Or they know that even if they could they would have to step on a lot of people's toes and compromise many of their own principles to do it. That's kind of the problem of rising in any hierarchy -- you basically have to become the sort of person you'd likely dislike to do it.
> I'd love to have my own welding/machining workshop.
Given your username that's redundant :)
Being a billionaire also has downsides, it will be much harder to tell people that genuinely like you from people that are just trying to get into your good graces because they are after your money.
Indeed, there are so many projects I want to work on outside of my real job.
I'm sure it would have many downsides as well, although if I could attain a high level of wealth and remain relatively anonymous it could be the best of both worlds. I do think fame would be very hard to deal with, especially for someone with my personality.
Becoming rich may have to do with intelligence, education, timing, location, relationships, effort etc. Many of these factors can be hacked. To become a billionaire, luck plays a disproportionate role.
Being a billionaire usually means that you will fear kidnappings and other crime against your family for the rest of your rich life.
Earning more than 200k per year will not make you any happier (see http://www.cnbc.com/2015/12/14/money-can-buy-happiness-but-o... ).
> That suggests that the simplest way to become extremely rich is by being born to the right parents. The second-easiest way is to find a rich spouse.
Articles showing just how unattainable wealth is in the USA always remind me of this quote which seems to be the most concise summary of why many poor and middle class people vote against their own economic interests:
> Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
The article isn't saying that wealth is unattainable, just that the wealth of the 1% is unattainable. A reasonable amount of wealth (middle/upper-middle class) is attainable. As other people have commented, most people don't care even to be in the 1%.
Basically having Rich parents makes it easier to become rich. This is even true in the Netherlands. I see children buying houses with parents money and subrenting it to make a profit. I just cant do this, i don't have the capital
I second this. Not having parents who spend their life accumulating wealth (read: bought a house which increased an order of magnitude in value over the last 20 years) makes it very hard to even afford a house for your own use, let alone buying one to rent out. With the wealth gap growing ever larger, it becomes increasingly hard to 'break out' of the (lower) middle class.
With asses price inflation, depressed wages, insane taxes and and overaged population it is very hard in the EU. Only few make it. By plain luck or maybe by ability.
I was born in the EU, got my PhD in the US and finally hard to start as an illegal immigrant in China and worked my way up. This being said, there are opportunities everywhere.
China. Angola. Colombia. Even Ethiopia. There are opportunities out there for the people who are willing to try or who are forced to try. Places, where there is still some growth, some opportunity and the government does not strangle you.
The best incentive may be if there is something that you like. Be it the weather, culture, language, women. Something that touches you. I saw too many people fail in China. This were the people who wanted to eat every day McDonnalds or Subway instead of Chinese food and called the Chinese "savages". Immerse yourself in that culture. Become that culture. Or how the Chinese say: What you can't avoid, welcome!
Same here, left to Peru and worked remotely, saved a bunch. Even if you have no coding skills, you can save up to 10 or 20k euro and open a bar in Peru or any other developing countries, I knew people who did this in Peru and were doing great. Social ladder is dead in the EU, time to move elsewhere folks, don't expect anything to change. A European/US passport and a few saving is one of the biggest and most unknown privilege Westerners have. It doesn't help that people are taught to expect help from the government instead of improving their lives by themselves.
Where the heck are you living that your house's value increased by an order of magnitude over 20 years. I live in one of the hottest real estate markets in the country, I bought in 1999 and my house is just barely under doubling in value. If not for the mess of 2008 it might have been worth more, since it was about where it is now before that crash. But I can't think of any place where people have seen an order of magnitude increase in 20 years.
Over a longer period (essentially a lifetime) I'm sure that's a possibility. So I suspect you've simply chosen your time period poorly.
By America they mean the country "USA". Not Brazil or Mexico or any other part of America. Given the salary inequality between the USA and most of the other countries in America it is easy to automatically imply that you only need to be in the USA to get rich in America.
I know it's very confusing to a lot of people, but USA stands for United States of America. It's also the only country in the world that has America in its name.
If you refer to "America" in Spanish it's assumed you're referring to the continent, the state is commonly referred to as the United States or the United States of America.
We actually call ourselves Americans here in Uruguay.
Thanks for pointing that out. So insightful. Also definitely thanks for clarifying the total confusion about what is meant by "in America". I thought to myself, "Now wait just a minute. Do they mean the USA? Because all those other countries must feel offended if so."
Also, I thought, "it's so true that the American economy is orders of magnitude stronger than other nations. Clearly this is because of an empire of oppression built upon the same small-minded chauvinism which leads Americans to refer to themselves as Americans."
A huge number certainly haven't succeeded massively. A few have. Also a lot of legal migrants already come from (relatively) rich families since US migration can be expensive and favours the educated.
It's probably no surprise that the same people that think hard work is what leads to success are the same people that don't understand what the wealth distribution actually looks like in america.
The 80/20 rule also says that 20% of the top 20% has 80% of the 80% of the total wealth. If you apply it three times, you get (0.2)^3 = 0.8% of the population has (0.8)^3 = 0.51% of the wealth. Which is even worse than what you see in the graph.
Also, your 7% number is wrong, from the graph it seems the poorest 80% has about 16%, which is less than the one predicted by 80/20, but not by much.
Again, I am not saying this is fair. The Pareto principle doesn't say this is healthy for a society, only that it is common.
"having rich parents" is a personal condition... you cannot choose condition, universe does not work like that - and every second we discuss income inequality is a wasted second. Thus we end up with hard work option
It's probably going to take a little while for people, if they haven't seen it before, to digest the information in the link I provided. If you aren't aware of how skewed wealth distribution in the US is, when you do realize, it always comes as a shock.
> "having rich parents" is a personal condition... you cannot choose condition, universe does not work like that - and every second we discuss income inequality is a wasted second. Thus we end up with hard work option
Non-sequitor.
Having rich parents can't be chosen: true.
Having rich parents (almost) be the only factor for success can be chosen, through economic policy.
There is absolutely no reason to ignore income inequality. Other than if you're one of the (extremely) few benefiting from it.
This overlooks the fact that policies and attitudes can greatly effect how large the difficulties are that poor people must overcome. Which is why it's really important to discuss the matter.
Well, the ideal would be very strange though. Top 20% owns only twice as much as bottom 20%? That would mean that the upper class - doctors, lawyers would earn only twice more than garbage men. That probably wasn't true even in Soviet Union
EDIT: played with it a bit and produced this chart - Y axis has the base of the exponential (top 20% earns n-times more than bottom 20%). It seems that what US has is not exponential though - I can't get the bottom 40% to be as small without the top 20% becoming too big. I think that means that it's subexponential
EDIT 2: This is actually about wealth inequality rather than income inequality. So it makes sense for that to be much larger. Here is the paper it's based on
No, it doesn't say that. The words in the video literally say in the 'ideal' income distribution that almost all people chose, "the rich folks are earning about 10 to 20 times as much as the poor folks"
> Top 20% owns only twice as much as bottom 20%? That would mean that the upper class - doctors, lawyers would earn only twice more than garbage men. That probably wasn't true even in Soviet Union
Probably related is that higher education is free (and you get a stipend and very cheap loans for living expenses) so doctors don't end up with hundreds of thousands in loans, and that doctors are in the public sector and not private.
And why the hell should I be making more than twice what a fulltime garbage man does? He's objectively providing a more important service and delivering more real physical value than I do.
This article is about employers hiring Ivy League graduates. Why is this news? The phenomenon is just as acute in SV as it is on Wall Street.
The Tier 1 schools in the US are the Ivy League, MIT, and Stanford.
Getting into these great schools starts by being incredibly precious in elementary school and middle school, and really accelerating the positive energy and focus in high school.
Radiolab recently featured (http://www.radiolab.org/story/radiolab-presents-media-busted...) some content from another podcast series called "Busted: America’s Poverty Myths", that examines various myths about the poor - and by extension, the rich - in the US. It was fascinating. One thing that was discussed is the degree of upward economic mobility in the USA. IIRC, they measure this by the likelihood that someone who is born into a family that is in the bottom 20% of earners enters the top 20% of earners in their lifetime.
In other words, what is the statistical basis for the belief that in America, anyone can go from "rags to riches"?
It turns out that in the US, the percentage of people who achieve this feat is, on average, about 7%. In Canada, it's about 13.5%. Another myth busted.
Conclusion: if you want to get rich in the Americas - or at least, well-off in the Americas - come immigrate to Canada. Especially if you're reading this comment, since you likely have the kind of education and experience that makes immigrating here a breeze. Sure, it's cold here in the winter, but you'll make enough cash that you can spend a chunk of the winter in Mexico!
I agree with you. But speaking as someone who is in "the 1%", my experience is that most Americans don't define wealth by numbers, they define it by how jetset a lifestyle can be.
Of course being richer than 95% of the country makes you "rich"; that's near tautological. But that's not really the perception. Rather, the perception is that you're rich when you no longer need to work at all and can simply do whatever you want. That's really fuzzy, and I'd agree that it's indicative of wealth disparity in America that this has become the predominant conception of wealth.
My point is that you two are probably talking past each other without meaning to.
Those areas cover probably max 0.1% of total land area in the USA.
Since these are some of the most sought after real estate areas, it seems these areas would be the preserve of the top 0.1%, or 1%. Back of the napkin maths here I'll admit.
The good news is there's still a huge chunk of the country where you would be considered wealthy by land value prices.
> Those areas cover probably max 0.1% of total land area in the USA.
Much less than that. I did a quick calculation and Manhattan + SF is 0.0018% of total US land area. Might be 0.1% if it's only developed land.
> Since these are some of the most sought after real estate areas, it seems these areas would be the preserve of the top 0.1%, or 1%. Back of the napkin maths here I'll admit.
1.6M live in Manhattan, 800k in SF. That's 0.8% of the population.
You are right but why is that something to strive for though? Most people here say they want to become 'rich' to achieve freedom. Why would your artificially make achieving that freedom harder by wanting to buy a 2br in Manhattan or SF? In many other, cheaper places, you have the freedom and thus achieved 'rich'. I am incredibly puzzled by the need to live in the most expensive places on earth; how does that benefit your quality of life? This is my lack of imagination maybe, I am not trying to judge here.
>>>I am incredibly puzzled by the need to live in the most expensive places on earth; how does that benefit your quality of life?
You have the causality in the wrong order. They are the most expensive places on earth because they improve your quality of life, not the other way around. The price is derived from demand which is derived from a desire to have access to many goods, services, and experiences not available in many other places.
I can speak personally to two other cities I've lived in where housing costs are quite high (though lower than SF and Manhattan): DC and Santa Monica / West LA.
My fiancée and I lived in DC for 5 years in a wonderful expat bubble. While I'm am American, the vast majority of our friends were from all around the world and worked at international development organizations. The extra money we paid for housing was worth all the interesting experiences.
Los Angeles is no different. It's easy to find interesting experiences and food through its diverse populations. There is a fundamental aspect to the nature of cities, viz. that there is a good to density itself. It enables humans to get value out of the shear existence of interacting with other humans in interesting ways. You need enough demand for an experience to support the existence of many experiences (e.g. You can't have a live punk music scene in a town of 100 people. Or even if somehow you do bc the entire town loves punk, it will be at the expense of those people being into other interests. Having enough people with enough wealth and distributed across enough interests/cultures/foods/music tastes, etc facilitates access to way more possible experiences. That, at least, I why I love large American cities.
That is a good point, but those experiences can be had in other, much cheaper cities around the world. Why pick exactly the most expensive ones. The experiences can be had in most big cities I have been, the goods + services are getting there but i'm not personally not too driven by that but can see others might be. For all these things I can see your point, just not why pick the most expensive ones?
And I guess it also has to do with the phase in your life; I value freedom above goods & services handy. The satisfying experiences I have in cities all over, also cheap as chips cities in Asia and cities & villages in Asia & Europe. For people making so much money it seems that freedom is within reach if only compromise on the place of living is made. But you make a good points; I made/make decisions based on those points as well at some times; just now I value freedom more than other things.
Perhaps this is a sign of the severity of income and wealth inequality: that even having more income than 95% of the country isn't enough to be considered 'rich'.
$1000 bucks can get you decent living standards in developing countries. But I would not say by a long shot he is in the top 5% by any standard.
Developing countries main characteristic is the huge disparity between the haves and have-nots, which of course, leads to emigration and crime among other issues. Countries with a large middle class therefore are relatively better off.
In any case, making $4000 per month or more is what'll get you royalty style living in those countries.
According to Wikipedia, the GDP per capita in Pakistan is $1400. He's making > $19000 per year, so he's making 14x what the average Pakistani citizen is producing, not earning.
The per capita income in Pakistan is $1,600 a year. You are making 12X the average salary.
Your $19,200 salary, when adjusted for purchasing power (about a 3-4X purchasing power multiplier) and you're effective PPP income is $60-80K.
And honestly that puts you in the exact same category as the rest of us with respect of this article: upper middle class engineers who are generally working to make others rich.
This article mentions the vast majority of 1% individuals are bc of working in finance.
This extends into the tech world where the vast majority of equity goes to investors. Thus, even our efforts are primarily enriching individuals in the finance 1% instead of enabling us to move into the 1% ourselves.
This is not too say we don't move up (Obviously the biggest centralization of wealth has been to individuals who founded tech companies), but engineering incomes in silicon valley are far lower on average than Wall Street incomes.
I'm biased here. I grew up well within the bottom 20% if not the bottom 10% of family incomes. I'm now personally in the top 5%. At no point in my life did it feel like there was anything holding me back. In fact if anything it was frustrating to watch as other people in my situation got handouts while I had to work my way up. I think America is just fine (with maybe a little too much affirmative action).
Often people luck-out and think that the same would happen to everyone sooner or later. Or worse they think it was their work all along and nothing else.
You can very easily deceive yourself into believing a certain set of things when the times are going good. Unfortunately you might have to fail for reasons beyond your control(for a lot of time, on a lot of things) to convince you otherwise.
None of the successful people I know had a single "big break". It took a handful, but more importantly it took the willingness to take risk or do without.
1. Did you study in high school while everyone else was having fun?
2. Break - get into good school
3. Did you graduate with a difficult degree? This is pure tenacity.
4. Did you do interesting projects on the side in college? Tenacity.
5. Said degree + projects lead to job. Sort of break.
6. Moving across the country for a better job - tenacity.
7. Switching jobs many times to move up - tenacity
8. Promotion to management/lead/whatever. Tenacity + break because you have a boss that likes you
9. Large jump in salary by jumping to a company on the way up - break.
10. Several years with low medical bills, no divorce, whatever so you can save $50k+ per year. Break with slight tenacity for not splurging on stuff
I grew up in a pretty bad home. My mother was crazy and didn't work and my father was an alcoholic who owned a bar. Got my first job at 13 and I've been working since. After high school I joined the Marine Corps and spent 6 years in the infantry. Got out 6 years ago and went to college on the GI Bill. Worked throughout college (including internships every summer) and got a great job when I got out. Worked my way up as fast as I could.
I'm not sure there's a "big break" I could point to besides maybe when I decided to join the military? But that's really something anyone could do.
> maybe when I decided to join the military? But that's really something anyone could do.
Not if you're handicapped physically in any way, not if you fail psychological screening, not if you're an immigrant, probably not if you're too old and so on (I'm talking about the military in my country, but is it any different in the US?). And of course not if the military as a whole is against your beliefs.
Going into the military is like becoming a priest. Most of the same advantages and disadvantages apply. Yes, it is a way out of poverty, but it's also a way of life you need to buy into.
I grew up well below the bottom 10% as well, and I'm no where near the top 5% either. I often feel a sense of inadequacy when I compare myself to those with better upbringings, and their subsequently greater accomplishments.
At the same time I saw a lot of kids worse off than myself work much harder and I feel disappointed or even ashamed that I didn't take advantage of the opportunities I did have.
> In other words, what is the statistical basis for the belief that in America, anyone can go from "rags to riches"?
Inertia of perception. If someone's perception of something is relatively solidified, it takes a long time - or major events - to change that perception. More so for massive groups of people.
The whole "rags to riches" mostly comes from the late 19th century, when the US was still expanding geographically and all the new folks could still get a piece of land for nothing.
That perception was solidified after WW1/WW2, from which the US came out unscathed and a lot richer due to becoming the world's supplier of weapons, materiel and a lot of other things that couldn't be reasonably produced in countries that were actually feeling the effects of those wars (occupations, massive bombings, etc.).
Now the US is a plain ol' regular country where almost everything has been divided up but to make things worse the general culture is very individualistic (self-perception changes just as slowly...).
Not to mention, the post-war period leading up to 1973, US saw the highest oil consumption per capita of any country in the world, and higher than today still.
That wealth didn't come from anywhere - it came from extensive exploitation of fossil based fuels.
America's bottom 20% 0-18,500 USD (US Census Bureau, 2006; income statistics for the year 2005)
Looking at raw numbers skips over a lot of things such as healthcare and education. You're probably better off being poor in Canada and rich in the US.
> Could it be that the distance between the top and bottom 20% is less in Canada
You're just describing the results of inequality: two things are further apart than two other things. It doesn't tell you anything about the cause of inequality, only the magnitude of one symptom.
It's like saying "a mile is longer than a kilometer". Well, yes that's an apt description but it doesn't tell you why that is the case.
This number conflates can with will. We cannot rule out the possibility that actual mobility is low because people at the bottom choose not to engage in behaviors that would help them rise.
I.e., imagine if the poor simply refuse work that's available [1], choose to have children outside of wedlock, do lots of drugs and commit lots of crime, they will likely remain poor. That's not evidence that "rags to riches" is impossible or even difficult, it's merely evidence that some people prefer other things more than riches and those people don't move up.
Here's a concrete thought experiment: imagine a poor Gujurati or Bengali moves to the US. Do you think he'll remain poor?
[1] It's a common liberal trope that we need Mexican immigration because they do jobs that "Americans just won't do". Strangely the implications of this are never explored.
" We cannot rule out the possibility that actual mobility is low because people at the bottom choose not to engage in behaviors that would help them rise."
Actually, your statement is such a common (and cruel) myth that there's a there's a whole episode in the series debunking it. You should listen to it.
There is a lot of bias in these numbers. People who have more money are less likely get fought doing drugs, but they are also able to afford to do more drugs. The risks of doing drugs drop when you do one transaction a month, vs trying to feed a daily or even hourly habit.
Too bad the study authors didn't think of that. If they did, they might have decided to use a survey rather than arrest data. Then they might even have titled the study "RESULTS FROM THE 2013 NATIONAL SURVEY ON DRUG USE AND HEALTH: MENTAL HEALTH DETAILED TABLES".
Step 1 in making a methodological critique of a study is to actually read the study.
Yes, because the CEO of IBM is going to say they use drugs.
Survey does not mean what you think it means. If you read this they are going to defend the method as a means to track tends but not the actual numbers involved.
Unlike last time when you clearly didn't read it, I think that this time you actually read the study and identified a major methodological flaw (in under 11 minutes!!!) that the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration didn't notice at all.
No, working with heath data on a regular basis I can tell you that it's not a flaw in the study. It's a flaw in your interpretation of the study. Pill speaking behavior for example is common even amount those who don't consider themselves drug addicts.
Surveys are a very useful tool, but because the heath care community and patient don't agree on definitions they don't represent absolute numbers well.
From the BLS PDF:
>Full-time workers continued to be much less likely
to be among the working poor than were part-
time workers. Among people in the labor force
for 27 weeks or more, 4.1 percent of those usually
employed full time were classified as working
poor, compared with 15.8 percent of part-time
workers.
That doesn't imply choice. Their clearly can and is a positive correlation between working part time and being unable to find full time work.
If only the BLS thought of this - then they might have included this data in Table 1. From that table we could then learn that 20% of the working poor (or about 7% of poor adults) are in this situation.
The number which implies choice is actually in paragraph 1, however: only 35% of poor adults worked or looked for work for at least 27 weeks/year. The remainder chose to engage in other non-work activities.
I looked through the 16-page BLS report and 20-page USCB report you linked but didn't see where either said that "the poor choose not to work" or anything close to equivalent to that. The nearest I can find is that people working full-time are less likely to be poor than people working part-time, but if there's anything saying that everyone working part-time does so by choice then I failed to see it.
... I see from another comment you've made that your actual point lies in the background information the BLS report mentions at the start (FFS, would it have killed you to say that at the outset?): 45.3M poor people, of whom only 10.5M are "working poor", from which you conclude that the others have chosen not to work. Well, let's take a look. About 14% of US senior citizens and 18% of US children are in poverty. That's about 14% of about 45M plus 18% of about 70M, or about 19M people. These are not people who have chosen not to work, but people not in a position to do so. So that leaves about 16M people of working age but not in the labour force. What else? There are about 10M people with disabilities in the US who are of working age but not in the labour force. I don't know what fraction of them are not in the labour force because their disability prevents them working, but let's suppose it's only half of those people. (I bet it's more.) That would leave 11M people in the US who are in poverty, of working age, not unable to work because of disability, and yet not in the labour force. Are all those people poor by choice? Well, no; I bet a lot of them are people who have tried and tried to find employment, failed and failed, and eventually given up in despair. But let's suppose I'm wrong and all those people could realistically get a job if they wanted. (I bet at least half of them couldn't.) And let's suppose, optimistically given those working-poor statistics, that all of them could realistically get a job that would stop them being poor. (I bet at least half of those who could get a job couldn't get one that would actually lift them out of poverty.) That would mean that ~11M out of 45M poor people in the US are poor by choice. Less than a quarter of 'em. (My guess, as per my parenthetical comments above, is that the real figure is more like 2-3M out of 45M, but I'm being generous to you here.)
Yes, poor people commit more crimes than rich people, even crimes with no direct connection to money. May I suggest that you take five minutes and see what other explanations you can think of for that, besides "poor people are naturally bad people who do bad things"? I can think of several. Here are a few to get you started: (1) Poor people can't afford to live in nice places; in the nasty places, there is more violence for them to get caught up in. (2) Poverty causes stress and people under stress are more likely to commit crimes. (3) The laws that determine what things are crimes are generally made by well-off people, whose characteristic ways of screwing other people over tend not to be criminalized. If a rich person and a poor person do equal amounts of harm to others, the poor person is much more likely to go to jail.
Yes, poor people use illegal drugs more than rich people, and (you linked to a 577-page document and gave no indication of exactly what bit of it you had in mind) what may be more to the point is that when poor people use illegal drugs it's more likely to mess up their lives enough that it gets noticed. (Because the worse your situation is, the more likely it is that doing drugs makes it really bad.) Again: I suggest that you spend a few minutes really trying to think of explanations other than "poor people are stupid people who do stupid things"; I can think of several. Rather than suggesting some examples, I'll leave this one up to you completely.
None of this justifies the claim that poor people are generally poor because they...
I looked through the 16-page BLS report and 20-page USCB report you linked but didn't see where either said that "the poor choose not to work"
I'm glad you could figure out this fact, stated in the first couple of paragraphs of the first study I cited, which I also explained in a comment 23 minutes before yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13659631
Well, no; I bet a lot of them are people who have tried and tried to find employment, failed and failed, and eventually given up in despair. But let's suppose I'm wrong and all those people could realistically get a job if they wanted. (I bet at least half of them couldn't.)
I bet they could, even if no hablo ingles y no se permite trabajo.
Here are a few to get you started: (1) Poor people can't afford to live in nice places; in the nasty places, there is more violence for them to get caught up in. (2) Poverty causes stress and people under stress are more likely to commit crimes. (3) The laws that determine what things are crimes are generally made by well-off people, whose characteristic ways of screwing other people over tend not to be criminalized.
Yes, the laws against wife beating are made by people who are rich enough to afford a wife who isn't "asking for it". And I can totally see how I'd "get caught up in" raping people if I lived a stressful life of watching TV in a bad neighborhood while not working.
most comfortably off people, if suddenly made poor without other changes to their character and social networks and so forth, would get out of poverty; but most comfortably off people, if they had been dropped into a situation of poverty from childhood onward, would not have escaped;
I'm a bit confused. On the one hand, the tone of your post suggests you strongly disagree with me. Yet you've just explicitly stated complete agreement with me on my core point.
It's evidence against a strawman theory that says poverty strikes completely at random and there's nothing at all anyone can do about it. I don't think anyone believes that, though.
That's not a straw man at all. Adriand discussed whether "anyone can go from "rags to riches"" and declared this "myth busted" based on the fact that most people don't. The only way the latter could imply the former is if all of them attempted to, but simply were unable to do so.
You are (I assume deliberately) missing my point, which is not that the law is too strict about misbehaviours characteristic of the poor but that it is too lenient about misbehaviours characteristic of the rich.
> On the one hand, the tone of your post suggests you strongly disagree with me. Yet you've just explicitly stated complete agreement with me on my core point.
First: you might consider the possibility that I might agree with you about some things and not others. Second: there are at least two possible versions of a point similar to the one I am agreeing with. One (with which I very much do not agree) says: the reason these people are poor is because they are inferior people -- stupid, lazy, etc. -- and they neither deserve nor will profit from sympathy or financial help. The other (with which I agree, with reservations) says: for the most part, these people behave much as anyone else would if put in their circumstances from early in life; some of their troubles are caused in part by their behaviour, but that behaviour is in turn caused in part by their troubles, and by and large the troubles come first.
These two perspectives agree on at least one important point: The most effective ways of dealing with poverty will attack it systemically rather than by playing whack-a-mole with individual cases.
> Adriand discussed ...
You may not have noticed, but there were two people in that thread taking positions different from yours, and the one you were actually replying to was not adriand and wasn't making the exact same claims.
Anyway: when you say "anyone can do X", I suggest it means more than "it is not literally impossible for anyone to do X". If in one country 7% of people who start in the poorest quintile get into the richest quintile, and in another 13% do, then there is a difference between those countries in how true it is that "anyone can get rich".
Perhaps anyone can go from rags to riches, in the sense that it's not literally impossible for them to do so. But that's compatible with there being substantial obstacles in the way, and if the fraction of people who manage it is small that's evidence for (though not proof of) such obstacles.
Is 7% small enough to make it strong evidence? As it happens I'm inclined to think not; your reply to adriand wasn't the one I disagreed with and replied to. That was your reply to timr. And the claim you made there was this: It's a myth to say that it's a myth that social mobility in the US is low because poor Americans choose not to do things that would help them get not-poor.
It doesn't seem to me that you've done a good job of defending that claim, which is more or less equivalent to the claim that social mobility in the US is in fact low because poor Americans choose not to do things that would help them get not-poor.
If at some point you want to discuss this with attention to the actual points at issue rather than just engaging in snark and presupposing all your claims, do let me know.
> imagine if the poor simply refuse work that's available (i.e. the kind of jobs that Mexicans do), choose to have children outside of wedlock, do lots of drugs and commit lots of crime, they will likely remain poor.
I'm from a relatively poor family (food stamps, free lunches) and have always been a believer in "where there's a will, there's a way," but this comment has a definite bias. You could have put in more "positive" choices that would have been completely realistic.
Perhaps they choose to spend more time with their children instead of 100 hours a week in the office or at two or three jobs, or they choose to live in a small town near family despite limited upward growth opportunities.
Many people I went to high school with are "poor" because of the latter choice. When you grow up with a local supportive network and everyone helps everyone else out (say, driving someone to work because their car broke down, watching someone else's kids because their mother is sick, passing on hand-me-downs), it's very hard to leave that network -- not only because of the loss of safety, but because of the social aspect of betrayal; leaving the network represents a loss of resources for everyone in the network and can be seen as a selfish behavior.
There are more reasons to "stay poor" than "looking down on work, too much sex, drugs, and crime."
The fact that a majority of poor people are not criminals does not exclude the possibility that that criminals are more prevalent among the poor than any other wealth group.
The initial discussion was about "poor people," not "criminals" or even "criminals among the poor." To enter that discussion with a focus on the symptoms of the minority to apply them to the state of the majority is disingenuous.
Every single time a post about poverty and inequality comes up, like clockwork, you're defending the status quo, greed, the american system, etc.
Is there any place you expound on your views in more detail? I think I'd like to mount a more formal, less piecemeal rebuttal to your worldview, if I can.
I've been considering writing a blog post on the topic. However, I don't think I'm arguing as much as you think I am. I'm not arguing for a status quo, greed or the American system.
I'm merely arguing that certain behaviors seem to be extremely common among the (American) poor and that these behaviors also have a direct causal relationship with being poor. This is my major claim - do you disagree with this?
No, but I find it strange to stop there, and find satisfaction in blaming it on 'poverty'.
Okay, poor people do things that keep them poor. You may call it a "poverty cycle".
Where to go from there? A lot of people reach out for race and genetics pretty quickly. I don't think this holds. What else is there? Economic policy, surely.
Adriand discussed whether "anyone can go from "rags to riches"" and declared this "myth busted" based on the fact that most people don't. The only way the latter could imply the former is if all of them attempted to, but simply were unable to do so.
That's the sole point being made in the comment you replied to. There are behaviors people can engage in to stop being poor, they simply don't.
I'm not allergic to genetic explanations, but I also believe that economic policy can affect behavior. I favor economic policies that will put the poor back to work and get them to stop engaging in these destructive behaviors.
(For example, I favor replacing welfare/disability fraud/etc with a Basic Job - like a basic income, but only given to people who work for it.)
Yes, the social mobility of Americans is almost non existent. One thing I noticed when I lived there is that even people at the bottom and in the middle thought that it was a meritocracy because 1) smart people who 2) studied really hard get into one of the great colleges, get the good jobs and become powerful and wealthy.
The paper that the article is about shows that your chances of going to a great college are 117 times higher if your parents are top 0.1 percent than if your parents are in the bottom quintile. So little Zach who's dad packs parcels for Amazon doesn't even have 1 percent of the chance of getting into Princeton as Matt who's father heads a team working on the Amazon Web Services. Not even 1 percent.
And apart from that I never understood why a genetic advantage like being born smart is less unfair than other birth rights or whether success in life depending on making the right choices when you are a teenager should be much more of a meritocracy. Almost no kid makes those right choices - to study the right things hard, do extracurricular activities etc - without a supporting parent enabling it.
And when there seem to be no fair meritocracy it's so much worse that the wealth distribution is skewed beyond anything.
Well there are not many opportunities for the poor in major American cities to get out of their condition and the way welfare and assistance programs are structured it can be detrimental to get beyond a certain means.
To solve a good amount of the city's poor prospects we need to get the War on Drugs back to reality. It not only strikes the city but it hits the poor outside as well. Families that least can withstand the loss of one income are the most affected.
Fix this damn War on Drugs, fix the police preying on the poor with seizure laws, and find a means to reduce the everyday government fees that hit the poor disproportionately will go a long way
I wouldn't claim 7% is non-existent. I think we tell children that college is the only path to wealth and thus many whom never had the opportunity to receive any college believe that they can't achieve anything but a poverty level standard of living. I grew up poor and believed this myself up until a few years ago and even without the benefit of a high school degree I have found that my upward mobility is only limited by my willingness to work hard and make strategic moves.
I wish one of my teachers would have told me that success is possible without education, but then again they went to college and got a government job so they probably had no idea that the path I'm traveling even exists.
Reminds me of the quip about the guy who, confronted by a smart friend over his family wealth, retorted "You inherited brains, why shouldn't I inherit money?".
'because if I do nothing with my brain, I'll have nothing. But if you have your 2 million sitting around (in an investment account), it'll earn you 160.000 a year.'
Intelligence is not inherited, it is teached. Smart parents raise smart children, but their same children raised out in the jungle would be dumb just like monkeys.
I'm thinking of doing my masters in(and eventually moving to)Canada instead of the US.
For the country that I'm from, the waiting time to get permanent residency in the US is much more than a decade, and with the political instability that's present now, it doesn't look to like changing soon. I don't think spending the best years of my life on a temporary worker visa- with all the restrictions and uncertainties that come with it, is worthwhile.
That comes with a compromise of course. The Canadian tech industry is, as far as I'm aware, miniscule compared to the US; but then the tech industry in the US exceeds virtually every other country in both quantity and quality, so it's not a fair comparison.
I wonder if people familiar with the tech scene in Canada can talk about how it compares to say, Europe, or if it really is a big compromise working in Canada instead of the US for a tech job(because of the lower wages and higher taxes).
> I wonder if people familiar with the tech scene in Canada can talk about how it compares to say, Europe, or if it really is a big compromise working in Canada instead of the US for a tech job(because of the lower wages and higher taxes).
I can't give you much direct experience, but I will say every "rockstar" level talent I know from Canada either immigrated to the US or is working remotely for a US company. Based on those conversation the top level talent seems to be making 2-3x more in the US on average than in Canada.
Doctors also make less in Canada. Lawyers also make less. Movie Stars also make less. CEOs too.
Everyone at the top makes less money in Canada, but the lower bound is quite higher as well. Education is much, much more affordable (e.g.: 4k/yr for university in Quebec), health care is universal (e.g.: as a clueless student I didn't pay anything when I had peritonitis and had to spend weeks in the hospital), etc.
People need to understand this. That extra money you get to pocket when working in the US isn't coming out of nowhere. You're complicit in the horrible state of US welfare, and profiting from it.
Well why it has to be more? See, if that was 20%, it meant that wealth distribution is entirely random and parents can't do anything to help their children succeed - that is not the world where many want to live. There should be a balance - getting from poor to rich must be possible, but hard.
People who get rich are those to work towards distant goals and accept delayed gratification. If they are unable to pass anything at all to their children they'd have a much better time drinking and smoking hash - there isn't so much they can spend in their lifetimes anyway, and if they can't pass anything (even cultural! that helps besides money and would already skew that ratio away from 20% down, even if all money was taken away) to their kids - why bother? To me, 7% of 20% poorest making it to 20% richest sounds already too much.
This isn't the fairest comparison, because the richest Americans are richer than the richest Canadians. If the Canadian income distribution is tighter, then it's easier for a Canadian to reach the top 20% simply because the gap between bottom 20 and top 20 is smaller.
I think a fairer comparison would be to specify the "yardsticks" on both sides: what % of people in either country below X income manage to achieve an income above Y?
"since you likely have the kind of education and experience that makes immigrating here a breeze"
I don't think you ever tried immigrating to Canada. I don't mean this snarkily but the world would be a much better place if every citizen was forced at some point to go through his countries immigration process.
I have a friend who has been for the last years going through the Canadian immigration and his lengthy facebook posts describe an awful and demeaning experience. In all disclosure, his partner is from a third world country, and that's probably the biggest problem, but he's a clever, resourceful and valuable person that has been living all around the world, including SV, and it's absolutely incredible how have made everything in their hands short of blocking his entry in the country to stop his immigration.
This didn't seem snarky to me. I appreciate the comment. I'm sure it's very hard - and my comment about it was unnecessarily flippant. In fact I know my country has some unjust immigration policies, like skimming the cream from developing nations. They invest in educating people to become doctors, then we lure them here. I'm sure there's a lot of other stuff like this that would be easy to criticize.
If this is what I recall hearing recently, it also had a very interesting, long segment with a professor who studied e.g. payday loans by having an in and working for 4 months at a payday loan business. She also did some other work pertaining to low income individuals' finances -- I don't recall exactly what, right now.
Turns out, listening to people and their reasons and how it all works, that these people were not acting "irrationally" at all -- within their contexts. There were very valid reasons they did not have bank accounts nor rely on banks to deposit checks, etc.
It didn't negate the expenses involved. But it provided a lot of information that balanced that not just against the sometimes unavailability of "traditional" alternatives but also against the unreported, undiscussed, perhaps too frequently not known or discussed downsides of those "traditional" alternatives.
As just one example: You have to pay rent, or your workers, or whatever, today or tomorrow or soon. With the payday or check cashing business, you leave with cash in hand. With the bank, you have to wait for e.g. a client's check that you just received today, to clear. Up to three days. And if something doesn't clear or there's some other mistake, suddenly you have $25, or $50, or whatever amount of penalties hit your budget. That continue to accumulate until you can fix your cash flow.
And, with software, banks have taken to deliberately, algorithmically maximizing those penalties. E.g you have $100 in your account, and three checks hit for $25, $50, and $125 on the same day. The bank will prioritize the $125 check first, so that you are hit with three overdraft checks, three sets of fees. Instead of e.g. clearing the $25 and $50 checks and leaving you with one overdraft.
It can be argued, I suppose that the bank is minimizing its exposure in some combinations of amounts and overdrafts it decides to allow. But really, it is racking up the fees.
And if you're on a very tight budget, these fees totally disrupt it.
Say a check you deposited didn't clear or clear in the expected timeframe. Bam, now your budget has a big hole in it due to large, unexpected fees.
People avoid this, instead paying the cut the the check cashing business.
It was very interesting. And a lesson in the risks of just absorbing and parroting some often reported "common sense".
>>"Between 1999 and 2004, just 2% of Princetonians came from the families in the lowest 20% of earnings, while 3.2% came from families in the top 0.1%"
These kinds of statistics are appalling to me. I wonder if they continue along the income percentiles (e.g. top 5% has a greater chance than lower 30%, or so). My parents are as middle-class as it comes, one is a nurse and the other is a probation officer. Their combined income is about $150,000. The top 0.1% make > $1.5 million per year. How can your parent's income have such a dramatic effect on your access to college? Is it not enough applicants? Is it lower performance on AP exams? Is it the inability to pay tuition?
I may be a bit bitter as I'm set to graduate med school with $250,000 in debt. It's hard for me to fathom having parents who could pay my tuition four times over every year.
If your parents made less money, all other things being equal, you'd be in better shape. $150k just gets you out of the income bracket that gets heavy financial aid from the endowments at top-tier schools, and so you, or someone, has to pay nearly full-price.
In comparison, my teacher and mechanic parents made slightly under 100k, underneath the line where financial aid kicked in heavily enough to be competitive with my local state university, and so I graduated with just the federal Perkins and Stafford loans I had to take out, to the tune of around 20k in debt.
But this just assumes that everyone is striving to get into 0.1% equally, where it might make more sense assuming that someone who goes to Wall Street wants to get rich more than a nurse.
It's like saying it's a lot "easier" being in top physical shape if you exercise at top sport facilities in the country, and/or already come from a family of athletes.
Both of which are already signals you might be trying very hard in the first place.
Coming from rich families might also mean being rich and making money is more socially valued. And rich families don't posses only money and connections which makes it easier, they probably also have good knowledge of how to make money and where money can be made compared to working class families.
So before jumping to any conclusions on how easy it is and why it is easier exactly, stuff like that needs to be thought through a bit.
Entrepreneurism is still very much alive. Down but not out. However for this board, talk of it is decimated. To the point where the only mention of it is in this thread, where I am speaking to one person, who needed to be reminded what it even means.
Came to work in the US. Have moved back to my home country. But would love to come to US again(A great country, no doubt). A few things that I have noticed.
1. It can be really quite hard to get rich(like crazy rich) as a programmer unless you have a very generous stock grant package. When I mean generous, I mean like really in the upper order of 6 figures. Given tax is going to eat a good bunch of it.
2. Taxes will eat a lot of your salary and bonus. So any dream of making it big out of saving up monthly salary is absurd to a large extent.
3. What makes 2. even more so true is at some point in time you have to buy a home, and take some responsibilities with regards to kids and family. Your savings cache will only decrease.
If you are in the Bay area, rents will eat your ice cream. Buying a home is in the order of >=$1 million. Kids can be expensive if you want them to have a good future. If you want to buy a home, you will lose half your life to monthly payments. Plus comes the regular fear of defaulting on payments in phases of financial crises and job losses. And also be prepared for routine house maintenance expenses and property taxes.
Overall life is hard for immigrants.
But I can imagine it would be the same for US citizens who come from poverty. Education would come at a thick debt on top of which you have to build the above points I mentioned.
Life if pretty much paycheck to the next. Paying monthly installment for car, bills, mortgage etc.
Somethings that I like about the US:- Social security, infrastructure, uniform quality of education, merit and overall values on which the country is built. Overall there is better appreciation for merit and quality than most countries.
If you are in the US you have already made it big by many a definition. You just have to go farther.
One thing often omitted, or taken for granted, in the "rich parents" discussion is the curious question of "How did the parents get rich?" Did they have rich parents too? Or did they actually started from very low and got clever/lucky/hardworking. If you think of it this way, having rich parents may not be a magic privilege, a "silver spoon", but a consequence of their effort and sacrifice. Their children do not have to bear the same sacrifice. But you, whose parents weren't that clever/lucky/hardworking, you need to bear the sacrifice - maybe even not to get rich, but give enough of a good start for your children to get rich, and you grandchildren to be called privileged.
Sacrifice implies you lose something with nothing gained. These people generated wealth and got posterity and legacy. They bought that with their work, volitionally, and bore the responsibility of the dedication required to keep it.
You aren't sacrificing your money to buy yourself lunch, providing for your kids isn't a sacrifice, and you aren't sacrificing by working more hours to afford that big house and nice car you have.
It's just hard sometimes, but it's all part of the bargain.
"Sacrifice implies you lose something with nothing gained."
Not true. That is just pure loss. According to its definition¹, "sacrifice" means either "to surrender or give up, or permit injury or disadvantage to, for the sake of something else" or "to dispose of (goods, property, etc.) regardless of profit". Parents working hard in order to provide for their kids may involve something from both of the meanings.
"you aren't sacrificing by working more hours to afford that big house and nice car you have"
It depends on how you look at it, and working more hours for a nice house and car can be both a transaction and a sacrifice. If you consider the leisure time you have to give up (assuming that you don't particularly enjoy your work) then it's a sacrifice. If you consider the time and energy involved in the paid work then it's just a transaction.
Maybe sacrifice is not a perfect choice of words on my part, but what I mean is some parents chose to sacrifice consumer goods and instant pleasures so their kids could have it better in the future. You are correct that something is lost here and something is gained, but to be frank I have no other word that'd be close to what I mean.
An interesting perspective and from an individual's point of view, probably quite a pragmatic one.
I still suspect that widening inequality means that this is either an unlikely occurrence or the effect doesn't last. I'm guessing the first given that wealthy families seem to maintain wealth quite well.
There are several things at play here. First, it would be great to find a century-long study on the number of millionaires by year. From little I could find it seems their numbers fluctuate like a sinusoid, especially after bubbles burst, meaning there are a bunch of new rich people every couple of years, and another bunch that go bust. Second, it would be nice to measure actual wealth of poor people in 1900s and today - my assumption being that poor people are actually getting wealthier, just not fast enough to catch up millionaires pace. Here's a note: intelligent wealth management pretty much guarantees logarithmic increase of wealth - the more you invest, the more you profit. Thirds, I have a feeling the middle class collapsed and 1/3 got richer while 2/3 got poorer. It would be super interesting to read some deep and long-lasting studies on this.
It should have been "how to get rich". However, at least in America nepotism plays a lower role in many professions compared to many other countries because competition is much rougher.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 179 ms ] threadMy theory is most people want more stuff, few really want to be billionaires, or even just part of the 1%.
Or it's unreasonable to expect to be able to, and few people dream about stuff they know can never happen. To avoid disappointment.
On second thought, I do actually want more stuff too, I'd love to have my own welding/machining workshop.
Given your username that's redundant :)
Being a billionaire also has downsides, it will be much harder to tell people that genuinely like you from people that are just trying to get into your good graces because they are after your money.
Indeed, there are so many projects I want to work on outside of my real job.
I'm sure it would have many downsides as well, although if I could attain a high level of wealth and remain relatively anonymous it could be the best of both worlds. I do think fame would be very hard to deal with, especially for someone with my personality.
Articles showing just how unattainable wealth is in the USA always remind me of this quote which seems to be the most concise summary of why many poor and middle class people vote against their own economic interests:
> Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
1: http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/12/opinion/the-triumph-of-hop...
But you can leave. Best decision I ever made.
China. Angola. Colombia. Even Ethiopia. There are opportunities out there for the people who are willing to try or who are forced to try. Places, where there is still some growth, some opportunity and the government does not strangle you.
The best incentive may be if there is something that you like. Be it the weather, culture, language, women. Something that touches you. I saw too many people fail in China. This were the people who wanted to eat every day McDonnalds or Subway instead of Chinese food and called the Chinese "savages". Immerse yourself in that culture. Become that culture. Or how the Chinese say: What you can't avoid, welcome!
Over a longer period (essentially a lifetime) I'm sure that's a possibility. So I suspect you've simply chosen your time period poorly.
I imagine this is true everywhere. The only variance I can imagine is in how much easier it makes it.
Mexico is the United States of Mexico, there also were United States of Colombia, United States of Venezuela (now renamed to simply Venezuela), etc...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico (Wikipedia doesn't show the official name in the title)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_of_Colombia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_of_Venezuela
If you refer to "America" in Spanish it's assumed you're referring to the continent, the state is commonly referred to as the United States or the United States of America.
We actually call ourselves Americans here in Uruguay.
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uso_de_la_palabra_americano
"En el uso tradicional a los naturales de América como continente.
En un segundo término, a los ciudadanos de Estados Unidos de América, uso derivado de la influencia lingüística inglesa."
Also, I thought, "it's so true that the American economy is orders of magnitude stronger than other nations. Clearly this is because of an empire of oppression built upon the same small-minded chauvinism which leads Americans to refer to themselves as Americans."
Is this person serious?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wealth_Inequality_in_Amer...
Also, your 7% number is wrong, from the graph it seems the poorest 80% has about 16%, which is less than the one predicted by 80/20, but not by much.
Again, I am not saying this is fair. The Pareto principle doesn't say this is healthy for a society, only that it is common.
"having rich parents" is a personal condition... you cannot choose condition, universe does not work like that - and every second we discuss income inequality is a wasted second. Thus we end up with hard work option
Non-sequitor.
Having rich parents can't be chosen: true.
Having rich parents (almost) be the only factor for success can be chosen, through economic policy.
There is absolutely no reason to ignore income inequality. Other than if you're one of the (extremely) few benefiting from it.
EDIT: played with it a bit and produced this chart - Y axis has the base of the exponential (top 20% earns n-times more than bottom 20%). It seems that what US has is not exponential though - I can't get the bottom 40% to be as small without the top 20% becoming too big. I think that means that it's subexponential
http://i.imgur.com/gHxBXwa.png
EDIT 2: This is actually about wealth inequality rather than income inequality. So it makes sense for that to be much larger. Here is the paper it's based on
http://www.nber.org/papers/w18559.pdf
It's true in Sweden
Doctor: http://www.lonestatistik.se/loner.asp/yrke/Lakare-1234
Attorney: http://www.lonestatistik.se/loner.asp/yrke/Advokat-1066
Sanitation worker http://www.lonestatistik.se/loner.asp/yrke/Renhallningsarbet...
Recycling worker http://www.lonestatistik.se/loner.asp/yrke/Atervinningsarbet...
Probably related is that higher education is free (and you get a stipend and very cheap loans for living expenses) so doctors don't end up with hundreds of thousands in loans, and that doctors are in the public sector and not private.
Do you think the statement in the article is wrong? Based on what?
Do you think a college degree is irrelevant to become a banker or other financier?
The article doesn't say that. The passage I quoted doesn't say that either.
The Tier 1 schools in the US are the Ivy League, MIT, and Stanford.
Getting into these great schools starts by being incredibly precious in elementary school and middle school, and really accelerating the positive energy and focus in high school.
In other words, what is the statistical basis for the belief that in America, anyone can go from "rags to riches"?
It turns out that in the US, the percentage of people who achieve this feat is, on average, about 7%. In Canada, it's about 13.5%. Another myth busted.
Conclusion: if you want to get rich in the Americas - or at least, well-off in the Americas - come immigrate to Canada. Especially if you're reading this comment, since you likely have the kind of education and experience that makes immigrating here a breeze. Sure, it's cold here in the winter, but you'll make enough cash that you can spend a chunk of the winter in Mexico!
Edit: actually, based off a quick Google search, it seems that if you earn 150k, you are in fact in the top 5%
Of course being richer than 95% of the country makes you "rich"; that's near tautological. But that's not really the perception. Rather, the perception is that you're rich when you no longer need to work at all and can simply do whatever you want. That's really fuzzy, and I'd agree that it's indicative of wealth disparity in America that this has become the predominant conception of wealth.
My point is that you two are probably talking past each other without meaning to.
Since these are some of the most sought after real estate areas, it seems these areas would be the preserve of the top 0.1%, or 1%. Back of the napkin maths here I'll admit.
The good news is there's still a huge chunk of the country where you would be considered wealthy by land value prices.
Much less than that. I did a quick calculation and Manhattan + SF is 0.0018% of total US land area. Might be 0.1% if it's only developed land.
> Since these are some of the most sought after real estate areas, it seems these areas would be the preserve of the top 0.1%, or 1%. Back of the napkin maths here I'll admit.
1.6M live in Manhattan, 800k in SF. That's 0.8% of the population.
You have the causality in the wrong order. They are the most expensive places on earth because they improve your quality of life, not the other way around. The price is derived from demand which is derived from a desire to have access to many goods, services, and experiences not available in many other places.
I can speak personally to two other cities I've lived in where housing costs are quite high (though lower than SF and Manhattan): DC and Santa Monica / West LA.
My fiancée and I lived in DC for 5 years in a wonderful expat bubble. While I'm am American, the vast majority of our friends were from all around the world and worked at international development organizations. The extra money we paid for housing was worth all the interesting experiences.
Los Angeles is no different. It's easy to find interesting experiences and food through its diverse populations. There is a fundamental aspect to the nature of cities, viz. that there is a good to density itself. It enables humans to get value out of the shear existence of interacting with other humans in interesting ways. You need enough demand for an experience to support the existence of many experiences (e.g. You can't have a live punk music scene in a town of 100 people. Or even if somehow you do bc the entire town loves punk, it will be at the expense of those people being into other interests. Having enough people with enough wealth and distributed across enough interests/cultures/foods/music tastes, etc facilitates access to way more possible experiences. That, at least, I why I love large American cities.
And I guess it also has to do with the phase in your life; I value freedom above goods & services handy. The satisfying experiences I have in cities all over, also cheap as chips cities in Asia and cities & villages in Asia & Europe. For people making so much money it seems that freedom is within reach if only compromise on the place of living is made. But you make a good points; I made/make decisions based on those points as well at some times; just now I value freedom more than other things.
Hackernews is not as small as you think
Developing countries main characteristic is the huge disparity between the haves and have-nots, which of course, leads to emigration and crime among other issues. Countries with a large middle class therefore are relatively better off.
In any case, making $4000 per month or more is what'll get you royalty style living in those countries.
I'm pretty sure he's in the top 5% :)
http://www.averagesalarysurvey.com/pakistan
It would be a decent salary for many countries in Europe.
The per capita income in Pakistan is $1,600 a year. You are making 12X the average salary.
Your $19,200 salary, when adjusted for purchasing power (about a 3-4X purchasing power multiplier) and you're effective PPP income is $60-80K.
And honestly that puts you in the exact same category as the rest of us with respect of this article: upper middle class engineers who are generally working to make others rich.
This article mentions the vast majority of 1% individuals are bc of working in finance.
This extends into the tech world where the vast majority of equity goes to investors. Thus, even our efforts are primarily enriching individuals in the finance 1% instead of enabling us to move into the 1% ourselves.
This is not too say we don't move up (Obviously the biggest centralization of wealth has been to individuals who founded tech companies), but engineering incomes in silicon valley are far lower on average than Wall Street incomes.
And the downvotes begin. Usa high inequality means low pay for many which benefits the wealthy!!
This.
Many times.
Often people luck-out and think that the same would happen to everyone sooner or later. Or worse they think it was their work all along and nothing else.
You can very easily deceive yourself into believing a certain set of things when the times are going good. Unfortunately you might have to fail for reasons beyond your control(for a lot of time, on a lot of things) to convince you otherwise.
1. Did you study in high school while everyone else was having fun? 2. Break - get into good school 3. Did you graduate with a difficult degree? This is pure tenacity. 4. Did you do interesting projects on the side in college? Tenacity. 5. Said degree + projects lead to job. Sort of break. 6. Moving across the country for a better job - tenacity. 7. Switching jobs many times to move up - tenacity 8. Promotion to management/lead/whatever. Tenacity + break because you have a boss that likes you 9. Large jump in salary by jumping to a company on the way up - break. 10. Several years with low medical bills, no divorce, whatever so you can save $50k+ per year. Break with slight tenacity for not splurging on stuff
I'm not sure there's a "big break" I could point to besides maybe when I decided to join the military? But that's really something anyone could do.
Not if you're handicapped physically in any way, not if you fail psychological screening, not if you're an immigrant, probably not if you're too old and so on (I'm talking about the military in my country, but is it any different in the US?). And of course not if the military as a whole is against your beliefs.
Going into the military is like becoming a priest. Most of the same advantages and disadvantages apply. Yes, it is a way out of poverty, but it's also a way of life you need to buy into.
At the same time I saw a lot of kids worse off than myself work much harder and I feel disappointed or even ashamed that I didn't take advantage of the opportunities I did have.
You should really listen to the show from RadioLab. NPR's On The Media aired some of it too.
Inertia of perception. If someone's perception of something is relatively solidified, it takes a long time - or major events - to change that perception. More so for massive groups of people.
The whole "rags to riches" mostly comes from the late 19th century, when the US was still expanding geographically and all the new folks could still get a piece of land for nothing.
That perception was solidified after WW1/WW2, from which the US came out unscathed and a lot richer due to becoming the world's supplier of weapons, materiel and a lot of other things that couldn't be reasonably produced in countries that were actually feeling the effects of those wars (occupations, massive bombings, etc.).
Now the US is a plain ol' regular country where almost everything has been divided up but to make things worse the general culture is very individualistic (self-perception changes just as slowly...).
That wealth didn't come from anywhere - it came from extensive exploitation of fossil based fuels.
Average earnings of Canada's 1% - $358,238 USD - http://globalnews.ca/news/3079173/heres-how-much-canadas-top...
Average earnings of US's 1% - $1,153,298 USD - http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2016/08/see_the_average_...
Couldn't find averages for the poorest but Canada's bottom 20% is 0-13,223 USD - http://www.moneysense.ca/save/financial-planning/the-all-can...
America's bottom 20% 0-18,500 USD (US Census Bureau, 2006; income statistics for the year 2005)
Looking at raw numbers skips over a lot of things such as healthcare and education. You're probably better off being poor in Canada and rich in the US.
You're just describing the results of inequality: two things are further apart than two other things. It doesn't tell you anything about the cause of inequality, only the magnitude of one symptom.
It's like saying "a mile is longer than a kilometer". Well, yes that's an apt description but it doesn't tell you why that is the case.
I.e., imagine if the poor simply refuse work that's available [1], choose to have children outside of wedlock, do lots of drugs and commit lots of crime, they will likely remain poor. That's not evidence that "rags to riches" is impossible or even difficult, it's merely evidence that some people prefer other things more than riches and those people don't move up.
Here's a concrete thought experiment: imagine a poor Gujurati or Bengali moves to the US. Do you think he'll remain poor?
[1] It's a common liberal trope that we need Mexican immigration because they do jobs that "Americans just won't do". Strangely the implications of this are never explored.
Actually, your statement is such a common (and cruel) myth that there's a there's a whole episode in the series debunking it. You should listen to it.
http://www.wnyc.org/story/who-deserves-to-be-poor/
The poor choose not to work: https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/working-poor/archive/a-prof... http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publication...
Single motherhood is strongly correlated with poverty: http://www3.uakron.edu/schulze/401/readings/singleparfam.htm
The poor commit lots of crimes, including crimes with no economic motive (wife beating, rape): https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hpnvv0812.pdf
The poor also disproportionately do drugs: https://www.samhsa.gov/data/sites/default/files/2013MHDetTab...
Step 1 in making a methodological critique of a study is to actually read the study.
Survey does not mean what you think it means. If you read this they are going to defend the method as a means to track tends but not the actual numbers involved.
Surveys are a very useful tool, but because the heath care community and patient don't agree on definitions they don't represent absolute numbers well.
That doesn't imply choice. Their clearly can and is a positive correlation between working part time and being unable to find full time work.
The number which implies choice is actually in paragraph 1, however: only 35% of poor adults worked or looked for work for at least 27 weeks/year. The remainder chose to engage in other non-work activities.
... I see from another comment you've made that your actual point lies in the background information the BLS report mentions at the start (FFS, would it have killed you to say that at the outset?): 45.3M poor people, of whom only 10.5M are "working poor", from which you conclude that the others have chosen not to work. Well, let's take a look. About 14% of US senior citizens and 18% of US children are in poverty. That's about 14% of about 45M plus 18% of about 70M, or about 19M people. These are not people who have chosen not to work, but people not in a position to do so. So that leaves about 16M people of working age but not in the labour force. What else? There are about 10M people with disabilities in the US who are of working age but not in the labour force. I don't know what fraction of them are not in the labour force because their disability prevents them working, but let's suppose it's only half of those people. (I bet it's more.) That would leave 11M people in the US who are in poverty, of working age, not unable to work because of disability, and yet not in the labour force. Are all those people poor by choice? Well, no; I bet a lot of them are people who have tried and tried to find employment, failed and failed, and eventually given up in despair. But let's suppose I'm wrong and all those people could realistically get a job if they wanted. (I bet at least half of them couldn't.) And let's suppose, optimistically given those working-poor statistics, that all of them could realistically get a job that would stop them being poor. (I bet at least half of those who could get a job couldn't get one that would actually lift them out of poverty.) That would mean that ~11M out of 45M poor people in the US are poor by choice. Less than a quarter of 'em. (My guess, as per my parenthetical comments above, is that the real figure is more like 2-3M out of 45M, but I'm being generous to you here.)
Yes, poor people commit more crimes than rich people, even crimes with no direct connection to money. May I suggest that you take five minutes and see what other explanations you can think of for that, besides "poor people are naturally bad people who do bad things"? I can think of several. Here are a few to get you started: (1) Poor people can't afford to live in nice places; in the nasty places, there is more violence for them to get caught up in. (2) Poverty causes stress and people under stress are more likely to commit crimes. (3) The laws that determine what things are crimes are generally made by well-off people, whose characteristic ways of screwing other people over tend not to be criminalized. If a rich person and a poor person do equal amounts of harm to others, the poor person is much more likely to go to jail.
Yes, poor people use illegal drugs more than rich people, and (you linked to a 577-page document and gave no indication of exactly what bit of it you had in mind) what may be more to the point is that when poor people use illegal drugs it's more likely to mess up their lives enough that it gets noticed. (Because the worse your situation is, the more likely it is that doing drugs makes it really bad.) Again: I suggest that you spend a few minutes really trying to think of explanations other than "poor people are stupid people who do stupid things"; I can think of several. Rather than suggesting some examples, I'll leave this one up to you completely.
None of this justifies the claim that poor people are generally poor because they...
I'm glad you could figure out this fact, stated in the first couple of paragraphs of the first study I cited, which I also explained in a comment 23 minutes before yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13659631
Well, no; I bet a lot of them are people who have tried and tried to find employment, failed and failed, and eventually given up in despair. But let's suppose I'm wrong and all those people could realistically get a job if they wanted. (I bet at least half of them couldn't.)
I bet they could, even if no hablo ingles y no se permite trabajo.
Here are a few to get you started: (1) Poor people can't afford to live in nice places; in the nasty places, there is more violence for them to get caught up in. (2) Poverty causes stress and people under stress are more likely to commit crimes. (3) The laws that determine what things are crimes are generally made by well-off people, whose characteristic ways of screwing other people over tend not to be criminalized.
Yes, the laws against wife beating are made by people who are rich enough to afford a wife who isn't "asking for it". And I can totally see how I'd "get caught up in" raping people if I lived a stressful life of watching TV in a bad neighborhood while not working.
most comfortably off people, if suddenly made poor without other changes to their character and social networks and so forth, would get out of poverty; but most comfortably off people, if they had been dropped into a situation of poverty from childhood onward, would not have escaped;
I'm a bit confused. On the one hand, the tone of your post suggests you strongly disagree with me. Yet you've just explicitly stated complete agreement with me on my core point.
It's evidence against a strawman theory that says poverty strikes completely at random and there's nothing at all anyone can do about it. I don't think anyone believes that, though.
That's not a straw man at all. Adriand discussed whether "anyone can go from "rags to riches"" and declared this "myth busted" based on the fact that most people don't. The only way the latter could imply the former is if all of them attempted to, but simply were unable to do so.
You are (I assume deliberately) missing my point, which is not that the law is too strict about misbehaviours characteristic of the poor but that it is too lenient about misbehaviours characteristic of the rich.
> On the one hand, the tone of your post suggests you strongly disagree with me. Yet you've just explicitly stated complete agreement with me on my core point.
First: you might consider the possibility that I might agree with you about some things and not others. Second: there are at least two possible versions of a point similar to the one I am agreeing with. One (with which I very much do not agree) says: the reason these people are poor is because they are inferior people -- stupid, lazy, etc. -- and they neither deserve nor will profit from sympathy or financial help. The other (with which I agree, with reservations) says: for the most part, these people behave much as anyone else would if put in their circumstances from early in life; some of their troubles are caused in part by their behaviour, but that behaviour is in turn caused in part by their troubles, and by and large the troubles come first.
These two perspectives agree on at least one important point: The most effective ways of dealing with poverty will attack it systemically rather than by playing whack-a-mole with individual cases.
> Adriand discussed ...
You may not have noticed, but there were two people in that thread taking positions different from yours, and the one you were actually replying to was not adriand and wasn't making the exact same claims.
Anyway: when you say "anyone can do X", I suggest it means more than "it is not literally impossible for anyone to do X". If in one country 7% of people who start in the poorest quintile get into the richest quintile, and in another 13% do, then there is a difference between those countries in how true it is that "anyone can get rich".
Perhaps anyone can go from rags to riches, in the sense that it's not literally impossible for them to do so. But that's compatible with there being substantial obstacles in the way, and if the fraction of people who manage it is small that's evidence for (though not proof of) such obstacles.
Is 7% small enough to make it strong evidence? As it happens I'm inclined to think not; your reply to adriand wasn't the one I disagreed with and replied to. That was your reply to timr. And the claim you made there was this: It's a myth to say that it's a myth that social mobility in the US is low because poor Americans choose not to do things that would help them get not-poor.
It doesn't seem to me that you've done a good job of defending that claim, which is more or less equivalent to the claim that social mobility in the US is in fact low because poor Americans choose not to do things that would help them get not-poor.
If at some point you want to discuss this with attention to the actual points at issue rather than just engaging in snark and presupposing all your claims, do let me know.
I'm from a relatively poor family (food stamps, free lunches) and have always been a believer in "where there's a will, there's a way," but this comment has a definite bias. You could have put in more "positive" choices that would have been completely realistic.
Perhaps they choose to spend more time with their children instead of 100 hours a week in the office or at two or three jobs, or they choose to live in a small town near family despite limited upward growth opportunities.
Many people I went to high school with are "poor" because of the latter choice. When you grow up with a local supportive network and everyone helps everyone else out (say, driving someone to work because their car broke down, watching someone else's kids because their mother is sick, passing on hand-me-downs), it's very hard to leave that network -- not only because of the loss of safety, but because of the social aspect of betrayal; leaving the network represents a loss of resources for everyone in the network and can be seen as a selfish behavior.
There are more reasons to "stay poor" than "looking down on work, too much sex, drugs, and crime."
The fact that a majority of poor people are not criminals does not exclude the possibility that that criminals are more prevalent among the poor than any other wealth group.
Is there any place you expound on your views in more detail? I think I'd like to mount a more formal, less piecemeal rebuttal to your worldview, if I can.
I'm merely arguing that certain behaviors seem to be extremely common among the (American) poor and that these behaviors also have a direct causal relationship with being poor. This is my major claim - do you disagree with this?
Okay, poor people do things that keep them poor. You may call it a "poverty cycle".
Where to go from there? A lot of people reach out for race and genetics pretty quickly. I don't think this holds. What else is there? Economic policy, surely.
Adriand discussed whether "anyone can go from "rags to riches"" and declared this "myth busted" based on the fact that most people don't. The only way the latter could imply the former is if all of them attempted to, but simply were unable to do so.
That's the sole point being made in the comment you replied to. There are behaviors people can engage in to stop being poor, they simply don't.
I'm not allergic to genetic explanations, but I also believe that economic policy can affect behavior. I favor economic policies that will put the poor back to work and get them to stop engaging in these destructive behaviors.
(For example, I favor replacing welfare/disability fraud/etc with a Basic Job - like a basic income, but only given to people who work for it.)
I suspect this is an understatement. Looking forward to you expounding on your views in greater detail sometime.
The paper that the article is about shows that your chances of going to a great college are 117 times higher if your parents are top 0.1 percent than if your parents are in the bottom quintile. So little Zach who's dad packs parcels for Amazon doesn't even have 1 percent of the chance of getting into Princeton as Matt who's father heads a team working on the Amazon Web Services. Not even 1 percent.
And apart from that I never understood why a genetic advantage like being born smart is less unfair than other birth rights or whether success in life depending on making the right choices when you are a teenager should be much more of a meritocracy. Almost no kid makes those right choices - to study the right things hard, do extracurricular activities etc - without a supporting parent enabling it.
And when there seem to be no fair meritocracy it's so much worse that the wealth distribution is skewed beyond anything.
To solve a good amount of the city's poor prospects we need to get the War on Drugs back to reality. It not only strikes the city but it hits the poor outside as well. Families that least can withstand the loss of one income are the most affected.
Fix this damn War on Drugs, fix the police preying on the poor with seizure laws, and find a means to reduce the everyday government fees that hit the poor disproportionately will go a long way
I wish one of my teachers would have told me that success is possible without education, but then again they went to college and got a government job so they probably had no idea that the path I'm traveling even exists.
For the country that I'm from, the waiting time to get permanent residency in the US is much more than a decade, and with the political instability that's present now, it doesn't look to like changing soon. I don't think spending the best years of my life on a temporary worker visa- with all the restrictions and uncertainties that come with it, is worthwhile.
That comes with a compromise of course. The Canadian tech industry is, as far as I'm aware, miniscule compared to the US; but then the tech industry in the US exceeds virtually every other country in both quantity and quality, so it's not a fair comparison.
I wonder if people familiar with the tech scene in Canada can talk about how it compares to say, Europe, or if it really is a big compromise working in Canada instead of the US for a tech job(because of the lower wages and higher taxes).
I can't give you much direct experience, but I will say every "rockstar" level talent I know from Canada either immigrated to the US or is working remotely for a US company. Based on those conversation the top level talent seems to be making 2-3x more in the US on average than in Canada.
Everyone at the top makes less money in Canada, but the lower bound is quite higher as well. Education is much, much more affordable (e.g.: 4k/yr for university in Quebec), health care is universal (e.g.: as a clueless student I didn't pay anything when I had peritonitis and had to spend weeks in the hospital), etc.
People need to understand this. That extra money you get to pocket when working in the US isn't coming out of nowhere. You're complicit in the horrible state of US welfare, and profiting from it.
People who get rich are those to work towards distant goals and accept delayed gratification. If they are unable to pass anything at all to their children they'd have a much better time drinking and smoking hash - there isn't so much they can spend in their lifetimes anyway, and if they can't pass anything (even cultural! that helps besides money and would already skew that ratio away from 20% down, even if all money was taken away) to their kids - why bother? To me, 7% of 20% poorest making it to 20% richest sounds already too much.
I think a fairer comparison would be to specify the "yardsticks" on both sides: what % of people in either country below X income manage to achieve an income above Y?
I don't think you ever tried immigrating to Canada. I don't mean this snarkily but the world would be a much better place if every citizen was forced at some point to go through his countries immigration process.
I have a friend who has been for the last years going through the Canadian immigration and his lengthy facebook posts describe an awful and demeaning experience. In all disclosure, his partner is from a third world country, and that's probably the biggest problem, but he's a clever, resourceful and valuable person that has been living all around the world, including SV, and it's absolutely incredible how have made everything in their hands short of blocking his entry in the country to stop his immigration.
Turns out, listening to people and their reasons and how it all works, that these people were not acting "irrationally" at all -- within their contexts. There were very valid reasons they did not have bank accounts nor rely on banks to deposit checks, etc.
It didn't negate the expenses involved. But it provided a lot of information that balanced that not just against the sometimes unavailability of "traditional" alternatives but also against the unreported, undiscussed, perhaps too frequently not known or discussed downsides of those "traditional" alternatives.
As just one example: You have to pay rent, or your workers, or whatever, today or tomorrow or soon. With the payday or check cashing business, you leave with cash in hand. With the bank, you have to wait for e.g. a client's check that you just received today, to clear. Up to three days. And if something doesn't clear or there's some other mistake, suddenly you have $25, or $50, or whatever amount of penalties hit your budget. That continue to accumulate until you can fix your cash flow.
And, with software, banks have taken to deliberately, algorithmically maximizing those penalties. E.g you have $100 in your account, and three checks hit for $25, $50, and $125 on the same day. The bank will prioritize the $125 check first, so that you are hit with three overdraft checks, three sets of fees. Instead of e.g. clearing the $25 and $50 checks and leaving you with one overdraft.
It can be argued, I suppose that the bank is minimizing its exposure in some combinations of amounts and overdrafts it decides to allow. But really, it is racking up the fees.
And if you're on a very tight budget, these fees totally disrupt it.
Say a check you deposited didn't clear or clear in the expected timeframe. Bam, now your budget has a big hole in it due to large, unexpected fees.
People avoid this, instead paying the cut the the check cashing business.
It was very interesting. And a lesson in the risks of just absorbing and parroting some often reported "common sense".
These kinds of statistics are appalling to me. I wonder if they continue along the income percentiles (e.g. top 5% has a greater chance than lower 30%, or so). My parents are as middle-class as it comes, one is a nurse and the other is a probation officer. Their combined income is about $150,000. The top 0.1% make > $1.5 million per year. How can your parent's income have such a dramatic effect on your access to college? Is it not enough applicants? Is it lower performance on AP exams? Is it the inability to pay tuition?
I may be a bit bitter as I'm set to graduate med school with $250,000 in debt. It's hard for me to fathom having parents who could pay my tuition four times over every year.
In comparison, my teacher and mechanic parents made slightly under 100k, underneath the line where financial aid kicked in heavily enough to be competitive with my local state university, and so I graduated with just the federal Perkins and Stafford loans I had to take out, to the tune of around 20k in debt.
It's like saying it's a lot "easier" being in top physical shape if you exercise at top sport facilities in the country, and/or already come from a family of athletes.
Both of which are already signals you might be trying very hard in the first place.
Coming from rich families might also mean being rich and making money is more socially valued. And rich families don't posses only money and connections which makes it easier, they probably also have good knowledge of how to make money and where money can be made compared to working class families.
So before jumping to any conclusions on how easy it is and why it is easier exactly, stuff like that needs to be thought through a bit.
http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/income-rank/
As of 2014, to be in the top 1% of income earners by household, you needed to make roughly $420,000 a year.
I think so many of the entrepreneurial doers left HN or stopped participating in discussions long ago.
From Dan Luu - http://danluu.com/startup-tradeoffs/
Incredible really.
http://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec01/#annotations...
1. It can be really quite hard to get rich(like crazy rich) as a programmer unless you have a very generous stock grant package. When I mean generous, I mean like really in the upper order of 6 figures. Given tax is going to eat a good bunch of it.
2. Taxes will eat a lot of your salary and bonus. So any dream of making it big out of saving up monthly salary is absurd to a large extent.
3. What makes 2. even more so true is at some point in time you have to buy a home, and take some responsibilities with regards to kids and family. Your savings cache will only decrease.
If you are in the Bay area, rents will eat your ice cream. Buying a home is in the order of >=$1 million. Kids can be expensive if you want them to have a good future. If you want to buy a home, you will lose half your life to monthly payments. Plus comes the regular fear of defaulting on payments in phases of financial crises and job losses. And also be prepared for routine house maintenance expenses and property taxes.
Overall life is hard for immigrants.
But I can imagine it would be the same for US citizens who come from poverty. Education would come at a thick debt on top of which you have to build the above points I mentioned.
Life if pretty much paycheck to the next. Paying monthly installment for car, bills, mortgage etc.
Somethings that I like about the US:- Social security, infrastructure, uniform quality of education, merit and overall values on which the country is built. Overall there is better appreciation for merit and quality than most countries.
If you are in the US you have already made it big by many a definition. You just have to go farther.
?!? That's literally against everything I ever read about USA (living in EU, never been to USA).
Any upgrade from 0 is good.
The world is so large, it's so easy to forget this when living inside one bubble or another. Thanks for pointing that out for me :)
You aren't sacrificing your money to buy yourself lunch, providing for your kids isn't a sacrifice, and you aren't sacrificing by working more hours to afford that big house and nice car you have.
It's just hard sometimes, but it's all part of the bargain.
Not true. That is just pure loss. According to its definition¹, "sacrifice" means either "to surrender or give up, or permit injury or disadvantage to, for the sake of something else" or "to dispose of (goods, property, etc.) regardless of profit". Parents working hard in order to provide for their kids may involve something from both of the meanings.
"you aren't sacrificing by working more hours to afford that big house and nice car you have"
It depends on how you look at it, and working more hours for a nice house and car can be both a transaction and a sacrifice. If you consider the leisure time you have to give up (assuming that you don't particularly enjoy your work) then it's a sacrifice. If you consider the time and energy involved in the paid work then it's just a transaction.
¹ http://www.dictionary.com/browse/sacrifice
I still suspect that widening inequality means that this is either an unlikely occurrence or the effect doesn't last. I'm guessing the first given that wealthy families seem to maintain wealth quite well.