Uta posted...
This is ultimately just what Late-Stage Capitalism looks like. America is rapidly getting there if we aren't already. Japan has been there for a while, Korea is speed-running it, and China will probably start to get there if they aren't there already (I dunno, I'm not super well-versed on China's economic policy, it's an area of new research for me).
China's already there. Taiwan is there too. Chinese tech companies have a 996 workday (9 am to 9pm, 6 days a week) and Taiwan faces a lot of the same problems that Korea and Japan do - a lot of the prestigious jobs are concentrated in a very small number of ultra-prestigious companies that expect you to put your literal body on the line and grind you into the dust. Japan at least seems to have housing that *tends* to be more affordable, but Taiwan's home sale prices to incomes are just ridiculous - someone working a typical office job would have to slave away for decades in order to own property. The only real explanation for how property values keep going up in a country with a stagnating population is...well...rampant real estate speculation. I do not know if Korea has the same problem, but China does as well.
And yeah, I'd say the US has a lot of the same problems. Americans are sold a dream about working hard in order to get ahead. But it's not true. The overwhelming majority of wealth in America is inherited. Social mobility in the United States has decreased dramatically. Even our education system is basically a function of wealth - the college admissions bribery scandal a few years back made it abundantly clear that rich and wealthy people have such huge advantages when it comes to education, which should be a public good to begin with.
So when you have a society which promises people that people who work hard can "make it", and then it just turns out that there aren't enough resources out there for everyone to "make it", young men end up jumping on board the Andrew Tate bandwagon. The comments left by those men in those comments are reprehensible, to be sure, but I think if you go to an MMA gym or some gaming forums, you'll hear the same shit in America.