That experience is not restricted to "3rd world". I think what you describe could be simply called "class differences".
Even what we now call 1st world countries had incredible poverty some 60 years back and it's not so long back, even if the face of poverty has recently changed from lack of opportunity to lack of achievement.
Up to 1980's, in the Finnish welfare state where I grew up, you would see men who slept in trash boxes through the -30°C winter nights. Men broken by war, alcohol and unemployment. Some women, too. With the minds, bodies and experiences they had, they did not have opportunity for anything better.
Yeah, seriously. My family has been American for at least four generations. I can tell by looking in the mirror that I'm at least 95% European, but I have no idea from where - before about my great-grandparents, there isn't much genealogy to follow, and for the most part that's because most of my ancestors were trying to keep a low profile and avoid having any records that the police could follow. I'm doing OK for myself now, but I grew up at the end of a dead-end dirt road that was connected by another dirt road to the actual paved roads. There's poor everywhere.
True enough, but having a history doesn't make one "high-class". I do know part of my genealogy up to a landed gentry nobleman who wreaked havoc in Germany and Prague in the 30-year war on behalf of the Swedish king, but still my father was born to a tenant farmer family.
But you may have a point that apparently the social differences are smaller small countries and communities where genealogy is better known. To take an example, in Iceland, there is extremely good genealogical data about everyone for over a millennium. Social differences are not very big and were not that big even before the adoption of modern welfare state.
Actually it probably does a "poor" kid from the right back ground (minor nobility landed gentry or even middle class ) will find it easier to get into Oxbridge / Harvard and also grok the social aspects as your parents told you how it works - Boris Johnson is a good example originally not rich but had a lot of connections.
For example know why not to wear "brown" shoes in town to an interview for a high paying job / internship.
I'm not British, but I've worked for several British companies and this topic has come up in conversation when I complimented someone on their black shoes with a Navy suit, as it's a combination that I never thought to pair (I hate black shoes).
My understanding is brown shoes are considered to be sporty or informal Britons. It's something you'd wear to go hunting or on a picnic, never to a work. So I think wearing brown shoes with business attire is seen almost like an American wearing hiking boots.
Because it shows that you don't know the rule not to wear "brown" shoes in town to an interview for a high paying job / internship and thus are not of the right class to get a high paying job / internship.
Though here perhaps the "class" is not exactly the right word. To know etiquette is not quite the same as belonging to a social class.
Question: do upper class Americans eat with fork in the left hand and knife in the right? Because I notice most everyone in America that I have met eats with the fork in the right hand, and I am almost unable to eat that way (except dessert).
It's curious, as a lot of etiquette norms are grown out of simply practical considerations (in this case, dominant right hand considered safer for knife).
If you are 4th generation, you probably are from a bit of everywhere given the way mixing works. But then even Europeans might ask themselves this question, since migration was/is a common thing in Europe as well.
Europeans know where they're from, their biggest question is what do you call the place they're from. "The conglomerate of free counties of supreme holiness", or "the post WWII ethnic safe districts masquerading as countries"
in a lot of the world there are good reasons to only talk about the current national identity, but that doesn't mean they don't know where their family is from.
Going back four and five generations, unless you're from a prominent family or living in a family register-using country or something like that, the records are probably pretty spotty
don't think so, coming from small country which was part of empire until WW1 there was not much issues to track records back to around 1750 mostly thanks to church (i remember national census around 1850) and it was family of farmers and guys doing odd jobs, nothing prominent, heck i remember one couple in family tree which had even birth date hour, both born between 2-3PM it got stuck in my head or poor fella having 14 children but only 5 of them surviving and their mother dying in 42
There are lots of issues with the accuracy of that stuff, but even if there weren't, really, what does it matter, if you don't have any sort of connection to the places your forebears were from anymore?
I don’t know, I feel it connects and grounds us to know a thing of our past. I like to ask people about their ancestry as part of bantering and I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations that way.
I’m a fourth generation American of Eastern European Jewish background and I’ve been able to track my ancestry back into specific countries in Eastern Europe via documentation I’ve dug up on ancestry.com but haven’t gotten further. I’ve found it a fascinating exercise. I have not been able to determine the source of my surname (Soffian) which still remains a curiosity for me. Sometimes you uncover interesting artifacts. I learned I had a great uncle who immigrated to America from Romania aboard the RMS Carpathia in 1904. Eight years later in 1912, this would be the first ship to come to the Titanic’s rescue, and six years after that would itself be sunk by a U-Boat. My great uncle had left Romania likely to escape anti-semitism. He’d eventually find his way out to Denver. Sadly, he’d die in 1918 (the same year the Carpathia was sunk) at the age of 25, very probably from the flu.
This was him btw, along with his headstone and declaration of intent to become a citizen:
My wife convinced me to do one of those this year actually - not 23andme, maybe ancestry.com? It's the one where you spit in a tube and mail it in. The results came back 98% Caucasian, northern Europe, and a lot of other stuff that looked like they just randomly made it up to make me feel like they really did something. I told one of my (Mexican) wife's (Mexican) friends that the results confirmed that I'm the whitest white guy in town and he said, "I could have save you $200 and told you that!"
The USA has a lot of room to improve for sure. But solutions that work for Finland, which is a small, ethnically homogeneous, high trust society, simply won't map to the USA which is the opposite of all those things.
It won't map because of our national obsession with crime and punishment. I'd bet dollars to donuts that it's far cheaper to put a drunk in a homeless shelter AND give him treatment (AlAnon, etc) than it is to lock him in a cage with a herd of sociopaths. But the Prison Industrial Complex has got to look out for its own, after all.
I agree with everything you said except for this. The idea that many/most/all prisoners are violent or sociopathic is a myth propagated by those who stand to benefit from the prison industrial complex. Prisoners are human and prisons are inhumane. For another take, here's the IWW IWOC[0]:
> Incarcerated people are legally slaves as per the 13th Amendment which abolished "slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime". We are legally slaves. If you've been to prison you'd know we are treated like slaves.
Billions are made annually off our backs. Outrageously priced or grossly inadequate privatized 'services' like health care, food, phone calls, assault our humanity - they feed us like animals, suck our families dry, and when sick leave us to die. The government spends as much as an elite college tuition per person to keep each of us incarcerated, but this money does not develop us as human beings, reduce crime or make our communities safer.
I wasn't making any claim to the tendencies of many/most/all prisoners. My point was that putting non-violent petty offenders in jail/prison puts them in the path of a concentration of sociopathic people, those who really should be kept out of society.
The intention isn't so much crime and punishment as is the justification. The need to reallocate idle citizens producing no economic value is the systemic reason to high prisoner count domestically. America's prisons are largely forced labor camps recycling rebellious, able-bodied men into a working, productive labor force. One local example for me is paying californian prisoner's $1/hour to fight forest fires in the American west.
Sure these solutions would work. Institute free universal healthcare paid for through the tax system, spend money on empowering women and helping families with children (including family planning), and make education free up to and including college.
To finance it, tax the rich, dismantle 4/5ths of the US military and stop fueling wars overseas.
But that's called socialism and is (unlike actual treason) treated like it would be high treason by the US political parties; mostly because they are all in the pockets of wealthy donors who would not like this new regime.
You can’t force people to accept treatment in US. While these might slow growth of the homeless population in dire need of medical help, it won’t prevent it.
To have no homeless, you have to have both resourcing for housing/medical, but also be willing to use force to compel those unwilling to get treatment/be housed where they have little choice. That’s a very tough leap to make.
The choice part never made sense to me - why would anyone want to live like that? But, as a society we value free will and therefore must respect the choices we do not agree with.
You don't generally have to force folks to get help. We (the US) do it in a small portion of the population: Severe mental illness, dementia, and substance abuse. They aren't talking about forcing folks to do things. You can encourage folks to do such things, though.
Most folks don't actually want to live like that, but some really do want to shun society. You can offer folks things like primitive cabins to help them shun society. Substance abuse, mental illness, and job loss are real problema with real solutions. Heck, if you can't solve someone's substance abuse or alcoholism, you can at least make sure they have shelter and food available to keep them safe even if they won't pay for such things. For a single person, it doesn't have to be luxurious: A dorm setup with private bathrooms and shared kitchen can work out.
Or maybe USA has way more people or other factors that make it a harder problem.
Some homeless people can't be helped since they have mental illnesses and break away from hospitals (USA has 70 times more people and homeless people are concentrating themselves in population hubs - that could make the problem more visible), and so on.
Something I've noticed about developing countries, people never attribute poverty to a character failure. People in developing countries come face to face with poverty every day, they have poor friends and poor family members, so the idea that poor people are unintelligent or not hard-working, never occurs.
When countries become rich (it's not just America), people lose their connection with poverty and start to blame poor people for being poor. This lets them justify voting against social security programmes because they believe "it will never happen to me, I'm not the kind of person who becomes poor".
Is saying that many of the homeless in America are mentally ill blaming them? It's our health system that can't handle them, for a plethora of reasons. It's not the homeless peoples' fault for having schizophrenia or PTSD or whatever mental illness, which many of them do.
Homelessness can't be fixed "at source". People become homeless simply by losing their job and defaulting on their mortgage.
Walking around San Francisco you would get the impression that most homeless people are mentally ill, but you'd be missing all the people sleeping away from busy streets, in tents, in their cars, squatting in unused buildings, couch surfing between friends, etc.
Poverty isn't caused by mental illness though it may be correlated with it. How many were mentally ill before becoming homeless? At what rate would wealthy people develop mental illness if you force them into the same situation?
In a lot of ways America is undergoing a "Caribbeanization" where there are two strata of society who rarely interact with each other except in contexts like buying something from a store and so have little concept of the other's way of living.
Not all social security programmes are good. Some of them are unrealistic, some of them are unfair to other people, etc. Voting against a particular social programme doesn't imply the person doesn't feel solidarity in general.
Maybe they're voting against it because while they're not poor, they still don't have more than enough - you can solve that by funding it through a progressive tax, but that makes it unfair in the views of many people.
That is true as well, including things like slavery, historical and recent immigration waves, and generally a rather different approach to social security, and much much more diversity.
I'm a Caucasian American whose family has no records of where we came from, not even where in the US my ancestors lived before they moved to the farm in middle of no where. My parents grew up on farms where the food they grew was the food they ate, and while my own childhood wasn't improvised (probably upper working class, if that's a thing), a lot of OP's post resonates with me.
For example the following feels like it was describing my own childhood.
>Beating your kids is not the right way to raise them. Yelling louder is not the way to win an argument. Hiding your faults hurts your family more than it helps.
When one focuses all their efforts in and before college in the sciences, neglecting a rounded, liberal education in the process, I am not all surprised by the lack of class knowledge.
Even what we now call 1st world countries had incredible poverty some 60 years back and it's not so long back, even if the face of poverty has recently changed from lack of opportunity to lack of achievement.
Up to 1980's, in the Finnish welfare state where I grew up, you would see men who slept in trash boxes through the -30°C winter nights. Men broken by war, alcohol and unemployment. Some women, too. With the minds, bodies and experiences they had, they did not have opportunity for anything better.