What Happens When America’s Kids Confront Extreme Inequality?

Posted on April 7, 2016 by Yves Smith

Yves here. I hate to sound like a pessimist, but I see the generally hopeful message of this post as unduly optimistic. And the flaw of its reasoning is in the headline of this post: “when kids get to confront.”
The reason these kids could confront inequality in this vignette is that the happened to live in an extremely atypical neighborhood, Chelsea, which has gentrified at a rapid clip so that the rich and borderline poor are cheek by jowl. In virtually all of the rest of the world, the wealthy do a much better job of cloistering themselves. But Manhattan is still a city of neighborhoods, each with its own distinct character and age/ethnic mix, and people spend a lot of their time on foot, so your immediate environs is very much a part of your daily experience (unlike a lot of suburbs, where your home is much more self-contained than an apartment in a city). The cliche, “familiarity breeds contempt,” fits. In other settings, where the moneyed can keep themselves at a suitably large remove from the less well off, it’s easier for them to perpetuate the myth that they are fundamentally better and more deserving.


http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/04/what-happens-when-americas-kids-confront-extreme-inequality.html