Not true. The US ranks very poorly compared to other advanced economies when it comes to income inequality and social mobility [1].
Also most of the examples you give prove exactly this: Mark Zuckerberg was just a kid in a Harvard dorm, and so was Bill Gates (one of your "examples"). Ted Turner went to Brown, and all almost every person in the list you gave went to a very good school, if not Ivy League. And yet most Americans claim that they can't afford college [2]. It is naive to claim that "most people aren't rich due to a lack of opportunity", because that's exactly what's happening.
[1]: "How to get rich in America", The Economist -http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2017/02/ec...
[2]: "83% of Americans say they can't afford college", Edward Jones study -http://www.thinkadvisor.com/2015/05/13/83-of-americans-say-t...
Let me describe it this way:
A high school kid can go out and buy any one of these computers:
Go through this free course:
Gain even greater skills and understanding through this:
And any number of these:
And then study this:
For a bright kid that's $200 and six months of a concerted effort to learn.
Now all he or she needs is some kind of an interesting idea.
Build a minimum viable product. Perhaps do all of this with a friend.
Apply to YC.
If all goes well, have access to hundreds of thousands of dollars and some of the best business coaching anywhere on earth. And millions of dollars past that if the idea generates interest. And hundreds of millions to billions of dollars in revenue in the future if the idea turns into a product that gains traction.
Please don't tell me there are no opportunities. All you need is a few hundred dollars, time and dedication and a reasonable support structure from which to explore (a friends couch or a bedroom at your parent's home). And, yes, a good idea and some luck.
This has never been possible in the history of humanity until modern times. A few hundred dollars, an idea and hard work.
Perhaps the reason the US ranks where it does is because people are not interested in making the effort required to improve their station in life. I know plenty of people like that. They talk, talk, talk and never take a risk of any magnitude or make the effort to turn talk into action. And they never go anywhere.
I'll give you a very concrete example: I have a good friend whom I've known for thirty years. He is a gun enthusiast and knows the subject very, very well. For as long as I've known him he has been talking about manufacturing accessories for other gun enthusiast. This is an extremely lucrative segment yet one I am not interested in. However, wanting to help him out I've offered him full access to my entire CNC shop along with workstations with the requisite CAD/CAM/FEA tools. Free of charge. All he has to do is buy raw materials, steel and aluminum, design something and machine it. I'd even have one of my machinists help him get started.
In other words, I am placing, at his feet, with no conditions whatsoever or desire to take a piece of the action, hundreds of thousands of dollars in high end manufacturing equipment, software, tools and support. No preconditions. A complete factory. We can even do electronics assembly for him. For free.
He can make as much money as he wants and I don't take a dime. I'll even do small production runs for him and not charge him a dime to run our machines and use our tooling just so he can have an initial inventory to sell.
That has been a standing offer that I have repeated with some frequency for the past fifteen years. What has he done so far? Talk. Just talk. He is a great guy and a good friend but he simply does not have what it takes to take that leap, even when everything is laid out for him.
BTW, I've had this discussion with him in person. I've asked him why it is that given the opportunity in front of him he just won't pull the trigger an try to turn his talk, his ideas, into a business. The response is always very circular and fuzzy, it boils down to the difference between talking about something and actually doing it. The latter is easy, the former is not.
Opportunities in the US have never been better. Blaming it on the rich is just one of the myriad excuses out there to justify not making an effort.
BTW, most people would feel rich if they made somewhere between $10K and $25K a year depending on where they live in the US. I am not necessarily talking about creating a Facebook here. There are plenty of business opportunities out there that can get someone to that $10K to $25K a month range without having to have a Masters degree from Stanford and wealthy parents. In fact, most of the very successful people I know ($1MM+ in income) never even went to college and clawed their way to success from nothing.
I'll give you an example of the latter. Friend of mine, emigrated to the US (legally) with very little to his name. Barely spoke the language. Barely graduated high school in Israel.
He bought a beat-up piece of shit car. Slept in it for about six months. Got himself a grunt job at an air conditioning installation company making shit money. Worked that for about a year. Saved up some money. He worked for me for a while doing electronics assembly work (which he learned with us, he knew nothing coming in). Did that for a while and saved some more money.
He eventually decided to go off on his own and start a courier business (letters and small parcel deliveries). This is before the internet, nothing was easy.
He beat the pavement for a month until he landed a small client. He had to be available 24/7. He would do his day shift making deliveries. At night he'd park his car in the parking log at his client's office with instructions to wake him up if they needed a delivery. He did that for a few months. Got a couple more clients. Continued to drive during the day and sleep in the car at night in a client's parking lot. Months went by like this.
Fast forward to today: He owns a good size courier/logistics company. He employs dozens of people. Has a small fleet of cars and trucks. They deliver locally, nationally and internationally, handling everything from small parcels to containers full of product. And yes, he makes millions.
Virtually no education. No money. Language challenges. And yet, today, he is wealthier than most US natives who have all the opportunities laid out in front of them.
If you want to blame the rich for everything, be my guest, it's a complete fabrication but hey, free country and all that.
Live long and prosper.
The top 10% are there because of a million reasons. You identified one of them. Perhaps they are some of the most confident people out there.
Success is hard. I suck at so many things yet I have managed be have success (after many failures and going bankrupt twice) because of grit, determination, being open to taking stupid risks and a saint of a wife who put up with my entrepreneurial bullshit for years. I'm not in that 10% but we do very well.
My trips up and down the scale (if such a scale exists) have taught me so much about human nature. It is so much easier to blame everyone else for one's own failures (or lack of motivation, risk taking, etc.). I've always said that in business I am and will always be my own worst enemy. The psychology of enduring the torture business can be is crazy.
The first time I lost everything I did not, for a minute, stop to blame everyone. I licked my wounds and figured out how to start from scratch again. Not a dollar to my name. Maybe that's why I don't appreciate victim mentality, I see it as very weak and have nothing but contempt for it.
There are obviously exceptions, but from what I've seen most tech billionaires have these kinds of backgrounds.
People who are successful never make these kinds of comments. Because they don't matter. They are irrelevant. Success in the US is decoupled from a privileged standing in life. People from all walks of life can be successful.
And, BTW, being a billionaire isn't the milestone. Most people would feel wealthy with incomes in the $10K to $25K range (depending on where they live in the US). This does not require PhD parents and two years at Harvard. In fact, most people who start businesses making, say, $1MM+ a year probably don't have more than a high school education. Yet, they do have a lot of grit.
The victim mentality of blaming the rich might be fulfilling to some but it is utter bullshit. I am not talking about the rest of the world here. In the US, this is pure nonsense. The opportunities available today in the US have never been better.
I have no idea what qualifies as "successful" to you, but I consider myself modestly successful and I make these kinds of comments. As a mid-level engineer at Google, I make > $200K yearly and own a home in one of the more expensive markets in the country. I'm sure that isn't impressive to millionaires, but it places me in the top 10% of earners and allows me to live quite comfortably.
Yes, I acknowledge that I got to this point with a lot of hard work. I went to a state school in the Midwest. I held part time jobs for the first few years, and for my final years of college I worked a full time job at night and went to school during the day. After graduating I landed a decent job, but pushed myself further by also picking up freelance work on the side. I was very conscious of the gap in skill that I perceived between myself and "real engineers". After a year of this, my skills had improved to the point where I could land a job at a west-coast startup. Luckily for me, this startup had a few big names attached to it that piqued Google's interest: after only 6 months at this startup a Google recruiter contacted me, and I leapt at the chance to interview. It had always been my dream to work at Google, so I took the opportunity seriously. For months, I'd leave work and head to a restaurant nearby to eat and study. I'd order dinner then do coding practice problems in a notebook until the restaurant closed. I'd go home and spend a little time with my fiancée, then after she went to bed I'd type my work into a compiler, fix any issues, then do a few more practice problems, going to bed around 2 or 3. Eventually this lead me to a state where I felt comfortable interviewing, and luckily I did well enough that I received an offer.
The point I'm trying to make with this long-winded story is that I am familiar with hard work, and yet in spite of that I attribute quite a bit of my success to luck. "The victim mentality of blaming the rich" is not something that only poor, lazy people do. Even I feel that inequality is partly a result of those with money and influence pulling the ladder up behind them.
And that's where you are wrong.
Look at it this way: You do very well. Are you actively trying to undermine those below you? Are you out there impeding the guy making a living driving for Uber from succeeding? Or the gal who wants to learn programming to get a better job? Or your co-workers?
How exactly do you, someone who by most measures is doing very well, conspire to impede others while growing your empire and sucking-up 80% of the opportunities at your level.
I've been an entrepreneur all my life and I've made high seven figures along the way. I can't remember a single instance where I ever thought of pulling the ladder up behind me. I was too busy making sure our competitors didn't eat us alive. And so were all of my friends doing similar things. I barely had any time for my family, let alone conspiring to be part of some evil master plan.
Look, folks with money are people, not some caricature fabricated in these victim mentalities. If this evil-ness applies to them it has to apply to you and me. Because you are rich by most standards. You have the potential to put away a million dollars or more simply by working where you work. How many people in the US can do that? Will you turn evil? Are you evil? No. Of course not. Don't apply caricatures to others while you would not, even for a minute, apply them to yourself.
As a general position I deplore negative views of reality. Things are not that bad. In fact, in the US they have never been better. Opportunities abound. I mean, just look at you. It took hard work to get where you are. Most people would not do as you did.
Is there an element of luck? Maybe, but the saying that says "luck is opportunity meeting preparation" applies in your case, doesn't it? Would it be right to vilify you because you are in the upper n%? No, of course not. You worked for this moment and you deserve it. If others want it they need to work for it, not sit on the sidelines bitching that you and others are pushing them down.
Given the range of opportunities in the US I contend one of the reasons for lack of mobility is this lack of drive. People are content playing with their iphones and bitching about the latest political figure on Facebook while some of us are working our asses off and doing very well for it.
As a general sentiment, I think we need (as a country) change to an entrepreneur and business friendly mentality. We need to teach kids business and entrepreneurship starting in elementary school. We need to stop vilifying the very things that drive economies. We need to have agencies like the SBA do a better job of empowering startups (they are horrible).
Schools are permeated by people who know nothing about business and entrepreneurship and, in a good deal of cases, vilify them. This has consequences. And we are looking at some of them. As a child I had the opportunity to attend high school both in the US and in South America. The contrast between the two school systems at the time (don't know now) was incredible.
In Argentina I was being taught accounting, business, marketing, economics, etc. Here, well, nothing of the sort. Another big difference I remember were what I would call the "militant teachers". It isn't uncommon in the US at both high school and college levels to have teachers and professors who use class time to pontificate about their own twisted views of reality rather than teach what they are there to teach. Kids are affected by this. And our teacher's unions pretty much guarantee these people can't be fired, which is exactly what should happen to them.
Once again, some of what's wrong in the US is the result of what we are going to our kids in school. If we want to change both our internal wealth balance and our economic standing in the world we have to start with our kids and what they are learning in school.
My fear is that, to some degree, it might be too late. We don't have another generation to "save" us. China is at or past the inflection point. We have lost so much focus over the last several decades that we've fallen behind significantly in many respects. And, while it is still true that there are tons of opportunities available to everyone in the US, it would be much better if we changed our focus away from Ivanka's clothing line or the latest political scandal and laser-focused on everything we have to do to make things better for everyone.
It's really not that. The problem is that you believe personal success and failure are something that entirely depends on you. That is not the case.
You, 'rebootthesystem', were probably not taken off the shelf by God, put inside a body on Earth and left to your own devices. No, you are the product of genetics, environment, upbringing, entourage, opportunities, and so on. Each person grows up to have certain motivations (or lack of motivation) without a choice of their own. You couldn't have been another person than the one you are right now. The choices you make aren't really choices - if you rewind the tape you'd do everything all over again, given that quantum physics doesn't intrude too much.
Your life is fairly deterministic, so you are just the sum of your past, thus it's unfair to say that your achievements are anything but the work of luck. The opportunities you were provided (like education, for example) differ significantly from what you would've had in a Bangladesh slum.
Sure, we can use other people's achievements as motivators for ourselves, but that's biology more than anything else. There's no such thing as self-made man; every person is the result of past events.
That is factually false, there is a strong correlation.
Listen, as an immigrant I can only laugh at such statements. Such nonsense. Most successful immigrants have piles of stories of other successful immigrants who came to the US with nothing, in some cases not even the language, and built success through sheer determination and grit. This country was built that way. Not by people blaming the rich for all their ailments. You are free to believe whatever you want, even if it is a fantasy.
It used to be that that was fine. You could work in factory doing honest manual labor, and still provide for a family and buy a house. That's not possible anymore, without taking on a mountain of debt. When you look at the stagnation of wages compared to productivity[0], it's not strange that people think "where did all that money go?", and then look at the increasing inequality [1] and decide where to lay the blame[2]
[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/US_produ...
[1] https://ddoublep.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/cbpp-income-gai...
[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Historic...
Yes and no. If by that you mean starting and running businesses, of course, you are right. I view entrepreneurship as a way of thinking rather than the act of starting and running businesses.
When given a choice I always like to hire people who have started and run a business, even if they failed. Why? Because what I am after is that manner of thinking.
I don't care if I hire a software engineer who doesn't know Python or can't solve gotcha Google interview problems. These are things that can be learned. What someone can't learn is what I call the entrepreneurial mentality.
Having someone work for you, in any capacity, who truly understands business is far more valuable than any knowledge that can be acquired by reading books or doing tutorials on YouTube.
What you gain is someone who will truly work for the business and understand their roles and responsibilities from a very different perspective.
I see entrepreneurship everywhere. Even as an employee, the things that will move someone up the scale within the company or across their industry are entrepreneurial in nature. Taking care of your customer (your employer). Making sure they are satisfied with your product (your work). Marketing yourself. Being an advocate for your employer's needs. Striving to innovate and make a better product (meaning, improve your skills). Having the best product (becoming an expert in the field). Etc.
Entrepreneurial thinking in the workforce would turbocharge our companies. The exact opposite of this is a unionized workforce. This is particularly true of government unions. Here you have a workforce that is almost as mentally dead as possible, not interested in improving themselves, not ever working towards improving efficiency and generally not engaged at all. One visit to the DMV paints that picture in no uncertain terms.
I think everyone can be an entrepreneur.
I think everyone should be an entrepreneur.
The interesting bit is that Zuck, being the son of a well-to-do guy who wasn't astronomically rich, ended up handing a couple of richer twins tens of millions of dollars, all thanks to how the legal system is set up.
Shifting one's economic standing is a contact sport requiring effort. Most people are not interested in making the effort or taking the risks.
Mark Zuckerberg was just a kid in a dorm. Look where he is now.
OK, don't like that example? Here:
https://goo.gl/uEUtKE
Don't complain about what others have achieved. In the US you have the opportunity to reach for the stars (literally). If you want it bad enough, with a little luck and hard work you can get there.
There will always be far more wealthy people than poor or middle class. Why? Because, outside of inheriting wealth, making money is very hard. Some get lucky and it seems to happen easily. That's not the norm. Becoming wealthy is hard perilous work. It requires incredible focus, dedication and discipline. In some cases it can cost people their family and health.
I don't like a culture that vilifies the wealthy or creates divisions along these lines. In a country like the US most people aren't rich due to a lack of opportunity, oppression or some grand plan to keep people down. No, most people are not rich because they either don't have what it takes or are not willing to invest the time, effort and sacrifice required to get there.
If 80% of the value is held by the richest 10% it is because they made money and continue to risk it in investments such as the stock market. I have friends who lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on investments in just a few months. Nobody talks about them taking those kinds of risks. They do talk about the new Ferrari they bought with the proceeds of the 1 out of 100 investments that actually panned out.
Funny how you never see articles during market crashes to highlight how much wealth that same 10% lost.
Or how they pay the bulk of all taxes collected.
This ideology is not aligned with a sensible reality.