If you’ve ever applied for a loan or credit card, chances are your lender acquired and examined a copy of your credit report before deciding whether or not to grant you credit….

Our country provides many mechanism to improve your own situation. Ultimately, it’s up to the individuals to make it happen. Not a government program or a new law.

I think we are confusing different things here. I was responding to brainmarket’s statement that, atleast seemed to me, to imply that capitalism needs the poor to be uneducated to be successful. This is clearly not so. The more educated the poor become, the more productive they become, and more productivity gives us more economic growth. With economic growth, we raise wages (atleast indirectly). For example, compare a highly capitalist country like the United States and a less capitalist country like Mexico. Yes, we both have poor people, but poor in the United States have significantly better living standards. In other words, while poor in the United States may have crime and family problems, problems created more by cultural issues than by economic issues, Mexico’s poor have economic issues. It is not unusual, for example, for Mexico’s poor to work ~12+ hours in the field, in the heat of day. Yes, some of our poor still do that, but it is much more limited compared to non-capitalistic countries.

So my point there was that with a higher educated underclass, we have higher productivity, and with higher productivity we have higher economic growth, and economic growth raises the standard of living for all, meaning that the poor are better off than they would have been with less economic growth. To see how economic growth raises wages, atleast indirectly if not directly, read this.

However, what some of you seem to be implying is that capitalism, to some degree, depends - not on an uneducated underclass - but on income inequality. This is (somewhat) true, but remember, income inequality does not correlate with absolute poverty, but with relative poverty, also, income inequality is becoming less and less relevant as a measure of real differences in quality of life, for example, see here.

Now to go back to what brainmarket says,

Let’s face it. The less THEY have, the more WE have. That’s a fundamental principle of capitalism.

This assumes that capitalism, and economics as a whole, is a zero sum game, that the pie is fixed, and can’t be expanded. This is not true at all. In fact, the opposite is truer than this. It is capitalism, along with its widespread innovation, that creates more of the pie, than in other economies. I don’t have the time to explain this now, but this post is a good place to start.

By the way, I have a doctorate degree, work over 50 hours a week, and produce NOTHING. Unlike my father, who worked for 40 years in a factory producing goods which were sold by his educated “hard-working” employers for hundreds of times what he was paid to make them.

Educating the masses so that they might hope to be the exploiting minority and not exploited majority is logically impossible and therefore pointless. But still we dangle the bait and they take it—look at the percentage of how many small businesses fail each year because we conned poor people into thinking they could be part of entrepeneurial America. Is this our little joke at their expense?

Like its so easy to do all that. I have two B.A. and a few credits from an M.A. and I can only do three of those things.

I dunno HP, brianmarket’s arguement sorta makes sense. Then again even if we were all educated it would probably be at different levels thus still keeping a pyramid system as far as wages are concerned.

The reason people get paid more is because they produce more, nothing really more fundamental than that. That is why degrees in certain fields increases ones pay, because it signals that you will produce more.

So therefore educating the poor should make them more productive, more productive means higher pay.

In fact, if you look across the board at strongly capitalist countries, you will see that the more capitalist the country, the higher is the wage floor for the poor, not the lower.

Which is why the poor from other countries immigrate to this country, yet the poor from our country don’t immigrate to other countries.