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Roachboy, the "tendency to naturalize social inequities" that you see me doing is simply a recognition that different people are good at different things and have different priorities. One of my friends is extremely good at making money, seeing opporutnities, and he's very good at it. He's a wealthy man. I'm not nearly as focussed on money - I need to be creative - so I'm in a line of work where yes, I make a decent living, but I'll never be rich. Other people may value leisure time, or have lower risk tolerance, or avoid stress, or seek fulfillment in other ways.
There are tradeoffs everywhere, and I have enough respect for people as individuals to recognize that they are allowed to make their own choices and choose their own muse. They take the risks they find congenial, they follow the paths they find useful, and they are entitled to those. This is part of the reason why I asked in that other thread why it is that people find economic inequality so bothersome. There are plenty of inequalities between people - in terms of talent, intellect, physical abilities, attractiveness, musical talent, etc etc etc. We don't object to those. I would argue, in fact, that economic inequality is just one more kind of human diversity.
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interesting...one reason i jumped out from the education debt thing really is that i don't conflate the diversity of capabilities or talent or interests amongst populations in general with the *particular* way in which economic and cultural opportunities are distributed in the american/capitalist context. rather, i tend to see the latter as cutting across the former and imposing constraints/limitations arbitrarily--so that, say, within a particular class fraction (o why not---in bourdieu speak, the one i am of, the "dominanted fraction of the dominant class" which is the space that most folk with my educational background end up in, particularly if they also happen to consort with artist-types) you might find a particular range of capabilities and talents which have been able to achieve some degree of operational fluency (yikes) but you'd have to be kinda restricted in your view to imagine that this class fraction includes all possible folk who have or who started out having similar abilities or talents, but who--for arbitrary reasons, that is for reasons of economic position in the main--have not been able to access the background, the opportunities, the time to work with what they are able to do well and push it into new areas (new for them, new objectively, it hardly matters)--and who might not for any number of other reasons felt authorized to embark on this sort of path to begin with.
my main difference then with your position is in the relation each of us sees between a diversity of possibilities or capabilities in a population which you might think about like aristotle did, that is with economic factors excluded--so that a "good society" can be seen as one in which this diversity is able to find expression and flourish--and the capitalist mode of production, with its divisions into classes--compounded by the american-specific way of repeating this class division spatially--which is compounded by the ways in which education is funded by locality--which makes of educational opportunities the exact mirror of the class order.
i can imagine a set-up in which that correlation of educational opportunities and economic class would be reduced or eliminated, and that is what i was trying to explain above--and i got to it by taking off from your mention of debt acquired to get through law school---which (btw) i am not critical of in itself--hell, i wouldn't be playing here as i do had i not also had access to debt--but it's the idea that you have to acquire it in order to get something as basic as education that i dont agree with, that i dont understand.
so..hope this is clear.
the other riff about coercion was interesting when i started it, but i've kinda lost interest in it now, just because it seemed to lead to something more engaging. so reset. there: i pushed it.