U.S.A., Land of Limitations? | Hacker News Reader

U.S.A., Land of Limitations?

nytimes.com

133 pointskareemm127 comments

I have said this to so-called progressives until I am out of breath. Class and economic inequality is the most pervasive and dangerous form of inequality facing us today in the rich world. We dwell on forms of inequality that are broadly ostracised and largely eliminated, while the elephant in the room is economic inequality that our business and political leaders endorse as enthusiastically as Confederate leaders embraced slavery.

Many people today believe that the poor deserve their lot in life, just as people would have said about African-Americans a century ago. Presidential candidates and senators say it openly and without rebuke. Both houses of Congress are controlled by people who talk euphemistically of the super-rich (who increasingly derive their wealth from inheritance not ingenuity) as "job creators". Meanwhile anywhere from a quarter to a third of our population is languishing with no jobs or shitty jobs, poor health, broken families and is always one parking ticket away from financial ruin.

This is the greatest challenge of our generation. We have to fix this.

Having lived in the US and three different European countries, I now live in what is supposedly one of the poorest European countries, Bulgaria.

Apart from the few third world countries I had visited, I had never seen real poverty until I went to the US. I had expected the US to be like Western Europe with bigger cars and more fast food, but I found infrastructure such as roads, airports, bridges, railroads that were seemingly left unrepaired for decades, public institutions like schools or government agencies were in worse shape than in the better Eastern European countries. They even had power outs not unlike the Eastern European ones. And just about everywhere we drove, even in wealthy areas such as Orange County or Manhattan, one wrong turn would take us to neighborhoods where we literally felt unsafe.

A few months ago I visited the poorest regions of Bulgaria, which happen to be (one of) the poorest region(s) of the entire European Union, Severozapaden Region, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severozapaden_Planning_Region. It's just South of the Danube, in the North western part of Bulgaria. And yes, it is poor, barely any businesses, and young people are moving out of there to find a future elsewhere. But a regular lower middle class suburb in America feels vastly more hopeless, rundown and outright dangerous.

I love the US and the US is a great place to be wealthy and I still believe your chances of making it really big are better in the US than in Europe as a whole. But Europe provides for a better life right now, not only for the poor, but also for most of us regular folks with no or little wealth and with lower or upper middle class income.

Thanks for sharing that. I've had similar experiences.

I grew up in Seattle, went to school in Philly, and just spent a year traveling through 14 countries in Asia (incl 6mo in India). The poverty on the streets of my hometown when I returned was absolutely shocking. And I found the poverty in Philadelphia to seem so much more crushing than what I saw in far poorer areas, like Indian slums or Laotian villages (I'm really struggling to deconstruct exactly why I had this feeling).

I live in a relatively poor village in Laos and have visited many villages way poorer than the one I live in and I think a big part of the reason people can stay happy and have hope on a budget of a few dollar a day is the strong sense of family and community in these villages. The poor in the western world seem much more isolated in comparison.

I think part of the reason for that contrast is that at least from my POV (being raised in poverty early on and only getting out of that that situation when my parents found work at Raytheon Beechcraft) is that poor people in the US will try to buy a the appearance of not being poor but never really save anything for things that really matter like healthcare and education. It's not that poor people can't save for it, but that it seems that US society puts an emphasis appearances rather than on the actual condition of one's economic standing. So, I've seen friends of mine (similarly poor or lower-middle-class) own nice clothes but have zip in terms of savings or things that could make their lives easier (ex. a well maintained car).

I want to emphasize that this isn't an attempt to convict people in those economic situations as bad, but that as a society we're really superficial in terms of taking care of poverty itself. Having a house, a car, and etc doesn't mean you can't be poor or have no economic safety net to even maintain that standard of living which my parents still don't (even at 57 years of age). What makes this worse is the fact that some people snub anyone that is perceptibly "poor". It's something that irks me because I've known very bright and capable people of the same economic standing as I started with getting rejected from job opportunities and even social occasions purely based on their economic standing. Then people wonder why poor people stay poor.

I have a very good friend that lives in one of Romania's largest cities. She regularly shows me photos of her city, and her surroundings, and I know what the economic prospects are of the people that live there. My opinion is the exact opposite of yours. I can't imagine the despair, the poverty, the lack of potential, that nations such as Bulgaria (median income of about $300-$400 / month) or Romania face. She just watched her grandmother die, with 'free' healthcare, because the doctors were so horrible they couldn't even begin to figure out what was wrong with her, and the local hospital had no MRI or CT machines - as she got worse, they wanted to take her to another hospital in another city, but the family - which has an average income in Romania - had no car to make the trips. So the grandmother died, at about 67 years old, while the family never even found out what she died of. Must be that universal healthcare I hear so much about that everyone but Americans have.

I think you're completely off base, and obviously so. Americans have among the highest disposable incomes on earth, falling household to income debt levels, and a jobs picture that has been improving non-stop for five years. Americans also have among the highest median household net wealth levels of any nation, and the best universities by far. Bulgaria? That claim almost comes across more as propaganda, when you understand that even Romanians look down upon the poverty in Bulgaria.

I personally grew up in one of the poorest parts of America, Appalachia. My experience is the exact opposite of what you describe. Where I lived there were no homeless; wages were half the national average, and we had great public schools, with some of the best rated teachers in the state; everyone had a home, and a car; a nearly zero murder rate; the standard of living was on par with the US median because the cost of living was very low; unemployment was higher, and people lived relatively simple lives when it comes to materialism. This is all mostly still true there today. Compared to the childhood of real poverty my Romanian friend endured growing up there in the 1990s, I grew up in paradise. Where I grew up, the poor there today have access to medical care and routine medical tech via medicaid, which the median household in her Romanian city can't get access to without going to Bucharest.

But don't take my word for it -

OECD better life index:

http://cdn.dejanseo.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/better...

And

http://media.economist.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/fu...

You could also run a dozen other economic metrics like long-term unemployed, unemployment rate, median income, median household net worth, household debt to income, health outcomes from medical care, access to the latest medical technology and drugs. You could compare classic markers for materialism for the poverty line and what it's defined by in say the US vs Bulgaria. The US does extremely well in most comparisons. There are perhaps eight countries on earth that produce better quality of life outcomes than the US, and for the top 75% maybe only five countries do better.

I'm now curious of where you lived in Appalachia and of what economic background you came.

I too grew up in Appalachia and quite poor ($6000 / year for a family of 5), and aside from the camaraderie of poorness, I wouldn't want to inflict that hardship on anyone: few jobs, poor food, poor housing, poor schools, poor hospitals, poor infrastructure.

Where I grew up there were two classes of people: the 'professional class' and the 'working class'. The professional class were multi-generational groups of irresponsible doctors, preying lawyers, slum lords, land owners, government cronies, and other sorts of con men. Their spouses, children, and cousins took most of the other middle class occupations. The rest of us were left with the scraps of broken 100 year economies of iron, coal, and steel. And, these two group rarely mingled.

When people ask me what it was like to live in Appalachia in the 80s and 90s, I tell them to rent Gummo http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119237/.

> camaraderie of poorness

Would you mind expanding on that?

The bond low income families form in a local area due to their shared struggle.

Yeah I got that, I wanted to hear more about it

I don't want to belittle your experience, but we just had something similar happen within our family, in the United States.

My wife's grandmother was on the decline due to dementia. Her care requirements were so high that we had to put her into a care facility. The problem is, because her symptoms didn't require putting her into a $6k a month facility, insurance wouldn't cover it. So for the remaining year of her life, we had to come up with the $4.5k a month for her care.

The care for people here is expensive, so much so that it can destroy families.

> the doctors were so horrible they couldn't even begin to figure out what was wrong with her

That happens here too, unless you have the ability to pay for a trip to the Mayo clinic.

> the local hospital had no MRI or CT machines

Ours does, and the costs for using it are prohibitive if you have no insurance. In fact if you have no insurance, you aren't welcome at the hospital unless you have a life threatening problem, like actively bleeding out.

> I personally grew up in one of the poorest parts of America, Appalachia.

That doesn't describe even my hometown, a relatively rich corner of Montana with lots of disposable income coming in from California expats. We have homeless, folks who can't afford a car, a few murders a year... in a town with a population around 40k.

"the doctors were so horrible they couldn't even begin to figure out what was wrong with her"

Yeah, unfortunately a lot of our good doctors are swept by the offers made by the western countries. It's sad, but true.

You said many people today believe that the poor deserve their lot in life. I think the people who believe that are ignorant or indifferent or both.

However, an ugly bit about the poor that no one wants to confront is culture. What is to be done about the culture of the poor that locks them in poverty? I don't think throwing more money and resources at the poor helps -unless- it is somehow coupled with culture change.

Wasting money/health on cigarette smoking and booze and drugs, credit debt and payday loans and living paycheck to paycheck, dropping out of school, lotto, endless streams of chaotic drama-filled relationships and unprotected sex and babies outside of marriage, junk food and fast food and drinking pop instead of water at every meal... These things to me aren't -only- an education problem, they're -also- a culture problem.

It's judgey for a well-to-do guy like me to talk this way, sorry in advance. I just find this culture thing very depressing because I don't feel there is much that can be done. It's very tempting for me to pick a single group to blame, like the banksters (especially re: payday loans) for being the secret hand in causing all this. But in my heart, I know the culture of the poor just really sucks in America, and there's a lot of wasted human potential. Nothing is being done to change that culture based on what I see on the boobtube.

If you ask me, the victimhood status we confer upon the poor only serves to lock them in their place. The greater society could do well by shaming bad behavior and try to steer poor culture people onto better paths.

This is the big mistake that the left makes in their thinking about poverty. They believe it's a fundamentally material problem. In fact, the material outcome is just the end-result of the real underlying causes: poor education, broken families, and other cultural dysfunction. There's obviously a feedback loop between material poverty and cultural problems, but you can't break the cycle by just throwing money at people.

We can't forget about historical injustices such as slavery and Jim Crow. The nation has a moral duty to especially help those communities. But what we're doing now, spending billions of dollars on dozens of anti-poverty handouts, is clearly not working.

I agree that the politics of victimhood is especially damaging. It robs the poor of their agency and sells them the lie that the only thing between them and prosperity is oppression by the rich. It's a politics of helplessness and envy.

A man who does not believe that he is master of his own destiny cannot thrive. When he is sold a life of dependence, he is made a serf.

"This is the big mistake that the left makes in their thinking about poverty. They believe it's a fundamentally material problem."

While I'm sure the left is different in the US, that seems backwards on a global level. It's generally the left that emphasizes immaterial things like education, maternity leave, kindergarten etc. while the right focuses on economic measures like lower taxes.

"you can't break the cycle by just throwing money at people"

Throwing money at people seems like a very effective way to limit the bad effects of poor people. Drug addicts with money tend to do drugs, while drug addicts without money tend to do robberies, burglaries, go to prison etc.

"believe that he is master of his own destiny"

The mindset that you should fend for yourself and don't be a burden is much more prevalent among the poor. More prosperous families tend to try to give their kids all the advantages they can. If anything the poor needs to adopt a culture of entitlement.

> but you can't break the cycle by just throwing money at people.

At least for those where money is currently the hindering factor you actually can. Financing students for example.

You also reduce the feedback loop to which you alluded. There are lots of factors where it might not be that obvious that it exists. Stress factors like poverty can greatly reduce mental capabilities for instance.

And in the end you make the lives of the poor people suck less with that money.

Financing students is a great example of how government ends up getting it wrong. In the US, we finance college students with grants and subsidized loans. But rather than making college affordable, this aid has had just the opposite effect by driving tuition up across the board. Flush with public money, colleges have become wasteful bureaucracies that are unaccountable to their customers, students and parents.

But once an entitlement exists, it's almost impossible to take it away. As Reagan said, "The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see on this Earth is a government program". So it just becomes a permanent structural deficiency of our society.

> In the US, we finance college students with grants and subsidized loans. But rather than making college affordable, this aid has had just the opposite effect by driving tuition up across the board.

Increasing price (outside of aid) isn't actually the opposite of the effect aid is intended to have -- subsidies always increase the cost before subsidy; the intent is that they will decrease the cost after subsidy for those receiving the subsidy since, under most reasonable supply/demand conditions, the amount of increase will be less than the amount of the subsidy.

And this would probably work fine for grants taken alone, but we can't really isolate the impacts.

Loans, however, aren't subsidies, they are cost-deferment measures. They aren't meant to make college more affordable (in terms of lower net cost after the policy) for those who get them, they are meant to allow people who could not afford college up-front but who would benefit economically from college so that college would be affordable if it could be paid for on a deferred basis can afford it.

College loans, however, are problematic because humans (in general, and those younger than mid-20s in particular) tend to be irrational and to -- as has, I believe, been shown in numerous studies -- overly discount deferred costs, so that loans have the effect of subsidies on near-term costs while at the same time just being deferred costs. So they increase the pre-policy cost without actually being a subsidy to those who qualify for them.

Subsidized loans are subsidies, in the form of 0% interest when you're in school and very low interest rates after. Those both cost the government a lot of money that the borrower would otherwise pay.

> Subsidized loans are subsidies

They are subsidies on the cost of borrowing money, but not on tuition (except at a very small ratio); but they act (in terms of effect on tuition prices, for the reasons discussed in my previous post) like a much larger direct tuition subsidy. because of this, it is much more likely that loan subsidies have a perverse effect on affordability than grants.

Poor people don't live in an isolated bubble. The culture you talk about is everyone culture. It affect middle class with a selection bias, like only seeing the welfare queen, and it affects the poor in a broken window theory fashion.

There is proven way to change that: government money, laws, media restriction. That worked with racism and women discrimination.

That probably does not sound good ( forbid media trash talking the poor in the land of freedom of speech ) but it is a vicious circle that needs to be broken somewhere and government is the one that has all the ropes to achieve it.

For example, every time you objectively think a private institution for health or education (school or university) is necessary instead of being a mere convenience is part of the problem. But you can't just put your kids in the public school and hope that enough people do the same as you do out of civic duty, you have responsibility to your children too. Poor people think the private school is better too, they just can't afford it and give up leading their kids to give up ending eventually in

> Wasting money/health on cigarette smoking and booze and drugs

Others fights to put their kids in there anyway and take incredible financial risk that could end up to them using last resort payday loan that fuel the statistic that make you think

> the victimhood status we confer upon the poor only serves to lock them in their place.

For my part, I blame a culture of super heroes measured in dollar where anything can be forgiven as long as you made a buck out of it. There seem to be an obsession in the US Media with the people that "made it" that I don't remember from my youth in Europe. Along with it, a culture of individualism that despite basically anything requiring a team always ends up as the simple narrative of the one lone genius against the world.

Your last comment may be the most telling. It's the same as climate change denial: as long as there's at least one narrative that fits your worldview, overwhelming evidence to the contrary is easy to suppress. Even if it were true and widely attainable, the implication harms the effort to reduce systemic poverty, because anyone who manages to break out of a high-crime, high-poverty area has all the incentive in the world to get the Hell outta there for the sake of their kids. The changes that are required to change communities come at the community level. Gentrification doesn't help - all it does is move the misery.

I agree with some things you say (culture is a major, problematic component to poverty, especially in America) and disagree with others. For example, shaming bad behavior is likely to be counterproductive, and requiring additional money/resources to be tied to cultural change doesn't strike me as the most pragmatic way forward either.

Lots of problems aren't best solved by governments. I don't go to my elected representative when I can't find a good burger joint in town; I tell someone who grills a mean patty to open up a restaurant. Just as many solutions are best done in the private sector (eg; startups), others are best done in "the culture sector" - Hollywood, the twitters. They're just as important, it's true. And it can be helpful to have public outcry to get the culture machine working on it. But I don't think cultural change should be the government's job (not that you explicitly said as such, but many people might leap to that).

I also think it's important to keep in mind the importance of economic and educational environment when thinking about culture. If you spend a little while in a Philly public school, talking to kids and teachers, you'll very quickly realize that it's completely unsurprising that kids don't have any faith that they can work hard within the system and see positive results. I'd rebel or lose faith too - there's just so much arbitrary shit that rains down on you, so few things in your life that you really have control over, that it wouldn't make sense to believe you could get ahead just by working hard, being nice, and following the rules. I'm impressed that any do.

EDIT: I should add that I completely empathize with where you're coming from emotionally on this. It's super hard, confusing, and frustrating - and I really don't know how much of what I just said above is even correct.

I believe you have the causality backwards, from the societal perspective. The poor are not poor because they have bad habits (addiction, debt, babies, dropouts); rather, they tend to behave in these ways because they are poor. While some individuals can avoid these pitfalls, as a whole, their culture is a symptom of their socioeconomic standing. You would probably be less likely to commit crime if you have a fulfilling job and a successful life, and you would care more about condoms, loan terms, and health if you had more to lose. Being poor means that you live day-to-day, and that affects your ability to think long-term.[1] If we the comfortable observers find their behavior paradoxical, it is because we aren't in the thick of things.

You're right: it seems very difficult to change the mindset of poor people. Fortunately, we "only" need to decrease income inequality, so that lower classes can earn a livable wage. The demographic transition is the perfect analogy, where fertility rates seem to magically drop as countries develop. If we remove the stresses of poverty, the poor will be able to live more effectively.

For the present, you can contribute by donating to charity, or by political advocacy: calling your politicians, voting for politicians who care about these issues, or helping fix campaign finance to level the political playing field.[4]

For the future, we can change quite a bit more. The obvious area is to make education more equitable and effective. For example, school districts are currently funded by taxes determined by housing values. This matters because education opens doors to higher-paying jobs: a PhD is expected to earn $4 million compared to $2.5 million for bachelors (lifetime),[2] and a high-school degree earns 40% less than that ($30k/yr compared to $50k/year).[3] Beyond the statistics, the culture of the poor stems from a lack of awareness of better possibilities or the belief that these better possibilities are unobtainable, so better education could break the cycle by inspiring children and giving them the tools to take control of their lives.

[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/your-bra...

[2] http://www.census.gov/library/infographics/sci_eng_majors.ht...

[3] https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=77

[4] http://www.democracymatters.org/what-you-need-to-know-about-...

I agree education is the key, but I cannot see how simply pumping more money into education is going to solve the problem.

In Oregon, we had a HS graduation rate of 69% this year. That is insane, we are the worst! We're as blue/progressive a state as you're going to find in the states. Low income kids, English language learners, and minorities are failing the most. Our spending per student is right around the average relative to other states.

Please consider that there IS a culture component and there are poor and minority families and communities that tolerate this atrocious performance from their kids. This is just one issue of many where really bad choices are being made and there is no secret about the consequences. And frankly, I think the politics of victimhood are toxic in this state and help create a safe environment for kids to fail out.

I don't seek to punish anyone, but I'd like there to be some blame heaped on all the responsible parties. Calling people to account on their poor performance is really cheap, we should do it more often.

30% of Forbes 400 billionaires inherited their wealth, 70% did not. What exactly are you using to claim that the super rich derive their wealth from inheritances?

I think the US actually is still by far the best place to become a billionaire. Only to have any shot at that at all, you need to start out as still fairly affluent. You need to have the time, opportunity and education to work on that dream, to grab that rare opportunity.

If your mind is entirely occupied with where your next meal comes from, whether you'll make rent at the end of the month, and how you're possibly going to cope with the random accidents of life, your mind can't even afford to think about bigger plans or opportunities.

Lift people out of that misery at the bottom. Make sure everybody has access to a good education. Make sure nobody goes bankrupt due to medical emergencies. Do that, and people will have the chance to move up again.

The US is still one of the very few countries where a lower-class person can become a billionaire.

I can name about three to four dozen recently listed (Forbes 400) US billionaires that came from poverty. You can look them up, the lists are easy to Google. Further, according to Forbes about half of their real estate billionaires come from at or below middle class, and about 40% of tech billionaires do.

But Forbes doesn't include any state or state-affiliated families. Considering the influence that is packaged with a billion dollars, it shouldn't be surprising that in many places wealth and political power are more closely tied than they might be in the US or Europe.

How many billionaires in the Middle East aren't counted? High ranking government officials in many countries also are likely billionaires via corruption.

It's unclear what proportion would be inherited vs new wealth, but it's another dimension worth considering.

Forbes 400 lists only Americans. It has nothing to do with Middle East billionaires or foreign government billionaires, who are listed under a different category.

Which is a good clarification, but his point definitely remains.

The rich are not just the billionaires. Try anyone who has enough that they'd never have to work if they didn't want to. Which is anyone with about $10 million and up.

Well, the numbers are similar for millionaires. This is for individuals deemed in the ultra high net worth category, which is $30 million and up....

"Sixty-five percent of the ultra-rich made their own money, while an additional 16 percent inherited a portion of the wealth that they grew to a larger fortune. The self-made rich have an average net worth of $142 million, versus $130 million for those who inherited their money."

http://www.bankrate.com/financing/wealth/myths-about-the-ult...

Total agreement. But curious, you've had to explain this to progressives until you're out of breath? The progressives in where I live are the only ones talking about this, and the (so-called) conservatives are the ones able to deftly brush the subject aside. Trippy.

Without knowing anything about OP, I could think of a probably too simplistic explanation, which is that both the perceived problem and perceived best solutions would differ and he belongs to the "other" camp.

Left: "there's an inequality of ability due to economic conditions, and the solution is redistribution"

e.g. affirmative action to push women/minorities/etc. into the workplace, taxes on the wealthy to finance programs for the poor, social housing quotas in every new development...

"Right" (usually more libertarian than where the GOP stands these days): "there's an inequality of opportunities due to regulations, and the solution is removing regulations"

e.g. Milton Friedman observing that the minimum wage increased black teenage unemployment and pushed many low-skilled black teenagers permanently out of the workforce as they were unable to get that first step on the job ladder; or Uber as a second, ad-hoc source of income for low earners being regulated out as an option as any Uber driver becomes an "employee"; or most extreme, that public schools are always a bad thing because the government monopoly on education means no effective oversight or pressure for teachers to perform.

With that remark I've fallen into the trap of separating the entire spectrum of views into two camps: progressive (liberal) and conservative. In reality this is not the case, but in general you can at least divide people into those that profess to care about inequality (and believe the government has a role in solving it, since politics is after all fundamentally about the government) and those who don't think it is a problem.

The latter group's views I disagree with, but I can't find much common ground with which to argue from. They don't think it's a problem and they don't want to do anything about it.

Among the former (people who would self-identify as progressives), I often find people fixated on certain pet issues relating to legacy social programs (you mentioned a few of them), rather than the broader picture of how a whole swath of the population is falling behind regardless of their colour or gender. These are the progressives who are caught up in, say, pushing for more generous public-sector pay, as if that helps the guy with no high school diploma. Or in fighting housing development on the grounds that it pushes out the poor, without asking why the poor can only afford to live in shitty neighbourhoods to begin with. I feel like many progressives are invested in fighting the symptoms of inequality rather than the causes.

I'd really love to see reforms that limit corporatist protections, subsidies, and un/under utilized assets owned by companies. Companies are emphatically not people, and should not be treated as such legally.. they are constructs to allow group ownership, and reduce liability as such. We've lost sight of this, and extended it to such a point that corporations literally have more rights than people, while we (as a society/government) work to prevent natural deaths of large companies and protect them at too many turns.

I think that if we started by backtracking on a lot of IP based protections, and changed the tax structure so that B2B transactions are taxed, actual investment over gambling could be a lot better. That's just me. We, as a nation and our government no longer legislate to ensure proper competition is allowed to happen and subsidize too much, and too often.

Poverty isn't a problem we can spend/indebt our way out of, we can only reduce some of the ways that the income gap has expanded out of control... Raising taxes isn't the solution, reducing loopholes, subsidies and deductions is. As would be making capital gains taxes line up closer to income taxes, with exemptions for directly inherited physical assets.

But, that's just my take on it... instead of spend at the bottom, cut from the top.

Whilst it is, as you hint, inappropriate to generalise whilst discussing policy due to the subject's complexity, I believe it is entirely appropriate to do so whilst discussing politics.

This is because the strength of a political faction (or its united subset) grows with the square of its size, and because the winning strategy in iterated prisoner's dilemma is tit-for-tat.

The former reason stabilises the system towards two roughly equal sized parties fighting for power and slowly iterating towards where the people are standing politically (compare the respective positions of Johnson and Goldwater in 1964, or around FDR's new Bill of Rights, to today's discourse) and moves away from discussing ideas and towards the behaviour of sports teams in a high stakes championship.

The latter reason means that if one side lowers itself to base populism, the other has to follow or lose the race. This cheapens the discourse and encourages simplification and the discussion of trivial matters (such as ideas no longer relevant, or high visibility but low impact "Cecil the Lion"s), whilst the civil service quietly takes care of the business of government. Panem et circenses.

Thus, people choose a camp, and rationalise their views accordingly so that they align with whatever the party is selling at the moment. This is, game theoretically, the most efficient use of their person for the cause since if they do not tit-for-tat, the other side will be stronger and win the argument.

It does not even make sense for the average person to think too hard about issues since they have such low visibility of them. How can someone who has never left the USA and whose town consists of 7th generation Swedish immigrants understand immigration and global competitiveness in a world where billions, equivalent to the entire US population several times over, are entering the middle class? How can one have a sound opinion about the Ukraine or Israelo-Palestinian conflict when both sides' intelligence agencies are doing their best to intoxicate public opinion? Whilst the NSA is now famous, how many of the general public know about the NRO, or have any idea how the roots laid by Soviet Active Measures distorted yesterday's zeitgeist and influenced today's? This is a subject Kissinger talks about many times in his works: that he had "no idea" and as he gained higher and higher clearance, his views changed.

But the senior party members do have access to the information (or as good as the alphabet soups can provide, anyway) and are supposedly meritocratically selected for their shrewdness, so what they decide is probably the best for the party. What is the fastest way to get the electorate to follow you? Shape the discourse with simplifications, red herrings, wild goose chases and The Donald's hairpiece. Let Fox News lead the GOP lot, let CNN lead the Democrats (or however you want to split your groups). This way, you manoeuvre House of Cards style into a position that optimizes your own, whilst not giving away too much of the country's future.

Personally, I think it is that last bit that the current generation of Washington residents is getting very wrong, because they do not see the bigger trends or think they'll be long gone, or the changes too gradual to be noticed and result in unpleasant circumstances for them. Like the Brits and the French they might find themselves swimming naked as the tide goes out... I could write for hours about it, but that would be off topic. Just thought I'd throw this in.

I don't mean to speak for the OP, just to relate my own experience. I grew up extremely disadvantaged - bottom 10% - and that's manifested in a few ways throughout life (ie. it took 7 years to get my bachelor's due to needing to work to support me + family members).

Nevertheless, I was recently told by a progressive regarding a tech conference that I was too privileged to offer a diverse perspective ('cause I'm a white guy, you see).

From the article:

"Sean Reardon of Stanford University has calculated that the race gap in student test scores has diminished, but that the class gap has widened. A half-century ago, the black-white test score gap was 50 percent greater than the gap between the richest 10 percent and the poorest 10 percent. Now it is the other way around, with the class gap almost twice that of the race gap."

But for whatever reason progressives (broad term I know) seem to be happy to talk about anything except class and income equality.

"privileged" and "diverse perspectives" are terms from recent "social justice" theory -- which is newer than "progressive".

It's of course very slippery to try to attach labels to any informal political groups, and probably better to discuss ideas, not people's labels.

Yeah, exactly. My impression is that Bernie Sanders (and to a lesser, but more ironic extent, Trump) are getting traction precisely because the mainstream candidates are all more-or-less beholden to different flavors of generational wealth.

In my experience, progressives are the ones who are pushing the class issue.

In these situations I like to ask: what other countries have solved this problem, and how? Are there any? If not, why not? Is it solvable? I never assume that every problem has a solution, and I definitely never assume that every problem has a government solution.

Countries with strong social democratic movements like Germany, Austria and some of the Scandinavian countries are able to provide a very decent quality of life with high education levels. However, they also have other variables like smaller population size (which makes it easier to reach a political consensus) and more ethnic homogeneity.

Didn't Germany just reach 12 millions of poor people ? http://www.euronews.com/2015/02/20/highest-number-of-germans...

A smaller population size doesn't make it easier to reach a political consensus. I am from Belgium and we hold a world record in that category: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/10/... 589 days at the time, I don't know if another country has done better since then.

What else could solve it other than a change of the regulations that led to the current situation? The only non government drivers of reduction of income I can see are war and financial crashes where the rich loose all of their money

I believe "neoliberal" (socially liberal, fiscally conservative) is the label for the "so-called progressives" you are arguing with.

> Both houses of Congress are controlled by people who talk euphemistically of the super-rich (who increasingly derive their wealth from inheritance not ingenuity) as "job creators".

I disagree. I hear too much talk about solving gaps and creating jobs, and not single shred of sympathy for the simple rich.

We need to stop thinking its our problems to solve these so-called "societal injustices". It's not my problem. I'm trying to improve myself!

People should mind their own business and try to improve their own situations. If they're in no / shitty jobs, poor health / broken families, they need to figure it out like everyone else! We can't play God and it for them.

It just enable this entitlement attitude of your piousness and their own of what they deserve.

As a member of a civil society, you have a responsibility to be charitable to those less fortunate than you. Civility is about considering other people in your own decisions.

This does not mean that you must donate all your worldly goods and live the rest of your days in poverty. What it means is that, when the time comes to vote in a property tax increase to fund education, or public transit, or any of a host of things that you think don't affect you personally, you have a responsibility to consider how these decisions will affect people who are not you, and that you should at least try to decide in favor of those people, if at all possible. I'm asking you to consider providing some resources as part of your duty to the rest of society, so that those less fortunate can have some hope of bettering themselves just as you did.

If we have any hope at all of maintaining an orderly society, we have to stop thinking only of ourselves.

Voting a tax increase is far different that donating your own money. You are voting to force others who may not agree with you to pay under threat of government violence. If you are asking me to provide resources then that is also a different story. And if you are persuasive I just might change my allocation of charitable donations. That is doing it right.

Added: I don't think the parent comment is wrong. It IS our duty to perform charity. But it should not be forced on us.

If it can be done through charity, why hasn't it?

People have shown time and again that it does take action through central authority to enact societal change because people will not "change [their] allocation of charitable donations" accordingly or have an allocation of charitable donations at all.

Societal progress in the face of injustice takes action from society as a whole.

Fortunately, "no I don't want to give back to the society I take from" doesn't fly with the IRS.

So you would base aids to the less fortunate on the willingness of those who have more to "donate" to those who have less ?

How would you go to make it happen, practically ?

Since people willing to donate have no real vision of people who are in need, you would need some sort of organization to collect the donations and distribute them.

This organization would need to run some sort of policies in order to make sure the people asking for donations are actually in real need of those.

You also would need to pay the people needed to run these organizations, perform the checks, mantaining a database of people in need and donators, and perform the actual donations.

For any country (remember, a country is responsible to the welfare of all its citizens, not only the ones well-off), working with possibly millions of willing donors and petitioners, pulling off something like this without a predictable budget and some defined policies and rules is quite hard.

Thus the modern welfare state, which might not be an ideal (or even efficient) solution, but a better one has not been invented yet.

> Since people willing to donate have no real vision of people who are in need,

They usually do, it fits their vision of what a "worthy" recipient of benefits looks like. Relying on charity to provide social services would mean a significant portion of people would be cut out from receiving them, either due to policy or the lack of donations.

I really think that IDF drafting and military service should be implemented in the US, just so people can see what exactly is government forcing something upon you ...

you can say he/they have moral responsibility. but laws are what they are, and that is truly the only real responsibility for all of us. just that you feel strongly about something and feel that it is the right way doesn't make it any more enforceable.

please note that I +- agree with you. anon3_ 2 had a slightly ignorant comment, maybe not intended, but I understand his view too (albeit I don't agree that much). the thing is, if he is really rich, he for sure wants to live in calm, secure and stable society where he isn't threatened daily just because he worked hard and now he is well off. For that, there needs to be broad(er) prosperity. Poor hungry people won't stay quiet for long. On the other hand, let's face it - people are lazy. not all of course, but many. Create easy conditions, and very few will do their best for society (aka work). Create too hard conditions, and many will break without ever reaching their potential.

I think state should be there to give a helping hand to those who work hard to make better life for themselves, but NOT make the better life for themselves. How? Now that's a question nobody has really good answer for :) I would bet on proper public schooling with high wages and great inspiring teachers. Add a non-abusable health care system (statement ridiculous in real world on its own), and society will flourish. All US would need is divert maybe half of cash for waging useless wars around the globe... ah wait

> you have a responsibility to be charitable to those less fortunate than you.

According to whom? I never signed up for this.

The only "responsibilities" (what a loaded word; you automatically imply we're irresponsible if we disagree with you) I acknowledge are those I took on of my own volition.

I think it a slightly different way. As a thinking person who is (somewhat) self-actualized I feel it is my duty to perform charity. The type and amount are my choice. And I feel that other thinking people should feel the same way. So I will remind them or attempt to persuade them if they are ignoring (what I feel is) their duty.

"Persuade them" how? By legally requiring them to pay taxes under threat of violence?

Precisely not that way.

> According to whom?

Most good and considerate people who aren't complete shitheads

Ah, right. A convincing argument; if I don't agree with your social deontology, I'm a shithead. You've persuaded me!

No, I'm not trying to convince someone who has made up their mind. You're really backing yourself up into that corner, though.

Most higher organizations/clubs/associations/families engage in philanthropy and charity, most religions espouse the virtues or godliness of good will towards others and, again, most people who have the capacity to feel will agree that extending that empathy towards others is a good thing.

The point is most people, especially those who see things from a higher level socially and intellectually, recognize the value of compassion and selflessness.

Someone who balks at the suggestion that they have a responsibility as a good person to be considerate, who embodies the message of Ayn Rand's Anthem, might be considered immature. A shithead, even.

You say it's not your problem, and imply that's because it's not your fault, but how sure are you of that?

When poor people can't get decent jobs, often it's not because they aren't capable of doing them. It's because there's a systematic policy of credentialist prejudice and discrimination.

When poor people can't get any jobs, often it's because there's a systematic policy of ageist prejudice and discrimination, in many cases enforced by law, plus bureaucratic regulations that make it hard to become an employer and impose costs on employers that exceed the value an employee could provide.

When poor people can't find a place to live, it's not because there's no land or we don't have the technology to build shelter. It's because zoning laws make it illegal to build more housing anywhere you could find a job to pay for it.

When poor people are sick in the U.S., often it's not because they aren't willing and able to pay fair market price for medical treatment. It's because for every dollar you spend on real costs of medical treatment, another ten dollars are consumed by the corruption and waste in the system.

If you've ever voted for a politician who contributed to any of these problems - which is almost certainly the case if you vote Democrat or Republican - then to some extent it is your fault, and you do have some moral obligation to do something about it.

I hope you never find yourself in dire circumstances, and at the receiving end of this kind of callousness.

I hope you do. It is not callousness that keeps people down, it is the failure of praise and positive reinforcement to be measured with realism and criticism. Even nasty namecalling can be constructive criticism, if someone is used to criticism and is introspective.

The most abject failures I've known in life are those who've been unable to recognize their mistakes, unable to handle criticism, and most clearly, those who've always had a bailout and never hit rock bottom.

Are you seriously wishing for someone to experience rock bottom and be met with, "Screw you, I'm improving myself!"?

If they're in no / shitty jobs, poor health / broken families, they need to figure it out like everyone else!

Like everyone else who isn't in a shitty job/poor health/broken family? And, by definition, haven't had to figure it out?

> "We like to boast of America as a land of opportunity, and historically there is truth to that"

I keep hearing this, but where is the evidence? Was there any objective research done to figure out whether at any point there was really some sort of magnificent economic mobility in the U.S.? There's lots of anecdotal evidence, sure -- stories of people who immigrated here with nothing and made it big, movies, novels, etc... but how do we know we're not just hearing about the exceptions, and that in the vast majority of cases, which do not capture people's imaginations, the poor stayed poor and the rich stayed rich?

One aspect is that well into the 19th century, perhaps even in the early 20th century, people in the US could participate in the massive land grab in the west. Basically, whenever the social framework got too bad, people could leave and at least go farm somewhere, giving them a living standard not too much below, and perhaps even higher, than that in larger cities.

The land grab is over now, but attitudes take some time to catch up.

This is particular interesting in comparison to Europe, where land grabs of this style have not happened in the last 1000 years or so. When the social framework got too bad, some people might have left to the Americas, but the people who stayed fought to solve those social problems.

I suspect that this is a large part of what drives the difference in perception of welfare spending between Europe and the US. It is also compatible with attitudes slowly shifting in the US to be more European.

Another perspective: while Americans were building a prosperous society of free men, the Europeans were continuously slaughtering each other, first for dynastic power, and then to impose their top-down "solutions" to the social problems you're talking about. Today the Europeans have so saddled themselves with taxation and regulation that they underperform economically. Their welfare systems have not solved poverty, but have fostered a culture of dependency on the state. In the pursuit of economic equality, they have succeeded mostly in raising the cost of living and creating a hostile environment for business. Because it's impossible to fire someone, firms are wary to hire, contributing to staggering youth unemployment. Minorities and immigrants are much more poorly integrated than in the US. Europe exerts little influence on world politics outside of the EU. Yes, I'm presenting just one side of the picture, but it's the side that's consistently ignored when the American left is clamoring for European-style socialism.

You surely mean "while European-Americans were slaughtering native Americans and profiting from the slave labor of black-Americans..."

you're not presenting one side of picture, what you are stating is plain wrong in many cases. Each sentence contains a lie or half-truth (ie something valid for few states out of 30 ain't universal europe-broad truth). I ain't lowering myself to your level, but let's say your comment is subpar for this site. Strive for better next time, I am sure you easily can ;)

Germany, for example, had officially recognized nobility till 1919. There were official classes and you could not become military officer or government bureaucrat if you was not born in the right family. First German experiment with democracy and equality under law was after WWI and failed spectacularly.

America, with democracy and no nobility laws was rightfully called land of opportunity compared to that.

Not sure why parent is downvoted; it's true. A century ago, the US really was the land of opportunity to many. Especially to people from rigid, class-based countries. And now the US has basically become similarly rigid, with what's looking like an unofficial aristocracy.

that's 100 years old history, and true. now let's talk about these times...

Well, let's stop at 70-year-old history on the way. At the end of WWII, the US had not been bombed nearly into oblivion, had not had large fractions of its population killed off, and had not been occupied (or ruled) by psychopaths trying to kill off everyone who wasn't like them. In the US, you could spend your time trying to build the future instead of trying to rebuild from the damage of the past. You also could live your life with less fear of a return of the days of killing. So, yeah, that looked a lot like opportunity in those days.

Today? That's less clear cut, I agree.

Trends in economic mobility are difficult to prove because mobility itself is a long-term phenomenon. But for example, college tuition has increased dramatically, and a college education is one of the main ways to attain upward mobility.[1] Poor people are not able to enter profitable jobs (e.g. medicine, management, programming) because it requires training they cannot obtain, so they are instead stuck in e.g. minimum-wage retail work.

Economic inequality is easier to measure, and definitely correlates with (lack of) mobility.[2] Higher inequality means that there is a greater divide between the poor and the rich, so that it is more difficult to become rich if you are poor. Here, the statistics are clear: essentially all measures of inequality are increasing in the United States.[3]

America in the 1940s was mostly middle class: blue-collar jobs provided a livable wage, and income inequality was much lower.[4] In the past 50 years, middle-class wages have barely increased,[5] while college graduates[6] and CEOs earn much more.

[1] http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2013/06/13-facts-h...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the...

[3] http://www.newyorker.com/rational-irrationality/american-ine...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Unite...

[5] http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/09/for-most-wor...

[6] http://www.census.gov/library/infographics/sci_eng_majors.ht...

Since Castro's communist regime came to power in Cuba, Cubans have been fleeing the island for freedom and opportunity in the US. With the exception of a minority that was lucky enough to have foreign bank accounts and land-holdings, they all came to the US with nothing. At the airport in Havana, the Cuban army emptied your wallet and purse, took all of your jewelry, and left you with essentially the clothes on your back. Fast forward to today and the 2 million Cubans in the US are the wealthiest hispanic immigrant group, and American-born descendants of Cuban immigrants are actually wealthier than non-hispanics whites (what most people call "white people"). There's no other place in the world where such a feat would be possible.

" There's no other place in the world where such a feat would be possible."

Oh? Based on your extensive research into immigration outcomes for all of the countries in the world? I happen to know for a fact, that many very poor Greek and Italian families migrated to Australia after World War II, and their families are doing very nicely now, thank you very much. The same story repeated a quarter of a century later as Australia dealt with a large Vietnamese intake during the Vietnam war and it's immediate aftermath - their community has also integrated well and is doing just fine economically.

I'm sure this is equally true of many countries in Europe. There is nothing exceptional about the US in this regard.

The evidence is in the scores of millions who came to America with nothing and rose into the middle class and beyond. If this was exceptional, you wouldn't see mile upon mile of suburban homes, cars jamming the roads, etc.

Aside: I met Rick Goff when I was in high school. My dad lived in Yamhill and was friends with him. One day we drove out to his place, turning off the gravel road toward a barn. Stepping inside the barn was a surreal experience. There, out in the middle of nowhere, in a fucking barn, was a freshly painted 1950's Rolls Royce. It was beautiful.

I don't know if he's a good example of the economic class divide, though. I understand Kristof's larger point and that he's writing from his own life experiences, but I think Goff's situation is more demonstrative of the rural-urban economic divide than a class divide.

He had a skill that people were willing to pay him for, but he chose to restore cars out in the country, in his barn. I can't speak for Goff's life choices, but during my summers in Yamhill and having relatives that lived in rural areas, I met a lot of people who would rather eke out a meagre existence in the countryside than move to where the jobs are. Part of economic mobility is just plain mobility.

   Rick acknowledged that he had made bad choices. He 
   drank, took drugs and was arrested about 30 times. But 
   he also found the strength to give up alcohol when he 
   felt he was turning into his father. What distinguished 
   Rick wasn’t primarily bad choices, but intelligence, 
   hard work and lack of opportunity.

If you were arrested 30 times, I'm going to guess that bad choices are, in fact, one of the primary distinguishing characteristics of your life. There are a lot of poor people with backgrounds ranging from unexceptional to tragic who haven't been arrested once.

This doesn't invalidate Kristof's larger point, of course, but it does mean he's not very good at picking reasonable, actionable examples. Short of taking away Rick's free will, Clockwork Orange-style, there may not be much we could have done for him. I disagree that Rick's life story invalidates the "American Dream," or even calls it into question.

My wife was listening to Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People," a book written in 1936 aimed at sales and business people. One thing that struck me was a chapter where he talks about empathizing with people. He gives the example of Al Capone. If we had been born with Al Cappne's body and mind and his circumstances, we would have been him. Therefore, people deserve very little credit for what they've accomplished and conversely very little discredit for what they've not. He ends the section with the saying "there but for the grace of God go I."

It's interesting because the intended audience of the book was not social progressives. It seems like a concept that wouldn't have been controversial at the time. It rings very differently in today's culture, where we like to talk about choices more than circumstances.

You might be interested in this ted talk, it touches upon this subject 6+ minutes in, but the whole thing is interesting.

http://www.ted.com/talks/alain_de_botton_a_kinder_gentler_ph...

It's very hard to get even not particularly wealthy middle class people to see this. People have very aggressive in debates with me about how hard they worked and how they should be allowed to pass their advantages on to their kids. There's also an oft repeated trope about how it's about values and character, which isn't entirely false, but besides the point.

It seems to be a basic human bias; we think everything positive that happens to us is due to our own merit, and everything bad is due to circumstance. In a country like the US, where I'm guessing people don't really mingle, you end up getting some very bitter people who either think they are being pulled down by the rabble or they are being held down by the aristocrats.

> It seems to be a basic human bias; we think everything positive that happens to us is due to our own merit

not all, but if one decides to move for work and opportunities, giving up close family, many friends, various safety nets that they bring (financial, personal etc.), start from 0, working hard relentlessly and then is successful (whatever that means), then coming back and listening some envious BS talk about privileged/lucky/whatever by people who eat junk food not because they have to, sit their evenings in front of TV consistently, never ever considered learning something in their (massive) free time etc. They started on +- same level, have same internet as me.

Do you really blame anybody successful? I don't. I want to give back, and I am doing that. But not to random Joe, but to my dearest - family and friends. If everybody does that, the very few truly unlucky remaining can be dealt generously with state social systems.

This is what made US so famous and strong in past - that your success won't be averaged with those that don't break a sweat, your success will be yours. And more you work on it, bigger it might be. Remove this incentive, and many very bright people will steer their energy elsewhere, and humanity gains less.

On the other hand, it's never been easier to:

1. get educated 2. start a business 3. access the global marketplace 4. invest

This sort of attitude just shows how great the disconnect is between the haves and the have-nots. Many of these individuals who lack privilege may not even have proper internet access, or the literacy skills required to harness the internet even if they did. Deep-seated social ills cannot simply be solved by ubiquitous internet access and ever cheaper consumer electronics.

Indeed, recent studies on MOOCs have shown that the majority of their users are (surprise, surprise) young, white males with college degrees and a privileged background. One could even make the argument that MOOCs are actually exacerbating inequality, rather than reducing it.

Regarding MOOCs, part is that is likely cultural - some groups are more likely to have been enculturated in communities where independent learning and self-study is acceptable, if not actively encouraged, versus being discouraged by social ostracization or physical violence in others.

The broader issue of drastic differences in outcome, where some people can't get a job scrubbing toilets while others are getting 250k job offers, is also probably due to the winner-take-all employment environment that an increasingly developed economy creates. Use of technology amplifies productivity, so that differences between different quantiles of worker productivity become larger, and companies have more incentive to hold out for the potential employees at the top of the food chain. And as it becomes a more competitive environment, there's less incentive for the less competitive members to bother participating whatsoever. Since increasingly more of society's functions can be performed by smaller segments of the population it shouldn't even be that much of an issue, except that, especially in the US with its widespread "screw the non-contributing zeroes" and "let them die" attitudes, no one wants to consider restructuring the system to support the huge portion of the population that didn't "make it," despite that being the same population that the same highly productive individuals are being produced by and drawn from.

So my suggestion is it results from productivity differences due to technological advancement, and social welfare programs will not eliminate those differences, they can just help sustain the necessary population that will never be making 250k a year working as a senior engineer for a large tech company.

Why do you think that the cultural capital of a certain social group is completely isolated and detached from their income level or past history of economic affluence or wellbeing?

What I find from my observations and unbiased reading is that rich people or people with a good track of generational prosperity have better chances to instill in their families the values of entrepreneurship and taking initiative while in poor or less fortunate families this becomes paradoxically difficult to achieve despite the seemingly urgent need to act on.

So, poor families especially the ones with a history of poverty and hardships spanning many generations back are hit on so many levels whether economically, socially or culturally and your thinly veiled attack on minorities communities and the insinuation that their culture product is the reason behind their economic hardships are not really helpful.

I certainly didn't mean it as a "thinly veiled attack on minorities," and it does seem more likely linked to the economic history of various communities. Children of college graduates are more likely to go to college themselves; parents with PhDs are more likely to have children who receive them as well. That could be due to genetics or shared environment or other factors, and there's a whole realm of twin and adoption studies on how much life outcomes are due to shared environment versus inheritance. Bryan Caplan has a good summary of this in the book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids (p. 53-58), but it mostly favors the inheritance-based view over the cultural one (admittedly contradicting my original assertion), and so certainly isn't going to be more friendly towards your view of trends in generational wealth.

How the suggestion that some social environments will be more supportive of self-education than others automatically becomes an attack on minorities is baffling. There was no intended suggestion of any such thing, and the entire rest of my post was hypothesizing something completely different: society's increasing net productivity leads to increasing gaps in income.

I agree. MOOCs would work if we did something like what Newt Gingrich proposed in the 90s: give every child in the US a laptop or PC as part of their schooling. Too bad his proposal was shot down as soon as he mentioned it.

I assume 1. Get educated refers to the internet and the rise of things like Khan Academy but 25% of americans don't have any internet (that includes mobile) at home.

http://www.census.gov/history/pdf/2013computeruse.pdf

Besides the free online access to education, more americans have college degrees than ever before:

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

The local public library provides free internet access, lends out books for free, and sells their overstock for a buck a book. You can also get tech books from goodwill for very cheap (I've bought many that way).

It really never has been easier to get educated.

Sure. Free wifi is everywhere, and tablets and smartphones are dirt-cheap. Not necessarily top-of-the-line devices, but units that are perfectly adequate for viewing Khan Academy, Project Gutenberg, the scads of free online college course materials...

Any decent library provides free internet access. When I volunteered at ours, most of the people there interested in the computers were job seekers who did not appear to have lots of money. Some of those were also in our free computer classes, some of which I taught as a volunteer.

You need to be already educated in order to take advantage of Gutenberg. Knowing which books make sense to read requires prior knowledge. Moreover, very little of what is on Guttenberg teaches actual skills you can earn money with.

The most important things you learn good school gives you are a.) ability to distinguish what makes sense to learn and what is waste of time b.) ability to study alone. And judging from what college profs say, even supposedly good high school that produce college students fail to achieve b. all too often. It does not mean it is impossible for all to learn useful things alone the way you suggest, but that is requires much higher abilities then finishing normal college.

Free online college course are great thing when you are already educated (e.g. like me), but: * they wont give you diploma which is what employers care about, * are much harder to finish from home when you are doing them alone, * some courses still require you to buy expensive books.

After work education programs have higher failure rates then full day students - it is just harder to study after you worked 8 hours or more assuming you did not slacked. Being full time student is easier.

Even paid online courses have have higher failure rates then comparable in person courses (e.g. comparable demographic), that might have to do with psychology (motivation) or simply with in-person communication between students being more effective then discussions on forums. Keeping motivation up when you are in daily contact with other students is non-issue, keeping it while alone is harder. Overcoming struggles when friends can give you advice in person is easier then doing it with forums only.

Everybody in HN makes big deal about how working with smart good people is important for you cause you learn from them, well this is the same thing.

Finishing coursera course from home where you can study whenever it suits you, where you can google anytime you struggle with no transport needed is easier then having to do so in library. Of course it is possible form library too, but it is harder, require more commitment and persistence.

Does it matter if they don't have access at home? Do the poor no longer have access to public institutions with internet access like say libraries? When I was younger, I was homeless for a few months and that's what I relied on to stay connected. These days there are even more places like the Apple stores.

Looking at the data you've cited, two years is a really long time when it comes to the evolution of technology. Now we have even more resources to stay online cheaply with extremely inexpensive smartphones (many homeless people possess them) and even cheaper computers ($35 to even as low as $10); not to mention the advent of cheap or free municipal WiFi and special Internet plan rates for low income people from all the major carriers. Consequently it's a bit strange to me that people who want Internet, don't have it.

This is probably better for data.

http://www.marketingcharts.com/online/smartphone-penetration...

Looking at the data, (correct me if I'm wrong) I feel that the people who don't have internet are both elderly and poor. If you're not elderly, you'll probably have Internet access one way or another. I'm guessing, but I feel that a large portion of the geriatric population just doesn't care about the Internet.

(I didn't down vote you and I do agree with the points somewhat)

1. It's still extremely expensive to get a degree or post-secondary education of some sort. Student loans are the only realistic option for many people.

Still related to the first point, proper education is more important than just education. Many people are still trying to go after what they "love" instead of the supply and demand of the marketplace.

2. It's never been easier to have an opportunity to start a business. Succeeding is still challenging.

4. Largely inaccessible to the low income class and a group of the middle class. You need excess money to invest, which increasingly people don't have.

While it's true that many of these things are easier to start, there are still significant problems that have to be overcome. Many of these have deeper issues.

On point 1, that depends if the college itself is accredited or of good standing such that employers won't scrutinize it.

On point 2, that depends on the state you're in and what goods/services are in demand. If you're in Louisiana and want to be a florist because there's demand for them, good luck (they have a licensing scheme for florists).

On point 3, this is only true if you have access to the Internet in a reliable manner.

On point 4, this can only work if you have enough money. Having five hundred bucks saved up as part of your yearly savings isn't going to move much even in risky investments (if a brokerage is willing to take such little money for their accounts).

Given the downvotes, I'm curious. Does anyone care to dispute the correctness of any of the 4 claims?

Not until you demonstrate that they are correct. Hard to dispute platitudes.

I'll start, that first one regarding education. Is it easy to learn now with the internet? Sure, undoubtedly true. Is that measurably better than before for any person? Probably not. Cost per semester hour at a college I went to 10 years ago, is over four times as high now.

That is just the first bullet point. I tend not to even consider the rest if the first point is so... out of touch might be the best way to phrase it.

As I pointed out in another reply, a higher percentage of Americans have college degrees than ever before.

Because you basically need a college degree to have a decent chance of getting a job at above the minimum wage. Semi-skilled labour in places like factories has gone and isn't coming back and jobs that didn't used to require a degree are demanding them because why the hell not?

Something like 28% of American adults have college degrees.

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

0.8% of Americans over 25 are earning minimum wage.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffreydorfman/2014/01/30/almost...

That leaves 70% of American adults do not have college degrees and are earning above minimum wage. Of course, depending on how one defines things those numbers can go up and down, but it's not a stretch to say that most workers do not have college degrees and earn above minimum wage.

One last observation - starting your own business does not require a college degree. (Probably the most famous of those is Microsoft, and Microsoft has hired programmers without degrees.)

That you quoted the percentage of total population rather than the percentage of total workers suggests that you're trying to spin-doctor. The same link calls $9.50 "well over" the minimum wage of $7.25... conveniently ignoring that $9.50/hour is still a shit wage. That link clings to the literal minimum wage like a limpet - notice how it never tells us the numbers of people barely above minimum wage? Earn $7.50/hour? Well you're too well off to be part of those statistics...

The author then has the gall to accuse others of using selective statistics to make their argument, and even throws out the 'class warfare' canard.

I did believe I was accounting for spin doctoring by increasing the 0.8% to 20% when I acknowledged different definitions and said "most".

Your link that you are taking as minimum wage doesn't account for people trivially above minimum wage. Yes, 'most people earn above minimum wage', but that's not the spirit of the discussion - someone earning 25c/hour more than minimum wage is still earning a crap wage. There are significantly more people on a crap wage than "the numbers go up and down a bit from 0.8%".

Similarly, that link only takes the federal wage into account - of course it's going to be abnormally low, given there are states with higher minimums. For example, Washington state has a minimum wage of $9.47/hour. A minimum wage worker in Washington won't show up in a study claiming $7.25 is the minimum wage.

Also, where do you mention 20%?

"Most" means >50%. 70 - 50 = 20

If it's such a small number of people, is there a problem with substantially increasing the minimum wage?

Given the widely documented increases in the cost of a US college education at rates far greater than inflation, it's easy to dispute your claim that getting educated has never been easier.

Paying off historically unprecedented student debts for recent US graduates also disproves your claim that it's never been easier to invest.

Of course it's possible that you weren't talking about formal education but, like it or not, credentials matter and employers are still more impressed by degrees from recognized institutions than they are by the fact that you've read a few Wikipedia articles.

You seem to have presented a false dichotomy, that to get any job at all you need to be college educated, bearing the burden of a huge debt.

Aside from the first point, you need money to do the rest. Furthermore, consider it from someone on minimum wage and limited work experience, they have basically no money to invest, banks would be reluctant to give them business loans, the education they can get for free barely registers as valid for most employers.

It's important to understand the concept of dead-end jobs. Some people are stuck doing jobs like stacking shelves at Walmart, they need the money they get so they can't quit or reduce their hours to return to formal education, but they don't have a varied background of work experience or recognised skills to easily move beyond what they currently do.

FWIW, I didn't downvote you.

> you need money to do the rest

2. Google "how to start a business with no money".

3. Etsy, Ebay, Amazon - costs nothing or next to nothing to set up your stuff there, access to global marketplace.

4. You can start an investment program with an online brokerage account with as little as $100. Online trades are $10.00.

>4. You can start an investment program with an online brokerage account with as little as $100. Online trades are $10.00.

Are you honestly suggesting that a viable way for people to get out of poverty is to start trading stocks with a starting capital of $100?

That's the dumbest thing I've read on HN by far and no that's not a compliment if case you were wondering.

Nobody is suggesting that someone living under a bridge should start investing. But there's a vast spectrum of people between that and the 1% who can invest. I did say 'start', implying that one would regularly add more funds over time.

The point, though, is that it has never been easier to invest.

So your solution to poverty is gambling on the stock market? You can dress it up as investment if you like, but it's still gambling.

They can't dispute them. That's precisely why you're getting downvoted.

Pretty sure education was much much cheaper a few decades ago.

http://www.thesimpledollar.com/a-dose-of-financial-reality/

This was also true when i took Economics of Inequality at university in 1997. Western Euro countries and Canada were ahead of America back then. From an outsider's perspective, if you're gonna make it rich, do it in the USA to make it crazy rich, but you're going to have a hard time making it from the bottom 10th to the top 10th.

So, you should leave the US to become rich, then return to turn that wealth into superwealth?

If you can swing it, sure

http://www.businessinsider.com/social-mobility-is-a-myth-in-...

Why didn't Kristof help this guy? It's not a systemic failure when a congenital alcoholic ruins his life, it's a human one.

I'd be interested in the stats in the other direction - how low of a chance of someone born in the upper quintile ending up in the lower quintile. The u.s. seems to be disproportionally high in mediocre people being at the top, being there through famil money.

Basically britain's upper class twits satirized by Monty Python.

Brookings, a center-left think-tank, has a pretty good summary of a lot of stats about income-mobility http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/Reports/2008...

(Also, a shorter note from the center-right AEI https://www.aei.org/publication/tracking-the-same-households...)

Basic Income.

  ?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share

Please, don't do that.

As for the article itself, I thought it's common knowledge that in most civilized world, social mobility is decreasing and income gap is increasing.

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