The golden goose, social classes, and the breakdown of civilization

Bosch season five air date: 18 April. Ten episodes. Four days later, six of the transcripts were already available. A few days later, the rest of em.

Anyway, the "golden goose" thing from episode two, about 10 minutes in:

EDGAR: Esquivel filed a complaint about Garcia for overprescribing oxy. They opened a file. It's an active investigation.
BOSCH: State medical board. Maybe what Junior and Pops were arguing about.
EDGAR: Old man killing the golden goose that lays the eggs.
BOSCH: Eggs are golden, not the goose.
EDGAR: I thought it was the goose.
BOSCH: I sometimes forget English isn't your first language.
EDGAR: W'ap enpoze'm manje, M'ap enpoze'w kaka.
BOSCH: "Kaka" what I think it is?
EDGAR: Ancient proverb. You stop me from eating, I stop you from shitting. Same thing.
BOSCH: As what?
EDGAR: As killing the goose.
BOSCH: I'll take your word for it.

"Killing the goose that lays the golden eggs" is the same as "You stop me from eating, I stop you from shitting"? Well I guess I have to take Jerry Edgar's word for it, too.

My interpretation of the goose story is simple. It's a definition: The goose is wealth. The eggs are income produced by that wealth. It's just a definition of wealth, and a bit of folk wisdom about protecting wealth. (The folk wisdom is just as true for a normal goose as it is for the one that lays the golden eggs.)


From The Class Structure in the U.S., at Lumen: Boundless Sociology:

A commonly used model for thinking about social classes in the U.S. attributes the following general characteristics to each tier: the upper class has vast accumulated wealth and significant control over corporations and political institutions, and their privilege is usually inherited; the corporate elite consists of high-salaried stockholders, such as corporate CEOs, who did not necessarily inherit privilege but have achieved high status through their careers; the upper-middle class consists of highly educated salaried professionals whose occupations are held in high esteem, such as lawyers, engineers, and professors; the middle class (the most vaguely defined and largest social class) is generally thought to include people in mid-level managerial positions or relatively low status professional positions, such as high school teachers and small business owners; the working class generally refers to those without college degrees who do low level service work, such as working as a sales clerk or housekeeper, and includes most people whose incomes fall below the poverty line. In the above outline of social class, status clearly depends not only on income, but also occupational prestige and educational attainment.

Class structure can be described in terms of "privilege" and "status" and "esteem" or, as the paragraph concludes: "status clearly depends not only on income, but also occupational prestige and educational attainment."

Sure. But things like occupational prestige and educational attainment also relate back to the measures of wealth and income, the goose and the eggs. And I have no trouble saying that as a rule the greater the disparity of wealth, and of income, the greater the distance between social classes.


On page 365 in the Study, from Chapter V: The Disintegrations of Civilizations:

... we have found already that the ultimate criterion and the fundamental cause of the breakdowns which precede disintegrations is an outbreak of internal discords ...

The social schisms in which this discord partially reveals itself rend the broken-down society in two different dimensions simultaneously. There are vertical schisms between geographically separated communities and horizontal schisms between geographically intermingled but socially segregated classes.

... [T]he horizontal schism ["between geographically intermingled but socially segregated classes"] of a society along lines of class is not only peculiar to civilizations [as opposed to primitive societies] but is also a phenomenon which appears at the moment of their breakdowns and which is a distinctive mark of the periods of breakdown and disintegration, by contrast with its absence during the phases of genesis and growth.

This is huge.

Toynbee is saying there is a natural limit to the concentration of wealth and income, a limit beyond which civilization can no longer continue to advance, but will begin to decline.

Seems to me that we should stop the concentration of wealth before it creates the breakdown of civilization. In our case, since we didn't stop it in time, policy needs to emphasize dispersion of wealth, enough to make things right.