If we believe that few employers are happy to carry employees who provide a net productivity deficit, then on the face of it we cannot assume that those who are impoverished and employed are not meaningfully productive. The question we ought to ask ourselves is how much disparity is acceptable to allow across the incomes of productive individuals; or more bluntly, why do the executive and management typically earn several orders of magnitude more than the producers? Is it necessary to encourage upward motivation, or is it exploitative and predatory?

America is doing quite poorly in terms of social mobility, compared to other top-tier countries.

For example, Scandinavian countries are famous as exemplars for how to be a developed country with high income mobility. But a recent paper focused on Denmark (the most income-mobile country in the group) in order to study the effectiveness of the Scandinavian model. It found that pre-tax, pre-transfer income mobility was the same as the US! Needless to say, this is a pretty shocking find, as it belies years of assumptions about equality of opportunity and its effect on achievement (as measured by income). Even the addition of Denmark's much heavier investment in all levels of schooling does nothing to budge the level of educational attainment among the poor, relative to the US.

From the Atlantic article linked in my footnotes:

> Low-income Danish kids are not much more likely to earn a middle-class wage than their American counterparts. What’s more, the children of non-college graduates in Denmark are about as unlikely to attend college as their American counterparts.

IMO, Denmark's generous redistribution is worth the impact on outcomes, but it's fascinating to see redistribution have almost ZERO impact on one of its most positive-sum, universally appealing benefits (moving more towards equality of opportunity).

[1] http://voxeu.org/article/intergenerational-mobility-denmark-... [2] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/the-amer...

What could make a difference though is the relative difference between poverty in US and poverty in DK. I am pretty sure that you are better of as poor in Denmark than you are as poor in the US. We probably have a better safety-net. And in the other end of the spectrum I'm pretty sure that there is a smaller percentage of mega-rich in Danish terms even. So while I agree that there is still a problem in Denmark I don't think our problem is as big as the US.

My main point being that you can't just look at Denmark through this lens and say - Hey! They haven't solved it. And you also can't say that we have. As I see it, it is as always; a lot more complicated.

Social mobility in Europe is also really not great especially once you adjust for the immigration, you also need to account for the fact that social mobility studies in Europe are based on the income level of parents and grandparents, both WW2/Eastern Block and immigration from Africa, Asia and the Middle east inflate the social mobility figures considerably.

This holds true even for low income jobs, McDonalds pays nearly 10$ an hour in the US vs 4.35 GBP in the UK, or 6.50 EUR in Germany (there are comming minimum wage changes in Germany so it will increase to about 8 EUR in 2017) and US those workers are taxed at considerably lower rates.

There is a better 'safety net' in most European countries, but there is a lot more opportunity in America. It's 100% true that 'anyone can make it' - as long as 'making it' means having a job, owning a home, in a regular place like Cleveland or Pittsburg or whatever.

Europe has a much, much stronger class system than the US.

American companies have tons of workers and professionals who came from poor situations. Europe is not like that at all.

A lot of what would be a college degree in the US is done though trade schools in Europe. I also think there are much stricter requirements on what the degree is in most countries, as in the won't fund a lot of arts degrees.

Source?

The US poverty line household income is $22,541, this is more than the median income in Poland, and not that far from the median household income in developed countries like Belgium.

That's not saying there are rivers of milk and honey flowing in the EU either. But over there, at least you still have access to decent health care even if you're at the rock bottom, and at least your kids could get decent education so they achieve escape velocity.

But here? Once you're below a certain level, society just throws you on the dung heap. Leaves you to your own proverbial "bootstraps", however stupid that meme may sound when you see how things could be handled differently in a civilized world.

I think this is a myth.

Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland all do pretty well on the 'gini coefficient' - but they are tiny, relatively homogeneous societies. They are ethnic groups - and they are each smaller than Los Angeles.

What would the gini coefficient look like for 'The entire EU' for example - which would be a better direct comparison to America.

It would be terrible.

Why? Because Greeks grow up mostly to live in Greece, and much poorer than Swedes, who grow up to be Swedes, generally much richer than Greeks.

Poor Greeks, Sardinians, and Bulgarians kids mostly do not grow up to reach the level of wealth of middle class Scandinavians - not even close.

From Slovenia to London ... the gap is really quite huge.

There's also a political angle; Meritocracy is an important justification for American capitalism. If you can't make the argument that the system is beneficial to the whole, then there's going to be support to overturn the system.

If your children squander your fortune and squabble over their inheritance, how you feel about that is entirely up to you.

Warren Buffet said he would donate the vast majority of his wealth to charity upon his death. When asked about inherentance for his children, he said that a couple hundred thousand each would be enough.

Parting thought: if your children waste the fortune that you worked so hard to build, that says just as much about you as it does your children.

But this is all hypothetical. I'm sure you have fine kids.

Wealthy kids will always have a leg up on poor kids. It can never become completely equalized, as whatever new attribute that does cause your children to do better will become a new aspect of wealth. That's one of the corollaries to what the GP was saying, and by its nature that leads to a system that leads to a system where the outcomes can never be entirely equalized as lone as you allow different wealth levels.

It's not that children from wealthy families do better (as any situation where that is not true points to a very sick society), but how much better they do, and how well we catch those that are disadvantaged when they fall. This is also complicated by the fact that poverty is relative (and when not, such as using official definitions, nobody can agree how useful it is), It's a very complicated topic, and in my opinion you are generally either stuck with so much nuance that it's hard to tease out some useful plan of action, or so little nuance that you risk taking away the wrong conclusion.

For example, in the end, is how wealthy your children are even the correct thing to be measuring for outcomes? What about happiness? What if we focused on increasing the number of people that reported being happy with their lives? That probably doesn't require people being in the top bracket for income, but it might require that most of the time they aren't in the lowest bracket.

I don't think I'll ever reach a point where I have a "fortune" to give to my kids :)

For example, my material scientist friend immediately launched into a tirade about how we should teach kids how subatomic particles actually work rather than the simplified model of the atom, about about how history is a useless subject that should be removed from school altogether. I couldn't have disagreed more.

Personally, I'd like to see tons of changes, including:

- vastly more funding, so we can attract more skilled and experienced teachers and have smaller class sizes

- year round school programs, so poorer children don't fall so behind during summer break

- more emphasis and encouragement around reading, which much fewer restrictions on what we consider "acceptable" to read (my high school did everything in its power to get kids to hate reading)

- systematic experimentation around different teaching styles and educational systems, so we can learn what works and doesn't

- history classes more focused on storytelling and distilling lessons from historical events, and less focused on pro-America propaganda and remembering random disconnected facts and dates

- more focus on practical psychology, rhetoric, debate, logic, and/or research in the curriculum (how can people become productive citizens and informed voters when they can't dissect an argument or perform research?)

- more emphasis on the benefits of the scientific method compared to alternatives

- practical education around business, finance, etc, so that poor kids aren't left behind in that arena

I could go on forever.

That's the problem, we have to get rid of the idea that there's a set of ideas that kids "have" to know. Why don't you let the kid decide what he wants to study. Like there will be limitations but fuck it, if s/he is interested in something weird, encourage it instead of killing it.

> vastly more funding, so we can attract more skilled and experienced teachers and have smaller class sizes

I think that the teacher model doesn't scale. Develop MOOCs and like online communities. School will be the bridge from real world to these communities. Teachers will help you when you get stuck.

> more emphasis and encouragement around reading, which much fewer restrictions on what we consider "acceptable" to read (my high school did everything in its power to get kids to hate reading)

Exactly. Also remove the idea that reading means reading fiction. Make sure that the kid is doing something somewhat productive and that s/he's engaged. Engagement is key.

>systematic experimentation around different teaching styles and educational systems, so we can learn what works and doesn't

I actually think that Barbara Oakley really hit the nail on the head. She describes it e.g. in this article http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/how-i-rewired-my-brain-to...

> - more focus on practical psychology, rhetoric, debate, logic, and/or research in the curriculum (how can people become productive citizens and informed voters when they can't dissect an argument or perform research?)

Exactly. But also fundamentally just make sure the kids can explore whatever area of human endeavor they want to.

The collective cultural experience is that this is sometimes incredibly valuable, but very often leads to intense study of subjects of marginal economic value. A person may be intensely interested in Latin and Greek Classics, but the odds of this producing skills for a livelihood are not as high as some other subjects.

Which is to say there's sometimes an awkward tradeoff between "Weird thing a kid wants to study" and "Thing that can be studied that will pay the bills later in life". This is not something that can be avoided by making education services free at point-of-consumption, because student time is finite.

I strongly suggest to speak with some actual teachers, instead of blindly relying on ridiculous propaganda. The problem is not the system, the problem is social mobility.

Poor kids don't do well in school because their families and their environment don't value education. They perceive (correctly, BTW, from a statistical perspective) that if you're born poor, there isn't much you can do. You're gonna die poor anyway. So why worry about school? Families don't care (exceptions do exist, of course), peers look down upon you if you're "bookish", it's a vicious cycle.

There's a lack of hope among those at the bottom. No amount of educational reform will fix that. People know they're in a social straightjacket from birth.

Fix whatever systemic problems keep America's social mobility so low, and the aforementioned issues will get a lot better.

How can you blithely state this "fact" given that the article itself shows that a poor person who graduates college has a better-than-average income distribution (every percentile is better off than the population as a whole).

It's really frustrating to me that people like you don't make any honest effort to distinguish between objective "lack of hope" where poor people actually cannot improve their situation, with subjective "lack of hope" where people for whatever reason are unable to be motivated to take actual opportunities that could help them. Clearly these are different phenomena and conflating them is irresponsible and dangerous.

Have you considered the possibility that the educational system doesn't value the needs of the poor?

If you can stomach some underground hip hip, here's a track by Dead Prez for one anecdotal inner-city perspective: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-8IUbVQRqAk

It did not accomplish nearly so much as you might hope.

The underground hip hop complaints as relative to material mostly cover political questions and show that he didn't pay attention to the courses that would help "get our rent paid".

More diverse electives for specialist history would have been nice, but there are practical restrictions on the specialist teachers available in a town of 50k people.

I wonder if it could be feasible to rotate kids through some kind of county/state shared resource with opportunities for "demoing" various specializations. Educational almost-internships for kids, if you will. 180 days/year, 5 days/week = 36 specializations. That's probably not enough time to get much of any feel. Kids pick their top 5 or 10, and spend a year learning about those. You don't necessarily need a specialist teacher for everything, but rather a specialist skilled in teaching research / getting to the bottom of a field/industry. Make the kids teach each other; teacher is basically a facilitator? Too impractical?

Getting kids to teach each other strikes me as impractical. Most of them aren't going to learn enough in a few days to teach a useful amount, and learning about a profession through the lens of an opinionated kid seems very sub-optimal. Plus, a year is a lot of time.

I have seen a lot of schools have "career day" type things, where parents come in and briefly discuss what they do. That's a little more direct and a less time consuming at ten to fifteen minutes a parent. This is valuable in proportion to the economic diversity and schedule flexibility of parents, though.

Exactly, I can't think of a single subject that actually achieves what it should when taught in the school setting.

The problem with the class I describe isn't that it didn't teach effectively. It's that the students largely didn't care to apply what was taught.

The model of turning a literate child loose in a library and letting them be for six or eight years should not be assumed as universally useful. It's not a good way to produce a shared general foundation for a modern democracy.

OTOH, even that would still probably disproportionately benefit those with the best home environments and support to make use of the more efficient system, and increase rather than narrow the gap between the best and worst served. Efficiency and equality are largely orthogonal concerns.

The purpose of the current design for primary and secondary education is to produce a general foundation atop which any sort of tertiary education can be built.

> The purpose of the current design for primary and secondary education is to produce a general foundation atop which any sort of tertiary education can be built.

Yeah, it's not very good at that.

The model of turning a literate child loose in a library and letting them be for six or eight years should not be assumed as universally useful.

If you're rich, you start working in your parents' business, you're also likely to intern in it, and/or in your parents' peers' companies, and if you're any decent you're likely going to be groomed for an exec position, a position the poor college grad will never be able to aspire to, and if you're not decent you're probably going to get some sort of face-saving "consultancy" position, paying again way more than the poor graduate can ever hope to get.

This is unrelated to the education system, and it's not something you can ever fix, because people will always try to make sure their family has an advantage, which means that as soon as a family reaches a position of influence it will use it to perpetuate its position.

Meritocracy is nice in theory, but humans as a species are wired a lot more for tribalism than for meritocracy, hence why to get some semblance of it you need a culture/government that fosters it, and those are in short supply.

Jobs aren't hard to find if you are one of the few people in the world who can do the job. I know, these aren't entry level jobs but given the right education, you can skip those I think.

> This is unrelated to the education system,

Fundamentally, I think that few things in society aren't fundamentally related to the educational system. Or more precisely, quite a bit of society can be explained by looking at the educational system 10 years ago.

[1] http://voxeu.org/article/intergenerational-mobility-denmark-... [2] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/the-amer...

2: Years of schools have essentially no explanatory power at an international level (even in lesser developed countries that should have much more "low hanging fruit") Other research shows that without improving test scores, which are strongly influenced by genetics, education is basically worthless for economic development.

https://pseudoerasmus.com/2015/06/15/education-econ-growth/

3: Poor people in the US, especially net of taxes and transfers, are quite wealthy by broader international standards. US poor vs Somalia? LOL that's not even a question. The poor in some of the more economically successful nordic/northern european countries might have somewhat higher material living conditions, but the differences are much more modest than you might expect and as compared to what you find in other developed countries (especially larger, less homogeneous, less cherry -picked countries), say, France, Italy, Spain, etc it's far from clear cut. The US also has significantly more diversity in multiple dimensions, especially as compared to an extremely (traditionally) homogeneous country like Denmark.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161011131428.h...

I think that just about everyone has dreams that can be solved with more knowledge and skill. The path to achieving these isn't always very clear though. The school should be the organization that gives you that clarity and supports you.

I fail to see how this won't devolve into parents that have more time to devote to their children's education through encouragement, steering, tutoring, or paying for the same having a better outcome. And since I think having more money is causal for having more time, I think that's just a way to make the problem worse, not better.

On some level, I think that if the kids need tutors, the system is broken.

What you describe would be good to reduce the advantage of wealth on outcome, but it's also papering over how hard the problem is. The real problem is getting from here to there. It's akin to saying "well, just eliminate racism." Sure, that's a good idea, nobody should object to that. But it's not like we'll wake up a year from now and say "problem solved!". As a simple example of this, we probably can't make good computer tutors for kids without somewhat good AI. That's not exactly an easy problem to solve.

Wealthy families will be able to pay a better "person who helps", or send their children to a better high school to study optical engineering. Fundamentally, wealthy people will always have access to better services.

America spends more % of it's GDP and more $ / capita than any nation on earth.

America graduates far more people from college than any European country.

European Americans score better than Europeans on standardized testing.

Same for all ethnic groups: Asian Americans do better than Asians, African Americans do better than Africans etc..

The reason America - on average - fares a little lower than Europe has to do with it's ethnic composition. BTW - I'm not saying that some ethnic groups / races are 'smarter' than others, but that literacy, attitudes towards education etc. are multigenerational things, and most Latino Americans and African Americans are only about 1.5 generations fully literate, so it will take some time to fully catch up.

In fact - if you account for ethnicity - America has the best schools in the world - wherever they come in from - they do better than they would have from whence they came.

I'm not saying American schools are perfect or whatever - but it's worth noting that if you look at the facts, they don't fit the whole 'American schools are crap' narrative. It's more nuanced than that.

It's a ruse to imply that Reagan's policies don't play a role in this. GP didn't claim that he's exclusively responsible, just that correcting those mistakes would be a good place to start.

Do you think that kids aren't thrown in jail every single day for war-on-drug offenses simply because Reagan was president almost 30 years ago?

That's my point. Regan has been dead for a while, he can't fix things now. If you don't like how things are going, blame the current people in power.

Gotta love the kneejerk downvotes I'm getting from people who likely don't have a clue what happened.

http://www.newfoundations.com/Clabaugh/CuttingEdge/Reagan.ht... http://www.nytimes.com/1982/12/28/science/california-weighs-... https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/from-master-plan-to-... http://www.salon.com/2014/07/05/ronald_reagan_stuck_it_to_mi... http://www.ontheissues.org/Celeb/Ronald_Reagan_Education.htm

> What's the point of being "wealthy" if [...]

You confuse "being wealthy" with "working one's ass off".

A lot of people work their ass off just to pay the rent and feed their kids.

Working your ass off does not imply wealth. That's the problem.

We should also be questioning why someone that can barely pay the rent decides to have another kid (or even a kid at all). Financial management should be a bigger part of our education system.

"Working your ass off does not imply wealth. That's the problem."

It has never and should never imply wealth. When I was in college, I worked my ass off and studied for an exam one time. I barely passed. Do you think this is fair? I probably worked harder than many of my classmates.

Obtaining wealth involves: timing, hard work, intelligence, and discipline...with a little bit of luck thrown into the mix. Most wealthy people in the US did not inherit it.

Before claiming that the system is rigged (which seems to be pretty common these days in our presidential campaign), we need to take a hard look at the responsibility of the individual.

There are plenty of hard working, well disciplined, intelligent poor people. There are plenty of lazy, stupid rich people. There's virtually no correlation between any of the things you named and wealth.

The question then becomes how much should a lucky person be "rewarded," or how much should an unlucky person be "punished." A lot of people feel that being unlucky shouldn't mean living in perpetual debt, for example, or going bankrupt because you broke a leg.

A lot of people feel that our society could gain a lot by helping those unlucky people rise to their potential.

Many studies find that your parents' wealth is the single greatest influencer of your wealth (http://www.umass.edu/preferen/gintis/intergen.pdf).

I would say that who your parents are is about as "lucky" a thing could be, considering it's totally independent of who you are or decisions you make.

My only other assertions being that smart poor people and dumb rich people exist? I hope that's self-evident to anyone on this board...

This statement is rife with all kinds of shitty assumptions. Until Obamacare came along, it was common for health insurance in the US to not cover birth control -- yet it often covered Viagra. So, a guy who is too old to get it up anymore is entitled to sexual pleasure, but a young woman servicing a man is going to vindictively be made to pay, both literally and figuratively.

Second, a woman can be raped and end up pregnant. Rapists aren't exactly known for using protection and one rape case was determined to be not rape because the victim managed to convince her assailant to use a condom to protect her from disease. The courts determined this somehow proved consent on her part.

Third, it's quite difficult to get an abortion in the US. There are a lot of barriers to getting an abortion. So if you get raped and wind up pregnant, good luck ending it -- even though rape is supposed to be one the exceptions that allows you to get an abortion.

Fourth, there are religious faiths that tell women they are going to hell if a) they don't willingly oblige their husband for sex or b) they use any sort of birth control whatsoever.

I could probably go on, but I am a desperately poor woman who needs to try to get some work done so I can keep eating this month, in spite of having been one of the top three students of my graduating high school class and having had both my kids legitimately within the bonds of matrimony and generally having done every goddamn thing "right" that I can possibly do, but it is still FUCK YOU Michele, because, hey, women don't need no stinkin justice or respect. And before you ask: I have been celibate for more than 11 years at this point.

Wow, do assumptions of the sort you are making piss me off. It is a great way to guarantee that the world will continue to remain in the toilet, no matter how hard people work or how virtuous they are.

Birth control costs literally $7 a month. You can get it from almost any pharmacy in the nation. Complaining about your health insurance not covering birth control is like complaining about your car insurance not covering gasoline.

How is this also not an argument that health insurance should pay for food? People (including women!) pay way more per month for food than the $7 that we've agreed birth control costs, and it's far more vital to one's continued health than birth control is.

> And my criticism is more like saying that insurance companies would pay for your gas if you were male but not if you were female.

Only in a tortured and incorrect fashion. Insurance companies will pay for treating all kinds of maladies that only women can get. Is that an argument that they're discriminating against men?

You may be conflating the resulting tiredness of menial physical labor with actual productivity, which is certainly understandable from an emotional perspective, but not really logical.

Edit: also, whether or not someone worked for their money, says nothing about good or evil. I'm sure we can all point out people in both camps.

Ancestor post stated that the intersection was not equal to the empty set. Its reply post implied that the intersection was not equal to the union, and perhaps that the intersection was not even a significant fraction of the wealthy set. They were speaking past each other.

Wealthy people like to overemphasize the contribution of hard work to their own wealthiness, which has a side effect of encouraging non-wealthy people to fall into exploitable patterns in their attempt to become wealthy. If you want to get rich, don't work hard. All that hard work is just going to distract you from what you should be doing--acquiring ownership of moneymaking machines that are either fully autonomous or have a very high multiplier for turning your own work into spendable money. You can buy them, or you can build them, but you'll have a hard time doing either unless you spend a lot of time around wealthy people, leeching off their knowledge of how the machines operate.