Throughout history and throughout the world, there have been classes of untouchables. Best known perhaps (other than Elliott Ness and Wall Street bankers) are the caste that goes by the name in South Asia, a.k.a. the Dalits, but there are/were also for instance the Cagots in France, the Burakumin in Japan, and the Roma and Jewish populations in medieval Europe though the Middle East. In the US, one could include the black and native populations. Wikipedia has this definition:
Untouchability is the social-religious practice of ostracizing a minority group by segregating them from the mainstream by social custom or legal mandate. The excluded group could be one that did not accept the norms of the excluding group and historically included foreigners, house workers, nomadic tribes, law-breakers and criminals and those suffering from a contagious disease. This exclusion was a method of punishing law-breakers and also protected traditional societies against contagion from strangers and the infected.
The origin of the phenomenon may have started simply as a way to exclude criminals and diseased people from a community, but obviously that's not where it led.
Untouchability typically means none to limited access to public resources, schools, churches, temples, and having to live outside of established communities and villages. Often - but not always - there was a connection with certain occupations, especially those seen as impure, such as handling the dead (this could include executioners), and dealing with human and animal waste. In parts of Europe, dealing with money was seen as impure, from a religious point of view, which drove a lot of Jews into the field, since they were banned from most other occupations.
I could write a lot more on the interesting though often cruel and barbaric history of untouchability in a wide definition of the word, but I want to focus on what started to make me think of it, modern unemployment numbers in the western world. That is to say, we are now on the verge of casting a huge group of people, essentially our own neighbours, outside of our communities. They are no longer allowed to participate in what makes our societies tick.
This is true for people of all ages (see: Companies won't even look at resumes of the long-term unemployed), but it's an absolute "disaster that got tired of waiting to happen" among young people.
Source; Market Oracle
