Privilege breeds privilege. Once you have at least a little bit of it. You can generate a little bit more with it.
The bar that you get to grow up in a relatively safe place, with non toxic friends or parents is quite high already. I haven’t been lucky to have grown up in a safe place or in a good family, but I did manage to make good friends, and if I had not been lucky enough to have positive experiences with some real smart resourceful people, I probably wouldn’t had been alive today. Not to sound too dramatic.
Every time I visited the US it was mostly to visit people who were in a very privileged position. They either rented an expensive apartment in new york city in an ok neighborhood, or they owned a 3 story house in the suburbs. When we drove to walmart I could already see in the parking lots the stark differences between people who called this country home.
Next to us parked a family, 3 kids, a car that looked like it was falling apart next to my friend’s huge modern SUV. I wonder if any of them will ever br able to afford an SUV, I wonder how many of them will be able to go to college. The father and mother were yelling a lot at those poor kids. Everyone looked overweight(no offense), the father literally obese. And we went on with our day. I bought a bunch of random stuff I didn’t really need and ate a lobster sandwich. And I kind of forgot for a long time that family ever existed, except for the couple of times I randomly remember them. Hope they’re alright.
I wonder if at a certain point, someone learns about compounding, and just sticks with it, building generational wealth. And poof, the wealth just keeps growing as long as the descendants don’t make errors.
We seem to love creating stories about why so-and-so is rich, but, I suspect the most common answer is “time, patience, and no major bad luck”.
Inequality is proof of free markets. Free markets are proof of prosperity maximalism. Worry about raising the floor, not the distance of floor to ceiling (there is no ceiling - shoutout Lil Wayne).
Inequality has biological foundations. Plants and animals have inequalities of king vs death level. It is almost inevitable barring some rare occasions in history.
In the US stock wealth inflates inequality measurement. No way a billionaire can liquify millions of stocks in a stable current price. Most are multimillionaires. Although there is a lot of room for improvement based on the recent history of strong democratic national tradition.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 30.3 ms ] threadThe bar that you get to grow up in a relatively safe place, with non toxic friends or parents is quite high already. I haven’t been lucky to have grown up in a safe place or in a good family, but I did manage to make good friends, and if I had not been lucky enough to have positive experiences with some real smart resourceful people, I probably wouldn’t had been alive today. Not to sound too dramatic.
Every time I visited the US it was mostly to visit people who were in a very privileged position. They either rented an expensive apartment in new york city in an ok neighborhood, or they owned a 3 story house in the suburbs. When we drove to walmart I could already see in the parking lots the stark differences between people who called this country home.
Next to us parked a family, 3 kids, a car that looked like it was falling apart next to my friend’s huge modern SUV. I wonder if any of them will ever br able to afford an SUV, I wonder how many of them will be able to go to college. The father and mother were yelling a lot at those poor kids. Everyone looked overweight(no offense), the father literally obese. And we went on with our day. I bought a bunch of random stuff I didn’t really need and ate a lobster sandwich. And I kind of forgot for a long time that family ever existed, except for the couple of times I randomly remember them. Hope they’re alright.
So the inequality of income of poor white people and rich white people has the same causes as for poor vs. rich black people.
Am I understanding it correctly?
We seem to love creating stories about why so-and-so is rich, but, I suspect the most common answer is “time, patience, and no major bad luck”.
Stop whining.
In the US stock wealth inflates inequality measurement. No way a billionaire can liquify millions of stocks in a stable current price. Most are multimillionaires. Although there is a lot of room for improvement based on the recent history of strong democratic national tradition.