In China, in the past two decades, many people have been able to achieve a class leap in a short generation or greatly improve the living conditions of entire families through their own talents and efforts.
However, this should become increasingly difficult to happen in the coming decades.
As mentioned in a previous article, a country or region usually needs to have several factors if it wants to develop rapidly. One is a stable internal and external environment; One is the lack of materials and high demand; The other is that there is a population or talent dividend, and the productivity is strong.
It just so happens that these factors have been present in China for the past two or three decades. Today, these factors have weakened dramatically.
Correspondingly, the odds of a lifetime changing one's life are greatly reduced.
In retrospect, in China's blood-related society, the power of the family should not be underestimated. In fact, for a long time, the real family foundation is often not created by one generation alone, but the result of a generation that has opened its mind, selected the best resources, and then gone through several generations of relays.
Many families in Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai have businessmen in almost every generation, so the resources of the whole family are many and well-connected. It is difficult for people who are poor and white to compete. We can only accumulate resources little by little, borrow luck, and borrow potential energy.
Zeng Guofan's family, the ancestor Zeng Mengxue settled in Xiangxiang in the early years of the Qing Dynasty, and 200 years later, Zeng Guofan, since then, the family has been hanging all the way.
In fact, this is not only the case at home, but also abroad. The Rothschilds, the Medici, the Kennedy, the Rockefellers, and many more are examples. Many European and American upper-class families, wealth and resources are often passed down for generations or even dozens of generations.
Looking at the vast majority of countries in the world, once the society has experienced a period of relative stability for decades or even hundreds of years, it will gradually move towards class solidification. Whether in Europe, the United States, Japan, or other developed countries.
This is particularly true in Europe, where ordinary people in most European countries are not bad, and social welfare is good, ensuring that ordinary people can meet their basic living needs. But if you want to achieve a class jump, it is almost a small probability event.
Therefore, the so-called "small-town problem-solvers", urban middle class and quasi-middle class, if they figure out these things, they will not be too anxious. Anyway, one generation lives the life of a good generation first. After all, a counterattack is always a small probability event, which requires an individual to have extraordinary abilities and great effort, and, importantly, luck.