Always. If inflation runs away, the poor suffer. If we get stuck in a deflationary cycle the poor suffer. Apparently it is impossible to construct an equitable system that works without gross inequality (spoiler: it isn’t but some people love inequality and will do anything to prevent things being distributed more equally.)
It provides a reason for them not to just “take their ball and go home” once they have a pile of money.
If that’s the reason for it it’s not doing its job. Investments are much like savings to high net worth individuals and their investments are managed by someone else and they simply lay in the cut and collect dividends. Yes there is a risk to investments but if you’re in a good wealth fund then over time you’re almost guaranteed to win even if you have disastrous months here and there.
Yes, this is true but you also have to factor in the marginal propensity to consume, or in plain English, the poorer you are the more of your income you have to spend on necessities like rent or groceries.
There are always high interest investments available to people with a large amounts of spare cash floating about even when inflation is low.
If your rent + utilities + food = your income then you ain’t hoarding money even in a deflationary spiral.
This is because inflation isn’t a bug it’s a feature.
Anything that transfers wealth up the chain, from working class to middle class and from middle class to upper class, is a feature of the western economic system.
For example, in England and Wales the Bank of England is charged with keeping inflation at a target of around two per cent. This means that the pound in a workers pocket is supposed to devalue. The advantage is that the government borrows money in its own currency so inflation means that its debt goes down (in real terms) when inflation goes up.
They’re hoping you’re too sleep deprived to notice.
I can see why you might think that from reading about it in 2024 but I’d suggest to you that the tempo slowdown is the major factor. Ska is an uptempo party music. Rocksteady slowed the tempo down and Reggae generally kept the tempo at that slower pace.
Also there was a progression of people leaving skinhead for rock following more high energy bands like The Who and The Small Faces and going through the psychedelic changes into Rock at the end of the sixties.
The fans of ska had no problem with reggae, especially Bob Marley, who was collaborating with Mick Jagger in no time. It’s just they’d moved on from skinhead because the scene had become much more associated with violence. There was also the very deliberate efforts of the National Front to recruit football supporters during the early 70s heyday of football hooliganism. A lot of the people that were into violence were attracted to the second wave of skinhead just as cultural changes to the music in Jamaica and the UK meant that a lot of the first wave were evolving into mods and then some of them hippies and eventually you see the emergence of street punk at the end of the 70s.
As for Rastafarianism, that was not at the time a dogmatic religion like Catholicism or the Moonies but arose out of cultural immersion and community practice in the places in Jamaica where most of its adherents lived. I don’t think it is a matter of being too black, it’s just that it’s very specific to Jamaica and eventually the Jamaican diaspora.
Edit: It’s no accident that the third wave of skinhead was kickstarted by Two Tone and was explicitly multi-racial and also that Two Tone harked back to uptempo ska.