pauperize

So perhaps the question is 'Why do we pauperize people interested in doing serious science and then make them feel bad about it?'

It won't pauperize me, you bet. Just one good spree for myself and the missus, giving pleasure to ourselves and employment to others, and satisfaction to you to think it's not been throwed away.

Maybe simply pauperizing people is the right answer and keep them pauperized from some time. Just imagine a prison system that doesn't contain financial criminals or drug cases.

A cynic might say that the very same SF elite desire more brown third-world immigrants in order to ensure that their pauperized underclass doesn't look like them. People don't like to be reminded of the downward mobility of people who look like themselves.

You end up with hackers who have the luxury to discuss freedom and the big bad System even as they pauperize most of the population on Earth and contribute to that same system. Not every hacker does of course, but enough do to make it a concern.

But then you end up in a world where most people are pauperized and no longer have any bargaining power in the face of these changes. You end up in a situation where you have entire cities prostrating themselves in front of Amazon so that they might deign install themselves there.

Costly distant wars, pauperized middle class after very long period of growth and prosperity, sclerotic establishment in total denial that times have changes.

An elite with highly paid and satisfying jobs served by a pauperized underclass of Uber drivers and mini-job holders who only have a crumbling public infrastructure to support them and no prospect of being a socially engaged citizenry.