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WHOA 64% to 29% of democrats.
Holy shit.
That's the headline right there.
this post was submitted on 14 May 2026
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I find the shift in black and Hispanic responses interesting as well. They were higher than white people before and now lower.
yeah it was a "first time?" moment
white people had chances to be employed for hundreds years earlier and still couldn't make it, while for many black people, it was the first time that they felt they got a chance too. 10 years later, many are disillusioned. i guess
this isn't beautiful. it looks like the numbers are rising. there are several ways to make the downward shift clearer.
on another note, it's always nice to see the cult is still drinking the kool aid. never change, idiot hogs.
Decline in upwards social mobility in the US (The very first graph is pretty illustrative)
I suspect almost all of those 47% are the old people who grew up when it was still the case for most people that they could actually improve their lot in life if the worked hard. That has worsened over time for decades and is not at all the case for the younger generations.
yeah i feel like the 1960s were the last time that people could actually be born and expect a lifetime of good employment options. for everyone after that, we're either getting the scraps, there's a declining labor market, we get to do the jobs today that didn't get done in the decades earlier, because nobody bothered to do them before, because they're less rewarding, anyways there's a ~~stagnating~~ declining labor market because there's just not so many more things to do. if you're born in 1800, people are spreading all over america, there's lots of stuff to do. if you're born in 1900, the electrical power grid just got invented, now there's time to build an industry. but now? (most of) all the technology is invented/developed. my honest prediction is that spaceflight is gonna be the last option to grow the economy, because space is (in principle) infinite, if we dare to use it. but apart from that, i don't think that people will have actual jobs (that are actually meaningful, no bullshit jobs, that pay actual wages, that actually improve society by a significant bit).
on the other side, it might be the start of a good time for all the people who don't actually want to work, because that's becoming a possibility, if we can push through the tax reforms to actually give wealth to the people, all of them.
So still about half of people are ignorant and have the intellect of a child. Got it.
That 47% are fucking delusional.
Even republican respondants going down is surprising
Ahead of whom, anyway?
many words today are used in a way that they can be interpreted in many ways, sothat each chooses the interpretation they like the most
some interpret:
- "getting ahead" = getting head. getting sexual experiences because times are good, people are enjoying things
- "getting ahead" = winning some race against somebody else. competitive people, competitive mindset. somebody else has to lose sothat you can win
- others just don't think about it and just take it as a "okay everything is good" thing.
Interesting how minorities believed it more then whites before, but now that has collapsed.
I guess 2016 was the height of the Obama era and there was still the slightest push to try and get minorities in high positions. Now anything that can help them has been deemed "woke" and defunded.
The three major groups of minorities are the emancipated black children of slavery, immigrants, and various natives.
For black people, even if equality hasn't been achieved, there was a rather large increase in quality of life for the overall community, even if it wasn't a uniform increase.
For immigrants, a lot of immigrants were able to improve their quality of life both within their generation and beyond to their next generation.
For various native groups, they are a rounding error compared to the first two groups.
I'd view this as a positive rather than a negative. 20% more people aren't delusional.
Things have definitely still gotten harder. Your framing isn't great because it implies things were just as hard a decade ago, which many factors point that isnt the case. I'm not saying it was easy then or the 67% were right, but things have gotten worse.
Yes, I was assuming people would be aware of that much on their own when I made a silly
I gladly receive any news of the expansion of class consciousness, and appreciate the data to prove it.
In the Netherlands, getting ahead requires a mix of talent, luck, being born in the right zip code and work. I can only guess how this works out in a highly competative economy like the US.
it's exactly the same.
the issue is the lack of a social safety net means your prospects of getting ahead if you are born poor are basically non-existence. that wasn't the case in the 1980s though, a poor kid could get into harvard with drive and effort. now, they don't have a much chance of going to a public college. the stats are insanely bad compared to where they were a generation or two ago.
the upper classes in the USA have systematically pulled up the opportunity ladder, and horded it all for themselves for the past 30 years. they have also made it so that talent less lazy children have to do very little to succeed in life, by systematically removing them from having to complete with talented hard working poor kids.
they seem themselves as an aristocracy more and more. the idea of meritocracy is rapidly disappearing.
sincere question - why does your zip code matter in the Netherlands?
Good question, and I was too lazy to search for a source. basically, statistical research has shown that zip codes of where you were born significantly correlate to income in the Netherlands, even in the same city. It depends partly on geography, but also on general wealth in the street you grow up in. A quickly googled source in Dutch: https://www.volkskrant.nl/nieuws-achtergrond/bepaalt-waar-je-bent-geboren-echt-je-kansen-in-het-leven~bc55f410/
In the United States, zip code also correlates because things like school funding are based on property tax and vary by location.
I recall getting one of these surveys a while back. It wasn't clear to me what they meant by "get ahead" or "work hard" or "can".
I selected "agree" for that question.
I think my main thought at the time was that if we all work together and help each other out instead of taking the easy route of continuing to contribute to the existing capitalist system, we could all have a much better quality of life.
Did the question say 'you' or 'we/us'?
Unfortunately I believed it in my youth. The hippies had the right idea. Take drugs and drop out of the normal economy.
I believe everyone has an obligation to make the world a better place. I resent peoples who abandon that obligation.
yeah like inmates or residents of auschwitz. the slackers.
the hippies all had trust funds. they never had to work in the first place.
just the modern day hippies do.
as true as any all x are/have y statements.
sorry, what working-class person do you know that goes around following phish or antoher hippie band?
it's not absolutely true, no, but it's generally true. to fuck off and not work for years, generally requires inherited wealth. normal people need income, because they don't have inherited wealth.
a lot of trust fund rich kids are pretend poor. tons of them in my city work work service jobs while they wait for their trusts to mature because it's 'authentic' and not 'working for the man, man'. meanwhile they turn 30/35 and you see them a few years later and suddenly they are telling you about their properties they rent...
I used to work in the ski industry. Almost everyone I knew was a drug-addled hippy who would work from August to March, then take seasonal unemployment and dick around all summer. Follow Phish, play in their own bands, or just do whippits in grocery store parking lots. And these weren't just college kids or anything. Most of it was guys who'd been doing the exact same thing every year for fifteen or twenty years.
right, people who don't need employment to live. it's an optional thing they do. precisely my point.
lots of trust fund types of people work part time for extra money or fun. that's very different than someone who needs to work full time year round to pay their bills.