Increase in culture of envy

[BrighteyesBonnie]

AIBU to think that the culture of envy has increased significantly in the UK (if Mumsnet is anything to go by)?

For example, a thread by a lawyer asking whether their current salary is fair given their qualifications and years of experience contained a lot of responses angry that the OP is earning more than them and also ridiculing the OP for wanting a better salary.

Another example are threads on private schools, where there is a strong undercurrent of anger at those who are sending or want to send their children to private schools. Privately educated people are viewed with harsh lenses and often insulted.

Ambition and doing well do not appear to be appreciated if you’re doing better than the average.

@Bumpitybumper I'm not sure why you replied to my point with your post?

*I can’t say I feel as

I know 6 people personally who are currently on TC who came from nothing and 2 even had to do access course due to issues in their upbringing.
Qualifying as a lawyer is no longer just for rich. Hasn't been for years now. Assuming that everyone was "priviledged" to qualify is quite diminishing work of people who did work hard.

Equally I don’t have much sympathy for people who make silly life decisions which will very clearly impact their earning potential. You see it on here time and time again. ‘I gave up work to be an unmarried SAHM and now hubby is leaving me, I’m screwed’. ‘3 kids under 5, pregnant and can’t afford food’. ‘AIBU to keep the baby even though the dad is a deadbeat loser and won’t contribute CMS’.

I don't consider looking after my children and giving them a good start as "a silly decision", but yes my career took a 16 year pause due to not working and then working around term time. However, raising kids is an important job and I don't think the rhetoric I am seeing on here of "don't ask for government help" is appalling. If you want to get cynical I was raising future workers who will pay your pensions.

I agree with this.

Social mobility is easier now than at any time in our history. If you have ambitions for yourselves and your children, the amount of resources and training to get you there is second to none.

I worry that the haters of the rich will change this country for the worse. Higher earners pay more in tax. Therefore the more higher earners we have the more tax there is to spend on public services.

Also, it's just a bit miserable to have no ambition for your children. I grew up in terraced house in the middle of a northern town, state schools etc.

Now earning £75k and am the breadwinner in my family. My DH has a famine or feast kind of business, but he grafts every day.

Qualifying as a lawyer is no longer just for rich. Hasn't been for years now

certainly still in MC firms partners from a private education background are over represented.

I bet half the people on that thread and on here piping up about 'inequality' (as if that's even the fault of high earners!) are working class Tory voters and don't see the correlation of that and the cost of living crisis/ever widening rich/poor division. Envy is easier than facing reality. As pointless as envy is.

I am continually surprised at the lack of envy in my home country, or at least the lack of consequences of such.

Go visit a deprived area of a northern city or town. (Hartlepool, say, or Walton in Liverpool) Then have a look round the rolling acres of the home counties with their big detached houses, mansions and castles. Why do the inhabitants of the former not simply go en masse and take from the inhabitants of the latter? Why do the many not simply grab from the few? It's a mystery to me.

And, along the same lines, albeit perhaps less, er, revolutionary, why do the masses of poor people not vote for a more equitable distribution of societal goods and wealth? A mystery.

If you are poor, and envy the rich, it seems obvious you will vote in favour of high taxes on the rich. Even if your income and/or wealth is just below the median, it would seem beneficial that you vote for higher redistributive taxation. Why don't you, then?

Perhaps people weigh such matters and come to a reasonable conclusion contrary to my own here. Perhaps they just don't envy the rich? Perhaps I miscounted? Or maybe it's something to do with who owns the information media and stuff like that. I wonder ...

I'm quite comfortable myself, btw. Well above median income and wealth. I was lucky. I cushion myself from possible big increases in taxation if ever poor people get envious by large regular charitable donations, which I can divert into taxation if ever society gets real about redistribution. I'm still comfortable after these donations, and so I would be under a fair system of taxation. (The difference would be that almost everyone was - just about - comfortably off as I am now.)

A (relatively) rich person, I vote and agitate for higher graduated taxation. (As a start, Bernie Sanders recently advocated 100% tax on income over $1bn. That's a start only, of course.) Why don't more people do as I do? Given the comfort and individual pleasure of my own existence, I can only surmise it's down to foolishness allied to moral turpitude. (Yes, that seems to fit many of the MN-posting bourgeoisie. Yes, indeed.)

Aren't most of them over 40? That really doesn't affect my point about who is qualifying recent years.

Because you implied inherited wealth was the biggest issue and not salaries. My point was the UK's distribution of wealth was actually very average when compared to other OECD countries so why do you think it's a massive issue? It's isn't exceptional in anyway and is streets ahead of other countries such as Sweden that people on this forum fawn over

It’s people’s sacrificing and saving and taking on large debt that they work to pay off.

And the parents who pass on their “wealth” to their children presumably worked and made choices that allowed them to be in a position to save and pass on wealth.

@Swansandcustard

How come the children of immigrants do well then?
Their parents usually have nothing and in the 70's & 80's mostly didn't even have the 'privilege' of speaking English and institutional racism plus everyday racism but still do better than their white contemporaries at the local crap school - now their kids, grandchildren are in high paying jobs.

As an Asian I and a lot of Asians I know don't have a lot of respect for people that claim their parents poverty, state schools etc for their lack of success or success as in not doing minimum wage jobs and admin - if we can do it what's stopping all those people that have the privilege of at least having parents that could speak the language English as natives stop them achieving, they have a head start!

I do, and I haven’t claimed otherwise. Not being inclined to perform affected humility does not mean I’m unaware.

My point is that my parents came from nothing and built their wealth, something they could do by virtue of the opportunities this country provided.

crossstitchingnana

You're doing no one favours by raising your children

That poster doesn't need your kids for her pension
State pension is rubbish and that poster probably has a private pension.

You raised your kids for you no one else cares about them, the world is over populated - immigrant labour can be bought in and it's better

Because it was made clear to you that you are not entitled to anything and have to work for it - 10 times as hard and that ambition to do better isn’t something to be embarrassed about. Certainly, it wasn’t the vibes or culture that it is somehow wrong to do better than others. However, you’ll now be called privileged and entitled.

It's a symptom of the cost of living.

Money doesn't go as far as it used to.

Can someone get that message out to all the poor people complaining on this thread then?

PS Some (rough-and-ready but indicative) numbers.

GDP/head, UK £32887 pa in 2022, see Office for National Statistics, UK Government

So, for a couple, about £65000 pa, or £5.5k per month.

Of course, from that we need to take tax to pay for public goods like NHS and schools and so on (yes, and fixing potholes, staffing libraries etc.) And for future investment. And so on.

A couple on £5.5k a month, how much tax could they afford to pay? Maybe 60%, leaving £2.2k/month spending? More? Less?

... And don't forget the possibility of taxing wealth, as well as income. Lots of scope there, even if we leave an ordinary home as an asset outside the realm of taxation, particularly for funding infrastructure such as transport systems and hospitals ... etc.

Long and short of this. If your income is currently less than GDP/head and your wealth amounts to no more than your house and garden (or for many people currently, not even that), it seems - all question of envy aside - in your interest for you to vote for higher taxes on income and wealth.

Why don't you?

It would appear that working hard and achieving is now a privilege rather than just that - working hard and achieving. The norm should be having less than your neighbour. Working to better yourself and succeeding in doing so is a privilege, even worse if your parents did the same, instil the same ethics in you, help you with the savings that they put aside, etc

GFP per head isn’t GDP per couple?

Both my grandfathers (born in 1923 and 1928 respectively) came from very poor working class families. One from a South Wales mining community, the other from the East End. Both did well for themselves, both bought large family homes and raised three children and had a non-working wife, and both eventually died leaving large enough estates to pay inheritance tax.

Their children and grandchildren (including me) have benefited from their hard work and ambition, no doubt about it. But I have friends whose parents and grandparents had no wealth to pass on. I am not better than them. I don't even earn more than them, in some cases.

My dad is intelligent and went to university but was not particularly ambitious and was definitely underpaid for his entire career. He was able to buy what is now a very valuable house using a £5,000 loan from his dad (about a 25% deposit on the purchase price) and getting a £15,000 mortgage based on his starting salary as a graduate trainee. As far as I am aware he never once asked for a pay rise, and his salary and career progression stagnated for the next 30 years.

In order to lend me an equivalent sum (25% of the value of the house my dad bought in 1979) he would have needed to find £150,000 in cash (three times his gross salary), not £5,000. But even then, it wouldn't have been enough, because I wouldn't have been able to raise a mortgage for the remaining £450,000 on my salary alone, despite the fact that my salary was actually higher than his by the time I was in my early 30s, i.e. getting on for 10 years older than he was when he bought that house.

If you don't have family money, then even if you have a six figure salary it's all going to go on buying and paying off a pretty ordinary house. School fees and skiing holidays are probably still out of your reach, and accumulating wealth to pass on to your children out of that salary probably could not be further from your mind right now.

I have a high salary (comparatively much higher than either of my parents have ever earned), AND I have had help from my parents towards my house deposit, AND I went back to work full time when my son was 7 months old and will do the same after this maternity leave, and I still can't afford the kind of house my parents bought when they were much younger than me, on one salary.

People need to get it into their heads. Salaries are not the issue here. Your salary makes very little difference to whether you are wealthy or not. Earning a decent salary might mean you don't have to choose between eating and heating, or that you can absorb the cost of living increases more easily than those on lower salaries. And that is not to be sniffed at. But unless you are doing something like investment banking, it won't make you rich.

And that is a problem. You should be able to create wealth from a decent salary without handouts from your family. If people can't do that, there is no social mobility.

The thing is working hard and achieving is a privilege now because most people work bloody hard and don't achieve much beyond scraping by

No there is increasing anger at how unequal our society is. Too many people using food banks while many others have a lot of wealth. Stark inequality is very bad for society

I am first gen and known some second gens in 2 countries I lived in.
I agree with pp. At my school the immigrant kids smashed our native language compared to us. They were not born to it, they came at ages like 5 or so. Absolutely amazing.
It is that you have to do better and more to at least be on "par with locals" in everyone's mind. It's well known that immigrants and usually second gen too have to work extra hard for it to be seen as "normal level of work".
Plus there is the "didn't move to live in shit, moved for better so will get that better".
Hence often doing well. Of course it's not 100% rule! Nothing is.

@MargotBamborough but why be angry at those who are able to and asking for them to be brought down a peg? Most people that are being targeted are not millionaires or billionaires. They are not living in mansions with private keys and their own cooks and servants living downstairs.