It has to be extremely difficult to focus on school and education when you don't know when your next meal is going to be. It's why I find news articles about lunch aids being fired for giving a kid lunch when they have no money so infuriating, and food insecurity is an enormous problem that is likely happening in your neighborhood today, and it's often overlooked. It's not easy to move upward especially when your choice is between "Do I improve myself by working hard or do I eat?"

I think that's the question, and usually that's because they were born in the wrong place, at the wrong time or under the wrong regime. When their kids are born, it's a different perhaps better time, so better starting conditions, and they now have a chance to succeed. The anomaly is corrected.

But those are anomalies, it's exceptional. I think the issue is when you take two people born in the same town, at the same time, and both work equally hard, except one has the parents to give them a head start in everything and the other doesn't. Maybe one will eventually make an average salary in a local company, while the other will have his own company.

Picture a first-generation immigrant family in America where the parents are older, don't speak English very well, and spend almost all their time working multiple jobs to pay bills and provide food and shelter for their kids. They then push their kids to do well in school because they know it's practically too late for themselves, but that their kids will be much better off than they were if they succeed in school.

Anecdotally, I knew several such families growing up.

[1] https://hcz.org/about-us/leadership/geoffrey-canada/

Education doesn't fall out of the sky.

But you can be in a great school district with parents who think education is pointless, and in a shit school district with parents who think (know) it's one of the only ways out, and the former will underperform the latter all things being equal.

And this isn't as simple as "dump more money on shitty schools and they'll become great." There are plenty of examples of poor areas with higher per-capita student spending than more well-off areas, and the schools burning giant piles are money are still worse.

Those schools aren't necessarily shittier...they are filled with kids that don't want to learn (and their parents increasingly blame the teachers for their failure).

Interesting hill to die on, but you do you.

At the same school, several of her students have received large scholarships, including full four year rides to university. This is rare, of course, but does correlate very clearly with parents being involved in their children's education, encouraging them, and not having an anti-achievement peer group.

But that's a little too nuanced for your straw man.

Middle class kids (and above) get good education handed to them on a silver platter while poor kids will have to fight tooth and nail to scrape their own education together.

It's not impossible but if you were that determined you could learn even better in a good school so the relative downside for poverty still persists. What you are setting yourself up for is not becoming poor. That's good but it is clearly not fair.

but at the school level what can they do?

Lots, actually, but it's very resource constrained, so once again, the relationship between money-poor schools and bad students plays out.

There are a variety of diversion programs that have been tried and shown great success with problem kids, but that requires staffing so that disruptors get more teacher attention than they otherwise would in a class of 35. Having competent, active counselling services in schools does a lot, too.

With that said, it's not my wife's experience (as an inner city high school teacher) that disruptors are the problem. They're a problem, but there are lots of ways to handle them, individually or in groups.

The way kids get shafted in poor schools is high teacher:student ratios that reduce or eliminate any individual attention a kid might receive, coupled with poor facilities and supplies. You rightly identify parental involvement as a key factor in school success, but the flip side is that kids lacking parental involvement are denied any individual attention in schools that are simply overcrowded and understaffed. And the kind of attention I'm talking about isn't substitute parenting, it's just following up with kids on assignments and attendance.

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/illinois/...

99.9% minority students, 94% economically disadvantaged. Testing scores are horrible...across the board. 2.8% percentile for their SAT scores...26% of the students took an AP exam and 3% those that took them scored acceptable (3). This brings up a lot of questions...like why is a school that can barely graduate kids (54%) focused on having 1 out of every 4 seniors take an AP exam?

Given that, it's less surprising to me that the bottom tier public schools in these areas wind up so much shittier than the average public school.

I'm thinking either it is externally visible or the factor is "solvable" for every student, meaning a school with bad students will receive more policies/measures to boost their performance as everyone is suffering from the same underlying problems. Of course this assumes that poorly performing schools get support at all.

Some school districts are now having a measure of success with having ONE school but tracking the kids into "accelerated" or "regular" programs and elevating the resources for both.

There was a whole podcast about it: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/podcasts/nice-white-paren...

This happened as a result of a large-enough number of well-to-do parents no longer being able to get their kids into very desirable and academically rigorous city-wide schools, so they effectively "took over" a neighborhood public/charter school by participating VERY HEAVILY in the PTA, the school's funding, and getting deeply involved with the ALL the kids, teachers and administration.

From what I can tell, it required a very uncomfortable and ongoing dialog about race and class. Not every school in every big city can do this, IMHO, but AFAICT it lead to better outcomes for all the students, including the at-risk students.

However now my values have shifted drastically. Ironically i would consider myself very lucky. Not wealthy by any means, but far better off than the average American household. Which then perhaps would put my children (which i'm not having, lol) in the position of being "children of well-off families".. maybe.

My view however is that this isn't wealthy. Instead this is where the middleclass should be. I don't make enough to retire early (though i could probably extreme FIRE, but that doesn't sound enjoyable to me). I'm not by my definition wealthy, just safe, satisfied, happy. No fancy cars or homes, just a stable honest and predictable living. These are traits that, in my mind, America should strive to bring to all people.

Unfortunately i've not seen this spread. I've only seen it decrease. People far more and more on the edge of collapse, with no safety net in their bank, no budget for emergency expenses, no possibility of retirement.

Relative to the current state of America i am wealthy. To me that is very, very sad.

Job loss is the only big worry, and even in that situation it wouldn't be difficult to find a similar job with similar pay. I know that is a comfort that not everyone(or most people) has. Knowing that this seems to be "as good as it gets" when compared to the majority of Americans is what makes me very, very sad.

Point being, I think people are more aware of the unattained wealth above them than the levels they've already surpassed. (Myself included). The comment you replied to strikes me in the same way, though not nearly as blatant!

Fast forward... I own a house in a rural area and have a family. I'll likely never have that cabin in the mountains, and I'll never be free of having to support my family. That's my fault though..I took the path of least resistance and ended up where I'm at - I didn't take the path towards what I dreamed about having as a kid.

Regardless, perhaps make it a goal to do this when you retire. It will give you something to work toward and possibly quell some of your regret.

If it's on your mind this much, and I'm no expert here, you might want to talk about it with a professional. You can't let this stuff bottle up and eat away at you from the inside.

Possibly because the parents parents didn't value education and by the time the parents came to value education they were already stuck in the cycle of poverty.

If you took the vast majority of babies and had be adopt them (this is of course kid napping which I wouldn't agree to) they would grow up to be more successful than if they remain with their parents. Of course successful is in the eye of the judge, some of their parents in 40 years would be glad for my help and some would think their baby would be better off with them.

The above applies to most of the people reading this as well. (a few of you have admitted you don't want kids because you would be a bad parent, and a few more could be good parents to your own kids but bad for adopted kids - but overall these groups are a minority)

Some people value education independently of their parents.

You go on to make a point about a head start being beneficial, and I'm absolutely not disagreeing with that.

By becoming trained in their fields it meant they had a better opportunity to earn, but that was limited by the lateness to which they started their careers. When my siblings and I arrived we could be encouraged into education from the earliest possible opportunity.

People are usually forced to emigrate somewhere else because of the conditions or their home country. Those who are down to emigrate to a foreign country (especially if their original country is not a warzone or is not that bad - implying they're really trying hard to improve their life) probably have some other characteristics that can be useful for achieving success.

The debate then moves on how much of those characteristics are genetic and how much are due to the bad environment per se (or maybe the good environment their families where able to setup in a bad environment) - on which I think we don't yet have a scientific answer.

Because they're busy trying to pay the bills? That hard work pays off in allowing their kids to focus on growing their brains.

Investing your optimism in the next generation is just the immigrant way.

Conversely, we have kids today, who for whatever reason have the opportunity to get an education but are sidetracked by entertainment and other things that can derail their long term prospects despite more being available to them. (Contrast with kids in third world counties who walk miles to the nearest school, pay for books from their meager earnings, take jobs to pay for their siblings’ education, etc) yet these privileged kids can’t be arsed.

r/antiwork is a response to rampant capitalism rewarding parasitic billionaires, not some idea that people don't want to do "anything meaningful" with their lives.

Have a nice rest of your day.

Fortunately, she had a particularly strong will, so she spent just as much time telling them where they could stuff their trade school, and ended up doing quite well for herself.

I'm not sure I would have done so well had I come from a family that was that opposed to education on principal. I don't have any trouble believing this sort of thing keeps lots of people exactly where they started in life. (Lucky for me, my dad spent several years working at a paper mill out of highschool before going back to get his degree, so I got to hear first hand about what a good idea that was.)

Working as a plumber, an electrician, or a carpenter can be quite lucrative, and they are certainly things that society needs.

Being pushed into higher ed is so much different than having an internal drive to do it. I'm glad that she's doing well and hopefully they can resolve their differences.

I have a number of friends who are teachers, and part of their job is to call the parents if the student is failing, falling behind, or not doing their work. The vast majority of the time the response on the other end of the line is "that's their problem, not mine." If the parents don't care, the students don't care, and life goes on as it always has for them.

This narrative about wealthy trades people like plumbers and welders is not well supported by any data. The ones who do well are the ones who start businesses and hire people, so they become business owners, but most trades people don’t end up there and they obviously can’t all do it.

You should know that the U.S. Fed (St. Louis) published stats on higher education which shows that on average a 4 year degree doubles your income vs anything less. A graduate degree triples it. When I read that, I was blown away that the difference is that high on average. I would have thought maybe 10%, but double the earnings on average for all degree earners is so huge it’s something you can’t ignore.

https://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/page1-econ/2018...

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/09/weldin...

The data suggests that people who hold a 4-year degree have X ratio of income. That's two things: the people and the degree, not just the degree.

From a previous study, a related (but inexact) surprising outcome emerged: After adjusting for applicant scholastic aptitude, the additional benefit from attending an elite school is “generally indistinguishable from zero.” Excerpt from article*: In November 2002, the Quarterly Journal of Economics published a landmark paper** by the economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger that reached a startling conclusion. For most students, the salary boost from going to a super-selective school is “generally indistinguishable from zero” after adjusting for student characteristics, such as test scores. In other words, if Mike and Drew have the same SAT scores and apply to the same colleges, but Mike gets into Harvard and Drew doesn’t, they can still expect to earn the same income throughout their careers. Despite Harvard’s international fame and energetic alumni outreach, somebody like Mike would not experience an observable “Harvard effect.” Dale and Krueger even found that the average SAT scores of all the schools a student applies to is a more powerful predictor of success than the school that student actually attends.

* - https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/does-it-ma...

** - https://www.nber.org/papers/w7322

Yes, true, it’s a valid point, but there’s really no debate over whether getting the degree is causal. And side note, the Fed’s data is for all Americans, not just a suggestive sample. The line between holding a degree and not is surprisingly clear. All the debate is over what the cause actually is. Specifically, to what degree the content of the education is responsible for better earnings vs whether simply holding a certificate, but not necessarily learning anything or gaining skills, is the reason for higher income. And I’m no expert here, I’ve only browsed a handful of them, but my understanding is that they more or less all conclude it’s a mixture.

And yes, selectivity of school has less effect than selective schools might have you believe, at the same time that just having a degree from a state university has more effect than some people suggest.

Is there no debate in the sense of "this is completely settled science that getting a degree causes a doubling of income on an aptitude-independent, statistically-sound, population-wide basis"? Or "it's not being debated because that debate is uncomfortable"? Or in some other sense of that phrase?

I’m only skimming quickly, this doesn’t fully back me up, but section III talks about some causal analysis, for example: “mediation tests causal relationships between variables. While the SCF is not longitudinal and thus a pure causal effect cannot be tested, we can be confident that reverse causality in the ordering of these variables is not possible.”

I have to be fair and note that there are also several comments about what is not causal as well as data that implies more causation than what their analysis reveals.

The references in this paper point to a couple of other papers that have “causal” in the title. Unfortunately I don’t have the time right now to read these again, but I recall seeing causal analysis during that previous discussion about the St. Louis Fed study, research that studied education outcomes and controlled for people with similar SES backgrounds, similar family history of education, etc., and found the apparent causal contributions of education.

BTW, there is absolutely a fuzzy gray line here. What I’m calling causation (social bias) may be what you’re calling correlation (education alone is not the entire causal reason for higher incomes - to your point that one cause is the people). Lest we get too stuck on terminology, I’m perfectly happy pointing out that the correlation is extremely high, and the statistical difference between with degree and without degree is surprisingly large.

For me, the key question here is where does "lots more people should attend four-year university" fall on the spectrum between "people should eat healthy food, exercise more, and refrain from smoking because the data shows that people who do that are healthier and live longer" (IMO causal for health) and "people should fly first-class because the data shows that people who do that are wealthier"? I suspect that college is at least 75% in the latter category. If it's 75% in the former, we should push for it. If it's 75% in the latter, maybe we shouldn't.

(I also could be unduly influenced by the SWE field wherein the same intelligent, qualified person who did or didn't attend college would still have very similar [excellent] career prospects with or without a framed piece of paper. In medicine and law, it's more causal.)

Even though that older Fed article is warning that for some people the “wealth premium” of a college degree is waning, it does talk about the stability and causation of the “income premium” that people with degrees enjoy, and since some of the reasons identified for the income premium have to do with social signaling and employer selection bias (as in, many high paying jobs require a degree in the first place), I believe it lands much more closely to the causal eat healthy for a longer life correlation. The more recent Fed link I posted above agrees in the sense that they’ve concluded after many studies on this subject that taking loans in order to go to school is absolutely worth the cost, that the financial returns are very very likely to pay off. At least for now...

I'm in full support of education, so this isn't a backhanded reason to argue against education. The disclaimer seems necessary these days :(

By all means, education is great, and people should seek knowledge even when it isn’t profitable. But let’s stop telling white lies to high school seniors about the disconnect between the goals of academics and the realities of the job market.

I hear this kind of thing, but I have to say it is less than convincing when most of the people saying it don't seem to be sending their kids to trade school.

Allegedly, the talent pool is really shallow - with a modicum of intelligence, passion and human skills, it's not that hard to make it. But most of the guys who end up studying trades are the bottom of the barrel who would do badly in any endeavor (or so I was told).

Then, I have a couple good examples of some guys with absolutely no education whatsoever who decided to start their own cleaning services by powerwashing restaurant kitchens, doing deep cleaning. These guys doing this cleaning gig the past few years are raking in $1k cash per night, 6-7 nights a week and making more cash hand over fist than a doctor makes. It's obvious to see what is the real underlying factor in all cases. Drive, motivation, and a go-getter attitude is what it takes. Plenty of people with degrees work at coffee shops and retail positions because after schooling, they expected a job to just drop in their laps but they have no go get it attitude from the start.

The biggest difference is the ebb and flow of available work. There were some months which were good, _really_ good, and others which were quite lean. Because of this, budgeting was an important skill to have.

Yes, and imagining is what is actually happening here, because you clearly do not understand plumbing (or any of the trades).

The studies aspect of it are the least part overall. Good plumbers (and electricians and builders) get good primarily through a delightful combination of attitude and experience. The experience comes from apprenticing early, and accumulating lots of "stories" along the way as a result of having to work in a large number of different contexts.

You will get none of this while working on your STEM career, and you will likely find that most plumbers (and electricians and builders) will be reluctant to take you on as an apprentice later in life without overwhelming evidence that you'd be remarkably good at it.

It's easy to watch a youtube video on something and think that it looks easy -- until you try it. I can sweat pipes but I'd wager that 10% of them have a pinhole leak when pressurized for the first time. If it was something that I did on a daily basis, over years, I surely would get better at it. Now try doing one through a small opening in the sheetrock, and don't burn anything.

When I'm working on stuff in my house, that's when I call a professional because I recognize my limits.

Good luck apprenticing as a doctor without 6 years of medical school. Or as an architect without architecture school.

Let's not overdo the "blue collar jobs are hard to get".

I am about as far from being a professional plumber as the plumber who tinkers with python is from doing what I do.

A professional tradesmen _knows_ he can show up to your home/business and fix your problem(s) with 99.999% certainty.

If it is your first time it is going to take much, much longer. If the only way to learn is on the job then you must have an experienced plumber by your side, otherwise you're going to bill 4 hours for a 1 hour job because you are not fast enough. Your first year is going to suck or you only ever do the same few skills you have learned by taking a risk. A botched job may have a much higher impact than a bug in a CRUD app (there are always exceptions).

That's a lot of nines.

It means if you were doing 5 of these tasks a day, for 250 working days a year, you'd expect only a 50% chance of finding a task too curly to do easily in the first 550 years of your working life.

I feel like there's very few people, in any field, who've earned that level of confidence.

If I was apprenticing 20 years ago, the pretzel work would be fine, and I would probably be more willing to dig.

They would have been better served by a trade which can pay way better than these office jobs.

It’s worth noting that this attitude makes sense for someone who themselves found school to be a degrading and unsupportive experience, and dealing with a teacher complaining about their child is just more of the same dynamic.

> Even when she was working at an engineering firm

Did she then get a STEM degree? Then, of course, it is better.

What is argued about I believe is the worthlessness of liberal arts degrees for a livelihood.

This is true, but which is the bigger factor in America: parent(s) who are uneducated themselves and do not take an active role in their childrens' education OR food insecurity? I would argue the former. I remember a recent story about Baltimore single mom Tiffany France being shocked that her kid (a senior in high school) wasn't going to graduate because he had a 0.1 GPA (the story was that that was one of the top GPAs in the school). Like... how checked out do you have to be from your kid's education in order to not know that your kid is rampantly truant and has <1.0 GPA over the course of 4 years? Not to downplay her own struggles; part of the reason she's checked out from her kid's education is likely due to dealing with her own jobs/responsibilities/issues. So for that reason alone even having 2 parents is a massive educational advantage over their peers.

Food insecurity exists, but also there is an obesity epidemic and single parenthood epidemic in America among various lower classes and based on personal experience I tend to think parent mentorship (or lack thereof) plays a far bigger role in kids' education than food insecurity.

A lot of the food that lower class families have available, stuff which is non-perishable, tend to have empty calories and less fiber. Soft drinks are a problem, and they're cheap.

That isnt to say that we cant or shouldnt do more about food insecurity, but wrt the GP post, it isnt the biggest factor.

The parent's attitude is absolutely a factor which was what my original message (up a bit from here) was about, but I don't think that you can deny that food insecurity plays a part in their attitude toward education.

It is stressful, which doesn't help, bit there are many stressful situations across all walks of life which can be stressful for extended periods of time.

Basically, I think we are agreed it is a problem worth addressing. I don't think we agree that addressing food insecurity will necessarily translate into better attitudes towards doing well in school.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19320248.2010.5...

However, my general impression is that the primary reason he is truant, has reading level of a 3rd grader (he is in 7th grade), doesn't do homework or make an effort in school, etc. isn't so much that he consumes a lot of empty calories. The primary reason IMO is that his single mom is 100% checked out of his education. And actually, more than just his education - practically his entire life. She has no idea who his teachers are, what his grades are, or even what his attendance is. He practically raises himself because his single mom is too burned out after working her jobs and other responsibilities. So... as a result, he drinks a lot of soda, eats a lot of fast food, plays a lot of video games, watches a lot of anime, doesn't go to school, doesn't read, sleeps on a very irregular schedule, etc.

In my experience people here are Christian, in which case there's that verse about heaven and wealth and the eye of the needle (Google it) or they're atheist and don't believe in souls.

I’ve never met anyone who would say exactly those words out loud either, and I don’t speak for the parent, but I feel like you might be taking what was an analogy extremely literally.

Have you ever met or seen someone sneer at a “hippie”? Have you ever heard someone argue that we should not increase the minimum wage? Have you ever heard someone suggest that homeless people are lazy or could get work if they wanted to? Have you ever witnessed anyone saying that the success they have is due primarily to their own hard work, and not for luck or advantages? I’ve seen all of those, often, and they all fit my interpretation of the parent’s comment.

Social Darwinism certainly is a thing and has been for a long time. A quick google about it brought up this article worrying that it’s a growing fad again: http://faculty.etsu.edu/odonnell/2011fall/engl3130/student_w...

Even just Survivor Bias in business - assertions that being better than the competition got them where they are - is relatively close to believing that having money proves you’re a better person. Certainly there’s no lack in the US of fascination with rich people nor of listening to our richest citizens. (How many famous rich people can you name? How many famous poor people?)

You need new experiences. Only ~70% of the US claims christianity (https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/) -- and that is "claims" because we all know there are people who do not practice what they preach.

If you have more than 10 friends and don't know a single non-christian, your anecdotal experience most certainly does not reflect the data.

Additionally, growing up in the bible belt, in my experience, the person you responded to is correct. "God will bless you" is a common refrain when talking about working hard, tithing, saving ones self for marriage, etc. And what is God's blessing in the arena of economics (hard work) except monetary reward? The prosperity gospel of mega churches is so popular for a reason, as disgusting as those of us on the outside may find it.

The more religious you are the more you appear to believe your wealth is a god-given right and that everyone else is a lazy no-gooder trying to steal the fruits of your hard work.

The puritans didn't wear drab clothes because they lacked decent dyes, they wore them as an element of modesty.

Alms to the poor was not considered a bad thing, it was religiously required, especially when used to evangelize.

[1] - https://www.apuritansmind.com/stewardship/rykenlelandpuritan...

Some of them say that the "eye of the needle" is actually a narrow gateway in Jerusalem - a physical gateway - which is a bit tight, but you can get a camel through it, so that's what Jesus was actually talking about, so actually it is fine to be rich; you might just have to unpack your camel a bit and carry your riches through.

"The prosperity gospel (also known as the “health and wealth gospel” or by its most popular brand, the “Word of Faith” movement) is a perversion of the gospel of Jesus that claims that God rewards increases in faith with increases in health and/or wealth." - https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/what-you-should-k...

And so on.

There are many places you can start your research, but maybe looking into how we leverage shame and stigma is a good start: https://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/noncommunicable-di...

I would assume you (and anyone else) are better placed to describe your own virtues (to support your correctness), than some strangers vices (to support their incorrectness).

I can't relate to you my experiences or the experiences of others I've known or just observed (I'm a keen observer) without just giving you anecdotes.

I could counter and ask you to measurably prove that people are not looked down upon for coming from a lower station, but I think we'd have some trouble with that as well. (Christians* are some of the worst for it—coming from one who grew up "in the church")

* Thought I should asterisk that so we don't go down a discussion about what makes a "true" christian. It's a broad scope and label of convenience. It's not meant to slander anyone practicing their religion. It's most certainly not isolated to Christians. Most of the encounters I've had are with people who tend to believe themselves somehow more... esoterically enlightened. It doesn't even make them bad people—just filled with hubris.

Reformed Christians believe that God predestined some people to be saved and others were predestined to eternal damnation

You might ask yourself what America would look like if american Christians believed this line. A billionaire like Donald Trump would be unelectable. The inheritance tax would be 90%. The social safety net would be larger than secular Europe. Health care would be free as a universal right.

I've never met one either, but I've definitely met plenty of people who think the opposite: if you had any advantages of any kind over anybody else, your accomplishments don't "count". The only people who can actually be proud of what they've achieved and deserve what they have are people who were thrown away in a dumpster at birth, grew up in a run-down, inner-city, rat-infested orphanage being beaten every day but still managed to graduate with a perfect GPA even though they had to walk five miles each way to school in the snow with no shoes.

Nobody was coming down on anyone for their accomplishments.

My intended contribution was that some (or in my experience, many) people in already achieved positions, regardless of how they arrived in their materially advanced station, might mistake the circumstances of another who is less materially fortunate as being so because it's a product of the less fortunate person's intrinsic inner worth.

And when someone, who is trying to breach those meritocratic strata for financial or other material rewards, encounters that kind of mindset in their superiors it can be terribly inhibiting—like trying to climb a hill of ice that refuses to believe it's slippery of its own accord and that the continual flailing of the climber is a failing of the climber alone. Or sometimes that would-be climber prefers to stick around the plains and enjoy the views. Neither of those situations makes the would-be climber a less-capable, less whole person—even if the would-be climber cannot see the icy hill for what it is.

("Why not pick a better hill" is about as controllable as "why not be born into a more materially advanced family")

Maybe not hearing of the former opinion is due to its unpopularity - there are more people not born into wealth after all; This means you are less likely to meet a wealthy person (or be a wealthy person if this increases likelihood of meeting one), and if you did, they would be less likely to tell you of their perspective.

But I'm comfortable living with contradictions, so I do believe there is a meritocracy, but I don't believe it's total.

Only wading in the shallows because I actually have some work to get to today, but to clarify by example:

I'm sure most North Americans around this forum grew up hearing lines like "you don't want to end up a janitor". Personally, I've seen episodes like factory supervisors ignore physical health requests because their faithful hourly workers were "probably just trying to get off easy" (no, they ended up losing their job when their back gave out). Obviously they were only a line hand, so they're probably a dirtbag, as the line of reasoning followed in that situation.. and so on.

Definitely not touching the hot mess of "marrying upward" or other potential confidence games.

For example, there only needs to be one president at any given time. The president didn't contribute the entire population to the country but he is compensated with power as if he did.

The idea that the person is the only deciding factor into the impact they have is absurd. Send a software developer back into medieval times and his programming skills will be worthless.

As someone who had to figure it out on their own, and is now a bit older, I can say I knew basically nothing when I started choosing my career path.

I used to think that the best route was the trade schools, because you can make a lot of money fast. But then I saw a lot of my friend’s salaries peak at ~$70000, and every year their jobs got harder and harder as they got older.

Then I used to think the most successful would be my friends in the hard sciences, like physics or chemistry, because they usually were extremely intelligent. But then after their PHDs, many just seemed lost and didn’t really know what kind of jobs to go to.

Of my cohort, it seems like the only successful people were:

1. The biology people who became doctors 2. The liberal arts people who became lawyers 3. Certain engineers (not civil) 4. Techies

That’s it. The 4 good career paths available to most of my high school/college cohort.

Everything else didn’t seem to matter. The business majors, and psych majors, and sociology majors who didn’t have parents to give them cushy jobs got stuck in entry-level hell.

In these poor communities I'm seeing a tendency to stigmatize education... that's the biggest problem. The educational resources available to anyone today obliterates what we had in the 80's. You don't need to be an elite to have access to the critical material, you just need the desire to pursue it.

For most children and teenagers, this desire is at least partly a function of one’s peers. Hence the premium placed on houses in certain school districts or neighborhoods.

Do you mean the materials available online? There's definitely lots of great material online, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence that schools and universities have gotten any better (despite becoming much more expensive).

I took an accelerated Calculus class one summer. My parents spent hundreds of dollars on a VHS calculus set to supplement the class because it was moving too fast for me. That was the difference maker in me passing. Today, getting that info is trivial and available to everyone.

Keep in mind that valuing education does not mean having a college education, it means that you value education and are more likely to keep learning throughout your life.

In the U.S. just focusing on education can be bad, if you pick the wrong one you just get a giant student loan and not much else.

Finally, even though starting conditions and luck are extremely important, you can’t do much about them. So hard and smart work is still the best option to improve. Going back and giving itself better starting conditions is not an option.

That for me pretty much sums up that mentality. I don't know where it comes from - maybe the delta from no education to education, no matter how basic, is enormous, whereas things like public school vs private school, or public school in town X vs. town Y don't have the same lift.

So if everyone else gets less poor say from free school lunches or free college, then it makes the wealthy relatively less rich even if their bank balance remains the same number.

It also means that the general population is harder to exploit.

So there are multiple motivations why some would like to perpetuate this myth and not fund social programs.

Other factors include the quality of my BS degree. I wish I was surrounded by professors who liked what they doing.

This is not a necessary condition, nor a sufficient one. There are plenty of examples where highly educated individuals didn't managed to become financially independent in spite of their education, which goes way beyond the old "literature/philosophy major" trope.

Statistically nobody goes from trailer park to billionare by working hard.

You have very, very, good odds of doing better than your parents if you manage to get to age 25 without incurring a felony record, addiction to something that will likely kill you or too many child support payments.

edit: I'm only talking about the US

However, is the same true for purchasing power?

Sometimes you hear about these mythical stories of janitors who could afford to actually buy a house, despite having two children and their partners being stay-at-home moms.

And yet today, I hear so many stories about 30 year olds with masters degrees who are still living with their parents because they can't afford to rent a studio.

Like I said, and I can't find good stats on this online. If you have any stats on which you based your comment, I'd love to see them!

Spoiler: it’s not pretty.

The other half is that if they are too high they don't create jobs that pay minimum wage. You can't legislate private jobs into existence.

The more coherent argument against the minimum wage is that it destroys jobs which cannot be profitable for the employer at the higher wage. The problem with this argument is that the preponderance of research indicates a small magnitude for the elasticity of minimum-wage employment with respect to the minimum wage, generally around -0.05. If a 50% increase in minimum wage results in a 2.5% increase in unemployment in the cohort of people earning near the minimum, and if your aim is to increase the average wage for that cohort, then minimum wage increases do work. The idea that they don't is based on non-quantitative reasoning about the rightness of interfering with markets, or the virtue of work, or a value judgment about a small amount of unemployment outweighing an overall increase in compensation, etc.

I've elided a bunch of detail here, in particular the distinction between minimum-wage elasticity and own-wage elasticity, but this is a good starter:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/impacts-of-minimu...

You can still find apartments built in the 1950s that are functional (places where the maintenance was done so they are essentially just as good as 70 years ago) and the rent is cheap. Most people want better.

The key information missing here though is a more generalized cost of living space per person, beyond housing. This data can still be biased, in general, because it may be the case that fewer people own homes, say more successful wealthy people, while the majority are renting these properties. I have a bucket of anecdotal examples of friends who still don't own homes in their 30s and are still renting.

This data would exclude all of those people painting a picture that people are doing well while some unknown population is renting, paying more per square foot than owning, and rates could be increasing per person per square foot over time. That population could be smaller or larger than those who own homes. I'd be interested to see those distributions of renting/owning and a similar cost comparison for renter square foot costs per capita.

Part of the problem here is a different problem -- the concentration of jobs in super high cost metro areas, and often also, the NIMBYism that prevents such high cost metro areas from building more housing to address demand.

There are so many affordable studios to rent. And so many jobs, and sadly they aren't co-located...

GDP does not correlate to "average wealth" and is itself a dubious measure for economic progress depending on what figures you pick to calculate it.

Also, no matter what metric you use, the "average wealth" of the younger generations, particularly millennials, is not in fact higher than their predecessors. The level of their productivity is a historical high point, but this is infamously contrasted by stagnating wages, assets, and by some metrics even overall quality of life.

That's only if you look at developed nations. The average wealth in Asia has exploded. The market for labor is far more globalized now, so you have to compete with people used to lower standards of living.

>The level of their productivity is a historical high point

Who's deserves credit for the productivity? Warehouse workers didn't suddenly get twice as good as good as moving inventory by themselves, they did so because Amazon investors invested in automation

Depending on their use they can save a lot of money relative to the the products/services they replace

And childcare expenses, of course. Especially childcare.

Also, when your cellphone is how you access the Internet because you can't afford a decent laptop, at some point it makes sense to go for a more powerful phone.

Sure but they’re not the majority. This article from forbes (a bit old now) was enlightening. But note that those running their phones into the ground aren’t too far behind those upgrading as soon as they can.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2015/07/09/how-of...

I suspect that the answer to these types of questions is that most people don't want to admit how mind-fucked we all are in to believing the bullshit that we are inundated with from the most powerful classes and how little freedom and financial mobility exists in the USA.

Because when someone pushed back on you, saying that smartphone ownership now is like car ownership became at some point in the past -- a necessity -- and then you changed it from "smart phones" to "the latest hot gadget".

So it's no longer clear whether you think smart phones and unlimited data are indulgences like ubereats is, or where one might draw the line according to you.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-s...

What percentage of the western population eats out 3-4 times a week? I'd bet it isn't more than 10-20%, depending on the country.

> Uber Eats delivery

Not sure the people who do the delivering can afford having food delivered in turn (at least not 3-4 times a week).

Fully 10 percent said they eat out 4 to 6 times a week, and 6 percent said they eat out everyday.

https://minnesota.cbslocal.com/2019/05/16/survey-shows-how-o...

https://www.fourth.com/resource/truth-about-dining-out-infog...

is now dead. All this is is a news site quoting it, second-hand, and I have seen enough news sites get original reporting wrong not to place a great deal of stock in them getting it right.

Stands to reason. Dedicating five or more years away from the workforce at least partially, if not in full, is an enormous setback financially. As money compounds, your earnings when you are young are dramatically more important to your financial stability than those when you are older. It would be surprising to learn that such a person is on equal footing with a janitor of the same age who started working at the age of 14.

It's a mistake to think all masters degrees are equally 'bankable'

My college US history course ~20 years ago very much drove home the fact that (at least at the time) social mobility in the US was the same as in India. The surprise, of course, was that India has a caste system, while the US narrative is freedom; if you work hard, you’ll get ahead.

I don’t remember the sources, but the rate of social mobility (up and down) we learned in class was ~20%, as defined by ending up in a different quintile than one was born in, meaning put people into 5 categories according to socioeconomic status, and see whether they ever change categories, for example going from middle class to upper middle class.

Wikipedia says that overall average social mobility in the US hasn’t changed since then. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_...

The reason I say this is as you point out, in the US we frame everything as being highly mobile. The illusory framing of our society in "the American dream" in K-12 education and freedoms dangles this carrot of possibility of high social mobility to children. It's not completely invalid, it is possible to make massive transitions in socioeconomic brakets, but it's just a framing of the rare exceptions, not the norms.

Most of us are going to be the norms, so these narratives are a disservice to people about what their real socioeconomic mobility potential and probability is. It's fine to dream, aim high, and shoot for the moon as a society-- that promotes growth and avoids stagnation. At the same time, we should be very clear what is and isn't a moonshot that way many aren't so resentful when they later discover what they thought was reasonable was actually incredibly difficult bordering on impossible. What's possible and what's probable need to be distinguished and the American dream framing doesn't talk to probability.

There's this whole lie painted to children that the US is somehow a meritocracy when it's not. Merit can help, but it isn't everything and we need people to understand this.

Going back farther, 120 years ago cars were the play thing of the super rich. Now the poor have much nicer cars (including options like electric start, not to mention the unheard of AC), that are fast and never break (by todays standard they break down all the time).

But yes, they do have access to cell phones and refrigerators, so good for them.

Section 8 apartments and double wides are such a massive step up from that. There will always be a bottom of the economic latter. But that bottom has moved up a lot over the past couple generations.

Mobility is a somewhat separate topic from what standard of living constitutes the bottom.

Also, the myth of mobility is not an entirely separate topic, in that it's another distraction frequently employed to place problems on the individual and avoid talking about systemic changes that could take place to benefit people on a broader scale.

I recently visited the ER for some chest pain which amounted to nothing and was charged $4,000 for it. Imagine what that would do to the 60% (!!) of Americans who can't come up with $500 for an emergency (see my top comment about stagnant wages, rising rent, and astronomical health care costs).

Comments like yours are easily and frequently used to distract from very real systemic problems that working class people still face. Access to cheaper smartphones doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things, but food and housing security and the ability to get medical treatment without fear of going bankrupt sure do.

This is what classist "but they have refrigerators" arguments love to obfuscate. Yes, a poorer person might still have a roof over their head and a smartphone. But they're spending a huge chunk of their income on rent. They want to move somewhere cheaper, but there are fewer opportunities, or their pay would go down too. They avoid seeking medical care because of how astronomically expensive it is, which makes future negative outcomes more likely (and more expensive). And seeking higher education amounts to taking on tens of thousands in debt from predatory lenders, with only a few college majors actually amounting to a good ROI.

It's not that poor people now have it worse than poor people in the 50's, it's that we shouldn't set the bar that fucking low in the richest country on earth. Our society could do so much more. That's what all these commenters are missing, willfully or otherwise.

Medical care has always been expensive. We have made a lot of progress: 200 years ago those ER bills would be zero: because everyone just died from what we consider solvable today.

2. Have you considered that Adam Smith's anecdata from 200 years ago may not be accurate anymore?

Having made progress since 200 years ago is no excuse for piss-poor progress compared to where we could be.

I'll restate my earlier point. The vast majority of Americans would suffer huge financial setbacks (to put it lightly) from one visit to the emergency room. Health insurance historically being tied to your employer isn't the problem, health insurance itself is the problem. It's a predatory industry which has successfully lobbied to make healthcare immensely lucrative for themselves and financially ruinous for average people.

It's interesting to me that you still think nationalized healthcare is "stupid" even though dozens of countries [1] have successfully implemented it. And yet you can look at the system we have here in the US, and say "oh it's just that it's tied to your employer. Otherwise it'd be fine." Healthcare isn't a commodity and shouldn't be marketed as such. The evidence that nationalized health systems can work well is everywhere. I also refused to see it for a while because of internalized fear of the "socialism" boogeyman, but turns out you can just do it and still have a capitalist market for other things. Go figure.

1. https://www.health.ny.gov/regulations/hcra/univ_hlth_care.ht...

What people say is often very different from the truth. It is hard to measure make an objective measure of quality of life, but that doesn't mean the subjective measure is actually correct.

Edit: High rent grants you access to higher paying jobs but not everyone actually gets those.

There are many different religions in the world, but I don't think it is a coincidence that the major religions tends to be very convenient for the top 1%.

They often teach that your life situation is a result of your actions (either in this life or the previous life), and if you follow all the rules you will be rewarded in this life or the next. There's a natural order to things, and it is all part of $deity's plan

Maybe people are waking up and realising that there are more to life?

Edit: This is not a rant against religion as a personal choice. I don't care about what you believe, so long as you do not use your religion as a tool to control politics.

This is flatly false, and to be honest it's a little embarrassing that you would parrot it without Googling it (which you were happy to do to pull up a tangential stat that didn't contradict the dishonest narrative you're pushing). The US is ranked 27th out of the 82 countries the World Economic Forum studied in 2020, and India is ranked _76th_.[1]

On top of that, note that Denmark is ranked #1 for social mobility in the WEF study. The relevant topic to this thread is pre-transfer social mobility (ie before taxes/welfare), where the US and Denmark look almost identical![2]

That doesn't suggest that Denmark's policies are useless: transfers are an effective poverty-fighting tool, and I have no doubt that the economic floor in Denmark is a much more comfortable one. I'm all for a stronger welfare state due to the human costs of poverty.

But this is all irrelevant to the topic at hand, and the false claim all over this thread that the US is uniquely bad at providing opportunity and mobility to those without it. We're better than the majority of the developed world at this, partially due to the productivity incentives created by how much more precarious poverty here is compared to OECD countries with the strongest safety nets. I should be clear: I don't think we're at an optimal point on the spectrum, and I think sacrificing some economic dynamism to palliate the human costs of poverty is worthwhile. But the claim that we're uniquely socially immobile by global or even OECD standards is a flat lie, propagated by people too simple-minded to understand the concept of a trade-off.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index...

[2] When looking exclusively at wages (before taxes and transfers), Danish and American social mobility are very similar. It is only after taxes and transfers are taken into account that Danish social mobility improves, indicating that Danish economic redistribution policies are the key drivers of greater mobility. Additionally, Denmark's greater investment in public education did not improve educational mobility significantly, meaning children of non-college educated parents are still unlikely to receive college education, although this public investment did result in improved cognitive skills amongst poor Danish children compared to their American peers.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nordic_model

A sibling comment to yours explains succinctly why your comment misunderstands mine: standard of living in the US is higher than India. The WEF’s metric is based on ranking the standard of living of each country against each other. It can be simultaneously true that the US standard of living is higher than India, and also that people born lower class in the US improve their lot at the same rate as people in India.

The difference is that the average standard of living ins the US far exceeds India's standard.

Yes you may not make your way to billionaire high class status from the lower class but you certainly can drastically improve your circumstances by working hard. The alternative is not to work hard which definitely isn't going to make your life better.

Additionally, I'd like to know how you think society should be shaped? It seems the other option would be to follow a more socialist or communist route where "equity" is the ultimate utopia... and that typically just brings everyone down to a lower status instead of raising everyone to a higher one.

US immigrants are, statistically speaking, at an even worse disadvantage than the American born lower class. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_the_...

If human ability follows normal distribution, there is a hard physical limit of how many people can move up the ladder each year. It physically impossible for every one to be at the same highest level. The good news is all level are getting higher year by year. The pie is growing for everybody.

> The article you linked in an opinion pieces of a single economist, who is critical of immigration.

What article? I linked to a section of Wikipedia, and that section alone has 9 different citations by as many authors.

> The good news is all level are getting higher year by year. The pie is growing for everybody.

Others in this thread have misunderstood my remarks as you have. The metric of moving from one class quintile to another during your lifetime is relative. It does not depend on standard of living at all. The pie can grow, and social mobility (as defined by changing class quintiles) can be stagnant, at the same time.

That is a laughably low bar, and it is unlikely for the trend you are describing to continue past the move from poor to lower middle class.

In a fair society, with equality of opportunity, it should be equally likely for a child born in a trailer park to become high income earner as it is for Bill Gate's child. That is the normal social mobility we should expect in a democratic society with no class structure. We are so laughably far off from this everywhere in the world...

And note that I completely accept that becoming a billionaire is going to be extraordinarily rare and a product of BOTH extreme luck and good work ethic. Or I would accept that, if not for the fact that being born the child of a billionaire is a guarantee to this future, or as close to a guarantee as one can ask for.

Every time I make this argument on HN I'm met with two responses

1) I worked my ass off when I was young to get to where I am, why should we make this easy for anybody, it will just create a lazy society

2) why should MY money go towards helping anyone else

Both are really hard to argue against no matter how much statistical data you pull out showing that improving equality of opportunity improves the society overall, because both are very emotional arguments. People feel that way and it's hard to change.

PS - the "funniest" response I had to this was someone saying that US has "perfect" equality because literally anyone from any walk of life can become rich or a president. Yeah he acknowledged that some people have it much harder than others, but it doesn't matter because at the end of the day anyone can get rich so everything else is irrelevant.

Hardly anyone who has done well wants to accept this reality. They would have to change their perception not just of the world, but of themselves. They might feel very guilty, and people don't like that feeling.

For most people their luck is about equal to anyone else. which means you can't get a head because everyone else is moving as fast as you. However you are still moving forward.

I mean, isn't that applicable everywhere? Even the most totalitarian country really only requires a military coup or revolution and, if you've worked really hard, you too could be King Dictator God Emperor for life.

That’s only if you assume there isn’t a generic component to traits that influence (broadly defined) success. But of course that’s not true.

We should expect Bill Gates to be much more intelligent, conscientious, and to have much better impulse control than typical people living in a trailer park. Ditto for many other traits. Therefore it’s much more likely that his children posses these traits compared to children born in trailer parks.

The behaviors that help you successfully move between lower rungs may (spoiler: they do) hinder you at higher rungs.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Even if there are genes for success, being successful is not proof of having those genes, and being unsuccessful is not proof of not having them.

Furthermore, if we assume that someone swapped Bill Gates' baby with a baby born in a trailer park, do you truly think that Bill Gates' genetic child will have a much better chance at success than the child Gates raised as his own?

Maybe aspirational, but it's not reasonable to expect this.

More educated parents both earn more money and educate their children more (and not per se due to their higher earnings).

It's hard to compensate for that.

It is not. In a meritocratic system, children wouldn't inherit resources, access to education would be conditioned purely by merit, and so would access to jobs, finance opportunities etc.

The nepotism rampant (edit: was "inherent") in corporations, government, the finance industry etc. are exactly the things that keep the rich rich and the poor poor.

- society (through local community funds etc) would ensure that everyone, regardless of anything else, has access to basic livelihood (food, shelter, clothes, transport, healthcare)

- society would ensure that everyone has access to the same educational institutions, including required resources (manuals, computer access etc.)

- people would strive to evaluate others based on actual aptitude, rather than class markers (e.g. someone speaking with a heavy "uneducated" accent or wearing low quality clothes wouldn't be looked down upon being evaluated for a professorship or top management position)

- inheritance would be heavily taxed; this would be set up in such a way that people would have a right to the human elements of inheritance - e.g. the home where they grew up, their parents' memories etc. - but huge transfers of wealth, such as inheriting your parents' Amazon stock would not be profitable.

Better off parents will still be able to give a better life and resources to their children, but the impact of that care on the ultimate outcomes will be much less. A "perfectly meritocratic" system would likely be horribly dystopic, such as entirely separating children from parents at birth, Brave New World style.

A good public education system goes a long way. At the moment in the US, rich kids benefit not just from the education their parents give them directly (which let’s face it is not necessarily that great just because they’re rich - how much has Ivanka benefited from Donald’s insights?) but also from the expensive schools that their parents can afford to send them too. Educational apartheid by wealth isn’t a necessary feature of a society. It can largely be legislated away given the social and political will to do so.

It is a fundamental feature in class-based societies like USA, the UK and much of the rest of the Anglosphere. Maintaining the class structure and preserving the accrued intergenerational wealth from the upper strata of society means that the kids of those wealthier classes must acquire distinctive social manners and culture which sets them apart from the commoners.

A reasonably fair society shouldn't allow for children to be born and raised in trailer parks in the first place. State policies should be directed towards strengthening the family unit and improving the conditions for the average working class people. Once you have eliminated the precarious forms of existence in society and have established decent cultural norms for working class people by which they value education, upward social mobility will happen much more widely.

I don't agree with this. You are measuring equality of outcomes, not of opportunities. They are different.

If you believe in a strong genetic component, than you can complicate the formula a bit.

That might be what we expect from a perfectly egalitarian society, but expecting any free, democratic society to come even close to perfect egalitarianism is completely delusional.

There are 2,755 billionaires in the world and 7.6 billion individuals, thats around 2.7 million to one. Not great odds for anyone to be frank.

Also is it any wonder people believe that they can't get anywhere when they are constantly told, they can't get anywhere. Seems a little self fullfilling to be frank.

It's disingenuous to suggest that a minimum wage worker with no safety net isn't getting anywhere because they're not trying, and to contrast their accomplishments with someone who started with wealthy, powerful parents.

For some, the adage "shoot for the moon - if you miss, you'll land among the stars" is fine. Take some risks, start a business, make a bet; the worst that can happen is you have to declare bankruptcy and move into a family member's vacation home. For others, the adage is more like "don't you dare shoot for the moon, if you miss, you and your family will be hungry and cold in a homeless shelter".

What looks better on a millionaire:

* The poor guy that invested every cent he had and kept slaving away for years every day at the brink of certain failure.

* The rich kid that got several hundred thousand from his parents for his first company and knew exactly that failure just meant asking his parents for another go or having to switch to a management position that has probably been waiting for him since he was five?

Of course the first one looks better, you can also bet that any millionaire telling it is a habitual liar that paid a good sum to have some PR guy find ways to navigate around his actual rich kid background without looking too obvious about it.

And everyone seems to think that the fact that all the billionaires came from a situation of decent familial wealth enabling them to make big bets refutes the fact that most people who don't screw up too bad end their career much better than they started and that most people's kids manage to start a rung up or so. Plumber sends his kids to community college and all that.

This is precisely the wrong model, one which accepts that there is no guarantee of equal opportunity. You're describing a promise almost as unworkable as the promise of heaven: if you're born poor, and you do everything well in life, your grandchildren's grandchildren will have a chance to enjoy the good life!

That is not what a democratic free society should mean.

Is this fair to them? Definitely not.

Instead of ensuring certain comforts in old age, your parents made an investment into future. This way they get a peace of mind, a feeling of beating their own mortality, leaving something (well, someone) behind after they are gone. It's a great deal if that's how they see things.

Immigrants doing it in one generation, working blue collar jobs while sending their kids to the ivy league or med school, prove it's not based on real barriers either way.

It is extremely clear that our society, nowhere in the world, doesn't offer equality of opportunity; based on your birth, even accounting for genetics, your mid-life expected income could be predicted with decent accuracy.

It's great that you agree with me about barriers, but you might mention it to the posters in this discussion who are explicitly making claims of feudalism and apartheid. Beyond that, my post gave a logical explanation for probabilities. I don't see where you provided a counter to that logic, or even addressed what I said. How is my statement about three generations, for example, countered by your claim about predicting mid-life expected income for a single generation?

There always was some upward social mobility and that is usually called IIRC a safety valve. Very bright and fortunate can come from rags to riches, but honestly there are very very few. But from what I remember from my sociology book, the large majority of people stay the same or, go to +1 or -1 social class level (if there are about 7) compared to their parents.

My hypothesis is that working hard can move you a few deciles on the income ladder (and position your children to start from higher up the ladder than yourself).

I also think though that people misestimate the slope of the income curve at various points, and that it becomes exponentially harder to get up the curve in the top quartile (I.e. going from a ~$30k (~25th percentile) to ~$60k (~50th percentile) to ~$120k (~75th percentile) to ~$500k (~99th percentile))

Lastly, I generally don’t see people that are not hard workers advancing (perhaps they might not advance as much as they should or would like) but I definitely see them make marginal progress vs people who haven’t worked as hard

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/09/social-mobility-upwar...

Sure, maybe if your parents are affected by one of those factors.

The point of the parent is not to say "you can't do anything to improve" but that, in general, starting conditions are the major factor deciding how much you can improve. Someone born in a poor family with hard access to education will need to work much more than others born in rich families to reach the same point. Maybe instead of saying "just work hard" to everyone we should also focus on those inequalities so people have the same opportunities to work hard and improve themselves.

Most immigrants come to America desiring to improve their circumstances from what they dealt with in their home countries. This means they're coming in at a much lower standard than people who've been in the US their whole life. This would explain why they have a higher rate of poverty. It has nothing to do with America being uniquely bad at helping immigrants improve their lives. You don't immediately achieve a higher standard of living just by showing up somewhere. It takes time and work. In a few generations they will improve their circumstances. This is what has happened with every large immigrant population that has entered America (Italians, Jews, Irish, etc.)

Exactly what are immigrants not allowed that citizens born in the US are? I'm having a hard time understanding what opportunities they would need.

At some point in the past every one of those rich families had an individual who did something to achieve more than the average person. So, if you don't like it then it would seem that you're suggesting we just allow immigrants (or low class) people to skip that by giving them things? Now, that would mean that everyone gets raised up to a similar level again and we're back in the same position where all the average people feel they're not being treated fairly because they don't have what upper class people have. Eventually you end up in a scenario where the only way to even it out is to bring down the people that are outliers and have mad their way into the upper echelon of society.

My point is not regarding that, just that the amount of business owners does not help too much in seeing whether they do harder work than others or not.

> Exactly what are immigrants not allowed that citizens born in the US are?

Citizenship? Permanent residence? Seems like a pretty big deal to me.

> At some point in the past every one of those rich families had an individual who did something to achieve more than the average person.

That something could be anything, from working really hard to just being lucky. Not to mention that a lot of individuals probably did the same personal effort but circumstances were not optimal for that effort to do something.

> So, if you don't like it then it would seem that you're suggesting we just allow immigrants (or low class) people to skip that by giving them things?

Yes. Education, healthcare, the basics so that they live and work without worrying constantly about survival.

> Now, that would mean that everyone gets raised up to a similar level again and we're back in the same position where all the average people feel they're not being treated fairly because they don't have what upper class people have.

This is a very simplistic take of wealth redistribution. The purpose of redistributive policies is not to take everything (houses, money, material things), put it in a pile and then give to everyone the same thing. There will always be people better and worse off. The idea of redistribution is to reduce the distance between those groups, so that

- People that are worse off have a minimum life quality. Even from an utilitarian point of view it makes sense: a homeless person, or someone who's starving, is not going to contribute as much to society as if they had a home.

- People that are better off still need to contribute to society and don't have power over it. Meaning worker protections, and also heavier taxes on non-productive capitalistic activities.

Many take risks to start businesses, make big purchases, pursue a novel career and so on. These are often fairly large financial risks, many with bankruptcy as an option, and I often ask what their backup plan is should their risky endeavor fail. I often hear some quick poorly thought out plan and after a few more questions, the real backup plan emerges: or I'll just go back home.

If you're not fleeing dire conditions, many immigrants come to the US to gamble for an opportunity to great success. If they succeed, they stay, if they fail, they go home. I had several immigrant friends that did just this. The vast majority now live back in their home countries and based on their social media, they seem to be doing quite well there. The few who have stayed are doing markedly better than they did in their home countries, jumping several socioeconomic brakets.

Immigrants also make up a disproportionate portion of poverty population.

They did not. They self-selected from largely good opportunities at home which they leveraged into good opportunities in the US.

Successful indian-americans are not generally dalit. In fact relatively few indian americans originate from lower-caste families.

And there are too many different kinds of american poor to average them. Who is the "average poor american"? A black american? A native american? A resource or industry-cursed white? An invalid vet? The opportunities, or lack thereof, are different for all of them.

2) Even in the less-dysfunctional countries like India or Russia, an average person makes much less money and receives far less assistance from the state than an average US poor, especially as far as "opportunities" go. Look up the numbers; for a nice example my family made less money per year than the yearly govt spending on an average public school student in the US.

There are some types of poverty in the US that could be explained by bad luck, like being disabled, sure. The other ones using hardship as an excuse just make me laugh. Like, as far as I recall, Nigerian Americans are one of the best educated immigrant groups, far above US-born whites. You cannot seriously claim they face less racism than US-born African-Americans, or that they experienced less hardship in Nigeria; on top of that they also have the difficulties that immigrants face. Sure, they may self-select - but that's exactly my point - any advantage these self-selecting individuals have, they deserve - probably twice over.

Most American poor are vastly more "privileged" (I don't like the word, but it fits) than almost anyone else in the world. But they waste the opportunity, for whatever reason.

If you get into a job at the right level due to educational or social advantage, you can get by working a lot less hard doing the same thing than someone who comes in as an intermediately-skilled contractor.

Working smart, taking risks (eg selling something illegal), and grifting are well-trodden paths that pay off despite reduced day to day effort.

I am curious what exactly do you mean by this? Adopting philosophy of Epicurus, in my view, can be very beneficial to a person.

I'll use myself as an example. Going by parents, I do way better than one would expect. But I was lucky to be born into a time where my neuroatypicality was suddenly useful in an industry big enough that it created social upheaval and space for some to rise. Lucky indeed; 50 years earlier I would have made a mediocre car mechanic, somebody who only worked hard on the rare car problem that was interesting.

And timing aside, two other lucky items pointed me at tech. One was getting an early computer (TRS-80 CoCo) as a gift from a well-off friend of my mom's. The other was my dad being a software developer himself. Which only happened because in the mid 1960s his dad was an exec at an insurance company that had just rented one of these newfangled minicomputers but didn't know what to do with it. My dad didn't have any training, but he was a) smart and b) a bad student in college, so my grandfather used his connections to try him out on computing. Something that was only possible because they were white; Milwaukee had no black insurance executives in 1965.

Have I worked hard at points? Sure. Have I worked half as hard as a restaurant prep cook or a single mom who cleans offices at night? Nope. Indeed, the hardest times I worked were at the shittiest, lowest-paying jobs. Working the grill at McDonald's. Running an injection molding press to make mirror rims for cars I couldn't possibly afford. Since getting into tech my life has been comparatively cushy, and getting cushier. Way better than what my middle-school automated career counseling service suggested I was destined for: bowling pin machine mechanic.

Starting conditions are a factor, but a terrible predictor. If you look at income by the quintile you are born into, it is closer to random than 1:1 predictive.

It is most true for the poor, where those born into the bottom 20% have about 45% chance of ending up in the same quintile. This means most people born into the bottom 20% improve their economic status, and most people currently in the bottom 20% started above it. On the opposite end, a majority of people born into the top 20% end up in a lower quintile. [1, table 2]

https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/70266/...

Closer to random would mean a 20% chance of ending on any quintile from any quintile. From your report (which has data from 1991, quite few things changed since then), the probability of being at the top 20% is 3% if you are in the poorest quintile, 40% if in the richest. That's not "closer to random" and definitely not a terrible predictor, given that's just a single factor in social studies.

Not to mention that the quintile method is just an approximation. You don't know if the 24.5% of people in the bottom quintile who get to the next one moved from being 0% to 39% or from 19% to 21%.

> This means most people born into the bottom 20% improve their economic status, and most people currently in the bottom 20% started above it

Well, that's a minimum. If starting conditions weren't a factor you'd have 80% improving their status, not 55%. You can rephrase the statistic in another way, such as saying that 13% of the people at the lowest quintile should be in the highest income bracket, but they're not there because they started poor. Or that 22% of the people in the highest quintile are there not because they worked hard enough, but because they just started there.

>you can rephrase the statistic in another way, such as saying that 13% of the people at the lowest quintile should be in the highest income bracket, but they're not there because they started poor.

You say "should" but it seems like this is only true if you expect (and want) completely random results.

Something that doubles or reduces by 10x the random probability is not "closer to random". I doubt that if you tell something that a factor is "closer to random than to a perfect predictor" they'd expect something like that.

> You say "should" but it seems like this is only true if you expect (and want) completely random results.

There is quite a lot of randomness involved in where one ends up. There is a random distribution of ability, of work industry, location, country, luck, connections, timings... quite a lot of factors so that you'd expect that randomness to dominate over the whole population and things be close to ~20%. In fact, countries with higher social mobility tend to be fairly close to that 20%. In Spain (which is by no means the best at social mobility, but it's the only one I have data at hand from) we are pretty far from that 43% chance of staying at the lower quintile, and also far from the 3% of moving from bottom to top: https://widgets.elpais.com/mapbox/2020/07/atlas-renta/pc_nac...

This shouldn't be a matter of what the layman thinks, it is a question of statistics. If someone said or thought that the class you were born into has a bigger impact on outcomes than other factors, they would be wrong.

Can you check your link, as it has no text.

Where do you think these "starting conditions" come from?

We've lost interest in the long game. The system looks much fairer if you think about your family rather than yourself. And sure enough, immigrants continue to come to the US looking for economic opportunities, which often take the form of small businesses, and then their kids become doctors and lawyers.

> Especially if they come here with the capital to start a small business, or to send their children to medical school.

I'm not sure what part of my comment or its parent made you think anyone was talking about refugees or illegal immigrants.

These claims simply don't hold up against scrutiny.

In the US, children born into a family in the bottom quintile of household income have a 58% chance to step up into a higher income bracket as adults, a ~30% chance to realize an above average income as an adult, and a 6% to reach the top quintile.

Being born into poor circumstances makes things undeniably harder, but the claim that working hard won't lead to a better life is patently false (and imo extremely pernicious).

Source: https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/02_econ...

Reading through these comments, I see an onslaught of unverifiable claims. I'd really appreciate evidence.

Now, I’m going to remove any moral or emotional thoughts for a moment.

Sure there may be a correlation between wealth and future success, but hasn’t that always been the case - it’s a fact of nature. The most successful genes are able to procreate leading to success. What we did is say “all humans need to have the same vindication’s” and ensure infant mortality was near zero. As a consequence even the least able to produce can (a) survive but importantly (b) reproduce.

If you want maximal improvement to society, reduce the points subsidies. Quickly, only those helping society will procreate.

All of our poor, all of them. Are a creation of our society. Historically, the weak and unfit didn’t survive. Those hardy enough to survive the system procreated and made a stronger society over time. today, we have the weak and unfit leading more weak and unfit. Eventually, this system will collapse.

Besides, if you really want the end result of human nature, you'd just get what we have today. Humans are, overall, compassionate for fellow humans. It's why we tend to the sick. Hell, our compassionate nature is so strong we sympathize with sick or disabled animals.

> Starting conditions (where one was born, levels of wealth and opportunity there, one's parents' education and jobs) are shockingly predictive about an individual's future. Hard work leading to social mobility has always been the exception, not the rule.

That could be true for USA where the mobility reached an equilibrium.

There’s also wealth that manifests itself as parents investing in their kid’s startups and providing social access to other elites.

Also, I was acquainted with a high school kid who had a supercar. He also was subjected to domestic violence, which curbed the majority of envy I had for his situation.

This isn't to say that starting position doesn't matter, I'm sure most of the vanderbuilts are still doing reasonably well.

When interest rates and returns on labor are low it becomes difficult to get ahead by either working smart or hard for the majority of individuals.

Even in the tech sector, the most lucrative approach is to simply work with a dominant firm. Founders/Employees give up too much equity and have too little cash flow to compete.

Taken to the extreme this economy looks more like a feudal economy of court jesters, peasants, and lords then the proto-industrial economies Adam Smith wrote about.

Low interest rates are an indicator that something is going wrong. Companies stopped hiring people and they already have done all the investments they could possibly do. The quick hack is to just let the government "steal" all the low interest money and spend it to generate inflation.

What we are seeing during this pandemic is that businesses are waking up. They are realizing that they actually have to work or else their paper wealth is going to disappear into nothing.

Fundamentally the problem is that cash is a low risk asset and the risk of actually doing work is too high compared to risk free money.

There is also a chilling effect where even the people who have the qualities needed to succeed, judge their own chances by the median of their peers, and thus don’t bother in the first place. This is one of the reasons I advocate for big-population standardized tests just a self-assessment tool for students. It won’t help most underprivileged people, but it will at least help the best of them, and get a positive feedback loop going.

I myself probably would not have worked hard enough if I did not consistently place high in these tests, as I was from a rather small city, and born with an under-confidence bias.

Does it guarantee success? Nope.

Is it a requirement for success in many circumstances? Yep.

What are the chances I would move into another position at your company?

My guess is 0%.

You might keep me employed, and not fire me. Maybe pay me a little more. But there would be no realistic hope to jump up to the next level.

That's been the case for a long, long time.

But now something new is happening. Now professionals at many companies are realizing that they are in the same position. They see that hard work will not lead them to jump to the next level.

If you showed that much initiative, I would absolutely try to train you in other skills.

I own a software company, and while we don't have a physical office, I'm always offering education material to employees who want to learn new skills.

My mentor had a saying that I agree with fully - skill can be taught. Effort can't.

If you're willing to put in the effort, I'll make sure you're rewarded.

https://m-g-h.medium.com/free-will-a-rich-fairy-tale-4fecf80...

I don’t have time right now to grab the data, bu last time I looked, there was actually a surprising amount of movement between the various quintiles of wealth from one generation to the next.

It’d be great if you included data that supports your claims.

It's not enough to be lucky. Most people still need to work hard to get ahead.

You can live in some shithole where 400$/month is easily enough to live without struggle, learn hard computer stuff and then work remotely for X times more than you needed to live.

How are you going to skew the odds if you aren't even trying?

Internet is huge advantage, you can not only have access to good information/knowledge/tutorials/blabla about something,

but also you can meet professionals with decades of experience in $something significantly easier

There were periods in history with great opportunities where many people actually really richer. Economies always went up and down, where up literally means opportunities.

I don't think we can conclude that from anything. It could just as easily be that our previous optimism was warranted but we've become influenced by a more pessimistic media narrative. To be clear, I don't have a position because there doesn't seem to be enough evidence one way or another.

It’s an intuition that’s very familiar to those born without a leg up.

There’s always hope. This isn’t about hope. It’s about seeing things as they are, as the parent suggested.

Fair enough.

> It’s an intuition that’s very familiar to those born without a leg up.

I was born to a blue collar family and I lived in a trailer until I was 6. I don't share the intuition.

I worked through college while my classmates skipped class, spent loads at starbucks, restaurants, etc. I double majored and graduated with a fraction of the debt of my peers, and I picked majors that are likely to pay well. I now make multiples of what my parents made together. N=1 and all that, but it's not "intuition of those born without a leg up".

It sounds like you made it through some trying circumstances. Good on you. It doesn't mean the rest of us who have witnessed the other side of the veil are incorrect in our own intuitions.

I wish I had grown up with the worldly insight to make money out of any situation along my way without losing my sense of myself or my principles. Instead I encountered recessions and empty job markets. C'est la vie. We all get our breaks somewhere.

So, to extend on that, my point was never one is more noble than the other—but pointing out that asking for datasets and conclusions about intuitions is like asking artwork to explain itself.

I think it’s somewhere in the middle, and America needs to make some reforms so we don’t have billionaires and abject poverty at once; however, I don’t think the media narrative is helping.

I do believe you have to work to prepare yourself to make the most of whatever comes your way. If it all was so simple, and so easily digestible then we wouldn't be having a discussion at all!

I can see where you're coming from when you mention a media narrative, but I disagree. But I think that's just a matter of perspective—I don't see it as some moral or other failing to decide that working hard and hoping and aiming for good fortune just to acquire capital when in the end you really just want to work a day job and smoke a joint and watch the flowers grow.

I think that's the tone that's being expressed, especially in the introspective light of the recent pandemic. The big questions have come out for a lot of people all over again: what's it all for, anyway?

America, the modern world, what have you, glorify financial success in itself above all else as if its representative of something deeper, more profound. I think the article(s) on the subject are pointing to the growing tendency of late to question whether it's really worth it, or in the interest of most people.

Personally, I don't get the quest for money alone. Life, for me, is primarily experiential. I'm a practical person, but there's no reality I can fathom in which I'd put a raw capital value or property ownership above a wealth of experience. For instance, I rent a beautiful old century townhome in a small artist's town in Ontario from a wealthy dentist. He bought it several years ago and has probably made a killing in the increase in property values here, but somehow I feel like I'm getting the better deal here. Especially when he keeps wistfully remarking that maybe they'll move in when they retire.

I'm saying that is a part of the question of what the articles are discussing, not something as singular as poo-pooing hard work or making money. But questioning whether hard work with the goal being money really being a path worth its while on its own. Especially if you can get 90% of the life you want without all of the strife.

The article is illustrating people asking: "Will years of hard work accomplish what people claim it will for me?"

That was not a reasonable question in most peoples' minds pre-pandemic, and "no" wasn't a reasonable answer. I think it's a big question for the times, and it's a good one. It always has been, but it is now, too.

You kind of just said it. What's the problem? But there's a giant argument about it going on throughout the entire thread, and people are asking others to back up their personal intuitions and experiences with data—like asking the wind why it blows in one direction versus the other.

He's talking about social mobility from 8:30

Initial Conditions really don't mean much in the long term trend. Short term, sure.

hard work is only one small ingredient

I'm a hard worker, I love it.. if the task suits me, i won't leave.. why did I fail ? people are jealous of your performance (inferiority), feel guilty of not being fast enough, are afraid of being thrown out because of you, and more and more politics (faster performance will be exploited by managers to pressure others in sad ways so people assemble/unionize and will restrict performance as leverage).

Unless you value yourself enough, society will drag you down to its level

What effort are they responsible for putting forth to better their life ?

Who is responsible for ensuring they have a good life ?

The effort of changing society to give more people more opportunity is generally undertaken on a moral basis alone. If you aren’t convinced by the premise, asking leading moral questions as if they have objective answers isn’t going to tell you anything you don’t already “know”, and it also isn’t going to provoke any kind of useful discussion around how we might implement real policies to this effect.

We have the rich who use the govt to oppress the people and preserve their wealth.

We have the poor who think the govt will help them

We have a large group of people who just want to work to survive

What rules would you put in place and how would you go about doing that to ensure the rich / powerful didnt corrupt the system ?

The US was designed with a constitution defining the rules a govt could work within and the bill of rights was added to ensure the govt didnt enroach on the peoples rights so they could control the govt

This design failed as did all the rest... why ?

Because people are inherently lazy and dont want to be bothered. So you think its better to simply feed these folks and ensure they are ok will somehow motivate them to work ?

Capitalism works better than most systems and in fact many of the so called socialist countries arent. They are capitalist countries that have strong social programs funded by said capitalism

Perhaps instead of letting the govt get away with violating the rules it was bound by we start enforcing the rules ?

Care to show me where I said any such thing, or even implied it?

> Perhaps instead of letting the govt get away with violating the rules it was bound by we start enforcing the rules ?

To what end? I feel like you’re just agreeing with the sentiment of the top level comment, that we need to do a better job ensuring that social mobility is more than an illusion.

I also feel like you’re ascribing some rabid anti-capitalist sentiment to me and/or the top level commenter when, in fact (again), I don’t think either of us expressed any such sentiment, even implicitly. I happen to agree (?) with you that capitalism in concert with strong social programs to ensure the independence and mobility of labor (in economics I believe we may call that “liquidity”, which is said to increase allocative efficiency) is the right way to go.

What impact do you think teaching nihilism has on children? I don't believe its true, but even if it were, it's not a useful model for life.

I don't think we should be lying to children. We should teach them honestly, even if the truth sometimes hurts. Maybe some of them will eventually be able to make life better for those who are less fortunate.

And just because somebody has next to no chance of living a cushy western lifestyle doesn't mean they're screwed and shouldn't bother. People can still live fulfilling lives.

I think it's better to be realistic about your chances and it may help to drive the political discourse into the right direction as well. After all this is a political issue.

In the end as others have said here it's more important to have a balanced, happy life and good health than to chase the lotto ticket in a rigged game.

It's really not. Hard work does lead to a better life. It's fulfilling in its own right, at least for me. That's why I go to the gym and push myself regularly. If I loaf around all day, I don't feel well. I find meaning and satisfaction from being productive or putting in effort. It's not only societal but biological.

Things are harder for some people, sure. But for children, the bar is so low in the US that a minimal amount of effort could put you on the right track. My experience was basically that showing up and doing what you're supposed to do puts you above 50% of your peers. Consider Hoboken High School. 12% of students are math proficient. NJ is 42, while the graduation rate is 90%. The bar is very low.

[0] https://www.publicschoolreview.com/hoboken-high-school-profi...

That's just a strawman. We're not talking about winning the lottery. This is about whether you improve your outcome by participating in the workforce in some meaningful way.

From the article:

>Despite strong economic performance, a majority of respondents in every developed market do not believe they will be better off in five years’ time.

That shows a disconnect between opportunity out there and people's feeling that they will take part in that opportunity.

But we're being fundamentally dishonest if we end the conversation there. People who are born poor have to work much harder to get out of it. Mistakes or misfortune that wouldn't be a big deal for someone in the middle class can be catastrophic for the poor. Ignoring that doesn't help anyone.

The point isn't "what do we teach our children?" The point is "how do we make society better for everyone?" And the individual view does not help with the latter.

Work on programs to make sure these basic things are available to everybody. Start mentorship and apprenticeship programs early. Work for a strong social safety net so that people don't have to worry if they start a business and it fails, they won't be homeless or without healthcare.

So don't teach hopelessness. Instead recognize the failures and fix them.

You might want your children to think social mobility is possible if they work hard enough

But you don't want your politicians to think social mobility is possible through hard work. Because if they don't know you've got a social mobility problem, how are they going to fix it?

>> You might want your children to think social mobility is possible if they work hard enough

I'd definitely want my children to work hard, understand how the world works, but I also don't want them to spin their wheels for 25yrs only to realize their car was on a jack and not going anywhere.

There are glass ceilings in certain countries and especially in certain industries. Recognizing that is important IMHO. I hope we break all such glass ceilings, but one has to recognize they are present, recognize the odds, and then make a decision to give away large parts of your time to attempt to do that.

Most don't disagree with that. The point is that the rate is different for different people. For some people, a decent live (house, bed, food) will take a lot of effort. For others, they might be born already into that.

What's important is that this is a discussion about policy and systemic problems. You can't address systemic issues with individual solutions (such as "poverty would be solved if people worked hard"), it's nonsense the same way it is to address individual problems with systemic solutions ("if you're homeless, ask the government to enact affordable housing policies).

My life still has purpose. I just don't work very hard.

I would tell them that they better advocate for a more equitable society or, yes, they are screwed. Too often self-empowerment is used as a way to tamp down any kind of organized push for equity. This is very convenient for those that benefit from the status quo.

I would argue that a truly useless model for life is pretending that the deck isn't stacked and letting those stacking it make out like bandits.

I can take a guess. Notice GP's emphasis on starting conditions without an explanation of where those starting conditions come from. If personal effort is fruitless (an "illusion," as GP puts it), then they must originate with something else. In this ideology that's usually thought to be exploitation, one group oppressing another and getting rich off their labor.

It's popular in part because it's partly true; stealing is certainly one way to get rich. But so is building. It doesn't have to be zero sum. Unfortunately it's easy to believe that it is because it excuses mediocrity. It's harder to believe that every choice matters because it entails more suffering in the short term.

What you say is that one should lie to people for their own good.

Also practically, none of that implies that doing absolutely nothing is a good idea. You are better off to work then to not work. It makes you eat better, buy new computer once in a while or new sofa. However, don't expect to become rich by working hard in your dead end job with zero chance of promotion.

And you wont be telling those people anything new. They all know that no matter how hard you work at moving those Amazon box in warehouse or driving Uber, they are earning for immediate survival and wont raise through the ranks.

If you say upfront that the odds are against you, then I think it can spark more conscious decisions.

I would tell them "dont get fooled by tales of money. Take care of your body, your relationships, because thats where your wealth is. "

"You're being held back by a system that works against you! Send me to Washington, and I'll fix it!"

Wash, rinse, repeat.

I think the real reason people struggle is because they just don't know how to take advantage of the opportunity available. It used to be easy - get some basic knowledge and find a hard working 9-5. Now that isn't the best path and while there is a lot more opportunity it is more open ended and one needs to find their own way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consciousness