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Comment by OGEnthusiast | Hacker News Reader

Really feels like the bottom ~70% of America is about to become a permanent underclass.

Phone use has taken us 80% of the way there. It’s wild how correlated kids with phones (and teens with social media) is to parents’ income.

Could you expand on that?

I could see rich kids using phones more. Or I could see poor kids using phones more, as an escape. Which way is the correlation?

Rich kids go to schools which ban phones—not phone use, phones entirely—and have device use policed at home.

The poorer the household the more likely they have a device, that they’re using that device in classes, and that they’re constantly on it at home. Within about ten seconds most people I know can tell if they’re in front of an iPad kid. (Eye contact. And not in the way someone on the spectrum avoids it while remaining engaged.)

Poor kids are consuming infinite AI slop and sports gambling at home, rich kids can afford to live in nice neighborhoods where they can enjoy public places and socialize.

Historically, 5 to 10% of the population have been the nobility, upper ranks of the clergy, and military officers and their families. Most of the rest has been the peasantry and landless workers with a small middle class of artisans and minor officials.

A great amount of inequality is normal. Only great wars and plagues achieve significant leveling of society.

Yeah, this is one of the non-theoretical slippery slopes everyone should have been worrying about online for the past couple decades. (Also attestation, but that ship is about to sail.)

What metric would you use to define underclass that doesn’t already apply?

Permanent is the more potent idea being conveyed. Loads of places have an underclass, but the idea that the opportunity to escape it and be condemned to a permanent social-economic station is contrary to the American myth.

I think 7% intergenerational poverty, primarily in the black community due to redlining and racist laws, covers it pretty well.

https://ballardbrief.byu.edu/issue-briefs/intergenerational-...

This is already the case

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