| Imagine all the jobs in this country lined up like a row of chairs. On one end are the best
paying jobs, jobs that provide more money that any one hundred people all put together would ever need to live
in total comfort and security. On the other end are the lowest paying jobs, jobs that don't pay enough for even
one person to live on, much less a family. And beyond the lowest paying jobs are the empty places representing
no jobs. A certain percentage of people in this country will always be out of a job, just because that's how our
system works. Now all the people of this country begin racing to claim the best chairs. The smartest or fastest or luckiest ones tend to end up with the best chairs, while most of the rest end up somewhere in the middle, with jobs good enough to live on, but a certain percentage end up with the worst jobs, and beyond that, some end up with no jobs at all. A conservative might say that this picture is wrong, that in this country, a person can move up in the system by working hard and improving themselves, and in a sense, this is correct. Think about the turtle in the parable. The turtle ought to have ended up as one of the big losers in the game, but partly through luck and partly through application, he found a way to break into the middle class of animals. Likewise, someone in our race for chairs could train to become a better runner, and so reach a better chair than he would have otherwise. But just think for a minute what that means in the big picture. Suppose our someone ought to have gotten the worst available chair, the one on the very end of the line. Instead, he raises himself up and manages to grab the tenth chair from the end. This is a success story, right? But what happens to the person who would have gotten that tenth chair otherwise? He ends up getting bumped to the ninth chair from the end, and the person who would have gotten the ninth chair gets bumped to the eighth chair, and so on and so on, until someone new is now sitting in that worst possible chair. As long as the chairs are as unequal as they are, and the worst chairs are as bad as they are, and the rules say that some must end up with no chairs to boot, and as long as the game is musical chairs and the stakes are high, there is no way to avoid some percentage of the players ending up in misery. If you look at any individual player, you can think that maybe things can get better, since any individual player can try to do better, but in the big picture, the whole group doesn't do any better, since the same number of people will always end up with the bad chairs or with no chair. More than anything else, I hope that this website will encourage people to look at things in terms of the big picture like this. |