Good luck with that.................

 

If Mamdani wants his affordability agenda to be more than a redistribution of this shrinking pie, he will need to recharge the private-sector engines of upward mobility. He can do that by confronting the occupational licensing and business regulations, land-use restrictions, and cost drivers that have made middle-class life in New York so hard to sustain.

-Michael Dresdale, from this essay

mobility........................

 

Social mobility was not very common in the eighteenth century.  But Franklin proudly made it his mission—indeed, helped it become part of America's mission—that a tradesman could rise in the world and stand before kings.

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

Opening paragraphs..............

      Feudalism is making a comeback, long after it was believed to have been deposited in the historical dustbin.  Of course it will look different this time around: we won't see Knights in shining armor, or vassals doing homage to their lords, or a powerful Catholic Church enforcing the reigning orthodoxy.  What we are seeing is a new form of aristocracy developing in the United States and beyond, as wealth in our postindustrial economy tends to be ever more concentrated in fewer hands.  Societies are becoming more stratified, with decreasing chances of upward mobility for most of the population.  A class of thought leaders and opinion makers, which I call the "clerisy" provide intellectual support for the emerging hierarchy.  As avenues for upward mobility are diminishing, the model of liberal capitalism is losing appeal around the globe, and new doctrines are arising in its place, including ones that lend support to a kind of neo-feudalism.

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class