romanticizing poverty is a privilege that the poor don't have

I'm not romanticizing it. I'm saying that it's optimal for me that lots of smart conscientious people get limited job opportunities because then they will do small things to excellence rather than pursue personal gain. This is good for me because I get to experience the results of these. The guy who would be a great engineer, quant, or business leader will end up making rice wine and so I get great rice wine. I don't want to be limited like that, though. I want to be sorted into my zone of excellence and then enjoy the positive externalities from the smart and unfairly limited.

i think it is romanticizing poverty. most poor people don't get the opportunity to do anything to excellence. survival takes precedence

I think it is also an inaccurate view of the world that most capable people drop their passions in pursuit of a career and monetary gain. not only that, but talent is multidimensional, and being a great engineer does not imply making great rice wine under different circumstances

poverty, and lack of social mobility, is largely a curse of wasted potential, not a silver lining of talent molded into artisanal goods

That's true. If you're African, your talent goes wasted. If you're British, the smartest guy ends up working on gov.uk for £40k/year. If you're American, the smartest guy ends up a billionaire.

The "more meaning" business is cope because as societies add more ability to excel, people of ability switch into economically rewarding activities at a high rate.

There's a nice middle where you can exploit them for positive externalities. In the past, through religion (many monks were undoubtedly great researchers) and today through a mediocre (but not awful) society.

what kind of conclusion are we drawing from a 2 minutes clip of a cafe here ?

I am using the conversation about a cafe to discuss something that I've known for three decades. This is often the case with people. My father can diagnose a bone and joint injury in minutes and often he can guess at history. "What kind of conclusion are you drawing from five minutes of palpation?"

Not five minutes. Fifty years and five minutes.

Who are "capable" people? Do you think if the cafe owner was born in the US they would be working at Google?

Lots of people in North America work in jobs with positive externalities (teachers, nurses, etc) and they're generally treated like shit compared to 9-5 office workers. I don't think the issue is that the former is group is less capable, they're just not sociopathic resource-collecting robots.

> Poor economic mobility

Maybe you mean poor job mobility for office work. Economic mobility as a whole is high enough for whole towns and villages to become desolate as former residents decamp for the cities.

That's not what economic mobility means - it's the ability to move upward (or being forced to move downward) through different income brackets, or more simply from working to middle or middle to upper class. It's not associated with geographic moves; indeed lack of economic mobility is a reason people move, in search of economic opportunity, but often find their increased income consumed by increased living expenses.