I excelled at math, loved computers, and went to DeVry to do computer programming. I was the first in my family to go to college. Started my first tech company at 22.
With a lot of hard work, I believe anyone can break out of poverty.
I used to joke with some of my fellow geeks (ok, I still do) that if we were born two or three hundred years earlier, we would have had a horrible life in the fields, farming.
Going back to why I replied, the sad fact about an information age economy is that working with information or your community (e.g. coding or using that information to trade) is leveraged and worth more than pure manual labor. At the highest level, you have CEOs with insane networks of personal relationships (I knew a family friend once who, with one phone call, got the best eye surgeon in the state to do an emergency operation on one of his friend's friends) and surgeons who can save lives. At the medium level, you have coders.
From a rational economics standpoint, everyone is expendable. But the replacement costs are quite high for those higher up the power-law curve of the information economy.
And some people with the talent to code don't have the physiology to last long doing manual labor.
What if you are in a part of the world (read much of the world) where the only paths to success require seriously unethical behavior?
The right partner makes a huge difference, but what if you only meet a suitable partner late in life or you end up sucked into their or their family's problems?
If you have good health, you do not live in fear of criminals and militias, if you and your partner love each other unambiguously and have the time to really support and enjoy each other, and because of all those things you are able to achieve some measure of financial security, then you have what a tiny minority of human beings get to enjoy as a fleeting mirage, and only a vanishingly small minority get to enjoy for a significant fraction of their lives.
Most human beings can only "make" a small part of their luck.
As to working hard, that isn't what counts. It's making the right choices, i.e. working smart.
Sure, lots start out with many disadvantages and will have a tougher road. But if you're able-bodied, you do have choices.
That's clearly not the case. Off the top of my head, success depends heavily on the neighborhood and family you are born into. Are your parents divorced, in prison, are they alchoholics, do they teach you values and education, do they abuse you, do they rear you at all, can they afford food, electricity, or college? Does the school in your zip code have books the classrooms? Are you going to get shot in the streets, do your friends sell drugs? Is it a wealthy suburban school where 90% go to college, a poor urban one where 90% are literate?
The fact is, if you are able-bodied, you do have choices.
I won't repeat what I've posted elsewhere in this thread. I'll just add that in my life I've noticed a consistent pattern. People who take responsibility for their choices do much better than people who always blame others, fate, whatever.
And American today has more opportunities for more people than anywhere at anytime in history. There's a reason why America has so many illegal immigrants and so many more that want to come here.
How do you square that with the data, the outcomes that wealthy kids are so much more successful? How about that they get into college at such higher rates at age 18? Why would poor kids be any lazier than wealthy ones?
> And American today has more opportunities for more people than anywhere at anytime in history.
Not to nitpick, but at least some resesarch says that social mobility is higher now in Europe. I also suspect it was higher in the U.S. in the 90's, when there were more social services and education (not to mention health care and housing) cost much less.
> There's a reason why America has so many illegal immigrants and so many more that want to come here.
Net illegal immigration with Mexico is now negative, at least last I saw (that is, more are returning than entering the U.S.).
Also, illegal immigrants often come from places that are much poorer than the United States.
I've tried to make it very clear in this thread that it is not at all about "just working hard". It's about working smart, i.e. making choices.
To know the truth about a country, check if there are walls around a country to keep people in, or walls to keep people out.
That doesn't change my point.
> To know the truth about a country, check if there are walls around a country to keep people in, or walls to keep people out.
A very broad brush on an irrelevant issue (relative economic opportunity between nations) to the problem at hand.
I'm glad you made it; that's impresssive and great news. The data and research overwhelmingly disagree with your statement; so few make it. Read the stories of those kids in the article; it's not reasonable to say that they merely lacked hard work. As I posted elsewhere, the bar obviously is set much too high for most of humanity (and I assume we are talking about people in wealthy nations).
"With a lot of hard work, and the legal freedom to move away, anyone can break out of poverty."
Staying in the same place (sounds like your grandparents were kick ass people) is pretty much the death sentence and many people, after certain youthful indiscretions may not be permitted to leave the area.
Plus, you're white so I'm guessing you've never been detained for "matching the description".
And, in many ways, the purest luck of the draw. If his grandfather didn't have a C64, what happens? Or for me, if my dad doesn't happen to go from selling office furniture to playing with computers when I was very young and I don't happen to then have computers lying around that I'm allowed to play with basically unimpeded from the age of three or four...am I in this field? Am I as good at it as I am? Isolating causes is so very, very difficult when it comes to the individual (easier when you are working with statistically meaningful populations, of course); trying to boil it down to "hard work" leaves out a lot of "hard workers" who end up disabled before they're 60 because their jobs grind them to powder.
I was very lucky. I didn't (and don't) work harder than my peers who didn't make it out of poverty, yet I did. Amount of effort isn't correlated with measures of financial security.
Working hard doesn't, by default, lead to financial security.
Working hard can lead to financial security but there's a lot of luck involved as well. Not to mention planning - unless you count that as work.
Trust me I am not saying working hard doesn't lead of results or don't work hard. I am saying that poverty isn't synonymous with "lazy" or even "not working hard enough."
Regarding the people you grew up with, you say they work as hard as you do. Are you sure about that? And while they may be working hard, how smart are they working? For instance, some went to college, did they get a degree in something that is in high demand where the pay is good? And getting a college degree is only one piece of a good education. How much did they really learn, and consequently, how competitive are they in the job market? Even if they're all in high demand STEM fields, they still have to compete with the thousands of other job seekers after all.
Thinking through the alternatives and making smarter choices is hard work. And that is cumulative. It's kind of like compound interest too. You may not see a big difference from day to day or month to month but given some roll of the dice in circumstances, over the course of years and decades, working hard will almost always make a huge difference.
There are enormous numbers of people who work very hard and get nowhere. The elements of the "Character Hypothesis" (persistence, determination, self-control / the ability to delay gratification, abstention from substance use, curiosity, conscientiousness, self-confidence, emotional intelligence, good communication skills, a willingness to listen, and grit) are all necessary to escape poverty, but not anywhere sufficient. Pure chance is a huge factor, but acknowledging that fact destroys the entire project in some minds.
There's a reason the Nordics have so much higher social mobility than the US does. They actually work at it:
"In addition to other correlations with negative social outcomes for societies having high inequality, they found a relationship between high social inequality and low social mobility. Of the eight countries studied — Canada, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Germany, the UK and the USA, the USA had both the highest economic inequality and lowest economic mobility. In this and other studies, in fact, the USA has very low mobility at the lowest rungs of the socioeconomic ladder, with mobility increasing slightly as one goes up the ladder. At the top rung of the ladder, however, mobility again decreases.[10]
One study comparing social mobility between developed countries[11][12][13] found that the four countries with the lowest "intergenerational income elasticity", i.e. the highest social mobility, were Denmark, Norway, Finland, and Canada with less than 20% of advantages of having a high income parent passed on to their children"
I'm not saying that you did not work hard, I'm sure you did. I am saying that plenty of people work just as hard but stay in poverty.
Maybe a major difference is that if you try that path and you are poor, you're out of options. If you try it and you are wealthy, then you change majors in college.
Common denominator is they love their art, do it constantly, had a dream of being paid for it, and sonething reinforces that.
Not to mention I don't think that you can really "force" yourself to have the "correct" interests.
This idea that programmers have that we must be special or that you have to be smart to be a programmer is ridiculous. I know plenty of dumb people, absurdly illogical dumb people who make it in this industry.
I wonder how many poor kids ever have the opportunity to choose a major in college?
Can you imagine... Not even knowing you can have interests.
Not that you can choose interests.
Not even believing that you can have something to be interested in.
Let that sink in
You really have no idea what you're talking about.
When you're poor and you don't want to be poor anymore, you choose to do things that give you financial security. Drug dealers turn into accountants. Kids who want to get in and out of college in 4 years choose to go into computer science. People who's 'natural' (which is a completely irrelevant factor) interests are reading books get into graph theory.
Interests being innate is a huge fallacy that people who have not had to handle situations like this believe.
For every one of you, how many of them?