Blog – ‘Engaging the Text’ #2 on p. 322
The essay does make a case that the wealthy are exploiting the poor. Gregory Mantsios explicitly says that capitalism is designed to give the powerflul people money and keep poorer people poor. Mantsios doesn't just assume this, he offers statistics showing how this works, such as SAT scores. Mantsios shows that the richer one is the higher SAT score they are likely to get, and the easier it will be for them to get into college, and therefore to get a job, etc... In addition, he points out that rich people keep money in the family. He says that 86% of people who make 100,000 dollars a year received assets that contributed a "substantial amount" to their financial situation. There certainly are other interpretations of the data that Mantsios provides, especially regarding the middle class. Mantsios defines the middle class as just 4% of the population. But the middle class could also be defined as an ever-changing group of people in the middle of how much money people actually make, as opposed to his method of taking all the money and dividing it by the number of people.
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Josh,
I found your stand on this article to be very interesting. After reading many of our classmates blogs, you are one of the few that has a different opinion. However, I found that your use of data to be convincing. It's interesting to see that you used the same information many of us did, but interpreted it differently. I never really thought about the SAT scores as an exploitation factor, but more as a comparison between the two classes. Interesting post!
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