Socopoly (SumBlog8)

During Monday’s class the activity was Socopoly. Our group was split up into 5 categories by social class. Money and properties were distributed by to give one person more money and properties all the way down to some people (which happened to be me) very little money and no properties. Very quickly the group members playing realized we all did not have the same opportunities. I ended up rolling first and very quickly landed on someone’s property that they had acquired at the start of the game. I handed over what little money I had and just like that I was out of the game.  The example that played out can very easily be correlated to the real world. Sometimes it takes just a little bad luck to push the little, struggling guy out of the game. As the board game continued it mimicked today’s society very well. One by one the poorest and least established player was eliminated and one by one the richest and most established players continued to collect properties and money. Our game did finally end with one man owning most of the properties and taking all the money from each participant. 

http://www.ted.com/talks/richard_wilkinson#t-857238

I found a Ted Talk about social inequality, which if you have the time (16:54) is extremely interesting! :) This ted talk talked about how the difference between social class among countries might be far less important that the amount of difference between social class within those countries. Basically the amount of distance between the upper class and the lower class could be far more important. Studies showed the social inequalities drastically changed based on level of social class. Prison, mental illness, high school dropouts, social mobility, birth rates, crimes, health, literacy rates, obesity, and addictions all have correlations with what level of social class you fall into. Information shows that the closer countries get to social equality within that country the more there is a decrease in all of these inequalities. This suggests that decreasing the distance between levels of social class could have huge impacts on society. This study goes on to show that tasks that result in changes in self esteem or social class status where someone else could judge you based on your performance, showed off the charts levels of stress like no other activity that was tested.This shows that society has put massive significance to the level of social class you hold and at the same time created a system that makes it very hard to change status. The big question then becomes: How do we begin to change this? Some countries have started taxing social classes in order to equalize them. Countries that have done this saw decreases in the inequalities.