Social Mobility

Today my office is having its carpeting replaced and the whole place is overrun by an army of movers, installers and handymen. The work crew rubs its large, tattooed, sweaty shoulders with the starched shirts of my pencil-necked colleagues. They yell across the hallways and laugh heartily when one of them drops a 200 pound cabinet on his toes. My co-workers cower in their cubicles, obviously uneasy with having to share their breathing space with the kind of people that they would cross the street to avoid in a dodgy neighborhood.
Watching the two groups side by side, it's easy to understand why liberals bemoan the lack of social mobility in today's America. The two are practically different species. I cannot see how anyone from the mouth breathing section of the population could transition to the heads-up-their-asses segment, without some form of early life miracle.The American dream of the hard-working mail clerk struggling up through the organization to become CEO is not just dead, it's laughable. A child from a poor and uneducated family will not be able to join the white-collared throng that clogs the freeway at rush hour in their tin coffins, unless he has a great deal of luck and significant internal motivation when he is still young.
While making the inter-class leap may be difficult in the US, it is virtually impossible in India. The flattening world has given the well educated minority a huge boost, while leaving the vast unwashed practically untouched and staring at a rapidly growing rift that they never will cross.
A maid from my college days in India sent her son to meet me when I was down there, in the hope that I could give him some career advice. Honestly, I was stumped. The boy had dropped out of school after the 5th grade and now helped his uncle at his electrician's practice. I racked my brains for a practical and honest answer, trying to put myself in his shoes. If I were him and knew what I know, how could I get back to an economically secure position without my college degrees, social connections and inside information of the system? The only answer I think of was this - if you're ballsy then get into crime, if you're glib then get into politics (although, come to think of it, the latter is just a slightly polished version of the former). Of course I didn't voice my thoughts, but instead dismissed the boy with some meaningless platitudes about working hard and trying to complete school.
If I had to guess then, based upon current trends, I would say that eventually the whole world would be broken up into the uneducated poor and the educated ownership class and that the gap between the two would increase substantially.
Rich countries would outsource the old service sector jobs that were once used as a bridge from one class to the next, to poorer countries. People in management or those who own shares in large companies will grow richer as productivity increases, while the uneducated and even the poorly educated will find it increasingly difficult to land a competitive job.
In developing countries again, those who have a good education will land high paying employment in global companies and those who are already wealthy will grow even more so as their assets appreciate in value. Children born to uneducated, poor families will never be able to accumulate the tools required to compete in one lifetime - unless, again, they turn to either crime or politics (After all Dawood Ibrahim was the son of a beat constable and the Rt Hon Deve Gowda used to haul sacks of potatoes at the Mandya railway station).
My advice? The chasm is going to grow increasingly large as the years go by. If you're born on the wrong side of it then at least try to lay the foundations so your children can cross it. If you're fortunate to start your life on the right side of the tracks then start accumulating blue chip stock (Big companies are always going to get bigger) and real estate (God isn't making any more of it) as soon as you afford it. That way even if your children grow up to be potheads or art history majors, they will still have a decent shot at a good life.