I love your story. There's also a ton of people who will delight in cherry-picking your story, as justification for not expanding the social safety net. "throwaway-0987 did it, and you can too! You just need to stop being so lazy"

A few factors to consider:

- You had an aunt you could live with

- As a youth, you were wise enough to go to trade school and college

- As a youth, you were wise/careful enough to not have babies. Furthering your education would be far tougher when you have kids to take care of

- You had access to government programs such as Pell Grants, which many people would deride as being "government handouts"

- As a youth, you were wise enough to avoid crimes that would disqualify you from educational/employment opportunities in your adult life

Stories like yours are wonderful in inspiring people to make something of themselves. But it doesn't change the fact that we as a society should do more to help people who are caught in a poverty trap, especially because of poor decisions made when they were teenagers. Just because someone ran a 4-minute-mile doesn't mean it's reasonable to expect everyone to do so.

> Anyway, people think I'm 'privileged' now because I earn a lot of money, but they have no idea that I used to sleep on the floor and eat in soup lines.

As always in such discussions, privilege is on a spectrum and has many dimensions. To give an obvious example, even as a youth, you were privileged to be an American citizen, with all the rights, assistance and opportunities it entails. If you were born in the same circumstances in Mexico or Congo, you would find yourself facing a far different outcome.

But when actually struggling (or perhaps even when comfortable), you should forget about policy and fairness and just make the best decisions you can and keep trying to do the right thing, and that gives you or your children or grandchildren the best chance to make it to a comfortable place.

You are obvioualy wearing your policymaking hat. Unfortunately, policymaking is and endless mess of arguing and distracts real people from doing the right thing. Calling things "unfair", even if true, is discouraging for struggling people and makes them less likely to succeed if they listen to you.

The fact is that there's a lot of opportunity here, and a lot of people in the world realize that and come here to realize the opportunity.

Any message of unfairness, in my opinion, should be coupled with the context that the best way forward is still by prudent choices and a multi-generational outlook. Like so many immigrants have.

You call poverty a "trap", but part of that is imposed by a given location. That coal mining town might never come back, and opportunities will be scarce. But growing cities will always offer opportunity to newcomers. It's much easier to "immigrate" from a declining city/town to a growing one than from another country.

This is not to say that we can't improve policy. We can. But the constant drumbeat of unfairness and victimhood is a counterproductive tactic in the policymaking process.

Even when born in the country, there are better and worse schools, better and worse social infrastructure, a billion different glass ceilings according to color, gender, age, accent or faith.

Your comment perpetuates the eternal lie that everyone can rise to the top, but we all know that some have a 50% chance and others a 0.0005% chance to 'make it'. It's absurd to blame the kid with a bad school and no breakfast for not living up to the highest moral standards and take all the right decisions when they have probably barely to no good advice, guidance or role models.

Its easy to judge, but try to empathise. That's not a policy hat, it's acknowledging reality.

What advice would you offer a young poor student looking to get out of poverty

A) The cards are stacked against you, but your best chance is to work hard, get good grades, keep a clean criminal record, go to college, and get a good job.

B) You are the victim of a broken system and this system needs to be fixed.

Both are true, but only one of these messages is actionable and relevant for the student.

Yes, the system us unfair, but people can and do rise out of poverty every day. In fact, most children born into poverty make it out of poverty (66% according to this PEW paper [1])

https://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/pcs_a...

A potential consequence of perpetually leaving 'B' out of the discussion is that, while some of these young, poor students will escape poverty and others will not, neither group may realize that the status quo reflects decisions made by human beings, not some invisible law of nature.

Telling poor and disenfranchised people that hard work is the solution to all of their problems sounds just like a recipe for inducing learned helplessness [1] to me. Sure, some hard-working poor people will escape poverty, but plenty won't. The difference between the two groups often lies in factors outside of their control.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

I must not have done a very good job communicating my thoughts, because this is explicitly not what I was advocating for. The post I responded to claimed that both "A) The cards are stacked against you, but your best chance is to work hard..." and "B) You are the victim of a broken system and this system needs to be fixed", then suggested leaving B out of the discussion - even while acknowledging that both 'A' and 'B' were true.

My suggestion was simply to not leave out true, relevant information for the sake of provoking some desired behavioral response from the target audience. That just seems manipulative and paternalistic to me.

This isn't a revelation, however. It's certainly not uncommon for members of marginalized groups to tell their children that they'll have to work twice as hard as other children to end up in the same place.

First, is learned helpless. As the article you linked points out, learned helplessness is not the result of working hard and encountering challenges. It is the brain's default assumption in the absence of of encouragement. People's brains are already predisposed to inaction and helplessness by millions of years of evolutionary biology. Humans are already predisposed to fallacies and heuristics that overestimate the challenges and obstacles, and reinforcing them is actively damaging. Poor people already know how hard their life is, they don't need other people to reinforce this.

Second, discussion systemic problems is almost never accompanied by a quantification of the relative impact of hard work vs social policy. Is it 90% hard work and 10% luck, or the the inverse.

Last is relevance. A poor child cant wait 30 years for political solutions to improve social mobility by a few percentage points. They can't go back and be born to a richer household. Pursuing an education and clean record has vastly greater impact on outcomes today, and will continue to be more impactful in the future.

In both the contemporary understanding of learned helplessness and its predecessor, that is to say, whether helplessness is the default state of human existence or a conditioned response, what's being considered is a person's view towards their ability to reach a desired outcome through their actions.

Decontextualizing the actions of those who face increased environmental challenges is likely to provide discouragement, not encouragement, as the actions of those facing greater challenges will seem less impactful in comparison to the more fortunate. In more practical terms, this means that the relative under-performance of the disadvantaged may be interpreted as some form of personal inadequacy rather than an expected response to greater-than-average challenges. This relates to something you said, quoted below:

> Poor people already know how hard their life is, they don't need other people to reinforce this.

This actually isn't true, at least in many important ways, and that's a major part of the problem. While poor Americans may realize that their house/neighborhood/car/etc. isn't as nice as those they see on TV, they can't understand what they haven't experienced - for example: the impact of stable finances, well-educated parents, or a high-performing school district on academic performance. This phenomenon also holds true for other segments of society - those more fortunate generally can't fully understand the disadvantages faced by those less fortunate than them.

This is why it's important to have honest discussions about the differing realities faced by those across society. If we don't understand the context of our actions, we can't understand the impacts of our policies, nor can individuals make realistic choices that optimize for their specific environment.

> discussion systemic problems is almost never accompanied by a quantification of the relative impact of hard work vs social policy

I don't think this is at all feasible. The lived experience of every individual is too unique, with an almost infinite array of immeasurable factors contributing to visible outcomes.

>A poor child cant wait 30 years for political solutions to improve social mobility by a few percentage points...Pursuing an education and clean record has vastly greater impact on outcomes today

I don't want to sound overly blunt here, but the entire point of my previous comment was that we can encourage disadvantaged young people to take the actions most likely to lead to success while acknowledging that 'the system' is broken and trying to fix it. Where did you get the impression that we can't tell children to study and avoid crime while also telling them that they should be aware of unique challenges they could face?

And, again, I'm not trying to sound blunt, but what poor child doesn't want to be successful? What poor child wouldn't want "an education and a clean record?" I think it's important to consider why many of them won't achieve those goals. To me, ignoring the disadvantages some children face and simply telling them to work hard seems both naive and insensitive, but, most importantly, unlikely to lead to a satisfactory outcome.

Policymakers in Washington and poor immigrants on the streets need different advice, because they control different things. If you are President or Congressperson in the U.S.A, then by all means: let's have a more humane immigration system, and universal health care, and a social safety net.

But if you're a poor immigrant in this country, none of that policy is up to you. Non-citizens don't get to vote; Congresspeople do not listen to them. They risk being deported for the slightest infraction. They often require their employer to sponsor their continued stay in the U.S. They lack financial resources, and oftentimes job skills. They lack cultural capital and a support network.

But they can control several things. They can control where they choose to settle, and move to areas with more opportunity. They can control what they choose to spend money on, and not let anything out the door that isn't absolutely essential for survival. They can control what they do with their time, and allocate that to building new skills and pursuing new opportunities. If they don't do all of those things, they will fall behind, through the cracks, because that's how life is for poor non-citizens in America. It's usually worse for poor non-citizens in the countries they came from, too.

Being able to think systemically, act collectively, and be free from any sort of reprisal or consequence is itself a form of privilege. I thought that chmod600's comment acknowledged reality more than yours did, because not everybody has that privilege. And if you're one of the many people who don't, your best option is to think about your own enlightened self-interest, act according to the options available to you, consider consequences carefully, and not feel too guilty about doing the best that you can.

It's not exclusively about immigrants. In fact, immigrants are less likely to be caught up in notions of fairness because they probably thought to themselves before they came something like "this is going to suck and be unfair, but it will be worth it for my children and grandchildren". So they just make the best of it and compare with the country they came from, not some ideal utopia.

The ability to vote is some tiny amount of control, but democracy is a blunt instrument to actually affect your life in a positive way. Policies and their implementation rarely live up to expectations even when enacted, so people waiting for them just get more discouraged. And a lot of policies that might sound good have bad unintended consequences, which is why there are endless arguments.

I don't mean to give up on policy, just to recognize that it's not going to be the salvation you're waiting for. Sensibly spend some effort to understand issues and vote for good representatives, but don't hold your breath. Focus on ordinary good advice and encouragement that work regardless of the policies.

Most of the goodness in the world is not some well-crafted policy, but ordinary people doing ordinary good things. Be positive and encouraging and give credit when people do those good things, don't be dismissive because you think people will misinterpret the story and craft bad policy out of it.

The way we build on success as a society is when people share their success stories. If every time someone shares their success, the response is instantly about how privileged or lucky they are, then our culture is sick. We should listen to and support those stories.

I would argue that a culture which attributes success in life to personal effort or choices is sick. This makes people blame themselves for not trying hard enough etc, when in reality there are more decisive factors such as who your parents are (or luck).

Don't we want a culture where success in life is associated with personal choice and an economic environment which allows it to be true?

For now, it is at least a half truth where some individuals are successful because of their hard work and others due to luck.

In what world would we want a culture where success is viewed as entirely random? how would this be better?

(Perhaps we should define "success" in this conversation)

This thread kicked off with someone who escaped poverty and made it to the middle class. I am not talking about the fetishization of the hyper-rich.

I do think that with persistence, hard work, and an average allocation of luck most people are capable of achieving a comfortable job and a happy middle class life.

In my observations, a lack of personal responsibility for improving your situation is much more harmful than idealizing the successful. For every person I know held back by some sense of inferiority, blaming themselves, I know 10 stuck in a shitty situation by complacency. I see skilled people in miserable jobs who could be interviewing, people lonely or shitty marriages they should change. I see people who are unhappy with their heath but make no change. Many of these people think, "I am just unlucky" and resign themselves to their situation.

While you don't think people will ever stop struggling, I'm not convinced. People can become disillusion and hopeless if you tell them their effort has no correlation with their success in life.

Some say that the "American Dream" of getting ahead with hard work is a lie, but I think the idea that your efforts have no impact on outcomes is an even bigger lie, and a more dangerous one.

None of this is accidental: it is the consequence of a specific program started about 1970, outlined in the Powell Memorandum, to grab control of the levers of power. Perhaps the most important factor was using military-grade propaganda methods to get the poorer half of voters voting against their own interests. It has been running for 50 years now, and has been a roaring success.

Kids come out of college now saddled with decades of crushing debt, facing homelessness after one medical or legal hiccup; scared voters are easily manipulated. Half the nation actually voted for an out-and-out con man--twice!--pretending to represent them while doing everything imaginable to grind them down further. Meanwhile the opposition has been forced to pray to the same gods, and depend on hedge funds to finance a half-hearted alternative that has to use a vocabulary created by the propaganda machine.

The amount of money generated by the US economy has gone up and up and up since 1945, but the amount collected by regular people--the less-than-99%-ers--leveled off in 1975. All the rest has gone straight to the pockets of those at the very top, even minting billionaires left and right. Make no mistake, we could all be fantastically better off given pretty small policy changes.

If you think <300k/yr is not middle class, I think we are coming from such different places that we cant have a meaningful discussion.

I'm just going to put this out there:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/203183/percentage-distri...

The propaganda message is that any improvement for the people at far left (with brown skin, in particular) would be at the expense of people immediately to their right. The other lobe, off-screen, that could afford everything, is invisible. The program has been a fantastic success. Champagne corks are popping every year, but most especially in 2020, when the right lobe shifted quite a ways further right.

I have some relatives in the other lobe. Their lives are very different from ours. Their kids' lives are very different from our kids'.

And, get the income not reported as "household income". Income of most millionaires does not show up on there. Jeff Bezos's and Trump's incomes are not on there.

Then what is the point of making better choices, such as staying in school, avoiding drugs and not committing crimes?

The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, both per capita and in absolute numbers (even counting, e.g., Chinese concentration camps). Cities have quotas now, where they are obliged to send a specific number to prison each year to maintain their contract. The prisons and police forces cost much more to operate than would be needed to lift every American out of poverty.

When you and I were young, no city police force had a billion dollar budget. Crime rates plummeted about 18 years after we stopped poisoning everyone with lead, so there is much less legitimate work for the police. They keep busy, though.

Having worked at minimum wage as a teen, I can guarantee you could not support a family on it.

> They graduate today with a lifetime of debt

The ones that did not google "starting salaries for major X" and compare that against the expected debt they'd incur, yes.

Yes you do need lucky genetics (and insane amounts of hard work) if you want to join the NBA, but if you're willing to work hard and make sacrifices it's more than enough to be born average (not too poor, not too sick), you'll be able to have a very decent life.

> But when actually struggling (or perhaps even when comfortable), you should forget about policy and fairness and just make the best decisions you can and keep trying to do the right thing, and that gives you or your children or grandchildren the best chance to make it to a comfortable place.

This exact dichotomy comes up when I give advice. I have started calling it 'advice for persons' vs 'advice for peoples' (the grammatical peculiarity is on purpose). Both are often completely different.

OP's advice is great for persons. It doesn't work for policy making which is decidedly about peoples. But, I don't think that was its intention to begin with.

The person can't live in a dense area and must have a car, to avoid other people since they are potentially dangerous. Also their workplace is in a dangerous area. So a large portion of their money goes to transportation and housing.

What if they were just as poor but the crime rate in general was just lower? They could live in dense housing and use public transport all day, as could the spouse and the kids.

To an outsider, this seems like a really big factor.

I am doing better than the average American, in large part, because I'm not burdened by the things that hinder the average American (hyper-infation is one way of easily getting rid of your student loan, but the other aspects of your life will be terrible - I do not recommend it)

> If you haven't experienced poverty in the third world, its easy to whine about privilege and inequality in the USA. If you have experienced it, then you already know life is not fair and there is always someone better off than you.

Shouldn't it be a point of pride - that the USA has less inequality than third world countries. Americans should absolutely "whine" about it, and avoid moving closer to third-world standards. That should be taken as well as saying "If you haven't been detained for months without trial in the freezing gulags, it's easy to whine about mass surveillance and unlawful arrests in the USA".

I don't get it, do you think the system is fair? Do you think it's fine to have so many homeless people in the US because they were given a fair chance? Do you think it's fair that you can go bankrupt due to a medical issue?

Each discussion has its place. We shouldn't derail every success story with comments about how "privileged" someone is for having an aunt.

It depends on the situation, of course. Slavery was so oppressive that it needed to be abolished before any other progress could happen. But that's just not the situation today -- lots of progress can happen without policy changes. I know that policy makers (or politically-obsessed people) like to believe that policy is everything, but it's really not. Policy is important but it's just one piece of a complex social system.

I don't mean to argue against a social safety net (free college in this example was certainly a good thing). I just mean to say that you can't discount the importance of hard work and good judgement. The government can not and should not lift people out of poverty if those people refuse to work to better themselves.

On a national or even global scale I try to avoid generalizations like this because trivially they don't lead to good policy outcomes. It's almost a little like stock picking. If 5/100 hedge funds make a positive return over the year, my first thought isn't "the other 95 refused to work to better themselves".

It's easy to understand this with hedge funds, but people commonly make this mistake when talking about human beings. You wouldn't be taken seriously if you said those hedge funds lost money because "they refused to work hard". I feel most people are the same way - I don't think any rational actor refuses to better themselves, rather it is a fallacy we tell ourselves to explain why things the way they are. I've seen plenty of "hard working" people relegated to poverty because their kid got sick.

Finally, the best solution is not to focus on individual funds, but on the index. Providing a better baseline for all companies leads to a better overall index and having a strong economy involves having a section of it the "wastes" a lot of money investing in the in the future.

Because...yes. So much yes. Even had this person engaged in crime ('to feed his family!'), but still come out of it on top, we'd be saying "see? Even with those slip ups, he did the right thing most of the time and came out on top", but then we turn around and three strikes, lock someone else up for decades. And we don't know the people who failed, despite doing everything 'right', who died homeless and malnourished.

This difference between individual advice and group-level policymaking (mentioned elsewhere in this thread by chmod600) accounts for a lot of talking past one another in political debates. They are two totally separate levels of analysis.

To be clear I'm not saying there isn't a level of difference in talent or work ethic; what I'm arguing is that viewing the world that way makes for terrible government policy. When someone says something like "welfare makes people lazy", they are making the mistake you are. Somehow the imaginary "real life work" is directly correlated with effort, but actual finance jobs are not.

There are successful companies and products that don't seem to have a lot of either behind them beyond the initial work to find a successful niche, that they've leveraged to great success. And companies and projects have failed despite having both of those because of circumstances outside of their control.

Just like people, companies are products of their environment. Why -doesn't- someone work hard? Or make the right choices? Because either of their environment, what they've learned, or because of who they were born as. Neither of those is under their control. And even if they do, and it doesn't pan out, why didn't it pan out? Again, factors outside of their control.

Perhaps there are some fund managers out there that are just like "Yep, it's a rigged system, I'm going to be the one getting rich off rigging it", but I haven't met one personally yet.

I think everyone is deserving of not living in poverty. Even "lazy" people.

If you don't believe in state sanctioned murder, then we have to clothe and feed and house people that commited horrible crimes.

Surely if a rapist deserves to be fed, so does an innocent person who can't find a job? Being useless is not a crime.

Also i dispute this qualification as lazy - some people are disorganised, not very clever, etc. You can only claim laziness if we had like a right to a job no matter what.

The State actively deprived the rapist of their ability to act autonomously to care for themselves, so they are obligated to do so on their behalf. The State (typically) does not actively deprive an innocent person who can't find a job of their autonomy. (There are some arguable scenarios in which they do, however, such as excessive fines, but obligation to pay those are dependent on ability, and feeding ones-self supercedes that in most jurisdictions.)

> some people are disorganised, not very clever, etc. You can only claim laziness if we had like a right to a job no matter what.

It is ethical to care for those who are unable to care for themselves. It's not as clearly ethical to force someone else to care for those who are unable to care for themselves.

Calling the unemployed lazy is a lie untill you offered them a job and they refused.

And you would be okay with that? You're advocating for actual slavery of inmates?

A free has has to eat, because of the nature of the universe, but he is free. He can choose his job, has recourses with his employers, etc.

Your statement implies that it's the government which gives everyone the deal "work or starve", but that's simply not the case. The free man is simply existing in the world, surviving as he sees fit. By taking away his capability to survive on his own, you have the ethical responsibility to feed him.

These ideas are preposterous by modern standards, but people can and have come up with arrangements where a person works from jail without becoming a slave.

Can a 'free man' survive 'however he sees fit'?

You can't even walk around 'freely', some guy in Uk was trying to cross the country naked and spent 2 years in prison.

Build a house in the woods, plow the land, hunt without a license, and someone will show up to deal with you. Sing a song in the street? You are breaking copyright and some public nuisance or antisocial behaviour laws. You built something with your own hands and sold it? Might have broken some patents.

About the only thing a free man may do is work for a man freer than him. I appreciate we have a civilised society, but compared to free day of olde, it's a total straigh jacket.

So no, these situations are not equivalent but they are comparable enough that I don't buy the categorical moral judgement you are casting.

However, when it's the government that comes and asks you to give them $100, so that they could in turn give it to Joe, an acquaintance of Steve living the same lifestyle that you have never even met, somehow now it is your moral obligation to pay up, as Joe clearly deserves your money. How does that work?

You're also ignoring the fact that someone who is eligible for this kind of social security and spends it all on booze is probably unwell and needs treatment for addiction and the conditions that cause it. In many cases, the cause of addiction is poverty itself.

This fear of being "scammed" by the Joes and Steves of the world is completely irrational. The government is taking a big chunk of your money anyways. What's being proposed is that instead of spending tax dollars on killing poor people abroad, you spend it on helping poor people at home, regardless of their work ethic.

So, say government increases the income limit for one of the lower tax brackets by $5,000. That's great for people who make more than that, which btw isn't all poor people, but at the same time it also gives more money to everyone who was already doing okay. Meaning inflation will soon eat up the extra money and we're right back where we started.

In order to help the poor with upgrading to non-poor, the government has to explicitly avoid extending that benefit to the rest of society, has to continue taking from middle and upper income people. It needs to be targeted, and tax cuts are a great way to target middle/upper classes while helping poor people less.

If my alcoholic friend from college came to me because he was short on rent or needed to buy them groceries, I wouldn't give them $100. I'd offer to buy them groceries or write a check to the landlord directly.

The government can do the same thing. If someone needs healthcare or education and can't afford it, pay for the healthcare or education. A social net doesn't mean a blank check.

Before you make soap box comments you should be aware of reality. You might think I'm arguing against welfare benefits but I am not. The whole time I watched this state of affairs I seethed because it was middle class tax payers making up the difference in pay for walmart and other corporations who pay poverty wages.

If society agrees to give $100 to Steve then you have no say in how that move is spent.

If you think it's better not to give to Steve anything and you lobby to change the law and are successful. When Andre is affected by this change he decides to make up the difference by breaking into your place and killing you. At least Steve doesn't have his hookers right?

Because to a first approximation, that's not what ever happens. "Steve" is far more a political talking point than a real person.

Neither of course! Either believing your own experience to generalize well or believing someone random on the internet would be crazy talk.

What you should believe is the research on this, which admittedly is difficult with anything this politicized. What I base it on is a combination of reading some of that (though I'm no expert) and knowing some people quite well who have had state level responsibility for programs of this kind.

Fraud, and "Steves" certainly exist, but it seems that the numbers are small enough they don't have much systemic impact, there are many much bigger issues.

That's what I meant by "to a first approximation"; not that it doesn't exist, but the effect isn't of 1st order importance.

Is this some fear that if we provide basic supports for everyone that "too many" people would not move beyond basics? That really seems unlikely.

Your claims that we have "more than enough" are unproven, imo.

Let's take housing. Is your claim that there is enough good housing around for everybody, or that it could be built quickly? How quickly - how many houses are needed, by your estimate? How many building workers are available, and how fast could they build? How many heavy machines (cranes, trucks, bulldozuers...) are available on short notice, to speed up the building?

I don't think many such machines are sitting around idly, and the same goes for construction workers. That means housing is already being built at maximum capacity, and yet there still aren't enough affordable houses.

Just because Apple can make billions of dollars of surplus, doesn't mean there is the equivalant of building machines sitting around idly, waiting to be hired with Apple's money (taking Apple as an example of a rich surplus company).

In fact that money is just debt, literally IOUs - "I owe you". Apple selling an iPhone to people for 1000$ means they trust those people will someday repay them with something worth roughly 1000$. That something could be a building machine. But that machine does not have to exist yet - at the point of sale, all there is is Apple's trust in "the people" to at some point provide that building machine.

Now if Apple were to say today "screw it, we are spending all our money on building houses for the poor", it would probably result in the equivalent of a bank run. Apple would try to rent or buy 10000 construction machines in a single go, but that many machines don't exist. So "the people" would have to go oopsie and say "actually, you can not get a bulldozer for your money".

Furthermore, suppose you were to budget 3000 calories of basic food for every person in Uk, you'd find it's a tiny fraction of national budget.

We had a 'homeless' guy build his house in a forest, but ofcourse the government showed up to remove him. Many people would sort themselves out if we did not prevent them from doing so.

The narrative of shortage is an obsolete idea from the 19th century. We produce more food, steel, oil, and every other real industrial good than we know what to do with. These discussions are like fighting WW2 with medieval tactics.

Today's economy is not limited by production like it was 100 years ago, its limited by consumption. By growing inequality and pushing people into poverty, the '1st world' is reducing consumption and destroying it's economy.

Think about it - how can we have abandoned factories, unemployed workers and surplus of all materials?

Think what 'productivity growth' means - if 40 hours a week was enough to feed and clothe everyone 70 years ago, and productivity went up 400%, how many hours do we need now?

That why we have useless hobs, and 60% of employees believe their job is useless.

The problem is not about morally corupt rich people being in charge, its about morons being in charge. If they were clever but evil, at least the system would not crash every 8 few years

I am sick of hearing about poverty as a growing problem. It simply isn't.

Median income, and the lowest income quintile, have grown steadily. The percent of Americans living in poverty has been declining. Median wealth is still lower than it was before the 2008 crisis, but it was growing strongly before and has grown strongly since the Great Recession.

All trends are upwards. Do not confuse growing inequality with growing poverty. Some are getting richer faster than others, but statistically everyone is getting richer.

Is there a specific metric in mind when you say people are being pushed into poverty? Or is it something you have just heard elsewhere?

However, even though the overall rates were returning to flat before the pandemic - the percent of people below 50% of the poverty line in the US has been historically higher by 50% than it has been in history since the beginning of the measure.

https://poverty.ucdavis.edu/faq/what-current-poverty-rate-un...

If you're an HN reader, you have to realize that for the most part you are in an incredibly fortunate bubble of being in a job that is in demand in a financially supported sector of our economy - it is not that way for many Americans (or many other citizens of other nations).

Today even an "average poor" person can live better than a king 400 years ago.

It shows about a 12% drop in homeless people 2007-2019. The US population overall grew just under 10%, too, so the drop on a per capita basis is higher than that. I imagine 2020 led to a large increase again, though. I also can't vet their sources without registering so take it with a grain of salt.

Specifically in UK in-work poverty has been going up and up for the past ten years.

I don't think number of houses is the problem, either. People need houses in certain places. That's why homeless hang out in San Francisco where a flat costs 1 million dollars, while a couple of hundred of miles away it would presumably be much, much cheaper.

As for your production, it still all costs energy, and getting energy also costs labor (and even wars, remember the wars about oil).

Abandoned factories simply have turned out to be not economically viable. If you think you can do better, why don't you pool your money with some friends, buy such a factory and start it up again?

You merely display the typical arrogance of socialist who always believe they could run everything better with a "planning economy". And when they finally get to try it out in the real world, they get a major painful reality check.

Take your factories: since they were not economically viable, it would be wasteful and a net loss for society and the economy to start them up again.

You are partially right about increased productivity, and it actually has improved the lives of many people. I personally am very glad that I don't have to spend my waking hours doing hard labor on a field just so that I can harvest some potatoes. Most people in the west have enough to eat, and clothes they can wear, many even have a nice smartphone on top.

Some resources are still limited, though, such as nice places to live in.

And the world population has also grown by a couple of billion people compared to 100 years ago. Your job that fed a family at the beginning of the 20th century still feeds a family today, only in China.

You post is narrow minded and presumptious - I am not socialist, we don't have rent controls in London, and there are economic terms other than 'socialist' and 'capitalist'. Try 'Shumpeterian'

But if you want to go on believing that the only choices are socialism or economic collapse every 8 years, go on.

About 10 million cars are produced in the USA every year. An RV/Trailer type thing is like a car - so quite easily you could imagine producing that many of these 'tiny houses' every year with car style factories.

About 600k people are homeless in the USA. That's about equal to the number of RV's produced every year.

So that solves 'physical' homelessness quite quickly if there was an effort to. (that disregards that some homeless choose to homeless out of mental illness etc)

Many have emotional problems.

Most people complain about their jobs, or multiple jobs, but know it provides so much more than money. Half the people I know would have 0 friends, O social life, if not for those lousy jobs.

It’s ironic you say the government doesn’t have infinite money to spend.

We are about to throw close to two trillion out of a helicopter. There is not a person, well one, on my block in Marin County that has not benefited financially from the virus, but will be getting $1400 to blow.

I am worried about inflation.

I suspect clever lazy people without barriers to social or economic participation usually seek out, and often obtain, jobs where they're paid to do approximately nothing. Lazy people, assuming that category is even meaningful, aren't masochists who want to live in poverty. There's more going on there.

Without the job, they would have extra 8 hours (plus commute time) a day to meet their non-job friends.

You can argue that there may be no actual lazy people, but that is another discussion.

"We are about to throw close to two trillion out of a helicopter."

Are you really not aware that the bill for that will simply come later (as it is a debt taken out on behalf of the population), and in the process of creating those two trillion, existing money has already been devalued?

Unless my physics course misled me, no, it isn't.

They create the money so they literally do. Doesn't mean it shouldn't be deployed wisely of course.

Society has limited resources. Until we manage the post-scarcity utopia, I would prefer my tax dollars go to someone who will use them to build a better life.

Perhaps you find that defensible, perhaps you find that appalling, but argue that position, not one that isn't true.

this is kind of reductive claim. in one sense, it's trivially true that the earth has more raw resources than humans can consume even over the course of centuries. AFAIK it's also true that, under the current system of organization, the global economy produces enough finished goods to feed, clothe, and house everyone (though people often bring up logistical caveats here, eg, distributing stuff in places where there are no paved roads or airfields).

the real question here is whether we would still have that quantity of finished goods under a different system of organization with different incentives. to be clear, I don't discount the possibility that we might have even more! but it seems more likely to me that people would simply produce less stuff if they didn't get to keep the surplus by default.

Of course people can keep the surplus. Some of it. But we're a far, far cry from the point where people will stop working when only getting a percentage of their labor's worth (or their parent's labor's worth, as is often the case).

some caveats apply to this offhand quip (very different tax laws and perhaps even widespread evasion meant almost no one was paying an effective tax of 90%, regardless of actual income). I suspect you know this.

I'm sure there's a lot of slack in the tax brackets. I doubt we are close to a laffer curve inflection point. all I'm saying is I'm not convinced by the style of argument that goes "we already have enough food for everyone; we just need to radically reorganize the economy and then no one will go hungry!". more analysis is needed.

Over 20% of the money in circulation in the US was printed last year. i.e. the pot is much bigger now. Also, while tax rates were high back then, loopholes were proportionately larger!

The kind of poverty where you starve and have to wear rags is becoming rare even in Africa. From this point of view, the system has clearly worked and the pendulum even went too far, with obesity becoming a serious problem in places that aren't typically considered rich (Mexico, Brazil).

Housing is a different problem. We have a housing crisis because many people want to live in a few select urban hotspots of the world.

What you call incentive is really compulsion, just of a more extreme form.

In that context, why focus on giving small portions of wealth to those in poverty (even if they aren't working as hard as you think they ought to)?

- it wouldn't be liquid, so you'd be giving part ownership in assets

- the value would be slightly less than median yearly income per recipient. At a pretty sizeable 5% average return, the individuals would net about $2,000 a year.

- if they chose to sell the assets, they would end up with about one year's median income and then it's gone

I'm not sure how much money you think lives up at the top, but redistributing it is not sustainable, and it's certainly not enough to magically pull everyone out of poverty indefinitely. (Or even for very long, at that.)

There are a ton of reasonable discussions to be had about imbalanced power structures between socioeconomic groups, but this whole redistribution thing is just a fantasy.

One can look at a million/billionaire and say, "oh, this person has 50 cars. That's way too many cars for one person to have! Let's give them away to people who actually need cars!" So you seize them and give them away—along with the other 12,000 super wealthy people that own 50 or more cars—and then you have... 200,000 people who still don't have cars.

For groups that preach so frequently about global and ecological sustainability, there's a disturbing blind spot for economic sustainability. I think that's more a feature of envy than responsibility, unfortunately.

What you've done is described a position ("redistributing all of the top 5%'s wealth at once"), described the problems with it, and then criticized my obvious blind spots due to this oversight. Forgotten in this tale is that I never held that position in the first place! You are criticizing your own invented argument.

Also, even if I did favor redistributing all wealth in the top 5% of families, a simple back-of-napkin calculation shows that your argument is wrong.

107 * 10^12 (total networth of US households [0]) * 0.619 (share owned by top 5% [0]) * 0.05 (rate of return) / (315*10^6 (population of US)) = $10k/yr for every person in the US just off of the returns from that wealth, which is 5x your estimate. The US Census poverty threshold is making below $13k/yr. If that wealth was held for you until you were 18, that would be every young person starting their life with $180k in savings, which is another $9k/yr with 0.05 rate of return.

Obviously, there's a whole host of issues with this, including some of the ones you mentioned, and (of course) price inflation, but I am not sure how you calculated your numbers.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...

upvoted

People just do not understand this. You could take away every penny from every billionaire in this country. If you sold everything they had, you would not have enough money to fund the federal government for even one year. And now the money is gone; you can no longer collect tax from the ex-wealthy.

Nevertheless, "just tax the rich" is treated as the solution to all problems. I guess people hear all the talk about the "top one tenth of one percent" and they imagine literally bottomless bank accounts.

To take that away from people is truly dehumanizing, but sounds like a typical socialist scheme (destroy the family, destroy individualism, everything has to be the same).

It's better the 1 rich person is forced to consume that in his lifetime. By doing so that money is redistributed back to the economy, and his 3 kids are also productive.

In scenario 1 only 1 out 4 people work. In scenario 2, 4 out of 4 people work.

Also - it's hypocritical for 'pull yourself by your bootstraps' for children born poor, and 'guaranteed basic income' for children born rich. That is more dehumanizing than not being allowed to pass off inheritance.

> 1 rich person saving his money so his 3 children never have to work is bad for the economy.

"Your rights are bad for the economy, we are taking everything from you. Back to work, pleb".

I think you misread the sentiment. What a lot of us would like to see is a more meritocratic system, where children start off on more equal footing and either earn their wealth or not. But inherited works against that. It is difficult to listen to arguments against taxing the wealthy heavily "because they earned it" while at the same time hearing support for what amounts to aristocracy.

The idea that we have to come up with a good reason _not_ to heavily tax people is backwards. The only reason you need is that people have rights. A man owns what is his and you have absolutely no right to it.

This is all beside the pont anyway. Increasing tax revenue will not solve any of the problems you are trying to solve. As I said elsewhere, you could tax 100% of every billionaire in this country, leaving them homeless, and you would not have collected enough money to fund the federal government for even one year. You could sell off your entire "aristocracy" and it wouldn't make a dent. The strategy of "just spend more money" does not work.

And how are we to do that without taking money from somewhere and using it to help people up?

> The idea that we have to come up with a good reason _not_ to heavily tax people is backwards. The only reason you need is that people have rights. A man owns what is his and you have absolutely no right to it.

Case in point. You can't take money away from rich kids via inheritance tax (nevermind that they'd still have innumerable advantages from growing up in a wealthy household), you can't tax the wealthy, but you're somehow supposed to help poor children up anyway. Who's paying for that?

Furthermore, I disagree with the statement on the grounds that national infrastructure and protections are doubtless large contributors to anyone being able to amass that kind of wealth in the first place, therefore it is not unreasonable to expect that a portion of that wealth be contributed back.

I think you would find that to make everything equal, you would have to take children away from their parents at an early age. Because having caring, loving parents is also an advantage. At least so far not all kids in a school turn out the same, even thought they all have the same teachers and lessons. Must be the parents that make the difference.

I don't think that would be desirable. I don't want my children to be raised in a government institution to make them exactly the same as everybody else, just for the sake of an arbitrary metric ("equality" measured in some arbitrarily chosen terms).

In fact why not get rid of parents altogether, and create children in labs? I bet that is the socialist dream fulfilled.

(Sorry about the cheap comment - I couldn't resist)

Also, sorry, but I don't care how productive other people's kids are, or "the economy". I care about the well-being of my kids. yes, I want everybody to be happy if possible, but my kids have priority to me.

And what exactly is "hypocritical"? What are you referring to? You assume everybody should have the same starting position in life, and I reject that notion.

Children of course are not at fault for the actions of their parents (like if they are drug addicts and have an unwanted child they can't afford, the child is not to blame - but neither are other people's children or parents). But that doesn't mean every child should automatically get the same "starting money". This is not a game of monopoly.

As I said - people compete to give their children the best odds. That is not even unique to humans, it is true for all of nature.

If you take that away, why bother with anything? Why should you bother to get a good job to be able to support your family? Just fuck and live the good life, and dump your children on society to be taken care of.

Already in the west everybody gets a pretty good deal in the form of an education.

* There is a caveat that it should be a new investment rather than a purchase of the existing one, the latter is zero-sum.

Yeah, I disagree. We're talking about on the order of tens of millions of dollars or more being passed from one parent to one child.

> So you are only deserving of a life free of poverty (even if you're lazy) if your parents happened to be rich?

This is such a twisting of my words I am not even sure how to respond. Are you saying the only way out of poverty is to steal everything you want from the rich?

Everybody should have a fair chance, but people who worked harder should also be allowed to benefit. Why should anybody be entitled to the fruits of their labor?

1. We can tell them it's their own fault for not making great decisions when they were teenagers, and therefore, they deserve to remain stuck in a poverty trap for the rest of their lives

2. Or, we can acknowledge that they are now in a situation where hard work alone is unlikely to solve their problems. And we can provide them with the tools they need to help themselves, and also become more valuable assets to society. For example, subsidized/free college or job training. Free/subsidized childcare. Safe living environments. Better access to healthcare. Better public transit so they can actually get to work. Etc

So it's less about "refuse to work to better themselves" and more about correctly placing incentives on the growth path for individuals so that they become the kind of people who want to "better themselves".

Of course there are those who, provided any amount of support, will not become productive individuals and it makes sense to continuously evaluate for growth.

But it is beneficial to society and to each participant to offer a minimum childhood to adulthood transition experience that optimizes for productive adults.

Of course, this is usually only important for the poor because most wealthier people are better at bringing up children.

> The government can not and should not lift people out of poverty if those people refuse to work to better themselves.

3 of those 5 factors began with "As a youth..."

The government can and should help the youth lift themselves out of poverty regardless of the situations of their parents or other situations. They lack many rights that adults have, and in exchange for that, they deserve better support then demanding children should simply "work to better themselves."

The common mistake here, which I think you mostly avoided but didn't make explicit, is to believe that if someone didn't make it they didn't work hard or have good judgment.

It's also problematic how little good judgment we require of young people coming from most backgrounds, compared to underprivileged ones. There is also a common and mostly false trope that many/most poor people are lazy and that is why they are poor. The truth is at minimum more nuanced than that.

Currently, hard work is a prequisite. In order to achieve equility of opportunity, which would allow anyone to succeed, we need to provide for the "unlucky" scenarios people fall into. Access to childcare and education are two big things in particular that should be improved.

At some point automation will leave us in a place where many, if not most, people’s labor is literally worthless because they’re not mechanics or engineers. Then what? Should those people starve even as we live in a time of abundance instead of scarcity? At what point does this concept of deservedness do more harm than good?

Who do you think wakes up and thinks, "I love poverty. This life is so easy"?

Yes, because obviously what someone who won (and lost) millions of dollars needs is not money, but help and support.

Not to mention, by the construction of your own strawman, if they’ve won such a jackpot they’ve probably also then paid millions in taxes.

[1] https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/08/15/5-million-lotto-...

I'm curious to know your position on those who are homeless -- as if mental illness, systemic neglect, and abuse combined with skyrocketing housing costs such that even otherwise-able people are just a few missed paychecks away from foreclosure) are incidental, and it's really a result of being "lazy".

Being homeless would rob nearly every opportunity from you. I don't think it would be fair to dismiss those people as lazy, if all the hard work in the world wouldn't do them any good.

One of those "decisions" was avoiding prison. OP says people call him privileged, so he probably didn't belong to a race that is jailed disproportionately for crimes that white people are let off for.

a lot of folks on the street disagree

OP could as easily "made the wrong decisions", it's literally a crapshoot.

> we as a society should do more to help people who are caught in a poverty trap, especially because of poor decisions made when they were teenagers. Just because someone ran a 4-minute-mile doesn't mean it's reasonable to expect everyone to do so.

Yes. Thank you. Lots of people start out poor and make it out. I did. Many friends did. But just as many did not. And it had _zero_ to do with "hard work". Almost all of it had to with the lack of a robust safety need and the need to (endlessly) prioritize survival.

At the same time, government policies that acknowledge that success is hugely dependent on starting conditions and luck seem to result in more equitable societies. (i.e. higher Gini coefficient or Shorrocks index)

I don’t think there's an inherent conflict between those perspectives -- it's boiling them down to two-dimensional strawman arguments that makes them look that way.

At a societal level, not every single person can be a software engineer, UI designer, realtor, etc. And additionally some fraction of people simply will make mistakes or not-strictly-optimal decisions. It’s a balancing act recognizing that individual decisions can have an impact on outcomes, that some portion of people will still suffer anyway, and alleviating that suffering as much as possible without creating a cycle of dependence/socializing the costs of easily fixed issues.

The trick is separating "Don't give up" from "it's your fault if you haven't escpaed poverty."

Cause it's also dispiriting to have worked your ass off for 10+ years and still be poor and have someone telling you if you were trying hard enough you would be in a different position.

The implication that there's some correlation between how hard you work and poverty. But most poor people I know work way harder than most "professional" people I know. If there's a correlation, it seems to me to be the reverse, poor people are, by neccessity to survive, as a general rule hustling a lot harder than wealthier people.

As the OP actually kind of outlines.

That's the compassionate read on it.

I think what both approaches miss, is the biggest underlying problem is Cost Disease:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...

Reeling in out of control price increases on the most important expenses like health care, education and housing would do more to improve the lot of the poor than any redistribution scheme.

Now, redistribution may be a necessary part of lowering costs. Like establishing government run health care to control cost increases and investing in public universities to radically reduce or eliminate tuition.

This approach helps everyone, but disproportionately helps the poor. And controlling costs will help the poor more in the long run, I believe, than any redistribution scheme that doesn't address skyrocketing costs.

Mother washed dishes then was unemployed from age 12-now and we bounced around her boyfriends houses

My metric (edit: for myself) "have you been poor" is gathering extra condiments from a gas station and having mustard on bread for a meal. We had food stamps, and a small social security check. I always had a bed, and food, but barely and i was aware how close we were as we midnight moved at least once.

I got my college degrees through federal grants and employer sponsorship; now making north of 200k I reflect on how privileged I am to get here. My mother kept me in an upper middle class public school system using a po box, I'm a white man who loved computers in the 90s. I ended up with a social network and a background that looks upper middle class.

I don't subscribe to that "I made it and so can you" I see my story as a I had privilege, how can we make privilege into equity.

I fear that the concept of equity presents a real possibility of a race to the bottom if we're not careful to prevent a Harrison Bergeron situation. That doesn't mean I think we should avoid equity, just that we should be cognizant of the potential pitfalls along the way to determining the exact implementation.

It turns out it's much easier to achieve equity by pushing people down (no more AP courses for anyone) than by lifting people up (getting more black and latino students into AP courses).

The "ruling" class were angry that the plumbers' kids weren't paying a full 4yr of dues to the state colleges so now they're making it so you need to go to private school if you want to get a head start at college gen-eds. And they sold the idea to the masses in the name of making all the animals equal.

I'm being cynical. More likely the people responsible just don't know or care and pushing everybody down is just the easiest way to appease the pro-equity crowd.

This is central to the whole problem with this concept of "equity". If the implementation, as you say, _at all_ involves cutting someone down, then it's morally bankrupt. Who decides who gets cut down? Does the person being cut down have a voice? Are they told how they're supposed to feel about it? Is that not creating a newly marginalized group? This will lead to lots of division, and understandably so.

There's a lot of truth to the adage "two wrongs don't make a right". Equity seems to be about saying that everyone should have the same outcome, by force if necessary.

I should note that "equity" need not mean "equality of outcomes", but when pressed for how one evaluates "equity" far too many proponents fall back to "equality (and proportionality) of outcomes" in practice....

Also, lots of weekends at public libraries.

(Thanks, mom!)

Do you really mean that or is that hyperbole? Because if you really mean that, thats a bit gate keeperish, isn't it? What if someone had their own mustard but dinner was still bread mustard? Its a ridiculous example, I know, but so is this yardstick.

It ends up being a discussion point with my wife for lots of topics where I'm not picky about the quality of food because it's not mustard on bread.

Seriously man, I want to be happy and nobody out there wants to tell me how. I am slowly discovering it for myself, but I feel like this is a deficiency in our media.

Thank god you now understand their trauma well enough to explain how they don't comprehend reality the right way.

I made it and you can too.

It seems to me that luck plays a huge role in each success story like yours. My wife had a similar trajectory and makes quite a bit of money. However, along the way, there were hundreds of decisions made that could have gone the wrong way. She's smart and ambitious and quite lucky.

So to me - and not wanting to speak for the OP of course - but the way I look at this is that the simple encouragement of "I made it and you can too" is more motivating than "I made it but then again looking back I had a ton of lucky coincidences that you probably won't have so, sure, try it, but don't expect success" :)

It's good for motivation and ... less good for social policy.

For those struggling through poverty - one must know that one CAN succeed, or else you end up in a psychological hole waiting for the next nibble of luck. A tempered balance of both optimism and also a real social safety net seems like the best of both worlds to me.

I’m pretty sure things would be very different today if I didn’t have that hope. Don’t take the hope from people even if it’s a long shot.

For all those reading this who are in a bad place financially or otherwise - YOU CAN DO IT! Do not listen to nay sayers and just do your best (or better yet, do even better - you can never really know your own limits/potential unless you try). It’s not a done deal, but is better than the alternative.

Seems like such thinking is a symptom of our current political BS. Having experienced some pretty crappy times, would you honestly think I’d oppose NOT subjecting others to the same misery?! Of course not, no one should experience these and everyone deserves basic dignity.

For what it’s worth, I don’t actually know of an implemented system that is sufficient in preventing/mitigating enough of the poverty. (EDIT: if we had basic income, that would probably do it, without means testing/etc) US situation is unbelievable in that regard - not only do we not have a safety net to speak of, our medical care system is a fast track to poverty and bankruptcy.

This is something we as a society need to deal with, and not disregard a systematic problem with anecdotal success stories and saying "You can too!"

It is very sad if you ask me. Some people hold the worldview that becoming poor and staying poor are things entirely outside of one's own control. Success stories threaten that worldview, so people admonish those who "made it" and remind them that they are nothing but lucky.

Today I am forcing myself to go through the motions of an application - and I am constantly asking myself why am I doing this, because they will just find fault with me and not respond.

Most everyone in my orbit has improved their situation too. Sometimes that was with help from a family member, but generally things have gotten better for friends who were in the same circumstances I was.

The two exceptions are those who got into drugs and never got out (a few folks I know seemed to never have issues, but they're the exception and not the rule) and a single friend who has some non-drug problems that probably need counseling work.

IMO it was passion for reading and building things with our hands that that seperated our cohort from the rest - that and the bond between those of us who knew we hadn't much of a safety net to rely on.

Good books and good company were all I had and all I think I'll ever need - that and the satisfaction of a job well done be it a piece of code well written, a field well groomed and raked or a McDonalds well wiped and scrubbed.

Luck is important, but it’s a mistake to try to attribute the success of others purely to luck. Someone winning the lottery is lucky. Someone who gets hired because a company noticed their quality GitHub commits to a project relevant to their needs is also lucky, but their success isn’t the result of luck alone.

I think we’ve become so afraid of giving the impression of victim-blaming people who are down on their luck that we’re afraid to acknowledge that people can and do work their way into better life circumstances.

Even if we think of luck as the central determinant of a person’s success in life, then we still have to acknowledge that the person’s own choices and actions will pivot their destiny around that luck. Licking in to a dream job through connections and serendipity doesn’t go very far if someone decides not to put in the effort required to succeed at the job, for example.

I read this rhetoric constantly, then I look at a bunch of hard working people that I know, who are poor.

Luck is the opportunity to succeed, hard work is the way to capitalize on that opportunity. One without the other means no success. And on that same note, you can make "good decision" that cause you to miss out on amazing opportunities, and "bad decisions" that end you up in with great opportunities.

I've made plenty of decisions that I thought at the time were kinda dumb, but put me in serendipitous situations which ended up landing me great jobs. So really, the luckier you are, the more chances you'll have to escape poverty; if you're willing to work hard at those critical times, you'll actually succeed.

And probably and equal amount of decisions that could have turned out better.

So rather than being the result of one or two lucky or unlucky events, the final outcome is more likely to be the average of the quality of all the decisions over time.

for instance, consider success to be a knowable function (like y = ax^2 + bx + c ). luck would be like having high (initial) coefficients and constants through no effort of your own (e.g., being born into a wealthy, connected family). hard work and good decisions might allow you to increase (or decrease through neglect/bad decisions) these coefficients at the margin, but the relative advantage often remains many multiples of the disadvantaged.

E.g. I aced an interview question on GC design because, after doing some GC tuning for a web app at work I read GC docs and then a couple research papers at home to understand it better. After the (group) interview loop, someone told me they were asked a hypothetical SQL backend design question they had trouble with, and I realized I knew then how SQL Server solved that, for similar reasons, so I could have aced that question too. Sure, I could have gotten yet another design question that I knew nothing about ("unlucky"), but to even have a chance to get "lucky" you need to prepare... to win the lottery you at a minimum need to buy a ticket ;)

As for the luck of the birth, almost by definition, when you are poor you grow up surrounded by people in similar circumstances; if you "make it", it is very easy to judge those who didn't, because well, they were in similar circumstances to you and you saw what they did differently, often in detail.

"I made it and you can too."

Note that I emphasized "can" in that quote. "Can", not "will". This isn't a guarantee by throwaway-0987, it's words of encouragement to try.

On a forum that celebrates startup moonshots, I find it odd that anyone would piss on the idea that trying is worth while.

The thing is, socioeconomic status affects our outlook. It doesn't matter if you're poor, rich, or somewhere inbetween. A simple example is taking advantage of opportunities. You may be unaware that they exist, view them as being out of reach, or simply see the risk as being too high. Only one of those even imply that chance plays a role. It is also worth noting that values may play a role. Some people like to blame being poor on bad decisions. While it may be true that some decisions are bad in the sense of generating wealth, they may be good decisions in other respects. Many jobs serve have social value or serve the public good, yet are woefully under compensated. Some people will choose that path simply because they are more intersted in serving others and simply don't have the will to be selfseving.

I think the "can" is applicable here and can think that even while acknowledging there are people who can't physically work. I don't want to put words in your mouth, so I'll ask: is this the only reason you object to using the word "can"? What would be more accurate in your view?

[0] We're talking about routine success here, not Elon Musk. We're talking about avoiding poverty, not going to Mars.

But to see the world through the lens 'everyone van make it, just put effort and stop worrying' is simply absurd.

The concept of Talent Stacking: https://personalexcellence.co/blog/talent-stack/

Those who accrue and leverage a variety of skills tend to get 'lucky'. This is why you could strip most entrepreneurs of all their money and assets, and not be surprised to see them enjoying success in 5 years. You put into place a system that makes making the right decisions inevitable, and learning from the wrong decisions.

To believe that your success is out of your hands is incredibly disempowering. I understand it's primary function is to help you empathize with others, but it subconsciously has a hold on you. A very limiting belief, I'd 'yeet' it immediately.

Of course you need to put the work in, but the deck is stacked in your favor if your family is very well off (and frankly you need to do far less work, due to nepotism and everything else), and massively stacked against you if you come from a poor family.

The point isn’t that they’d be poor if you took away what they built... it’s that they succeed in building it in the first place! That process of building wealth in all its forms is the key.

It’s not easy. It’s definitely not fair. Some people start out way ahead. Some people start out way behind and don’t even have role models to show how it’s done. It always takes time. My view is that you just have to accept people where they are, respect their efforts, politely look past their structural (dis)advantages, and deal with them as human beings who deserve love and support for their own sake.

I find the developments of cheap solar power + low latency satlite internet + digital banking(access to stable currencies + inflation hedges + global transactions) as essential to deliver the services that the most successful and privileged have used, to the poverty stricken around the world.

As these people join the fold, do we prepare them documentation, do nothing, or set up roadblocks?

Sometimes they are able to do a minor hurt to a vast number of people (marketing, some sales, etc...) and they don't feel like they are doing anything wrong. Sometimes they are just conforming to the standards our society has set, (everybody is doing it).

I myself try to do the best, but I've discovered the only way to advance is to job hop my way to a decent salary. I'm sure this has caused problems for others, but it's accepted in this industry. I've seen others who won't job hop languish with much lower salaries.

If you study the right things, you'll get "lucky" in interviews because the more problems you've seen in the domain, the more likely you are to be tested against the knowledge you've already acquired. But that's clearly not luck - it's preparation. You won't ace every interview, but you'll do well in enough.

I made the wrong decisions several times. I lacked focus in and after university that cost me several years in my twenties. As soon as I made a plan to change things, the plan worked. When a plan goes wrong, you evaluate and make a new plan. Every idea doesn't always work - you just need one that does.

Sounds fortunate. This is one aspect where I too have been "lucky" in the past, but you have to be both lucky and good.

Some of the advice I wish friends would take is this: accept help wherever you can get it, as long as it won't distort your relationship or create an untenable dependency.

And in this industry, nobody is comfortable talking about it. Most of the people I work with graduated from school as guaranteed millionaires. I hear things get said by people that are so far from the orbit of my reality and I cringe.

Reading the article was really eye opening for me because I hadn't thought of all of the life skills that I've picked up simply as a result of being poor. It even affects how I think about my new-found wealth. I spend an enormous amount of money on tools and equipment. I'm the one helping all of my friends build, move or fix things.

I grew up lower middle class but my dad grew up poor. I think a lot of his practices still rubbed off onto me, sounds a lot like what you describe.

We have a friend who grew up comfortably and have noticed how that influenced their more laissez-faire approach to life. E.g. when we help them move, we do most of the work. There’s a sort of “everything will work out” mentality on their part, whereas I’m constantly worrying about how it’s all going to fall apart.

It’s not really good or bad, though. I almost envy the carefree attitude. Childhood trauma tends to make people try to control things more as adults, and I wish I didn’t stress things so much. My wife also grew up more “securely” and we talk a lot about how it informs our worldview differently. Thankfully it doesn’t cause problems though, it’s just interesting. I think we’re just different enough to make a great team.

And as others mentioned, I value the life skills I gained by my upbringing and early start on working for myself. I can build and fix things, and cook really well. Gonna be just fine, I think.

Happy building, busterarm!

This is surprising to me. I’m also a former poor. A lot of people I work with in tech come from generally “normal” backgrounds. Middle to lower class (in excluding h1b and green card holders). It just turned out for them that their passion and hobby (computers) ended up being a great career.

Now things are probably different for younger generations now that the secret is out about P90 software salaries.

Good thing I got in while they were still taking nobodies.

I feel the same way! I look around at my younger peers with such impressive pedigrees: Stanford, Ivy League, PhD’s, former founders, etc. and I think “wow, I’d never even get my foot in the door if I were entering today!

I got in before the door closed for sure. I just started late so the younger ones are my peers.

I've been a blue-collar programmer (not Software Engineer) my entire career.

I think they're finally on to me though and I may have to skip out soon. Code reviews, unit tests and Scrum are not my thing anyway. ;-)

I still hope I can land a decent software engineering position someday without such a degree, even if its not at a FAANG company and doesnt pay as well

Man, I remember some of the business courses I took, as well as the reports and presentations we did after our internships. So many people's thoughts and conclusions read basically as "I learned that the poor are people too". This was at one of the top universities in my home country. It's reasonable to expect these people would be industry leaders eventually. The lack of empathy they showed was appalling.

All that being said, I'm glad you got through the challenges in your early life. I wish we were more tolerant about poorness, because sharing experiences like yours could definitely teach and encourage other kids to fight for a better quality of life. Having more people with your experience in places of power could also help bring a little more empathy to society. We need it badly.

My dad had a bunch of tools growing up which he used to do household repairs and repairs on the cars, I remember for the longest time my parents driving an old station wagon with a lot of duct tape holding things together or covering leaks and the air conditioning not working.

I still try to repair things on my own if I can, while some people I know just go hire someone on Handy or something to fix things for them.

If you make the assumption that HN is vaguely representative of the software industry and then looking at the reception that all the comments that stop short of saying "luck is the primary factor of success" are getting it seems pretty obvious why nobody talks about it.

Shadow really though? I'm super glad everything came through my own work, I'd hate if my parents gave me anything. I hate spending any money, to me that is just sensible though not a problem.

Also wrt money, I always hated spending it, and really hated debt/interest. Now I find myself very willing to spend money on actually useful things like gear and tools, lest the power of money, or my ability to earn it, diminishes in the future.

I definitely feel on this one. I had to learn a lot of those things on my own as well

You'd have to rewire your whole way of looking at the world. That's some serious therapy.

You are all right. I was lucky. We all are to some extent. I consider my aunt my only real family. I still drive to visit her grave each year.

I wouldn't have gotten where I have without someone telling me to take my shot and apply to a good college I dreamed about applying to when I was much younger. My parents encouraged me to with their blessing. There were plenty of neighbors and friend who told me it was a moonshot to get in, that I should go to state school, that I couldn't afford it, I wouldn't fit in, yadda, yadda, yadda. But I got in, went, graduated, and I've done well.

I'm sure if my parents told me it was a long shot, I wouldn't have applied. And, I can imagine internalizing this idea that I never had a chance because of who I was and where I was from.

So don't apologize. You don't need to feed the self-righteousness of others.

Good realization. Too many of us deride counseling as an admittance of weakness, it isn't. Hiding from it while maintaining there's nothing wrong is.

Fast forward to my 40s and I make a quarter million a year. Have a net worth of over a million, a quarter of which is liquid sitting in several bank accounts making zero interest.. but I NEED it there. Own a house outright that is far too small for the family I raised in it (the kids have begun to move away so it’s getting ‘bigger’). Max my retirement plans. Go long on safe market bets. My car is 12 years old and burns oil (it’s a Prius so.. it evens out?). I pay my kids college tuition and squirrel away all my money.

My wife says most people like to collect things and I collect money.

I probably need help but between growing up poor, not figuring out a career path until 30, and the Great Recession... everything is a bubble and unsafe.

Wood and Raspberry Pis, comparatively speaking, are cheaper than table saws and oscilloscopes.

I'm poor, but not extreme poverty poor only because I'm "lucky" that I've had my parents be able to support me. I have several health problems which border on being disabilities (for which actually getting support would be very hard). Without my parents I'd probably be dead. My goal isn't even not being poor just self-sufficient. Of course I'm grateful for having them and how hard they've worked to get where they are now, but anyone pointing out this "luck" anytime I try to comment about my experiences pisses me off to no end. Do you think I don't ponder how much worse off I could be? Will dwelling on that even more than usual help me or anyone like me? No. It already depresses me enough as it is. What helps is hearing that other people have managed to improve their lives too (I also look at ways I could apply what they did). The worse part is when people say it in a way that dismisses all effort on my part (which is how it's usually put even if the people writing it don't realize it). As if, because statistically there are people at my level with worse/better luck that somehow should mean anything to me. I'd rather some ignorant rich person complain about being "poor" than that sort of thinking. If I had put in no effort I would probably still be stuck at home, in pain, probably suicidal.

I can't speak for people in extreme poverty, but I can't imagine "well, you got the short end of the stick" helps them in any way. I would say, yeah, you got the short end of the stick, but even more because of that, if you don't try to dig yourself out, no one is going to come do it for you. You'll fail, again and again and again probably. It's not your fault, and yeah, it's not fair. But if you give up there is not even the chance of getting out.

My wife and I are DINKs, so while neither of us make amazing money in combination we make a solid wage. No retirement (yet), but a house, and an income that is starting to pay off life (house/retirement/etc) with lots of safety buffer.

With all that said, i'm still terrified of losing everything. I'm sure i've acquired some skills, but passing interviews is difficult so i always think losing it all is one job loss away.

I just have to focus on improving myself, to mitigate my fear of losing it all. I'd like to build software to help people. I'd like to make enough money to eventually help some individuals, too.

Maybe being poor gives you perspective, but i loathe the "bootstraps" mantra. The overwhelming hopelessness you can feel when you're poor and see no path upwards. Yea, you can get a job, but minimum wage barely pays for itself. You want some modest things in life like a house, a car.. but saving for those at $200/m takes a long, long time.

I got out. I hope to stay out. But i consider myself lucky.

I'm glad you got out, but hard work is no guarantee. A lot in this world is luck and connections.

"I made it and you can too" should be "I made it, but lots of others don't. If you work hard, you might, but don't be discouraged if you don't. It's possible to do all the right things and not make it out. If you make it out, give back to those who are in similar situations, and try to improve the pathway out of the darkness."

You lost me at this conclusion. This is wrong in every sense of the word and perfect case of Survivorship Bias[0]

The point of having societies is so we should not fend for ourselves, especially rich societies. In rich countries there should be no poor people and charity should not exist because it is not needed.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

In short, you're not alone and as long as you're not making yourself or people in your life miserable well maybe you're not too far off from where you need to be.

https://www.amazon.com/Millionaire-Next-Door-Stanley-Thomas/...

I will say the folks who come from richer backgrounds do have some advantages over us who grew up poor. For instance I had no idea how much scholarships subsidized learning and went to the state school I could afford to fund on my own.

It’s important to not turn this into a rich versus poor debate, because it can give people on either side of that divide the false impression that they’re naturally better at managing money due to their background. The truth is that wealth management is a learned skill that often comes separately from one’s career or upbringing. And the point of the book is that looking wealthy and being wealthy aren’t as tightly coupled as we believe.

"If you have never been poor, you may not realize how awesome Small houses and Toyota Corollas are."

Very fair and great point, so I hope it's clear my next statement is not intended to refute this at all!

However, you could also say that if become or remain wealthy, you never forget how awesome Toyota corollas are.

That was really my point: it's ok to not go buy a condo in Aspen the second you can afford it. The original poster was saying he knows he's being overly frugal. OK, fine. My counter-example of TMND was don't feel you need to move to a flashy conspicuous consumption lifestyle either.

People want to be millionaires, not to stare at 7 digits on a webpage, but for the lifestyle it affords. This book just assumes the end goal is the number on a bank account.

To be fair, I believe that motivation comes from the reader, not the author.

>People want to be millionaires, not to stare at 7 digits on a webpage, but for the lifestyle it affords.

Again to be fair I believe you're projecting: you may want to be a millionaire for the lifestyle it affords, whatever that means to you. The book is a recipe on ways to retain wealth and anecdotes on how people accumulated their own. It's not a self-help guide to motivate people to become millionaires. I think it's assumed if they're reading they book they're already motivated and need to know how, not why.

The value would be discussing why you want to spend it, why you should reconsider because it wouldn't affect happiness, something like that.

Some do. Others do not.

My boss makes ~300k a year base. He drives a ten year old Golf, carries zero debt, and plans his (very infrequent) meals out around "which restaurant is running a 'kids eat free' special today?"

His goal is to build up a sizeable savings, retire and live off interest, and provide generational wealth for each of his children.

One of his peers makes ~300k a year base and enjoys driving a Ferrari that costs more than my house. Different strokes for different folks :)

Currently it basically tells you that if you spend the least possible, you accumulate wealth faster. Well, wasn't that obvious.

One reason is that if one accumulates that wealth, and puts that wealth to work itself making money (i.e., investing it) then one obtains an income stream that is separate and apart from the number of hours per day one can spend "working".

Accumulate enough money that is itself making money, and one can live comfortably without having to spend 40+hrs/week "working" for one's income.

I don't plan on retiring, but i'd feel so, so good if i hit $X tomorrow.

The economy could still go down, but as long as society doesn't collapse retirement-amounts can bring massive QOL, even if you don't live like you're rich.

This a million times. I ended up in a small private university (which was awesome and I still love it) that initially gave me a lot of scholarship money, but didn’t even try to get into top tier. While good at educating, the network and the name recognition were not there at all. Can’t remember how this came up, but at one point I compared notes with someone who attended top 10 university and their grades/scores were slightly worse than mine - live and learn :)

For any one "millionaire next door" who made it by being frugal, many more starve no matter how frugally they live. Many will rise and fall, many more will never even rise above poverty.

I'd like to see the statistics on lifetime well-being between frugality and financial risk-taking†. I'll bet the disparity is shallower than we'd like to believe.

These discussions always interest me, but I'm disappointed by the amount of puritan dogma that usually gets treated as some kind of natural truth. If being poor taught me anything, it's that there is no dogma you can lean on.

† Caveat: the risks being made with a goal to "level-up" (read: escape poverty), rather than blind self-indulgence. Ex—do you max out your credit card (/whatever available leverage) to acquire the tool you need to perform a job in the manner of quality you know can be accomplished with said tool, or do you buy the tool you can "afford" and gradually, over time, work your way up to the "right tool" in this case. In the past, more of the latter may have been possible. These days, I think you're at an even more immense disadvantage by taking that path. Admittedly, my outlook might be too coloured by my own experience. Had I not taken the chances (sometimes enormously painful), I would probably still be trying to squirrel-away $5 bills at a time while working 11 hour warehouse shifts.

Same with mine. I never travelled outside of Canada until my mid thirties because the notion of spending that kind of money (despite having it) seemed absurd. My kids lost opportunities because in the back of my mind, we’re constantly on the brink of homelessness. I have a seriously difficult time shaking this state of mind.

Something I’ve found useful is reminding myself that 1) I managed to survive and stay healthy despite how poor I was, and when things go wrong, there is typically a way forward. If something were to go wrong, it would likely be outside of my control. 2) my energy is better spent being moderate about money, otherwise relaxing about it, but then focusing my energy on immediate things which matter and are within my control. 3) most people I know carry and manage more debt that I’ve had in my entire lifetime. If I were to lose everything tomorrow, I’d still be ahead of them. I always exaggerate my risks.

Good luck.

I also remember being the kid who didn’t buy Nikes or the natural rubber soles to play sports on parquet, so had to do with other sports that didn’t have that requirement.

I also remember the PE teacher telling me I could not just wear short pants, I needed to get sports shorts...

After buying (mortgaging) a home though, I was surprised that it was not the liability I expected it to be — even with the interest on the mortgage, it was my biggest asset and always has been.

At least with a house i can budget to pay it off and budget to repair it. Both seem reasonably stable to plan for, assuming you make enough money.

> My fears about being poor again drive my wife and kids crazy. They think I'm nuts and say I need counseling. I probably do.

Do it. This is on the PTSD spectrum and in my own case the habits of poverty have substantially impacted how I've experienced my own life.

10 years of working 2-3 jobs was enough to crawl out of deferred expenses land and pay for a few community college classes. I lucked my way into an unexpected pile of cash and a decent paying job. I bought a house and a car, and savings started piling up. I continued to be hounded by anxiety that I didn't notice, because it was the same pot of anxiety I'd been boiled in to that point.

Everything was fine and rosy for a while. Eventually the anxiety burned out enough fuses to start directing choices. What seemed like interests became obsessions. Unpowered hand tools can't run out of gas, work when the electricity's off, and are easy to fix if they break. Gardening replaced more of the shopping list. Wild edibles supplemented gardening. Bicycle commuting saves money and makes scavenging more accessible. Years of anxiety slowly bloomed into delusions, one thing led to another, and quite suddenly I was living out of a bicycle and two panniers. The persisting anxiety of poverty pulled the plug on my success.

Homelessness, poverty, and mental illness are all outcomes of one another. Removing someone from the circumstances of poverty or homelessness is only the first step.

I got lucky again, managing to stumble over housing and a surfeit of income before homelessness made its recognizable mark. Profoundly lucky that by chance I came to know folks who've done social work with others recovering from homelessness, who told me to get some counseling so I could learn to experience the life I had, feel like I own the things I own, and stop alternating between resentfulness and fear of my own success.

Anyway, I'm gonna be that person now and offer the perspective that poverty in the USA is only transactionally similar across lines of discrimination. People of color (and other marginalized persons) do experience a source of trauma and hardship that doesn't go away like poverty does, but does additionally compound the frequency and quality of poverty they experience.

In college, when we were somewhat better off but before I could work a real job, I often had a choice of either paying my internet bill, buying (cheap) cafeteria lunches, or buying beer. So, unless I wanted to and could find a part-time job, I liked to joke that my choices were - hungry, sober, and online; sated, sober and offline; and hungry, drunk and offline. I was still happy. After I got my first job, sometimes I would get impostor syndrome and become afraid of losing it; then I'd be like, well I used to be happy when I was choosing between the three options, so anything on top of that is just a nice bonus. As long as I have 150sqft of housing, some food and an internet connection I will be fine. I like to think about that every time I'm afraid of losing my current level of privilege.

I tend to agree, but I also need a couple of things on top of that:

- the place needs to be relatively quiet (no asshole neighbors on the other side of the wall, or a busy street)

- I need to have an access to relatively peaceful area for walks, preferably green

- I need to live in an area that's not depressing because it's decrepit or filled with aggressive idiots

- I need friends in a distance that makes seeing them often not a nuisance

Take away any of the above and I'm not doing too well long-term. Also, I suspect most people in the world are missing at least one thing from my list.

Financial literacy should be the a 4 year highschool class. Not being fluent is a detriment to millions.

I've lived on <$20k (as an individual), and lived very frugally as a result, but I've never been in a position where I was struggling financially, so I lack any trauma around that. I do still have some lingering "Is this $5 item worth it?" tendencies, though. Automating bills away can help, but what I really like is having a spreadsheet of "if I had to cut back, I could easily live on $X month" + "I have $Y saved up" and focusing on that ratio. Gives me the appropriate background sense of "I'm doing fine", and allows me to say "fuck it" and spend money more readily.

At any rate, if you're driving your family crazy, and you think counseling might help, try it. That's one life-improvement investment that doesn't saddle you any long-term financial obligations. Your "If I had to cut back" number stays low.

My old habits had me tracking after the fact and I found that I either obsessed over minutiae, failed to plan for the future, or worried too little about bigger purchases.

But now, I put my money in a virtual envelope the moment it comes in, and I have to start thinking about how I'm using it: if I empty out the "restaurant" fund, I have the freedom to reallocate, but I'm forced to decide to reallocate – I don't just swipe a card and figure it out later.

This also shows me without any question what my current baseline is: I can look month over month and know how much of my spending is discretionary, how much is saving, and what the bare minimum is that I need to survive.

Sure, overcoming poverty is possible, but it's a shifting scale over time thats heading in much worse directions due to inflation in basic living costs and companies and individuals breaking the ladder that got them on the surface.

The horrible thing is that much worse situations are common today. The most common one I've witnessed into is "Dad left, mom is sick". The children become primary care givers to the remaining disabled parent. That basically axes higher education options. Such kids often cannot work outside the home and if they do it will be at most part time and very local. One can choose not to have children. One can decide not to commit crimes. But one cannot choose whether or not to have disabled parents/siblings that need 24/7 care. The really dark aspect is that children grow up. An unplanned child will grow and eventually not need 24/7 care. An aging disabled parent can remain at the same level need for many decades, normally progressing to greater need with time.

From the way you're speaking (for want of a better phrase), it sounds like the poverty experience traumatised you, and you're re-living your trauma each day.

Fast forward to today I am doing well, like you I have no debt whatsoever, decent cash flow, and decent net work.

A couple of interesting things:

1. 1/3 of homeowners in the US are mortgage free

2. Read the book "The Millionaire Next door"

Third anecdotal note: I have recently switched job, and I work in a company where there are about 25 people. Well I have noticed that the amount of $ spend on lunch is inversely proportional to the pay: the highest paid employees pack their lunch from home; the lowest paid go out and buy lunch most days, and more expensive lunches.

That fear feels similar to PTSD - we experienced something we never want us or anyone else to experience.

A lot of people don’t really understand how much space and luxuries we actually have around us. The trick is that in that modest house everything works, nothing leaks. The car starts and is safe and comfortable enough. If you take these for granted, it’s no big deal. But if you understand that this is in and of itself better than many places, boy is it satisfying when you have it. It is also terrifying that you may lose it again.

The knowledge I feel makes for the better life. The fear unfortunately poisoned it for me for a long time, but I think I’m almost past it. Hope you are as well!

House cost 200% yearly pay... drive 2005 Toyota Corolla. I'm the poorest dressed millionare you will know. I buy two shirts a year and wear conference shirts.

Speaking as a very lucky person who makes less then you.

On the edge of solvency it takes so little for things to go badly wrong, even if your scrupulously careful. On the other hand, it's the ability to make effective use of financing options and to leverage even modest wealth or income through mortgages and such that enables a lot of middle class families to prosper as much as they do.

I came from a family that was lower middle class when I was young, then upper middle class, then back to lower class before I graduated college. And I graduated into the 2008 recession.

When I got my current job back in 2017, I finally felt what I though was economic optimism - a sense that the future would be better than the past. What a feeling. This phrase is over-used, but it did feel like a weight off my shoulders.

Then COVID happened...

Any they are right thinking that,aren't they? That kind of money and wealth gives you a huge safety blanket and insulates you from most of the stresses described in the article. That's the whole point of the article, that this is a huge privilege that's overlooked by the well off.

I had a couple very thin years -- savings dwindling, and then gone; work was scarce. Collectors were calling. I was afraid I was going to lose my house. My power got cut off.

I scraped by, and got out of it, and find myself now in a very fortunate position -- better off than I was before, excellent income, minimal debt (and zero consumer debt), etc. -- but even a couple years of that kind of instability leaves a mark. It's not as much as throwaway's, but I'm very debt-averse. I'm very risk-averse. We save a LOT. I'll never be in that position again.

I find that most people never consider how precarious their position really is until an object lesson comes along.

Maybe the Wish will help, or Intentionality. Prayer also popular.

Against this never lose sight of the fact that since 1971 economic mobility in this country has eroded as comprehensively as has the social safety net as has access to high quality public education not to mention health care.

Since 1971 wealth inequality has increased and we are now over the event horizon. So much wealth has been concentrated in the hands of the ultrarich that they have successfully captured both discourse and polity. The possibility space is defined by those who own the means of not just literal communication but the fabrication of consensus opinion and the boundaries of the political spectrum.

What was possible, like this, a generation ago, is literally orders of magnitude more unlikely today.

The status quo cannot hold, and it isn't holding. We remain on the brink of literal violent fascist coup and permanent kleptocracy. Take a look at the headlines from CPAC...

These are dark days.

Most readers here are part of the precariate 10% or aspire to be, the buffer zone of the rich-enough who zealously angrily defend the prerogatives of the very wealthy with whom they identify though they are no more of that class than the utterly disenfranchised permanent Lower Class who have roil and rage in Nomadland, controlled by the surveillance capitalism systems so many of us are building...

It's not going to hold. It's not holding.

My father left when I was 6. My mother went cleaning to make some money. Later, she remarried and my step dad was well off, but he also had kids of his own, so it wasn't that much of an improvement.

We didn't have much and all of my childhood I played video games I borrowed from friends on PCs I built of old parts I got from friends or in the trash.

When I went to university, I suddendly met many people who had rich parents and I felt like the dumbest person around. I guess, I probably was, haha.

Since coding paid well, I could clear all my dept realatively early after my degree and now I have saved some money.

But I still have the feeling tomorrow all my clients will desert me.

Don't worry too much about that, I've seen people here seriously claim that you're privileged unless you are destitute and homeless. The word has lost all meaning.

Knowing just how bad things can get, especially when you have kids, motivates you to maintain a large cushion in a way for people who haven’t seen things fall apart have a difficult time relating to

Love this. These are luxury products for upper middle class folks in a lot of developing countries. I don't think people really grasp this until they experience it themselves.

And yet statistics disagree with you...

Edit: Nevermind, I saw your other comment. You meant to cheer people up, not make a moral judgment.

> I made it and you can too. Poverty has no color. It impacts everyone. You can't tell just by looking at someone.

These two statements are so irritatingly bland and dismissive.

> Anyway, people think I'm 'privileged' now

Yeah, so if people look at you and say "that person probably grew up in a nice home with good parents", that is a privilege. Boo-hoo, middle-class people accept you and think you belong within their social tier. The fact that you're afraid your co-workers will know that you grew up poor is proof of how much of a privilege it is.

By that, I mean that a non-trivial percentage of the people in your circumstances at every step of the way (soup kitchen, GED attainment, degree attainment, buying your Corolla, buying your house, applying for your $200k/yr job) didn't make it.

I admire your accomplishments. I loathe and rebuke your, "And you can too!". The entire point of the essay you're replying to is to encourage sympathy and empathy for the people who cannot and will not, who will continue to exist in large numbers as long as our society remains as it is. You missed the point.

I had a stroke that resulted in some permanent loss of intelligence. Like most here, I started out a bit higher than average, but experienced what it was like to be below average (right after) and ramp up to a bit below where I was before (after 2 years).

My intelligence, and it's ability to show me the answers to difficult problems, the thing that gave me all of my success, is only very slightly tied to my efforts/education. I was lucky to have been born smart, and it's the only reason I "made it". Maybe I could have "made it" some other way, but it made my climb out of poverty so much easier. Not everyone will be able to climb as well.

FWIW I grew up poor and I do the same as you - no debt, pay cash for cars (even expensive ones) and despite millions in the bank, I fear not being able to provide for the family. At my age, I've learned that this is a good thing, as opposed to people my age that have spent lavishly and are now wondering how to start saving for their retirement in 10 years.

I’d love to be corrected on this.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/some-amazing-findings-on-inco...

This is how they counter all the talk about the 1%. They suggest that 56% of people will be in the top 10% for one year or more. In their entire working lives.

Distortions include:

-income is not wealth

-some kinds of income are very uneven year-over-year

-jumping into the top bracket for only one year doesn't indicate income or class mobility

-most of the top 1% of income do in fact stay in the top 1% of income

People who earn a lot in one year but don't become wealthy may include:

-actors who get one TV commercial

-waiters at high-end restaurants who burn out

-realtors who get a few good sales in a row

-victims of disabling accidents receiving large insurance payouts

-oil and other trade workers in Alaska

-minor lottery winners

-people cashing in a retirement fund to deal with emergency spending

The fact that America is a land of random windfalls doesn't help with social mobility. A family with multi-generational poverty gets a windfall and immediately has to spend it just trying to catch up a bit.

The other misleading thing is it looks at 44 years of longitudinal data, and doesn't make corrections for differences between the early years and later years. Income has become more polar in the last 40 years, so the current numbers are a fair bit worse than the average numbers of the last 4.4 decades.

What it really comes down to is that the upper tail of the "reliable income" distributions is thin enough that a large fraction of the people who end up in various "top N%" buckets are there due to various windfalls, lumpiness of income (e.g. a writer getting an advance that they live on for a few years while writing the book), etc, etc.

Which is, by the way, why the way we do progressive taxation is a bit weird. Progressive taxation with tax brackets based on lifetime earnings, as opposed to current-year income, would make a lot more sense in some ways...

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/aparnamath...

The old republics (US & France, mostly) tend to overlook class... to some extent intentionally. My country (ireland) has the opposite problem: too much class consciousness. To much telling of class-sentric stories.

But, class dynamics do exist in the US & France too.

Class mobility exists too, but it's nowhere near as mobile as income mobility. Class is stickier by definition. You can just as easily colour in a class stickiness story with statistics. The likelihood at birth of someone graduating high school, going to prison, being poor, rich etc. It is true that where you start is a pretty good predictor, statistically, of where you will end up.

It's important to keep both perspectives in mind, simultaneously. There are real opportunities to escape poverty. The ovarian lottery is also very important, so are other "lotteries." It's also a mistake to see yourself as a statistic.

"I made it and you can too" - That's just either ignorance or really wishful thinking.

Or misleading (as a possibly good-faith mistake) use of the word "can", that would be better phrased as "I made it and you might too".