Destruction of social mobility has surely trapped some innately able people in permanent cultural and fiscal poverty.
EMERALD, QUEENSLAND, AUSTRALIA: This is with reference to George Fulton’s article of August 11 titled “Underclass dismissed”.
I would like to thank the writer for a strikingly rational and perceptive analysis. I would like to add a few observations of my own. For decades, technology has been replacing low- to medium-skilled people in the workplace. Given that all of us have quite natural intellectual and educational limitations, the result has been the displacement of the less able and less educated from the workplace. Even the modest attainment of a pleasant middle class life now seems to require multiple degrees and continuous lifelong re-education and training. In addition to this, the destruction of social mobility (the vandalistic closing of grammar schools, the withdrawal of free tertiary education and the massive expansion of welfare) has surely trapped some innately able people in permanent cultural and fiscal poverty. The cherry on this evil cake is the ever-expanding population which, of course, depresses wages in the remaining low-skilled jobs.
Keith Rowley
Published in The Express Tribune, August 12th, 2011.
