak with the wrong accent.

It doesn’t surprise me when some turn to crime as a possibility to improve their lifestyle, even if it’s only for the short term.

The interactions needs to be made much earlier, so the children have both a role model and a mentor to help them. And such bad areas need to be broken up so that no child grows up in an area where nobody around them has a job. You can only aspire to something that you see happening around you….something you can imagine is a possibility for you if you try hard enough.

EIWT Weston, Ireland

Silvaire wrote:

What young, poor people in Wales need to do is find a way to leave for greener pastures, and apply themselves to the problem of accumulating resources once they get there.

This was evident in my observation of the problem. Referring back to the 50% of my peers at school who didn’t do A-levels with a view to going to university, there was a home town mentality that seemed to underpin their view of the world. To them, Cardiff was a long way away and a big city. London was a completely different world. Spain was somewhere you went on holiday. To a lot of these people, the idea that they might move to another town or city in a completely different part of the UK, or even abroad, just didn’t register.

I grew up there but I knew there wasn’t much work there, so I didn’t go back after university.

EGLM & EGTN
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